such as international treaties and programmes, on the Internet, in addition to those
which are available in archives and literature. Boxes in the text of this book contain
background information, elaborations, overviews and tables. For reasons of simplicity, all
boxes and tables are called ‘Figures’. They are numbered per chapter and are meant to
provide more specific information and to follow the line of an issue or organization.
For convenience, all paragraphs have subheadings. Anyone wanting to trace a certain
topic can do this via the table of contents, the index and the (sub)headings of sections
and paragraphs. Each chapter starts with a boxed table of contents giving the sections
and figures of that chapter. For references the author–date system is used, which
refers to a bibliography at the end of the book (alphabetically ordered and chron-
ologically by author). For reasons of readability the acronym NGO is used, rather than
INGO (international NGO).
Acknowledgments
In the 1990s, Bertjan Verbeek and I started a research programme on, respectively, the
autonomous policy making of international organizations, decision making within them
and (with Jutta Joachim) implementation by them, which resulted in three edited
volumes (Reinalda and Verbeek 1998; Reinalda and Verbeek 2004; Joachim et al. 2008).
At the Nijmegen Department of Political Science, Robert H. Lieshout asked me to
lecture on international organizations and allowed me to do this according to my
understanding of the topic. The discussion forum he established for the international
relations staff, called WOIB, can be considered a green zone within a by now rather
bureaucratic academic world. WOIB has only one goal, which is debate in order to get
better insights and improved texts. John Groom offered Bertjan Verbeek and myself an
introduction to the European Consortium for Political Research, which gave us the
opportunity to establish an international network of researchers and helped us to publish
our volumes on international organizations in the ECPR series published by Routledge.
I am particularly grateful to them, to my students, to my co-participants in international
panels and workshops and to my English corrector, Annemarie Weitzel. I am looking
forward to comments on both details and the entire process since 1815.