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The Survival of International Organizations
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Transformations in Governance
Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is
designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international
relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the
dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments,
and public–private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the
organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is
selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading
and emerging scholars.
The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES
A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (5 volumes)
Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks et al.
A Theory of International Organization
Liesbet Hooghe, Tobias Lenz, and Gary Marks
The Rise of International Parliaments
Strategic Legitimation in International Organizations
Frank Schimmelfennig, Thomas Winzen, Tobias Lenz, Jofre Rocabert, Loriana Crasnic, Cristina
Gherasimov, Jana Lipps, and Densua Mumford
The Political Commissioner
A European Ethnography
Frédéric Mérand
Interorganizational Diusion in International Relations
Regional Institutions and the Role of the European Union
Tobias Lenz
International Organization as Technocratic Utopia
Jens Steek
Ideational Legacies and the Politics of Migration in European Minority Regions
Christina Isabel Zuber
The Institutional Topology of International Regime Complexes
Mapping Inter-Institutional Structures in Global Governance
Benjamin Daßler
Shared Rule in Federal Theory and Practice
Concept, Causes, Consequences
Sean Mueller
Ethnic Minorities, Political Competition, and Democracy
Circumstantial Liberals
Jan Rovny
European Blame Games
Where does the buck stop?
Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Bernhard Zangl, Berthold Rittberger, and Lisa Kriegmair
For a full list of titles published in the series, see pp. 211–212
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The Survival of
International
Organizations
Institutional Responses to Existential
Challenges
Hylke Dijkstra
Laura von Allw¨
orden
Leonard Schütte
and
Giuseppe Zaccaria
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© Hylke Dijkstra, Laura von Allw ¨
orden, Leonard Schütte,
and Giuseppe Zaccaria 2025
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Preface and acknowledgements
This book is the result of a ve-year research project on the ‘decline and
death of international organizations’ (called NestIOr) funded by the Euro-
pean Research Council (ERC) in which the four of us worked together
(2019–2024). Well before it was a project, it had started as an intellectual exer-
cise. The principal investigator of the project (Hylke Dijkstra) was curious
about the ‘second half’ of the lifecycle of international organizations. While
legions of scholars have studied the design and development of international
organizations (IOs), no one really seemed to be interested in the decline and
death of IOs. This was surprising as much of diplomatic history and politi-
cal philosophy is about the rise and fall of dierent governance forms—once
great powers, vanished kingdoms, and dissolved military alliances.
This intellectual exercise suddenly became more pertinent in 2016 because
of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as the U.S. Pres-
ident. Along with demands and pressures by the emerging powers, there
was a real chance that established IOs would fall apart. To study these exis-
tential challenges to dierent IOs, Laura von Allw¨
orden, Leonard Schütte,
and Giuseppe Zaccaria joined the project as PhD candidates working on
the policy areas of climate and energy, security and defence, and trade and
development. Their purpose was to go ‘inside’ the various IOs and trace how
these existential challenges play out. They conducted 114 interviews with IO
insiders, the results of which are presented in this book.
Aer researching the decline and death of international organizations
together for more than ve years, we ended up writing this book about their
survival. What we found across our case studies is that various institutional
actors within IOs—political leaders and also everyday ocials—had devel-
oped proactive strategies to respond to existential challenges. They did not
sit back waiting for their organizations to be dissolved but rather stepped
up and adopted a range of behavioural and discursive responses. In some
cases, they helped their organizations to adapt to existential pressures. In
other cases, they shielded their organizations from such challenges through
careful resistance strategies.
For us, survival is therefore the story and oentimes such ‘non-events’
deserve more scholarly attention. The dog that didn’t bark; the communist
revolutions that did not happen in Western industrialized societies. But we
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vi Preface and acknowledgements
feel that there is something more to the title and topic of our book. For us, it is
also normatively important as scholars to provide a more optimistic account
of the state of international cooperation. If all scholars and pundits talk about
‘the end of liberal international order’ and ‘the crisis of multilateralism’, it
becomes a self-fullling prophecy. For us, this would be a disservice to all the
people in the machinery of international cooperation, who work hard every
single day to address international challenges. While political philosopher
Thomas Hobbes rightly notes that ‘nothing can be immortal which mortals
make’—this clearly also includes IOs which one day will be dissolved or fall
into desuetude—we should be careful not too easily write o the organiza-
tions that provide the very fabric of international cooperation. Particularly at
a moment when Donald Trump has returned to oce.
We owe a debt of gratitude and that starts with our funder, which has
made our project possible. In formal terms, this book is the result of a project
funded by the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme (grant agreement no. 802568). The ERC funding
scheme is, of course, well known, yet we only started to appreciate its merits
when we were actually working on the project. ERC projects demand intellec-
tual ambition and risk-taking, for instance developing a theory on the decline
and death of IOs that can turn out wrong. Moreover, ERC funds team sci-
ence bringing together complementary knowledge and skills in an integrated
project. Finally, we felt a sense of responsibility to make the most out of this
exceptional opportunity we were granted.
Beyond funding, we need to thank a range of colleagues who have been
willing to engage with our project and scholarship. Within our ERC project,
we owe much to team members Maria Debre and Farsan Ghassim, who
as postdocs have been instrumental for our team. Maria helped set up the
project and establish our team. Her initial quantitative analyses also provided
direction for our case study research. Farsan joined halfway through the
project and provided much needed renewed energy for all of us. Both have
also repeatedly commented on this book project, which has become better
because of it. In Maastricht, we need to further thank Thomas Conzelmann,
Sophie Vanhoonacker, and Esther Versluis who served as co-supervisors of
respectively Giuseppe Zaccaria, Leonard Schütte, and Laura von Allw¨
orden.
They have been involved throughout the project as well and been a source of
support.
A good number of colleagues and friends have taken an interest in our work
by joining our kick-o workshop in Brussels in January 2020 and our nal
workshop in Maastricht in June 2023, serving on PhD defence committees,
and by (repeatedly) commenting on our work: Johan Adriaensen, Michael
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Preface and acknowledgements vii
Bauer, Steven Blockmans, Inken von Borzyskowski, Richard Caplan, Mette
Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Julia Gray, Yoram Hael, Tim Heinkelmann-Wild,
Anna Herranz-Surrallés, Gisela Hirschmann, Stephanie Hofmann, Chris-
tian Kreuder-Sonnen, Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Bernhard Reinsberg,
Yf Reykers, Thomas Sommerer, Soetkin Verhaegen, Stefanie Walter, Clara
Weinhardt, and Carmen Wunderlich. There is now a true scholarly commu-
nity that studies the decline, death, and survival of IOs in a most professional
and collaborative manner. Thank you!
We have also presented our work at two dozen conferences, and we thank
all the organizers, chairs, discussants, and participants. In particular, we
would like to highlight two workshops where we presented earlier versions of
this book. We are thankful to Tom Hunter and Stefanie Walter for hosting us
at Lake Zurich for the workshop on ‘International cooperation in challeng-
ing times’ on 3–4 October 2022 and Stephanie Hofmann for the workshop
‘Global order, international organisations and organisational options’ at the
European University Institute, 13–14 October 2022.
This book is informed by 114 interviews with politicians, diplomats, o-
cials, experts, and other stakeholders at the various IOs we study. We are
grateful to them for receiving us, including in videoconference calls during
the pandemic, and taking us on a journey behind the scenes to comprehend
the functioning of the various IOs.
As with most research, ours has been a cumulative project. Readers famil-
iar with our work will recognize that our book builds on Hylke Dijkstra,
Laura von Allw¨
orden, Leonard Schütte and Giuseppe Zaccaria (2024). Don-
ald Trump and the survival strategies of international organizations: When
can institutional actors counter existential challenges? Cambridge Review
of International Aairs, 37(2), 182–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.
2022.2136566 licensed under CC BY 4.0 and adapted here. This was a rst
comparative case study article among the four of us where we focused
on institutional actors. This book is naturally much longer, with a more
developed argument, and also other types of case studies.
Readers may also recognize some of the specic case material, such as
Laura von Allw¨
orden (2024). When contestation legitimizes: the norm of cli-
mate change action and the US contesting the Paris Agreement. International
Relations, advance online publication. © The Author 2024, https://doi.org/
10.1177/00471178231222874, which has been adapted here (This material is
not covered by the terms of the Creative Commons licence of this publication.
For permission to reuse, please contact the rights holder); Leonard Schütte
(2021). Why NATO survived Trump: The neglected role of Secretary Gen-
eral Stoltenberg. International Aairs, 97(6), 1863–1881. https://doi.org/10.
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viii Preface and acknowledgements
1093/ia/iiab167 licensed under CC BY 4.0 and adapted here; and Leonard
Schütte and Hylke Dijkstra (2023). When an international organisation
fails to legitimate: The decline of the OSCE. Global Studies Quarterly, 3(4),
1–13. https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksad057 licensed under CC BY 4.0 and
adapted here. The CC BY 4.0 licence is available at https://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by/4.0/. For enquiries concerning use outside the scope of the
licence terms, please contact the rights holder. These previous articles were,
however, stand-alone case studies engaging with dierent research questions
and theoretical perspectives. This book therefore not simply brings earlier
ndings together but advances an innovative argument with new data as well.
We are nevertheless pleased to acknowledge these original publications. We
are particularly thankful to the various journal editors and reviewers who
have improved our thinking.
This book has become much better because of all the constructive sugges-
tions of the reviewers at Oxford University Press. They have gone above and
beyond in trying to help us articulate our argument better and encouraging
us to bring out the interview data. We owe Dominic Byatt a lot for support-
ing this project from the beginning and for his advice and full attention as
we were writing this book. It is an honour to publish this book in the ‘Trans-
formations in Governance’ series edited by Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks,
and Walter Mattli, which has become a focal institution in its own right for
scholarship on IOs.
We would not have been able to write this book without the support of
our family and friends. Hylke Dijkstra likes to thank his family for all their
support and his undergraduate professors who had him read the classics in
diplomatic history and political philosophy. Laura von Allw¨
orden likes to
thank her parents and close friends for their support. Further, she would like
to thank her PhD supervisors, fellow colleagues along the academic road, and
friends she made here along the way. Leonard Schütte is grateful for the gen-
erosity and understanding his family and friends exhibited throughout this
project. Giuseppe Zaccaria likes to thank his partner, friends, and family for
all the support they oered him during his PhD trajectory (and beyond).
Maastricht, Kiel, Berlin, Glasgow
July 2024
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Contents
List of tables xi
List of acronyms xii
1. Introduction 1
1.1 The question 5
1.2 The literature 9
1.3 The argument and findings 14
1.4 The method 22
1.5 The book 26
2. Institutional actors and the survival of international
organizations 29
2.1 Dierent types of existential challenges 32
2.1.1 Existential challenges to international cooperation 32
2.1.2 Existential challenges by powerful member states 34
2.1.3 Existential challenges by competing institutions 36
2.2 Dierent types of IO responses 38
2.2.1 Adaptation and resistance 39
2.2.2 Responses by institutional actors 41
2.3 Abilities of IO institutional actors to respond 46
2.3.1 Leadership 48
2.3.2 Organizational structure 50
2.3.3 Formal competences 52
2.3.4 External networks 53
2.3.5 Conclusion 55
2.4 Outcomes for IOs 56
2.5 Conclusion 59
3. Trade and Development 62
3.1 WTO and the Appellate Body crisis 65
3.1.1 The WTO and its main functions 65
3.1.2 The Trump administration and the WTO Appellate Body 67
3.1.3 WTOʼs institutional response to the Appellate Body crisis 70
3.1.4 Outcome of the challenge to the Appellate Body 77
3.2 World Bank and the creation of the AIIB 79
3.2.1 The World Bank and its main functions 79
3.2.2 The establishment of the China-led AIIB 81
3.2.3 The World Bankʼs response to the creation of the AIIB 85
3.2.4 Outcome of the challenge to the World Bank 92
3.3 Conclusion 93
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xContents
4. Climate and Energy 96
4.1 The UNFCCC and the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement 99
4.1.1 The UNFCCC and its main functions 99
4.1.2 The withdrawal of the United States from the Paris
Agreement 101
4.1.3 UNFCCCʼs response to the U.S. withdrawal 103
4.1.4 The outcome of the challenge to the Paris Agreement 113
4.2 IEA and the creation of IRENA 114
4.2.1 The IEA and its main functions 114
4.2.2 The creation of IRENA for renewable energy 115
4.2.3 The IEAʼs response to the creation of IRENA 118
4.2.4 Outcome of the challenge to the IEA 124
4.3 Conclusion 125
5. Security and Defence 128
5.1 NATO and the Trump presidency 131
5.1.1 NATO and its main functions 131
5.1.2 The challenge of burden-sharing and Russia policy 133
5.1.3 NATOʼs response to the Trump presidency 135
5.1.4 Outcome of the challenge to NATO 142
5.2 OSCE and the development of EU security policy 144
5.2.1 The OSCE and its main functions 144
5.2.2 The creation of EU security policy and OSCE contestation
by Russia 146
5.2.3 The OSCEʼs response to indirect and direct existential
challenges 148
5.2.4 Outcome of the challenge to the OSCE 155
5.3 Conclusion 157
6. Conclusion 161
6.1 The question and the argument 163
6.2 Comparison of the case studies 166
6.2.1 The findings 167
6.2.2 Explaining responses by institutional actors 170
6.3 Implications for research on international organizations 174
6.4 The survival of international organizations 178
List of interviews 182
References 186
Index 206
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List of tables
Table 1.1 Overview of case studies and empirical results 17
Table 2.1 Examples of responses by IO institutional actors 42
Table 3.1 Overview of empirical ndings on WTO and World Bank 72
Table 4.1 Overview of empirical ndings on UNFCCC and IEA 104
Table 5.1 Overview of empirical ndings on NATO and the OSCE 138
Table 6.1 Comparison of ndings of the case studies 172
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List of acronyms
ADB Asian Development Bank
AIIB Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
APEC Asia Pacic Economic Cooperation
ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations
AU African Union
BRI Belt and Road Initiative
BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa
COP Conference of the Parties
CFE Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe
CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy
CIS Commonwealth of Independent States
CPC Conict Prevention Centre
CSCE Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe
CSDP Common Security and Defence Policy
DSB Dispute Settlement Body
ERC European Research Council
EU European Union
EULEX EU Mission in Kosovo
G7 Group of 7
G20 Group of 20
GATT General Agreement on Taris and Trade
HCNM High Commissioner on National Minorities
IO international organization
IEA International Energy Agency
IBRD International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
ICSID International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes
IDA International Development Association
IFC International Finance Corporation
IPU integrated police unit
IR International Relations (the academic discipline)
IRENA International Renewable Energy Agency
LPAA Lima-Paris Action Agenda
MDB multilateral development bank
MPIA Multi-Party Interim Agreement
MIGA Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NAZCA Nonstate Actor Zone for Climate Action
NDC nationally determined contribution
NGO non-governmental organization
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List of acronyms xiii
NSC National Security Council
ODIHR Oce for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OPEC Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
OSCE Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
RFoM Representative on the Freedom of the Media
SACEUR Supreme Allied Commander Europe
SPSU Strategic Policy Support Unit
TRIPS Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
UN United Nations
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientic and Cultural Organization
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
UNMIK UN Mission in Kosovo
US United States
USTR United States Trade Representative
WHO World Health Organization
WTO World Trade Organization
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1
Introduction
Shortly aer the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the leading Inter-
national Relations (IR) theorist Kenneth Waltz made the infamously wrong
prediction that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) ‘days are
not numbered, but its years are’ (1993, p. 76). With the principal threat out of
the way, NATO no longer seemed to have a purpose. Waltz rhetorically asked
‘[h]ow can an alliance endure in the absence of a worthy opponent?’ (p. 75).
Against these odds, NATO survived the end of the Cold War. It adapted
itself to the new security environment and NATO allies have sent military
missions to Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya (e.g. Dijkstra, 2015;
Johnston, 2017;McCalla, 1996;Thies, 2009;Wallander, 2000). NATO still
continuously needs to prove itself. U.S. President Trump refused to endorse
Article 5 and privately indicated that he wanted to withdraw the United States
from the North Atlantic Alliance (Barnes & Cooper, 2019;Schuette, 2021a),
while French President Macron called NATO ‘brain-dead’ (as cited in The
Economist, 2019). Yet the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022,
once again, underlined the importance of NATO: Thirty-ve years aer the
fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO continues to guarantee the collective defence
of Europe.
NATO is just one example of the many international organizations (IOs)
that have faced existential challenges, dened as challenges that potentially
put their ability to perform core functions at risk. The United States, for
instance, stopped contributing to the United Nations Educational, Scientic
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) budget in 2011, thereby depriv-
ing the organization of nearly a quarter of its resources (Eckhard, Patz, &
Schmidt, 2019). The United Kingdom quit the European Union (EU) in 2020,
Burundi and the Philippines the International Criminal Court, Japan the
International Whaling Commission, and the United States put in motion the
process of leaving the World Health Organization (WHO) during the Covid-
19 pandemic (von Borzyskowski & Vabulas, 2019). Meanwhile, the World
Trade Organization (WTO) nds its Appellate Body inoperable following
the American refusal to appoint judges (Hopewell, 2021a, 2021b; Payosova,
Huauer, & Schott, 2018;Zaccaria, 2022) and the organization has been in
The Survival of International Organizations. Hylke Dijkstra et al., Oxford University Press. © Hylke Dijkstra, Laura von
Allw¨
orden, Leonard Sch¨
utte, and Giuseppe Zaccaria (2025). DOI: 10.1093/9780198948445.003.0001
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2The Survival of International Organizations
a stalemate ever since the breakdown of the Doha Development Round in
the mid-2000s.
Elsewhere in the international system, the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was dealt a strong blow due to
the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement under Pres-
ident Trump. This created fears that other states would follow the example
thereby eroding global climate action (Jotzo, Depledge, & Winkler, 2018).
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), set
up to mitigate East–West relations, was already on a downward trajectory
long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and is generally unable to provide
common security for its participating states (Schuette & Dijkstra, 2023a).
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) demanded to be
taken seriously in their Durban Declaration of 2013 and have set up alterna-
tive institutions that potentially challenge the existing postwar setup (Chin,
2014). Their view on global order has resonated with many other states lead-
ing to an expansion of the BRICS in 2024. A potent challenge comes from
the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt
and Road Initiative (BRI) (Hameiri & Jones, 2018;Liao, 2015;Ren, 2016).
China has also attempted to capture key United Nations (UN) agencies and
continuously challenges established UN human rights norms.
There is no shortage of scholarship discussing these existential challenges
to IOs and the assault on the liberal international order more generally (e.g.
Copelovitch & Pevehouse, 2019;Ferguson & Zakaria, 2017;Foreign Aairs,
2017;Lake, Martin, & Risse, 2021;Mearsheimer, 2019;De Vries, Hobolt, &
Walter, 2021). Coming from very dierent theoretical perspectives, scholars
show how populism, nationalism, power transitions, and the ‘folly of lib-
eralism’ explain the contestation of IOs and international institutions. For
John Mearsheimer (2019), the liberal international order and its interna-
tional institutions were ‘bound to fail’ (title), as they ‘contained the seeds
of [their] own destruction’ (p. 7). Michael Zürn (2018) and his co-authors
point at the rise of international authority—and liberal intrusiveness—since
the 1990s. They argue that this almost inevitably resulted in a greater popular
contestation of the IOs, since IOs have been the main beneciaries of such
increased authority (cf. B¨
orzel & Zürn, 2021;Zürn, Tokhi, & Binder, 2021).
Whatever the precise underlying causal logic, the understanding among
many is that the future of IOs is bleak. Contestation might cause ‘gridlock’
(Hale, Held, & Young, 2013), which no longer allows IOs and other interna-
tional institutions to take on urgent policy problems. It might put them on a
pathway to ‘decline’ (Zürn, 2018, pp. 13–14, 101, 255–257) or at least make
IOs less central to international relations. The ultimate way for states to show
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Introduction 3
that IOs have outlived their purpose is to disband them altogether. Mette
Eilstrup-Sangiovanni (2020) nds, in this respect, that 39% of the IOs (218
out of 561) created since 1815 have formally ceased to exist (see also Peve-
house et al., 2020). Even if not formally declared ‘dead’, Julia Gray (2018)
shows that no less than 38% of seventy international economic organiza-
tions were inactive during the period 1948–2013, thus essentially in a state
of ‘coma’. While the termination of major IOs remains a rare event in recent
history (Dijkstra & Debre, 2022), the degree of pessimism in the academic
literature is considerable (e.g. Lake et al., 2021, p. 225).
The existing literature thus discusses many of the challenges that IOs
face—the rise of China, hegemonic contestation by Trump, and how pop-
ulist political parties complicate cooperation—yet scant attention is paid to
the IOs themselves. IOs are implicitly portrayed as both victims and hap-
less bystanders as international and domestic politics unfold. How IOs deal
with the various existential challenges is rarely the topic of academic inquiry
as such. This is surprising for two reasons. First, IOs dier signicantly.
While IOs have some common dening features (cf. Hooghe et al., 2017;
Pevehouse et al., 2020), they also var y to very large degrees in terms of institu-
tional design (Koremenos, Lipson, & Snidal, 2001). They are like apples and
oranges—two fruits that are round and of similar size, but have a dierent
colour, taste, and texture (Rittberger et al., 2019, p. 5). This logically requires
us to study how existential challenges play out across IOs. Second, IOs are
generally considered—like all bureaucracies—to have a degree of autonomy
and agency, as they are intentionally put at some distance from the mem-
ber states to independently implement their mandates (Bauer & Ege, 2016;
Chorev, 2012;Cox et al., 1973;Hawkins et al., 2006;Reinalda & Verbeek,
2003). Even in the face of formidable challenges, IOs are not powerless actors.
They have options to respond.
When taking a rst look at how IOs have responded to the existential
challenges touched upon in the preceding paragraphs, we indeed see con-
siderable variation. As mentioned, NATO is an example of an IO which has
adapted several times to the changing international environment aer the
end of the Cold War. There are, however, many other IOs that have come
out of existential challenges relatively unshattered. The EU and the World
Bank have respectively dealt with the challenges of Brexit and the creation of
the rival AIIB in ways that have consolidated their organizations. Other IOs
have, however, been less responsive. The WTO has not been able to kick-
start the Doha Round or revitalize its Appellate Body aer Donald Trump’s
rst term. While the WTO continues to operate in several domains, it is con-
siderably less central to international relations than it was during the 2000s.
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4The Survival of International Organizations
The same can be said about the OSCE. As a security organization, it has not
been able to address the deteriorating security environment in Europe since
the 2010s.
When zooming in a bit, it becomes apparent that IOs have used a whole
range of dierent strategies to cope with and counter existential challenges.
In response to the outcome of the Brexit referendum, for instance, the Euro-
pean Commission appointed a high-level politician in Michel Barnier to keep
the remaining EU member states together in order to resist most British
demands. The World Bank leadership, on the other hand, took a much more
accommodating—though proactive—perspective on the AIIB and reached
out to shape this China-led institution in its own image. The UNFCCC Sec-
retariat, to give yet another example, had gradually built a strong external
support network of state, sub-state, and non-state actors supporting climate
action, which was activated to counter the challenges by Donald Trump to
the Paris Agreement. Other IOs were far less proactive in developing strate-
gic responses. For instance, the WTO Director-General did little to address
the looming crisis of the Appellate Body and suddenly resigned during the
Covid pandemic.
What explains these dierent responses by IOs? Complementing the state-
centric literature which mostly studies the causes of existential challenges,
this book focuses on the role of institutional actors of IOs—IO leaders and
their bureaucracies—and analyses their abilities to formulate and implement
response strategies to existential challenges. The book argues that these central
institutional actors within IOs have a strong interest in the survival of their
organizations and potentially a wide arsenal of behavioural and discursive
strategies to cope with and even counter challenges that put their own orga-
nizations at risk. They can help, for instance, their IOs adapt to a changing
international environment, resist the populist urges, or face o competition
from other IOs. The ability of institutional actors to respond and to strate-
gically tailor responses to dierent types of existential challenges, however,
greatly varies across IOs. While some institutional actors have consider-
able agency to purposefully respond to existential challenges, in other IOs
their ability is severely constrained. By uncovering why some institutional
actors within IOs can better answer to existential challenges than others,
this book contributes to an emerging academic literature on the survival
of IOs.
This book is therefore about the IOs themselves. It is about the Secretaries-
General, Directors-General, and Executive Secretaries who lead IOs. But
the book is equally about the middle-managers and the desk ocers, who
keep the machinery running, within the directorates of the international
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Introduction 5
secretariats of IOs. They too can facilitate organizational adaptation and/or
resist existential challenges. The book explains why these institutional actors,
who serve principally the IO rather than member state interest, respond
dierently when their own livelihood gets threatened. Providing detailed
comparative case studies of six IOs and original data from 114 interviews,
the book goes beyond the ocial documents and public debates. It uncovers
important behind the scenes processes about the survival of IOs and inter-
national institutions. Overall, it provides a corrective to the more alarming
accounts of the crisis of IOs and presents a more optimistic take on the state
of liberal international order and the future of IOs as major international
vehicles for cooperation: Over the last few decades IOs have survived key
existential challenges and are here to stay.
1.1 The question
The last decade has been taxing for international cooperation with the rise
of populism, the Trump Presidency, and the renewed assertiveness of the
emerging powers. Various IOs have been challenged repeatedly in ways that
put their ability to perform core functions or even their very livelihood
at risk. This book studies the varying responses by the institutional actors
of IOs—IO leaders and their bureaucracies—to such existential challenges.
Institutional actors have a strong interest in the survival and well-being of
their organizations and likely ght tooth and nail to keep their IOs relevant.
At the same time, institutional actors are heavily constrained in their actions.
They may not have the necessary leadership, competences, resources, or net-
works to respond. Furthermore, as bureaucracies, institutional actors are
oen slow-moving: They may not recognize existential challenges on time
or are unable to formulate a purposeful response strategy. This book there-
fore studies the survival strategies of institutional actors within IOs and
their ability to determine their own fate. It seeks to answer the research
question why do the institutional actors of IOs respond dierently to exis-
tential challenges? It is about institutional responses by IOs to existential
challenges.
The examples in the preceding paragraphs of IOs facing existential
challenges—from NATO to Brexit, WHO, and the Paris Agreement—have
received considerable academic and public attention. This is for good reason.
Existential challenges to IOs are important because these are extraordinary
moments in international relations during which a lot can happen. Not
just to those IOs, but to international order more generally. IOs are, aer
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6The Survival of International Organizations
all, institutions that bring a degree of permanence and continuity to the
otherwise volatile relations between international actors. IOs reduce uncer-
tainty, create stability, and produce collective goods—from collective defence
and international justice to pandemic expertise and world heritage lists.
As multilateral institutions, founded by three or more states, IOs are oen
designed to absorb the diverse inputs of international actors, notably from
their member states, and address a range of everyday challenges. Yet exis-
tential challenges to IOs are not like everyday challenges that can be easily
absorbed. When IOs are existentially challenged, in ways that put their very
organizations at risk, the institutions underpinning international order are at
stake.
Conceptually, it is important to dene ‘existential challenges’ and clar-
ify how these challenges dier from other challenges or everyday ‘inputs’
that go into the political system of IOs (e.g. Easton, 1957;Rittberger et al.,
2019). Aer all, IOs constantly face demands from their membership but
also from non-state actors, experts, and public opinion. Such demands are
normally channelled through diplomatic routes, lobbying, and stakeholder
consultations but also more public routes. Around many IOs, there are lively
debates in terms ofpublic events, think tank papers, news media, and in some
cases regular demonstrations. IOs clearly have to navigate such environmen-
tal demands. Existential challenges to IOs are, however, dierent. They are
not about states blocking the consensus on a policy dossier, or activists and
lobbyists voicing their concerns. Existential challenges are about the more
fundamental undermining of IOs. In this book, we dene existential chal-
lenges as those that specically put individual IOs at risk of no longer being
able to eectively carry out some of their core functions.
Existential challenges therefore include two properties. First, they are
about the core functions of IOs. Unlike regular inputs into the political sys-
tem of IOs, existential challenges put parts of the very political system at
risk (the polity). In the ultimate case, existential challenges may result in
IO termination, dissolution, desuetude, or death (Debre & Dijkstra, 2021a;
Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, 2020). But there are also scenarios where IOs turn into
‘zombies’—organizations that continue to operate without much relevance
to international relations (Gray, 2018). Furthermore, existential challenges
can aect only part of the core functions of an IO. When the Trump admin-
istration, for instance, refused to appoint judges to the WTO Appellate
Body it eectively rendered this adjudication court inoperable. The WTO
continues to exist, but it can no longer carry out its core adjudication func-
tion. Second, existential challenges are about potential risks to the political
system. The outcome of such challenges is not predetermined. Existential
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Introduction 7
challenges do not have to adversely aect IOs. IOs may be able to cope with
or counter existential challenges. This makes it important to study the pro-
cess of what happens when existential challenges to IOs arise and why IOs
respond dierently.
When an existential challenge hits an IO, all eyes are oen immedi-
ately on the institutional actors which are the embodiment of IOs and vital
for the everyday running of IOs. Through their position at the centre of
IOs, institutional actors are potentially in a powerful spot to address exis-
tential challenges. And with their own jobs on the line, they are among
the most motivated advocates for the survival of their organizations. Insti-
tutional actors typically include IO leaders or ‘heads’ (e.g. Chesterman,
2007;Cox, 1969;Hall & Woods, 2018;Kille & Scully, 2003;Mathiason,
2007;Young, 1991)—such as Secretaries-General, Directors-General, and
Executive-Secretaries—and the international public administration, secre-
tariat, or bureaucracy of IOs (e.g. Biermann & Siebenhüner, 2009;Bauer,
Knill, & Eckhard, 2016;Trondal et al., 2013). Institutional actors are there-
fore those actors who serve principally the IO institution rather than par-
ticular interest. IO institutional actors thus do not include the member
states meeting in the plenary organs or executive boards, nor the parlia-
mentary assemblies or adjudication bodies (on the dierent IO organs:
Rittberger et al., 2019, pp. 60–61). By studying institutional actors—IO
leaders and their bureaucracies—the book thus focuses on the actors that
make IOs go around and that play a lead role in addressing existential
challenges.
By asking the research question why the institutional actors of IOs respond
dierently to existential challenges, we start from the assumption that insti-
tutional actors will potentially have some agency when their IOs are existen-
tially challenged. This implies that institutional actors have a private interest
in organizational survival and that they have substantial political and bureau-
cratic resources at their disposal. Michael Bauer and J¨
orn Ege (2016) have
referred to this as the bureaucratic autonomy of ‘will’ (their autonomous
preferences) and ‘action’ (their discretion and resources). We assume that
autonomy of will is strong for institutional actors, when faced with exis-
tential challenges, as their jobs, prestige, self-esteem, and institutions are at
stake (e.g. Kaufman, 1976;Strange, 1998). With respect to discretion and
resources, we focus in this book on IOs that have at least 250 ocials though
in some of the cases even thousands of bureaucratic sta members (see also
Section 1.4). We assume that these are substantial resources allowing the IO
institutional actors to potentially strategize and to formulate and implement
responses to existential challenges.
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8The Survival of International Organizations
In trying to answer the research question, this book puts forward two
propositions. First, we expect that institutional actors will respond dier-
ently to dierent types of existential challenges. IO institutional actors are
more likely to resist direct existential challenges by powerful states and more
likely to adapt to indirect existential challenges where states establish com-
peting institutions (Proposition 1). It is particularly dicult for IOs and their
institutional actors to give in to powerful states, because unilateral demands
by such states may erode the very mandate of the IO or put a burden on
the rest of the membership (see on ‘accommodation dilemma’, Walter, 2021).
Faced with such types of existential challenges, it is more likely that insti-
tutional actors use their resources to try to resist powerful states through a
range of discursive and behavioural strategies. In the case of indirect existen-
tial challenges to IOs, where states or groups of states set up new competing
institutions (‘contested multilateralism’, Morse & Keohane, 2014), we expect
adaptive responses by institutional actors. Once new institutions have been
set up, the ship has typically sailed, and institutional actors in incumbent IOs
will try to (re)establish their central position in international relations, which
requires adaptation.
We therefore expect institutional actors to tailor their responses to exis-
tential challenges, yet we also expect, secondly, that their ability to pursue
strategic responses will depend on their own leadership, organizational struc-
ture, formal competences, and external networks (Proposition 2). IOs and
their institutional actors have been constituted very dierently with a wide
variety of institutional designs, which we expect will aect their institutional
responses. IOs have, for instance, very dierent types of leaders (Hall &
Woods, 2018) some of whom may be better accustomed to deal with ques-
tions of institutional survival. Strategic responses by institutional actors are
further not a given when IOs come under pressure (Chorev, 2012, pp. 28–41),
as institutional actors should be able to recognize the challenge on time,
pick an appropriate strategic response out of a range of available options,
and properly implement the response. This is a tall order as IOs and their
bureaucracies can be inert (Barnett & Finnemore, 2004;Bayerlein, Knill, &
Steinebach, 2020;Weaver, 2008). Going by some of the examples provided
above—from high-level political leadership in the EU in response to Brexit to
the UNFCCC secretariat relying on external networks, and the World Bank
reaching out to the AIIB—we indeed witness a palette of dierent responses.
To conclude, this book addresses the question, why do the institutional
actors of IOs respond dierently to existential challenges? It proposes to
consider the dierent types of existential challenges as well as the ability of
institutional actors to strategically respond. Institutional actors tailor their
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Introduction 9
responses to the dierent types of challenges, yet their ability to do so may
depend on their leadership, organizational structure, formal competences,
and external networks. While some institutional actors will be motivated
and at the forefront of protecting their IO, other institutional actors may not
have the internal strength to do so. So even if institutional actors have major
incentives to respond to existential challenges, strategic responses are not
automatically forthcoming. Which institutional actors put up a ght for their
organizations and which ones do not? By uncovering why institutional actors
of IOs respond dierently to existential challenges, this book contributes to
new insights on IOs and provides knowledge about whether IOs are hap-
less bystanders as existential challenges unfold or active and purposeful
agents.
1.2 The literature
By addressing this research question, this book contributes to the burgeon-
ing literature on the crisis of liberal international order and the crises of IOs
in particular. It takes, however, a distinctive perspective and makes two con-
tributions. First, rather than studying the existential challenges—and their
causes—as others have done, the book focuses on the responses of IOs and
their institutional actors. It qualies the extant literature by showing that
institutional actors are not simply bystanders as their IOs get challenged.
Second, this book questions the idea that IOs are by default slow-moving,
sticky, and path-dependent organizations, gridlocked by veto-players and
bureaucratic inertia. It shows that institutional actors of IOs can pursue
proactive responses to existential challenges, helping their IOs to adapt
and/or shielding them from the worst external pressures. Compared to the
existing literature, this book thus studies the agency of the institutional actors
to determine their own faith. It does so through a comparative case analysis
of IOs informed by rich interview data.
Let us address these two contributions and the shortcomings of the existing
literature in turn. First, much of the literature on the crises of IOs and lib-
eral international order tries to explain the origins of existential challenges to
IOs. Realist and domestic politics approaches are particularly vocal in debates
on the liberal international order, while liberal-institutionalist scholars have
focused on the changing nature of international problems. The trouble with
these approaches is that they do not tell us much about IO responses to exis-
tential challenges and thereby only present us with a half answer. This is
problematic as for all the challenges to liberal international order, we know
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10 The Survival of International Organizations
very little about the actual consequences for IOs. Indeed, the very assump-
tions of these theoretical approaches, such as state-centrality or a focus on
the domestic level, oentimes get in the way of understanding eects at the
IO level. Yet unless we know how existential challenges exactly play out in
IOs, we cannot judge their signicance in the rst place. There is no space
here to discuss these extant debates in exhaustive terms, but it is nonetheless
instructive to briey consider the main arguments.
The ‘trilogy ’ by John Mearsheimer (1994,2014,2019) on institutional insti-
tutions broadly exemplies the realist state-centric approach. In his view,
institutional institutions are a mere reection of great power politics (1994),
unable to handle China as an emerging power (2014), and the liberal inter-
national order is simply a post-Cold War liberal folly that cannot withstand
the realities of power politics (2019). Throughout these arguments, IOs are
either forums where great power politics plays out, or temporary vehicles for
member states to pursue their collective interests (e.g. Mearsheimer, 1994, pp.
13–14; Walt, 1990). Once relations between states become less cooperative,
IOs will likely suer. Changes in the power constellation among states will
also have strong repercussions for IOs. A power transition from the United
States to China, for instance, will likely negatively aect cooperation and
raise zero-sum questions over participation in international institutions (e.g.
Gilpin, 1981;Kennedy, 1987;Mearsheimer, 2001,2019, pp. 44–48).
Domestic politics explanations of the existential challenges to IOs are per-
haps less vocal but certainly at least as prominent. In a study of the EU,
Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2009) argue that the ‘permissive consensus’,
in which elites insulated from domestic political parties and public opin-
ion could promote cooperation, has made way for a ‘constraining dissensus’
in which those elites now must consider the domestic arena and ‘look over
their shoulders when negotiating European issues’ (p. 5). The resulting politi-
cization of international cooperation has oered opportunities for challenger
political parties and ‘political entrepreneurs’ (De Vries et al., 2021) to blame
IOs for rising inequalities due to globalization, cosmopolitanism undermin-
ing national identities, loss of sovereignty and control, and a general feeling of
ineciency. This argument is further strengthened by Michael Zürn (2018)
and his co-authors (Zürn, Binder, & Ecker-Ehrhardt, 2012) who argue that
the rise of authority of IOs since the 1990s has triggered politicization and
legitimacy crises as IOs have relied too much on expert-based authority and
arguments for their legitimation.
In addition to these realist and domestic politics approaches, a third
set of liberal-institutionalist explanations focuses on the problem struc-
ture of cooperation (Keohane, 1984; ‘demand and supply’, Keohane, 1982;
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Introduction 11
Moravcsik, 1993). Many international and cross-border problems are tem-
porary and uctuate over time, the argument goes, which likely aects the
relevant IOs when the underlying problems disappear. International prob-
lems have become ‘harder’ and more complex resulting in institutional
gridlock (Hale et al., 2013). Scholars have, in this respect, questioned the very
design of formal IOs and argued that we need more informal institutions
and networks (e.g. Slaughter, 2005). The rise of informal forms of interna-
tional governance has indeed been steep (Westerwinter, Abbott, & Biersteker,
2021). With the increasingly overlapping scope of IOs (Hael & Hofmann,
2017), we witness a degree of competition, not just between IOs themselves,
but also with other forms of international governance (Abbott, Green, & Keo-
hane, 2016;Morse & Keohane, 2014). Such competition for the resources
results in existential challenges for IOs that fail to be suciently focal, which
in turn may lead to decline, specialization, or death (but see Reinsberg, 2025).
The origins of existential challenges for IOs and the variety in their causes
are well-discussed therefore in the academic literature. Yet these approaches
tell us less about how such challenges play out in IOs. Even if the logic of
some of these arguments is endogenous—authority triggers politicization; or
path-dependent institutions are no longer t for purpose—these theories pay
very little attention to the responses of IOs and award IOs little to no agency
(Goddard et al. 2024;Kreuder-Sonnen & Rittberger, 2023). This makes them
deterministic. Yet IOs are clearly not ‘bound to fail’. Several IOs, as noted
above, have come out of existential challenges rather unshattered. More gen-
erally, many IOs have survived systemic transitions, world wars, periods of
decolonization, and various economic and nancial crises (Debre & Dijkstra,
2021a;Dijkstra & Debre, 2022;Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, 2021;Hael & Nadel,
2024). Simply trying to explain the causes of existential challenges to IOs is
therefore not enough. We also need to know how existential challenges play
out within IOs and what IOs can do to respond when their livelihood is put
at risk.
When it comes to the responses of IOs and their institutional actors to
existential challenges, we do know from the literature that IOs are oen-
times considered as slow-moving, sticky, and path-dependent organizations,
gridlocked by veto-players and bureaucratic inertia. The logic here, to put
it somewhat crudely, is that those that want to challenge IOs will even-
tually encounter bureaucracy and give up as they run out of energy and
political capital. Equally, IOs will be very constrained in their abilities to
respond to external pressures, as they are stuck between veto-wielding mem-
ber states and their own bureaucratic complexities. This is the second point
where we challenge the literature. While this institutional argument explains
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12 The Survival of International Organizations
the persistence of IOs, even when faced with existential challenges, in our
book, we highlight the actual strategic and proactive behaviour of institu-
tional actors in IOs. Our argument is outlined below, but for now, it suces to
say that institutional actors help their IOs adapt by facilitating compromises
among the member states and/or engaging in layering strategies. Bureau-
cratic sabotage is part of their toolkit but, as we argue, oentimes applied
strategically. It is worth reviewing some of the arguments in the literature
about sticky IOs before discussing the proactive behaviour of IOs.
The argument of institutional stickiness runs deeply throughout IO schol-
arship. Institutions are the rules of the game that structure how states interact
in IOs (cf. North, 1990, pp. 3–4), and institutions established in the past con-
tinue to dictate present-day politics. As John Ikenberry (2018) has repeatedly
noted, IOs and the American-led international order, as they have developed
in the postwar period, are ‘easy to join’ and ‘hard to overturn’ (p. 24). In the
rationalist varietal of institutionalism, IOs and their institutional actors face
an ‘accommodation dilemma’ where they may need to accommodate chal-
lenger states, but at the same time want to avoid creating opportunities for
other states to challenge the status quo (e.g. De Vries et al., 2021;Walter,
2021;Jurado, León, & Walter, 2022). The status quo thus becomes a focal
point from which it is dicult to pivot. Rationalists are also quick to point
out that any change in IOs will be challenging due to the large number of
principals and veto-players in IOs (e.g. Nielson & Tierney, 2003;Tsebelis,
2002). Existential challenges are therefore likely to lead to ‘gridlock’ in IOs
(Hale et al., 2013) with limited response options.
In addition to the distributive and coordination games that member states
play, scholars have also pointed out the lack of responsiveness by IOs from
a bureaucratic perspective. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore (2004)
have developed the concept of ‘institutional pathologies’ where IOs can
act in ways diametrically opposed to what their founders intended—for
instance, UN peacekeeping failing to respond to genocide or the IMF deeply
intruding in domestic policies. For them, we can only understand such IO
behaviour by considering the bureaucratic logic within IOs. Others have
made similar arguments about bureaucratic politics, organized hypocrisy,
and administrative styles within IOs (Bayerlein et al., 2020;Weaver, 2008).
Taken together—the diculty of member states to reach compromises on
reform and the bureaucratic inertia in the IOs themselves—these logics result
according to the extant literature in a strong status quo bias and a lack of gen-
eral responsiveness. Path dependency is the result. Indeed, we are regularly
reminded that many IOs no longer t their purpose and therefore lack legiti-
macy. The UN Security Council with its 80-year-old power constellation and
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Introduction 13
the Group of 7 (G7) reecting the economic reality of yesteryear are cases in
point.
While this institutionalist argument certainly has its merits, that is IOs
can be slow-moving and sticky organizations at times, we see something else
across our empirical cases. In this book, we will show that many IOs and their
institutional actors were in fact rather responsive and proactive in respond-
ing to existential challenges. The eventual outcomes for IOs may well be close
to the status quo, but it was hard work for those IOs and their institutional
actors to defend such status quo and avert scenarios in which their organiza-
tions would decline. In addition, the member states argument of veto-players
and gridlock has proven less convincing in the empirical cases where IOs
were existentially challenged. In those moments of crises, the formal rules
oen become uid providing more opportunities for institutional leadership
to develop purposeful responses (cf. Kreuder-Sonnen, 2019;Schuette, 2024;
Stone, 2011). We will develop the full argument below, and how it exactly
plays out across dierent types of existential challenges and dierent types
of IOs.
What appears from this review of the literature is that scholars insu-
ciently pay attention to the proactive responses of IOs to existential chal-
lenges. This is either because they account for too little agency to IOs in
international relations, are too busy studying domestic political debates, or
assume that IOs are slow-moving and too gridlocked to be able to han-
dle existential challenges. This lack of focus on IOs and their institutional
actors, however, conicts with the key recent advances in international pub-
lic administration, where scholars have started to take an interest in the
inner workings of IOs. What is more, several recent single case studies seem
to suggest that institutional actors play a lead and proactive role in cra-
ing strategic responses to existential challenges (De Sa e Silva, 2021;Heldt
et al., 2022;Hirschmann, 2021). This also includes some of our own work
(Schuette, 2021a,2021b;Zaccaria, 2024). This book takes the next step by
explaining why the institutional actors of IOs respond dierently to exis-
tential challenges. We study positive cases where we can identify proactive
survival behaviour, but also the negative cases where IOs failed to respond.
This book thus contributes to the literature through the comparative case
analysis of six IOs and is informed by rich interview data.
In conclusion, the academic literature thus far prioritizes state-centric
accounts of the crisis of liberal international order and the various existen-
tial challenges that threaten IOs and other international institutions. This
does not suciently account for the variation among IOs and their institu-
tional designs. Clearly some IOs will be better able to cope with existential
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14 The Survival of International Organizations
challenges than others. Research on IO responses, however, remains more
limited. What does become clear from those studies is that institutional actors
generally play consequential roles. They do so, however, to dierent extents.
1.3 The argument and findings
This book argues that institutional actors in IOs can play a proactive role
when their organizations are put at risk. They have a strong interest in ght-
ing for organizational survival and they have a wide range of instruments to
do so. Institutional actors can help their IOs adapt in response to contesta-
tion and/or help to resist and circumvent existential challenges. Institutional
actors, however, respond dierently to existential challenges: Institutional
actors respond dierently to specic types of existential challenges (Propo-
sition 1); and IOs are dierently constituted in terms of their institutional
design and institutional actors thus have dierent abilities to respond to
existential challenges (Proposition 2). Some institutional actors can be sur-
prisingly proactive and eective, but they do need to recognize challenges
and require leadership to formulate and implement strategic responses in
time. We also argue that the internal organizational structure as well as the
embeddedness in external networks are relevant for institutional actors when
they are faced with existential challenges. IO institutional actors tailor their
responses to the specic type of existential challenge, but we need to consider
the very abilities of institutional actors to strategically ght for their survival.
In this book, we provide evidence from six dierent case studies across
three policy areas (trade and development; climate and energy; security
and defence). Three of the case studies deal with the responses by interna-
tional actors to direct existential challenges posed by powerful states. These
focus on how WTO, UNFCCC, and NATO institutional actors responded
to the Trump administration refusing to appoint judges to the Appellate
Body, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, and challenging the very ratio-
nale of NATO. The three other case studies deal with indirect existential
challenges resulting from the creation of competing IOs that draw from the
same resource base. The book focuses on how the World Bank, Interna-
tional Energy Agency (IEA), and OSCE institutional actors responded to
the respective creation of the AIIB, International Renewable Energy Agency
(IRENA), and EU crisis management operations. The book thus presents
evidence from dierent types of challenges posed to IOs across dierent
policy areas. Across these six comparative case studies, we nd considerable
variation in responses by institutional actors to existential challenges.
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Introduction 15
Our starting point is that institutional actors play a central role in the
lifecycle of IOs. Various scholars have already pointed out the role of insti-
tutional actors in the creation and development of IOs. We argue that
institutional actors can equally be consequential actors in responding to
existential challenges in order to avert paths towards institutional decline
or even dissolution. Three decades ago, for instance, Oran Young (1991)
pointed out that political leadership is necessary to establish international
institutions. Tana Johnson (2014) furthermore compellingly shows that insti-
tutional actors oen take part in the negotiations on new IOs and that they
aect the institutional design of these new IOs in ways that benet them
privately. As IOs develop, over time, institutional actors have been found
consequential as they can formulate new norms in IOs and help expand man-
dates (Debre & Dijkstra, 2021b;Hall, 2016;Littoz-Monnet, 2021;Weinlich,
2014). If institutional actors are causally important for IO creation and devel-
opment, we argue they are also likely important in subsequent stages of the IO
lifecycle.
Importantly, existential challenges are permissive of extraordinary
behaviour by institutional actors. In normal times, IOs may face internal
bureaucratic politics over limited resources and can be slow-moving. But if
survival is at stake, the interests of institutional actors are likely to be more
focused. In a classic in organizational studies, Herbert Kaufman (1976)
notes about public agencies facing termination, ‘[t]hey are not helpless,
passive pawns in the game of politics as it aects their lives; they are active,
energetic, persistent participants’ (p. 9). For IOs, Susan Strange (1998)
even goes as far as to note that the job security of IO bureaucrats is the
main explanation for why IOs ‘never die’ (title). Leonard Schütte (2024)
equally notes that IOs may go into a survival mode when threatened.
Indeed, in moments of crises, when many things can happen in a short
period of time, formal rules become more uid and actors other than the
formal power holders can decisively move in (also Kreuder-Sonnen, 2019;
Stone, 2011).
An important condition for proactive behaviour by IO institutional actors
is that they clearly understand that their organization is existentially chal-
lenged. This sounds obvious, but IOs do not always see problems coming
until it is too late. We argue that IO leadership by Secretaries-General,
Directors-General, and Executive Secretaries is a key variable (Chesterman,
2007;Hendrickson, 2006;Kille & Scully, 2003;Park & Weaver, 2012; see also
Moravcsik, 1999). Particularly in crisis situations, there needs to be direction
from the top. This starts with IO leaders recognizing the existential challenge
and taking the lead in formulating a response. While some IO leaders will be
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16 The Survival of International Organizations
more hands-on, skilled, and can rely on (personal) authority and networks
or their public prole, others might not consider challenges existential until
it is too late. Some existential challenges lead to acute crises, while others
are more slow-burning or creeping (e.g. Boin, Ekengren, & Rhinard, 2020),
which makes the recognition of existential crises less than guaranteed. Some
IOs may have also experienced similar types of crises before and possess
experience in how to address them.
Once institutional actors in IOs recognize existential challenges, the key
question becomes how to respond. What we know from the study of IO
agency and international public administration is that institutional actors
have various ways to exert inuence. Institutional actors have, for instance,
discretion in policy implementation which states have delegated to institu-
tional actors (Hawkins et al., 2006;Pollack, 2003). The literature also tells us
that institutional actors facilitate deal-making between states (Beach, 2004)
and increase the performance of IO programmes (Heinzel & Liese, 2021),
while inuencing the outcomes of policy (Biermann & Siebenhüner, 2009;
Eckhard & Ege, 2016;Ege, Bauer, & Wagner, 2021). IOs and their institu-
tional actors have set up public communications oces (Ecker-Ehrhardt,
2018a,2018b), adopted democratic narratives (Dingwerth, Schmidtke, &
Weise, 2020), set up international parliamentary assemblies (Schimmelfen-
nig et al., 2020), and have focused on improving their own degree of identity
cohesion and hierarchy (Von Billerbeck, 2020).
It is useful to group these forms of IO agency along two dimensions in
terms of response options. Institutional actors can help their IOs adapt to
cope with existential challenges or try to resist and counter such pressures.
Institutional actors can adopt, in this regard, both behavioural and discur-
sive strategies (Heinkelmann-Wild & Jankauskas, 2022;Hirschmann, 2021;
Tallberg & Zürn, 2019; see also Barnett & Coleman, 2005;Chorev, 2012;
Kruck & Zangl, 2020). Institutional actors can, for instance, initiate reforms
and facilitate compromise between the challenger states and the rest of the
membership (adapt; behavioural). They can use agenda-setting or discretion
in implementation to counter challenges and/or build coalitions with like-
minded member states and non-state actors (resist; behavioural). They can
use discursive strategies through their communication departments for issue
framing and creating momentum for reform (adapt; discursive) or go on a
public relations oensive in support of the legitimation of their organiza-
tions (resist; discursive). These are not mutually exclusive strategies. IOs can
be accommodating in discourse but quietly resist behavioural change. Over-
all, institutional actors have a considerable toolkit available to cope with and
counter existential challenges.
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Introduction 17
Table 1.1 Overview of case studies and empirical results
Cases Sta size Existential
challenge
Institutional
response
Outcome
WTO 625 Trump blocks
the
(re)appointment
of judges to
Appellate Body
No response Appellate Body
becomes
inoperable
World
Bank 6800 China creates
the AIIB as a
rival institution
World Bank
internally
reforms and
reaches out to
the AIIB
World Bank
adapts and
remains the focal
development
bank
UNFCCC 450 Trump
withdraws the
United States
from the Paris
Agreement
UNFCCC
indirectly relies
on external
network
Recommitment
of other states to
the Paris
Agreement
IEA 260∗Denmark,
Germany, and
Spain lead the
creation of
IRENA as a rival
institution
focusing on
renewable
energy
IEA eventually
engages with
climate action
through layering
IEA adapts its
priorities
towards climate
action
NATO 1000∗∗ Trump questions
Article 5,
demands
increased
defence
spending, and
rapprochement
with Russia
NATO leverages
challenges on
defence
spending while
resisting Russia
policy
NATO comes
out unshattered
and allies
modestly
increase defence
spending
OSCE 616 EU develops
competing crisis
management
operations as
East–West
relations
deteriorate
Belated and
limited response
to adapt
OSCE divests
from crisis
management
operations and
declines
Sta data are self-reported on websites, budgets, and annual reports. These data include only sta at
headquarters.
∗Data from Overland and Reischl (2018).
∗∗NATO International Sta only.
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18 The Survival of International Organizations
The empirical cases of this book provide powerful examples of such IO
responses (see Table 1.1). The World Bank, for instance, adapted its lending
portfolio following the creation of the China-led AIIB. It considered that as
the AIIB focused on infrastructure, it should invest more in human capital,
norm-setting, and governance practices. The IEA initially resisted adapta-
tion following the creation of the rival IRENA, but over time started to
pay increasing attention to climate change through a layering strategy. The
UNFCCC, when faced with U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, chose
a dierent strategy. It focused on activating, and relying on, its large network
of state and non-state actors supporting climate action. This large coalition
strongly resisted the potential unravelling of the Paris Agreement through
largely discursive actions aimed at the delegitimation of Trump. NATO insti-
tutional actors meanwhile leveraged the challenge posed by Trump to get the
other allies to increase their defence spending, while quietly resisting Trump’s
demands for a rapprochement with Russia using backchannels throughout
the U.S. government and also U.S. Congress.
When comparing the empirical evidence, the cases also reveal great varia-
tion across the IOs in how their institutional actors responded to existential
challenges. NATO and the World Bank actors provided the most proactive
response among the six IOs studied in this book. NATO actors carefully
craed a strategy to respond to the challenge posed by Donald Trump using
a combination of adaptive and resistance strategies through behavioural and
discursive means. The World Bank not just adapted its lending in light of the
creation of the AIIB, but also helped develop the AIIB through exchanging
sta and engaging in joint projects. Two other IOs, the OSCE and the WTO,
had much greater diculty in responding to existential challenges. While
the OSCE was developing crisis management missions during the 1990s, the
emergence of the better resourced EU as a key crisis management actor from
the mid-2000s meant that the OSCE had to divest in a context of rapidly
deteriorating East–West relations. The WTO failed to respond when Don-
ald Trump started blocking the appointment of judges to the Appellate Body,
which rendered the Appellate Body inoperable.
What explains these varying responses by institutional actors to existential
challenges? This book argues that we need to consider the type of existential
challenges (Proposition 1) and particularly also the abilities of institutional
actors themselves (Proposition 2). When it comes to direct challenges by pow-
erful member states and indirect challenges where states act through compet-
ing institutions, we see considerable dierences. Accommodating challenger
states tends to be dicult for IOs (De Vries et al., 2021;Jurado et al., 2022;
Walter, 2021). Powerful states are, of course, customers to be taken seriously,
but their demands may erode the mandate of the IO or put a burden on
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Introduction 19
the rest of the membership. Accordingly, we nd that institutional actors
approach direct existential challenges through behavioural resistance rather
than adaptation strategies. While IO actors may want to placate challengers
through discursive adaptation, in behavioural terms they are constrained. In
the cases of WTO, UNFCCC, and NATO, despite variation in the proactive-
ness of institutional actors, we generally nd resistance to challenges from
the United States and President Trump.
Indirect existential challenges, where powerful member states create new
rival institutions to challenge incumbent IOs, on the other hand, are more
likely to result in adaptation strategies. Ultimately institutional creation is a
costly act by challenger states (Jupille, Mattli, & Snidal, 2013), aimed at the
longer term. They oen pursue institutional creation if other cheaper options
(such as the reform of existing institutions) are unsatisfactory. Institutional
creation is thus a clear signal that those states engaged in creating rival insti-
tutions mean business. It also raises questions of focality in international
relations, that is which IOs are most central, and the distribution of scarce
resources over IOs. Incumbent IOs likely want to get in on such action or
at least protect their own organization from losing resources. What is more,
once rival institutions have been established, it is normally too late for incum-
bent IOs to resist their creation. Openly competing with rival institutions is
also likely self-defeating if the membership largely overlaps. In terms of our
case studies, again to dierent degrees, we see indeed adaptation in the World
Bank, IEA, and OSCE. The specic types of existential challenges therefore
inform the calculations of institutional actors when they have to devise their
responses (evidence for Proposition 1).
While the type of existential challenge is important, and institutional
actors tailor their responses accordingly, the constitution of the institutional
actors themselves helps to explain the proactiveness and purposefulness
of their responses. As noted above, institutional actors studied in the six
cases of this book all have considerable bureaucratic resources (at least 250
sta members), yet this does not automatically result in careful strategic
responses to existential challenges. The book analyses, in this respect, the
leadership, organizational structure, formal competences, and external net-
works of institutional actors as key institutional variables helping to explain
responses (Proposition 2). Across the empirical cases, it nds that IO leader-
ship is particularly important, not just in recognizing existential challenges
but also in formulating and implementing consistent response strategies. It
appears that the embeddedness in external networks can help institutional
actors in terms of survival. A fragmentated organizational structure can fur-
thermore constrain strategic responses. Surprisingly, formal competences of
institutional actors play a less important role.
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20 The Survival of International Organizations
Leadership by Secretaries-General, Directors-General, and Executive Sec-
retaries is critical when dealing with existential challenges. The empirical
cases of this book show that IOs strongly vary in terms of leadership and
that this matters for strategic responses. The NATO case is particularly illus-
trative. Even before the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, NATO
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg lauded Trump for his ‘strong message’
on defence spending and pledged to ‘work with President Trump on how to
adapt NATO’ (as cited in Nelson, 2017). Stoltenberg, as such, became one
of the few international leaders to have a working relationship with Trump,
which he used to the advantage of NATO. Another example of strong lead-
ership was the case of the World Bank. The World Bank President Jim Yong
Kim also understood from the beginning the challenge of the China-led AIIB
to the Bank and developed a response accordingly. WTO Director-General
Roberto Azevêdo, on the other hand, hardly engaged when the United States
blocked the appointment of judges to the Appellate Body and when he did, in
2019, it was too late. The IEA similarly only started to adapt aer the appoint-
ment of the new Executive Director Fatih Birol in 2015, which was six years
aer the creation of IRENA.
Leadership is thus overall important in recognizing the challenge and for-
mulating a response strategy, but IO leaders should also be able to give direc-
tion to their bureaucracies and leverage all the available in-house resources.
The organizational structure of institutional actors and the authority that IO
leaders have internally varies, however, greatly (Bayerlein et al., 2020;Elsig,
2011;Graham, 2014;Hall & Wood, 2018). For institutional actors it mat-
ters whether they are integrated bureaucracies with clear reporting lines or
a fragmented collection of directorates consisting of autonomous subunits.
In the empirical cases, we nd particularly that the WTO was constrained
by its organizational structure in responding to the Appellate Body crisis. As
an adjudication mechanism that should be insulated from state politics, the
Appellate Body has its own secretariat, which is part of the WTO Secretariat,
but not rmly under the authority of the Director-General. The organiza-
tional structure of the OSCE institutional actors was also kept decentralized
by design with considerable autonomy for the dierent OSCE institutions
and eld operations. This constrained its responsiveness.
A key variable in the literature concerns the formal competences that insti-
tutional actors have and the levels of delegation (e.g. Hooghe et al., 2017;
Tallberg, 2003,2010). If institutional actors, for instance, have agenda-setting
powers, they can propose to adapt or reform IOs in light of existential chal-
lenges. Across the empirical cases, however, the book only nds limited
evidence for this. Of the six IOs, the WTO has formally the highest level of
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Introduction 21
delegated powers and NATO the lowest level (Hooghe et al., 2017), yet NATO
developed the most purposeful response and the WTO the least purposeful
one. This also ts in with the argument made in informal governance that
formal competences take a backseat in crises (e.g. Stone, 2011). The book
nonetheless nds that the formal competences of institutional actors may
(indirectly) set expectations and dictate appropriate behaviour. The NATO
Secretary-General, for instance, formally chairs the North Atlantic Council.
This not only allows the Secretary-General to call for meetings and set agen-
das but also means that the Secretary-General acts as the spokesperson for
the Alliance and everyone immediately looks to the Secretary-General for
guidance. More generally, however, it is what IO leaders do in their positions
and whether they actively lead in responding to existential challenges.
While institutional actors mostly facilitate the work of their IOs, some are
also increasingly active outside the walls of their organizations. The embed-
dedness of institutional actors in external networks aects their ability to
mobilize support in the environment surrounding IOs to counter existen-
tial challenges. Scholars have, for instance, pointed at orchestration, the use
of non-state actors, and collusion with like-minded states (e.g. Abbott et al.,
2015;Dijkstra, 2017;Sending & Neumann, 2006;Tallberg et al., 2013). The
case studies also show empirically how such variation in external networks
aects the ability of institutional actors to respond to existential challenges.
Particularly, UNFCCC institutional actors have been active in building a
wide network of non-state and sub-state actors, which they could use when
the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement. But NATO actors
also have strong external networks including in the U.S. State and Defense
Departments, with senators and house representatives across the aisle, and
the think tank community. Other institutional actors are notably much less
strongly embedded in external networks, such as WTO and OSCE institu-
tional actors, even if the OSCE did set up a modest external network of think
tanks and academics.
The variation in leadership, organizational structure, and external net-
works therefore helps us to understand why institutional actors across dif-
ferent IOs formulated dierent responses to similar existential challenges
(evidence for Proposition 2). The formal competences of institutional actors
surprisingly play a lesser role. Overall, the book nds that institutional
actors have potentially considerable agency when dealing with existential
challenges. Institutional actors, however, need to strategically choose within
the range of available response options. Strategic responses do not come
automatically to institutional actors even if they have sucient bureau-
cratic resources. Particularly, the quality of IO leadership is important and
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22 The Survival of International Organizations
institutional actors tend to use dierent strategies depending on whether they
are facing direct challenges by member states or indirect challenges through
other competing institutions. To understand the survival of IOs, we there-
fore need to pay much more attention to IO leaders as well as the ocials
and bureaucrats that care for IOs every day.
1.4 The method
To sustain this argument, this book provides evidence from six comparative
case studies across three dierent policy areas. For each of these case studies,
the book traces the process from the moment that an existential challenge
appears on the agenda, through the formulation and implementation of the
response by the IO and its institutional actors, towards the outcome. The
data used in this book come from publicly available sources and also from
114 original interviews with key policy ocials and experts.
This book seeks to explain why institutional actors of IOs respond dier-
ently to existential challenges. It is important to elaborate how we method-
ologically approach and operationalize existential challenges and institu-
tional actors. To start with existential challenges, they have been dened
above as those that specically put individual IOs at risk of no longer being
able to eectively carry out some of their core functions. The question there-
fore is how we know an existential challenge when we see one. Since the
outcome is not predetermined—existential challenges may result in a nega-
tive outcome (dissolution in extremis) but may also be countered—we should
avoid posthocism by reasoning backwards (cf. Capoccia & Keleman, 2007
on critical junctures). At the same time, it is clear from the academic lit-
erature that the causes of existential challenges are oen external to IOs,
for instance when a war breaks out between two member states which sub-
sequently results in less cooperation, and quite varied. Furthermore, some
crises are acute and fast-burning while others are creeping (Boin et al., 2020)
making it more dicult to determine when precisely creeping crisis becomes
an existential challenge.
To address these methodological points, this book does not survey all sorts
of problems (e.g. war and conict, hegemonic transitions, economic down-
turns and domestic politics) that might potentially result in trouble for IOs.
Instead, it stays closer to the IOs themselves and contestations that directly
and indirectly aect them. It considers, in this respect, two types of existen-
tial challenges. The rst type concerns direct contestation by a powerful state.
Powerful states have outside alternatives to IOs, strong informal channels
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Introduction 23
of inuence within IOs as well as diplomatic and coercive means that they
can deploy outside IOs. As one example of this type of direct contestation,
we study in this book the Trump administration and ‘America First’ which
not only questioned the eectiveness of many IOs and the distributive bar-
gain, but also the very need for cooperation in the rst place. The second
type concerns indirect contestation by newly created competing IO. Newly
competing IOs are oen established by member states dissatised with the
status quo in existing IOs (Morse & Keohane, 2014;Urpelainen & Van de
Graaf, 2015). Competition is indirect in that newly created IOs draw on the
same resources as the existing IOs and if they succeed in establishing them-
selves, it may result in a divestment by the incumbent IOs. These two types
of existential challenges are further developed in the theoretical chapter, but
by focusing on challenges related to IOs (rather than broader problems in