Andrew F. Cooper is University Research Chair, Department of Political Science, and Professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo. From 2003 to 2010 he was Associate Director of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and in 2019 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Diplomacy Section of ISA. He is the author of 11 books, and the editor/co-editor of 22 collections, and his articles have been published in prestigious journals such as International Organization, International Affairs, World Development, and International Studies Review.

• 1: Unravelling the centrality of the contest over international institutions 2: Concertation as a foundational/fundamental institution 3: Crises as potential animators of institutional transformation 4: Raising the stakes of the institutional contest over the normative dimension 5: Hierarchical privileges of institutional convenience 6: Between aspirations and anxiety: The ambivalent hold of formal institutions by non-incumbents from the Global South 7: Inserting designers into institutional design: Institutional entrepreneurship and the evolution of state-based plurilateralism 8: Recalibrated but still contested: The G20 as a twenty-first century institutional concert format 9: The challenge of personalist-populist institutional disruption at the core of the system 10: Aspirations of a BRICS solidarity concert/hanging together as a pluralist club Conclusions

In this book, perhaps his most ambitious so far, Cooper brings together a lifetime of work on global governance, diplomacy, and summitry, into a grand synthesis on one of the most significant, yet most neglected phenomena in international relations. The Concertation Impulse in World Politics constitutes a major theoretical breakthrough, conceptualizing the emergence of an alternative to traditional IOs as key entities in the new century. Cooper does justice to the role groups like the G7, the G20 and the BRICS play in a rapidly changing international system, capturing their unique features and dynamics, and providing fresh insights into our troubled and crisis-prone world.