Life Cycles of International Organizations: Revamping, Upgrading and Repurposing

• In Event: Under Pressure: How International Organizations Try to Avoid Decay

Abstract

Multilateral projects have never been a certain bargain. Individual member states question or leave IOs, and once one member state has threated to leave or has left an IO, scholars have also observed reverberation and contagion effects and instances where the collective membership has let go of their IO. However, we can also observe that member states can use these crises instances to renegotiate existing bargains. This paper seeks to examine what – besides the IO’s acronym – is disappearing when IOs “die” and what, if anything, can be recycled or reincarnated? The argument I propose in this paper is twofold. First, given the binary (dead or alive) way of thinking about IO death in conjunction with a material understanding of IOs, we do not pay enough attention to the process of IO transformation. This leads me to the second part of my argument. If we consider IOs not only as physical sites where member states come together to pool and delegate sovereignty and decide together on a fixed formula but, drawing on sociological studies, also as sites where expertise is fostered and communities – as weak as they might be – are built, we cannot only observe the end of IO acronyms but also their various transformative mechanisms that I call revamping, repurposing or upgrading. By focusing on these transformative mechanisms, we observe that certain fundamental parts that make up IOs are more resilient than assumed.

Author

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