This unique handbook brings together a team of leading scholars and practitioners in order to map, synthesize and assess key perspectives on cooperation and rivalry between regional and global organizations in world politics. For the first time, a variety of inter-disciplinary theoretical and conceptual perspectives are combined in order to assess the nature, processes and outcomes of inter-organizational partnerships and rivalries across major policy areas, such as peace and security, human rights and democratisation as well as finance, development and climate change. This text provides scholars, students and policy-makers of International Relations with an exhaustive reference book for understanding the theoretical and empirical dimensions of an increasingly important topic in International Relations (IR), Global Governance and related disciplines.

Rafael Biermann is Chair of International Relations at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Previously, he was Vice-Dean of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Visiting Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and responsible for policy planning in the German Chancellery and the MoD. His major monographs focus on international conflict prevention in Kosovo and Soviet policy on German unification.Joachim A. Koops is Dean of Vesalius College, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Research Professor at the VUB's Institute for European Studies and Director of the Global Governance Institute (GGI). Recent publications include The Oxford Handbook of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (OUP, 2015), The European Union as a Diplomatic Actor (Palgrave, 2015), The Responsibility to Protect and the Third Pillar<(Palgrave, 2015)