The Life Cycle of International Organizations

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

IOs today face challenges at a scale and scope that might seem extraordinary. Member countries seem to be backsliding; contestation poses direct or indirect challenges to those IOs' legitimacy; economic and political tensions may strain the ability of member countries to adhere to their multilateral commitments.
But the current state of global governance falls into perspective if one views international cooperation as subject to a cycle of life. This roundtable discusses a life cycle approach to international order, which takes seriously the primacy of IOs themselves in the study of global cooperation and treats their vitality as an important precondition for understanding world politics. We cannot fully grasp the effectiveness of international cooperation unless we first take stock of the causes and consequences of the dynamic processes within IOs. This is particularly important because, despite issues of selection and false positives in the study of IOs, we know that IOs in the global North as well as the global South experience variation in vitality, and even IOs that seem optimally designed can decline or die. The proposed roundtable includes contributors who have contributed to a forthcoming special issue in the Review of International Organizations on IO life cycles.
A life cycles perspective acknowledges, first, that IO vitality can rise and fall both within and across IOs --- and that such variation is neither exceptional nor linear. That is, all IOs go through various life stages, but the stages are not inevitable nor necessarily sequential; IOs can ebb and flow through many different stages in the course of their existence. The focus on dynamic processes within IOs suggests that the good times as well as the bad can often be ephemeral: for every heady beginning, there is often member-state retrenchment and contestation later down the line. The terrain of international cooperation is complex, and conditions both within and IOs can shift dramatically even within a few years of the organization's founding. Furthermore, ``efficient" design cannot insulate IOs from inertia and death: even the IOs that we think of as stable and successful, such as the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT and the World Trade Organization, and NATO, have experienced moments of drift and decline. Acknowledging this reality offers a more sanguine picture of the state of international cooperation and the liberal order more broadly.
Second, IO life cycles have consequences for the international system: when IOs decline, die, or change, it does not simply mean that efficient actors are just pruning off dying branches and moving to an ever-more-optimal equilibrium of international cooperation. Rather, various stages in an IO's cycle of life represent changing realities and occasional adaptation, not efficiency, and even IOs whose design reflect protracted periods of bargaining may find themselves paralyzed by crisis. In a life cycles view, the bargains behind the initial IO contract are but one moment within an IO's broader existence. Well before their contracts are inked, international agreements can go through protracted and sometimes failed negotiations; their launch can be delayed by failed ratifications or the introduction of legal reservations to the treaty, often from the very governments that signed the deal.

Sub Unit

• Division 17: International Collaboration

Chairs

• Julia Gray University of Pennsylvania

• Daniela Donno University of Oklahoma

Presenters

• Ayse Kaya Swarthmore College

• Karl Orfeo Fioretos Temple University

• Felicity Vabulas Pepperdine University

• Inken von Borzyskowski Oxford

• Henning Schmidtke European University Institute

• Averell Schmidt Brown University

• Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni Cambridge University

• Tobias Lenz Leuphana University Lüneburg