Conceptualising the role of interconnections between issue-areas of global governance: the case of refugee protection

The way in which issue-areas are interconnected is an increasingly important factor in explaining political outcomes at the global level. However, existing theoretical literature on interconnections, which is divided in this paper into agency-based accounts and structural accounts, is inadequate for systematically understanding the role that they play in world politics.

This paper therefore sets out a new conceptual framework for understanding interconnections based on a structure-agency approach. It develops two main concepts: embeddedness (the structural relationship issue-areas) and linkages (the way issue-areas are grouped together in bargaining), and explores the relationship between the two.