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Life, Death, Inertia, Change: The Hidden Lives of International Organizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2020

Julia Gray
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Abstract

The life spans of international organizations (IOs) can take unexpected turns. But when we reduce IO life spans simply to their existence or lack thereof, or to formal change involving the addition of new members or the revision of charters, we miss the subtler dynamics within IOs. A broader continuum of IO life spans acknowledges life, death, inertia, and change as responses to crises, and affords a more nuanced perspective on international cooperation. Through this lens, the setbacks that many IOs are currently experiencing look less extraordinary.

Keywords

international cooperationinternational organizationinternational tradeorganizationsbureaucracieseconomic cooperation
Type
Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 33 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2020

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References

NOTES

1 A vast empirical literature relies on large-N data on international organizations using the correlates of war data (Pevehouse, Jon, Nordstrom, Timothy, and Warnke, Kevin, “The Correlates of War 2 International Governmental Organizations Data Version 2.0,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 21, no. 2 [Summer 2004], pp. 101–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar), which has binary measures of IO existence and membership. Just a couple of examples: Greenhill, Brian, “The Company You Keep: International Socialization and the Diffusion of Human Rights Norms,” International Studies Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 2010), pp. 127–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mansfield, Edward D. and Pevehouse, Jon C., “Democratization and International Organizations,” International Organization 60, no. 1 (January 2006), pp. 137–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Others code various aspects of the institutional and contractual aspects of IO; for example, Smith, James McCall, “The Politics of Dispute Settlement Design: Explaining Legalism in Regional Trade Pacts,” International Organization 54, no. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 137–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hooghe, Liesbet, Marks, Gary, Lenz, Tobias, Bezuijen, Jeanine, Ceka, Besir, and Derderyan, Svet, Measuring International Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dür, Andreas, Baccini, Leonardo, and Elsig, Manfred, “The Design of International Trade Agreements: Introducing a New Dataset,” Review of International Organizations 9, no. 3 (September 2014), pp. 353–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For an authoritative treatment of this subject with respect to comparative political economy and political science, see Geddes, Barbara, Paradigms and Sand Castles: Theory Building and Research Design in Comparative Politics, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; as well as Geddes, Barbara, “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics,” Political Analysis 2 (1990), pp. 131–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; King, Gary, Keohane, Robert O., and Verba, Sidney, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stein, Jana von, “Do Treaties Constrain or Screen? Selection Bias and Treaty Compliance,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 4 (November 2005), pp. 611–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 See, for example, Kaya, Ayse, Power and Global Economic Institutions (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, “Death of International Organizations. The Organizational Ecology of Intergovernmental Organizations, 1815–2015,” Review of International Organizations (December 2018); Cottrell, M. Patrick, “Legitimacy and Institutional Replacement: The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Emergence of the Mine Ban Treaty,” International Organization 63, no. 2 (April 2009), pp. 217–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lipcsy, Phillip Y., Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

5 Strange, Susan, “Why Do International Organizations Never Die?,” in Reinalda, Bob and Verbeek, Bertjan, eds., Autonomous Policy Making by International Organizations (London: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar; and Bernholz, Peter, “Are International Organizations like the Bank for International Settlements Unable to Die? A Historical Case Study of the BIS,” Review of International Organizations 4, no. 4 (December 2009), pp. 361–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 De Vries, Catherine E., “Benchmarking Brexit: How the British Decision to Leave Shapes EU Public Opinion,” Journal of Common Market Studies 55 (September 2017), pp. 38–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.