Conference Program

Some of the global and local problems of international relations of 2020s lead many commentators not only to reconsider the priorities of the international intergovernmental organizations (IGO), but also to question their raison d'être.

Without any doubt, IGOs can be instrumental in facilitating international cooperation through the administration of international agreements, organization of their amendment process, management of dispute settlement and promotion of government transparency. IGOs can also be helpful in providing assistance to states, requiring aid and support.

The effectiveness of the IGOs in performing those and other functions is determined by various factors, inclusive of political (such as distribution of political power among states), economic (such as fluctuations of supply and demand of goods and services), legal (such as procedures and mechanisms envisaged in the relevant international legal instruments and interpretation thereof) and institutional (such as the organization of day-to-day exchange of information between various units within the organisational structure). Efficient collaboration between IGOs can be very useful in minimizing the negative effects of those factors and enhancing their positive effects.

This presentation focuses on several selected cases of collaboration of IGOs in the context of some of the current global and regional developments. The comparative analysis method will help identify some of the key positive and negative factors determining the efficiency of such collaboration in 2024. The presentation also includes recommendations on further improvement of methods and mechanisms in the cases selected for review.

In the face of the COVID-19 crisis, not only states but also international organizations faced one of the most serious tests of their action and mutual relations. The aim of this paper is to analyse the main practices used so far by the WHO and the EU and in the relations between them in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the effectiveness. The choice of the WHO and the EU is not accidental, as these are the organizations that play the most important role in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic at two basic levels in this field, i.e. at the global and regional levels. The article adopts several research questions, such as: Do the WHO and the EU have sufficient powers to protect health and fight the pandemic effectively? What practices and instruments are used by international organizations (the WHO, the EU) to fight the pandemic – are they already in place or is this a period of shaping new mechanisms, instruments and practices that are more suited to unusual realities? During the pandemic, to what extent are international organisations using their capacities and practices are able to play an effective role as crisis managers on a global or regional scale?

The paper considers the importance of safety culture in the context of health security, i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic and the global and social transformation it has caused. Namely, significant changes and challenges in the security sphere through the time, have usually consequently changed and shaped the safety culture of societies, communities and individuals. Therefore, the aim is to analyze the preventive function of the safety culture in the protection against infectious diseases as health security threats, using the example of the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be said that the COVID-19 pandemic induced the development of a “new safety culture”, specific to the field of health security. This is reflected through the key elements of the safety culture - knowledge, attitudes, values, emotions and behavior of people regarding the COVID-19 threat, which are shaped by the so-called “new normality”. This approach in considering the COVID-19 threat emphasizes people as a referent object, which is close to the human-centric paradigm of health security, which goes beyond the narrow state-centric paradigm. The paper will be based on an academic literature review and analysis of relevant reports and publications of international organizations such as WHO and UNDP. The expected contribution of the paper would be reflected in elucidating the theoretical value of the concept of safety culture in the understanding of infectious diseases as emerging health security threats, but also in the analysis of the importance of safety culture for practical improvement of health security.

The introduction of “new” public diplomacy highly involves the realm of digital platforms and social networking. International or intergovernmental organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the European Union (EU) recognize the importance of digital capital in generating internal and external support from the foreign audience. In answering the research questions, digital diplomacy dimensions from Bjola and Jiang (2015) such as digital agenda-setting (message content), conversation-generating (the mode of engagement with the audience), and presence-expansion (informational reach) were used.

This study employed a descriptive qualitative approach of the secondary data from ASEAN and EU-related academic literature, Google Trend results, and social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter from January to October 2022. Data from Facebook was manually coded in terms of the date, type, comments, shares, and reactions of the posts from the official accounts of the two IOs. Data for the Twitter account was imported and analyzed through NodeXLPro, a social media analysis software.

Findings suggest major differences between the two organizations in terms of the messages, conversation, and engagement in the digital platforms. ASEAN’s relatively smaller pool of resources resonates in the promotion of its internal affairs to gain support from the international community. EU’s use of digital diplomacy was directed towards more important issues, especially the Ukraine-Russian War.