About the Collection

Charters of International Organizations (CIGO) is a research project and dataset that seeks to collect, analyze and make available the founding documents of all international organizations alive after 1945, for the purpose of advancing scholarship and practice. International organizations are central to international governance, and a primary mechanism by which states cooperate to produce public goods outside their borders. Their number has expanded dramatically with the number of recognized states. Our sample includes at present more than 350 texts available online, and the underlying dataset has more than 470 texts, as well as more than 600 amendments thereof.

For each of these texts, we focused on certain concepts that are central to researchers in the fields of law and international relations. Our underlying ontology involves several dozen items, and we are currently working on a dataset paper that will lay out the project in more detail.

Our criteria for inclusion track those of international lawyers and political scientists. International lawyers generally agree that international organizations require (1) an international agreement including two or more states; (2) a permanent secretariat or other indication of institutionalization; and (3) a “distinct will” that shows the organization is separate from the member states that created it. Political scientists who have studied international organizations generally draw on the Correlates of War (COW) dataset, which has been regularly updated by Jon Pevehouse and his co-authors. The COW project restricts its sample to international organizations with two or more member states, and we follow this criterion in our own work. We excluded any organizations that are established under the national law of a single state, or that lacked indicia of institutional structure or a distinct will.

To obtain charters, we drew on publicly available sources. In some cases, we wrote to the secretariat of the organization to obtain their charter. In several cases we commissioned translations from original languages, primarily French, Spanish, and Arabic. For each organization, we gathered the most recently amended version of the charter that we could obtain.

Our focus on charters deserves some explanation. Charters are functionally the constitutions of these organizations and are sometimes even labeled as such. Each of these instruments reflects a discrete moment of purposive institutional design, in which representatives of states joined together to define problems, to articulate collective goals, and to specify the means through which they will pursue those goals over time through an organizational structure. The participating states take the negotiations of such texts quite seriously, and revisit that text periodically, including through amendments. We recognize that written charters are inevitably incomplete as sources of rules or legal authorities of international organization, and we do not include other documents such as procedural rules, headquarters agreements, or staff rules and regulations.

CIGO is produced by scholars at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan, led by Professors Kristina Daugirdas and Tom Ginsburg. We are grateful to David Crabtree of the University of Chicago and Morgen Miller of the University of Michigan for their dedicated work on the project. For financial support, we thank the American Bar Foundation, the Russell Baker Scholars Fund at the University of Chicago Law School, and the Malyi Institute for Legal and Institutional Integrity at the University of Chicago. The project was supported by the National Science Foundation, Award #2416251. Documents published in this collection have been edited by the project team. An appropriate citation of the documents would be:

Users with corrections and comments can write to tginsburg@uchicago.edu