Acknowledgments
This book was a long time in the making. A small group of contributors began collaborating on groups in the UN a decade ago, and we presented papers at several BISA and UACES academic conferences. We added contributors as we went along, and in 2017 published some of the papers in a special issue of the Hague Journal of Diplomacy.
We are grateful to the contributors to the special issue and this book, for their keen engagement in the project and their timely submissions of work. We would also like to thank Thomas Weiss, who encouraged us to pursue the project, and Sam Daws, who acted as discussant on several conference panels and provided us with valuable suggestions. Insightful reviewers for the Hague Journal of Diplomacy and for Brill further helped us to refine and strengthen our arguments, as have the journal editors, Jan Melissen and Paul Sharp. We also thank Ioannis Vrailas, Deputy Head of the EU Delegation to the UN, who provided a commentary for the special issue of the Hague Journal of Diplomacy. The editors are grateful to Isabella Andrade for her assistance in completing the index. Finally, all of the contributors to this book would like to thank the hundreds of diplomats we have interviewed as part of the research project and who have helped us to understand the practices of group politics at the UN.