Under Pressure: How International Organizations Try to Avoid Decay

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

During the past decade, international organizations (IOs) have experienced various crises. From populist sentiments, member-state withdrawals, challenges from rising powers to organization-specific scandals, the past decade has been characterized as a state of crisis for IOs. These crises are widely seen to enhance the role of member states in IOs, further strengthening the tendency in extant research to assign IOs and their representatives a rather marginal and passive role in international cooperation. This panel suggests that independent of member states, IOs themselves have a strong will to survive. It brings together research on the strategies that IOs develop to secure their survival in the face of serious exogenous shocks. What type of strategies do IO bureaucracies employ? What are the conditions of their success? How can we explain variance in the usage and success of IO survival strategies across time and space? Addressing these questions, the panel contributes to the growing literature on the death and survival of IOs and, more broadly, to theories of international institutional stability and change. The panel embraces diversity by including a variety of methods, balanced gender distribution, and both established and junior scholars from various continents.

Sub Unit

• Division 17: International Collaboration

Individual Presentations

• Resilience of the UN Joint Inspection Unit: Path-Dependence and Complexity - Eugenia M. da Conceicao-Heldt, Technical University Munich; Patrick A. Mello, Technical University of Munich; Omar Ramon Serrano Oswald, Hochschüle für Politik, Technical University of Munich

• Life Cycles of International Organizations: Revamping, Upgrading and Repurposing - Stephanie Claudia Hofmann, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

• Institutional Threat: How New Multilateral Institutions Affect Existing Ones - Ayse Kaya, Swarthmore College; George Yin

• Legitimacy in Times of Crisis: How International Organizations React to Pressure - Tobias Lenz, Leuphana University Lüneburg; Henning Schmidtke, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies

Chair

• Jonas Tallberg Stockholm University

Discussant

• Karl Orfeo Fioretos Temple University