Introduction

Various crises of global reach have appeared over the last two decades, severely challenging the efficient production and distribution of common goods. Due to the increasing globalization and interconnectedness of international relations, the global crises of the 21st century are particularly complex (Carr and Lesniewska 2020) and thus require coordinated efforts to absorb negative repercussions or, eventually, solve them (Lopez-Claros et al 2020). Contemporary global crises are also characterized by overlapping policy areas through which international actors are oftentimes involuntarily bound together, such as security, global health, trade or finance. Examples include global climate change (Schenck 2008), migration and refugee crises (Weiner 2018), as well as the COVID-19 global pandemic (Lipscy 2020) or the Russian invasion into Ukraine (Mankoff 2014; Fazal 2022), which simultaneously affect international actors across different policy realms.

International organizations (IOs) have been at the forefront of these crises in the 21st century (Hardt 2014). IOs are not only forums (Tallberg and Zürn 2019) but can also be mandated by their member states to enact role(s) themselves vis-à-vis the international environment (Panke 2022b). In other words, IOs are important actors in the realm of global governance (Dingwerth et al 2019). This is particularly important during global crises, which individual states are not capable of tackling on their own. Not only have IOs oftentimes been first responders to crisis of global reach, for example, by pooling resources or reducing collective action costs, IOs also commonly function as mediators between conflicting parties responsible for the outbreak of crises or between actors that have turned into such over the course of the crisis (Chapman and Wolford 2010). While IOs differ in their activities amid global crises, there are numerous indications that they have been important actors in their management and turned into potent stabilizers of the international order (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Hofmann 2020).

Apart from being stabilizers, IOs can adopt a broad variety of different roles when being faced with global crises. This encompasses IOs as conflict managers (for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN], see Yates [2017]), crisis managers (for the International Monetary Fund [IMF] see Kahler [1985]), facilitators of stability and democracy (for the Organization of American States [OAS], see Slater [1969]) or crisis bargainers (Chapman and Wolford 2010).