Stephanie C. Hofmann’s research while affiliated with University of Florence and other places

What kind of order and contestation dynamics emerge if the initial institutional bargain includes liberal, partially liberal, and nonliberal visions of order? This contribution to the special issue locates the liberal ideational and institutional properties within the crisis management domain and analyzes contestation dynamics and their impact. My argument is twofold. First, liberal visions of order (e.g., based on human rights and self-determination) have coexisted alongside other aspirations focusing on the right of nonintervention and privileged political communities because post–World War II conflict management is rooted in the legal ambiguity of the Charter of the United Nations (UN). This ambiguity (low legalized institutionalization) gives space to different interpretations of what counts as peace, enforcement, threat, and the relationship between the UN and regional organizations (low liberal embeddedness). Second, ambiguity and competing visions of order sustain persistent contestation, which produces dialectical ordering within and outside the UN. Within dialectical ordering, order-challenging contestation occurs when actors disengage from the global level or when their vision of order becomes globally hegemonic. While order-challenging attempts in the realm of crisis management exist, they have remained unsuccessful so far. Seen from this perspective, there has never been a liberal international order in conflict management—only liberal attempts to impose a liberal order on an ongoing dialectical order-making process. So far, other order-challenging attempts, such as Russia’s sphere of influence or China’s developmental peace approaches, have also remained unsuccessful. Contestation remains the norm.

In surveys, Europeans routinely express high levels of support for a common security and defence policy of the European Union. Do these responses reflect real demands or superficial support that would crumble if the issue was politicised? This article provides new answers to this question. We conducted pre-registered survey experiments with more than 40,000 respondents from 25 European countries in which we randomly varied whether respondents received information about potential costs of two hypothetical cooperative activities: military operations and defence procurement. Support for these activities was systematically lower when costs were mentioned. We conclude that, in the event of politicisation, there is considerable potential for shifts in opinion and that caution is required in deriving a mandate for specific activities from high approval rates for cooperation in general.

The concept of organizational accountability is central to good governance both domestically and internationally. However, assessing accountability in densely institutionalized global governance spaces requires new conceptual and analytical tools. Rather than concentrating on the accountability of states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), and transnational corporations as distinct sets of global actors to whom different accountability criteria and mechanisms may apply, we want to focus on how growing overlap and interplay among diverse global policy actors affects organizational accountability. And rather than focusing exclusively on accountability in terms of retrospective sanctioning based on fixed standards or legal obligations, we suggest that, in a densely institutionalized world, accountability also needs to be thought of as a prospective process. We therefore suggest a stronger focus on pluralistic, participatory, and deliberative forms of accountability that emphasize standard‐setting and responsiveness through collective deliberation, learning, and competition.

Organizational overlap is a ubiquitous feature in regional governance. Most studies have focused on member states, demonstrating that overlap enables states differently. We still know little about whether and how overlapping organizations impact international bureaucracies and how this shapes the relationship between bureaucratic actors within organizations. We argue that overlap can empower international bureaucrats, but not equally. Those with autonomous resources from member states are the most attractive interlocuters for bureaucrats from other organizations and, hence, likely to become most empowered. Substantive expertise and formal competence are less consequential in this context. We unpack this argument by looking at a policy domain understood to be heavily guarded by member states, security and defence policy. Based on primary documents and interviews, we show that the European Union (EU)–North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) overlap has enabled the European Commission to leverage its position within the EU to its advantage and further encroach on the EU's security and defence activities.

When member states of the European Union face serious international threats, does this serve as a catalyst or obstacle for European integration in the security and defence domain? To gain purchase on this question, this paper examines public opinion from a common instrument fielded in 24 EU member states (and the United Kingdom) with a total sample size of more than 40,000 respondents. We argue that theoretical accounts of perceived threat produce rival hypotheses. Threats might have either uniform or differential effects on different groups of citizens and could lead to either convergence or divergence of public opinion. We show that perceptions of foreign threats are associated with more favourable views on integration in the security and defence domain. Importantly, this association is as strong among Eurosceptics as among Europhiles. The findings presented here are consistent with the view that functional pressures may temporarily convince Eurosceptics to accept integration in the foreign and security domain.

Why and how do pathways to regime complexes diverge? Building on insights from the literatures on institutional design and historical institutionalism, we argue that early institutional design choices produce long-term variation in the pace, density, and composition of institutional layers within a regime complex. In a first step, we argue that if an institution becomes focal, this increases the exit costs for member-states to leave. Additional institutional layers become a more likely outcome. In a second step, we argue that depending on the focal organization’s formal or informal design, variegated sovereignty costs inform the additional layering pathways. If a focal organization is formal, sovereignty costs are high for member-states. Consequently, creating additional institutional layers becomes cumbersome, leading to a slow pace of “negotiated layering” and a regime complex characterized by low density and composed of formal and informal institutions. In contrast, low sovereignty costs associated with informal focal organizations enable a rapid process of “breakout layering” resulting in a high density of mostly informal institutions. We develop our argument by examining the evolution of security institutions in Europe and Asia through diplomatic cables, treaty texts, personal memoirs, and policy memos.

The current binary understanding of membership in international organizations (IOs), especially regional organizations (ROs), creates blind spots and biases in our understanding of who matters in IOs, as well as why and how they matter. Existing scholarship primarily looks at full member-states or non-state actors to capture who influences such organizations. Associated states are often portrayed as passive receivers of IO rules instead of active contributors. We address this blind spot and resulting analytical bias by exploring what types of association relationships exist and how they impact IOs. We propose a novel conceptualization of membership that we call member ness. On the level of IOs, memberness is based on the relative openness of organizational boundaries and stratified access via material and ideational contributions. On the level of states, memberness captures associated states’ individual choices to contribute materially and/or ideationally to an IO. Memberness moves away from a purely rights-based understanding of membership (or who you are in an IO) to include a capacity-based understanding (or what you do in an IO). This shift in focus uncovers new channels of influence on IOs. Associated states’ material and ideational contributions to IOs constitute three memberness types: payroller, sponsor, and advisor. We argue that these memberness types impact IOs’ vitality, design, and performance in previously unrecognized ways. We illustrate these types with empirical examples from ROs across the globe and discuss the implications of memberness for IO research programs.