Providing Security: Towards a Typology of Security Organizations

• In Event: Security Organizations in Evolving Global and Regional Orders

Abstract

Actors can manifest multilateral action in many different ways. Scholars working on institutional design have pointed out that organizations vary at least according to their membership, scope, centralization, depth, delegation and formality. To analyze these manifestations, much attention has been given to institutions in the domain of trade, finance, and environment. Security has remained at the margins of debates on international organizations and global governance. The more or less explicit assumption is that postulated hypotheses travel across policy domains. So, while this literature has improved our understanding of the workings of international organizations, it has paid little attention as to whether these different organizational structures can be observed across multilateral forums across different policy domains. This paper is a first step towards redressing this imbalance by looking into military alliances, crisis management organizations, disarmament treaties, arms control governance, and cyber security organizations. I show that while individual security organizations resemble in design and function organizations in other policy domains, overall, most security organizations rely heavily on scarce and expensive resources which sets them also apart. It is this important substantive difference that sheds new insights into the study of multilateral action. We need to pay more attention to the barriers of entry to multilateral action to understand the dynamics within it.

Author

• Stephanie Claudia Hofmann, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies