Philip M. Tantow

Friedrich Schiller University Jena | FSU · Department of Political Science

The institutional development of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the past two decades was markedly shaped by global public health emergencies. In the aftermath of the SARS crisis in 2003, the organization was delegated new legal authority to contain contagious disease outbreaks. In light of its contested performance during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009-10, however, member states cut WHO off the resources to fulfill its mandate. Finally, the coronavirus crisis has seen an intense politicization of the organization and the (preliminary) withdrawal of its most powerful member state. More often than not, IOs do not look the same before and after major crises in which they are involved. The shape of the European Union before and after the euro crisis attests to this as well as the International Organization for Migration in the context of the humanitarian crisis in Libya after 2011. However, the direction of change is undetermined. Broadly speaking, sometimes IOs emerge stronger form crises while sometimes they are weakened. How can this variation be explained? When are IOs able to use crises as opportunity and when do they function as constraint? What are the conditions under which crises either compel states to defer to the judgment of IOs or lead them to contest and defy? In this project, we intend to 1) gather data on comparable crises in world politics and IO responses to these crises; 2) theorize factors accounting for the different institutional IO trajectories; 3) test the theoretical expectations in both quantitative and qualitative studies.