Building on John Ruggie's pioneering study of multilateralism, this paper presents an analogous study of multistakeholder governance, or multistakeholderism. Its central argument is that multistakeholderism is, as yet, a much less well-defined institutional form. Cases exhibit significant variation both in the combinations of actor classes entitled to participate and the nature of authority relations among those actors. The first section discusses multistakeholderism as an institutional form, and proposes a taxonomy of its types. This section also briefly addresses the implications of the analysis for International Relations theory. The paper then conducts a comparative analysis of multistakeholderism, applying the taxonomy to five illustrative cases. It demonstrates the degree of inter-case variation, and the range of issue-areas across which the institutional form is employed and invoked by actors. Three cases are drawn from the increasingly contentious area of Internet governance; the paper thus makes a secondary contribution to this growing literature. The paper's most striking finding in this regard is that Internet governance often fails to live up to its multistakeholder rhetoric. Other cases include governance of securities regulation and the governance of corporate social responsibility. The paper concludes by examining the implications of our argument, and identifying areas for further research.

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In 2013, despite deteriorating relations between Russia and the United States and increased global contention over cybersecurity issues, participating states in the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly agreed on a landmark report endorsing the applicability of existing international law to state military use of information technology. Given these conditions, the timing of this agreement was surprising. In this article I argue that state representatives engaged in a rule-governed social practice of applying old rules to new cases, and that the procedural rules governing this practice help to explain the existence, timing, and form of the agreement. They also help to explain further agreements expressed in a follow-on report issued in 2015. The findings of the case study presented here demonstrate that social practices of rule-making are simultaneously rule-governed and politically contested, and that outcomes of these processes have been shaped by specialized rules for making, interpreting, and applying rules. The effectiveness of procedural rules in shaping the outcome of a contentious, complex global security issue suggests that such rules are likely to matter even more in simpler cases dealing with less contentious issues.

Social Practices of Rule-Making in World Politics identifies a class of social practices of rule-making, interpretation, and application, demonstrating the causal importance of these practices (and the procedural rules that constitute and govern them) in explaining outcomes in world politics. The book utilizes rule-oriented and practice-turn constructivist approaches to argue that procedural rules about rule-making, or secondary rules, shape the way that actors present and evaluate proposals for change in the rules and institutions that structure international systems. The book examines four important international security cases: the social construction of great power management after the Napoleonic Wars; the creation of a rule against the use of force, except in cases of self-defense and collective security, enshrined in the Kellogg-Briand Pact; contestation of the international system by al-Qaeda in the period immediately following the 9/11 attacks; and United Nations efforts to establish norms for state conduct in the cyber domain. The book makes several contributions to International Relations theory. It provides insight into how actors know how and when to engage in specific forms of social construction. It extends the application of practice-turn constructivism to processes of making and interpreting rules. It improves upon existing tools to explain change in the rules and institutions of the international system. Finally, it demonstrates the utility of the book’s approach for the study of global governance, the international system, and for emerging efforts to identify forms and sites of authority and hierarchy in world politics.