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Some European policymakers have been tempted to use the Iraq crisis to build new momentum for further integrating European security and defence policy. But proceeding along this path would be a mistake. Adding military force to the European Union at a time of fundamental disagreement about where and when to deploy troops is a waste of resources and will likely undermine European credibility by deepening divisions among its member states. If Europeans want more global clout, they should instead focus on strengthening their capacity for what they do best, namely non-military crisis-management and post-war reconstruction. (Survival / SWP)

Defence date: 6 July 2001 ; Examining Board: Prof. John Ikenberry (Georgetown University) ; Prof. Andrew Moravcsik (Harvard University) ; Prof. Thomas Risse (European University Institute) ; Prof. Daniel Verdier (supervisor) (European University Institute) ; First made available online on 11 April 2018 ; The dissertation seeks to offer a broad security-based explanation for regional integration. The central argument is that integration presents a solution to a particular time-consistency problem—known in the security literature as the 'preventive war dilemma*—which arises from uneven growth rates among states. Conventional international relations theory offers only one solution to the preventive war dilemma: war. I argue that another possibility is for states to create a regional institution that enables credible commitment. If states can create an institution which constrains their actions and disables their future discretion to use force arbitrarily, the time-consistency problem disappears. I label this strategy of integration, 'institutional binding'. Looking at the historical record, we find several instances in which states have managed to solve a preventive war dilemma and avoid war by integrating with a rising challenger instead of balancing against it. The dissertation examines three such cases. The first is the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1579-1795) in which six smaller Dutch provinces chose integration as a way to bind a growing Holland. The second is the German Zollverein (1834- 1871) which—in parallel with the German Bund—provided a framework for peaceful cooperation among the German states, which enabled them, for a few decades, to stave off Prussian domination. The third case is the European Communities (1952-) where integration has been motivated by a desire to contain a potentially resurgent Germany. In all three cases, a primary motivation behind integration is the desire by smaller states to establish binding constraints on a more powerful, rising, power in their midst. By contrast, competing explanations stressing external military threat or economic concerns as key motivating factor for integration perform less well across the three cases. The dissertation concludes that regional preventive conflict is a crucial factor in explaining regional integration.

AbstractGiven high costs of negotiating formal international institutions, states are widely expected to adapt, reform, and repurpose existing institutions rather than create new ones. Nevertheless, during the past century some 60 intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have been directly replaced by a legal successor. Why do states sometimes dissolve an existing IGO only to replace it with a new one that takes over the incumbent organization's mandate and assets—a practice known as institutional succession? We offer a theory of institutional succession and illustrate with examples. Against the dominant belief that creating new IGOs is a choice of last resort, we argue that reform and succession are equally expedient tools for achieving institutional change but address different negotiating hurdles. By creating a new institution (as opposed to amending an existing one) succession bypasses veto players that may stunt reform. However, succession suffers from potential diseconomies-of-scale (since not every member of an existing IGO may join the successor) which reform does not. Depending on which negotiation hurdle prevails, reform will be preferred to succession or vice versa. Our analysis advances existing understandings of institutional contestation and change within the life cycle of an international organisation.

Why do transnational actors choose to campaign on specific issues, and why do they launch campaigns when they do? In this article, we theorize the membership, focus, timing and strategies used in transnational advocacy campaigns as a function of long-standing professional networks between NGOs and individual professional campaigners. Unlike previous scholarship that highlights the role of powerful 'gatekeeper' organizations whose central position within transnational issue-networks allows them to promote or block specific issues, we draw on recent work in organizational sociology to bring into focus a wider transnational community of individuals and organizations whose competition for professional growth and 'issue-control' is crucial in defining the transnational advocacy agenda. In doing so, we qualify existing notions of agenda-setting and gatekeeping in International Relations (IR) scholarship. To illustrate our theory we use a longitudinal network analysis approach, alongside extensive interviews and analysis of primary non-governmental organization (NGO) sources. Our empirical focus is on transnational disarmament advocacy. However, our theoretical analysis has implications for transnational advocacy more broadly.

We construct and test a model explaining why states sometimes replace existing international institutions. Recent literature in International Relations has theorized the conditions in which states reform existing institutions, shift between existing institutional fora, or create new rival institutions to challenge or constrain incumbents. However, the notion that states might directly swap an existing institution for a new replacement is rarely considered. We show that institutional replacement is a common alternative to either institutional reform, 'regime-shifting' or 'competitive regime-creation,' and offer a strategic bargaining theory explaining the conditions underlying this choice. To test the formal and empirical validity of our argument, we offer a formal bargaining game and detailed empirical evidence from two historical cases.

Published online: 06 November 2021 ; Recent decades have seen a proliferation in the number, depth and span of international institutions regulating different domains of global politics. Issues like global health, intellectual property rights, climate change and many others that were once governed by relatively distinct rulesets are today regulated by multiple institutions with intersecting mandates and memberships. As a result, the creation, evolution and effectiveness of international institutions are fundamentally shaped by how they relate to other institutions operating within their policy domains. Yet, global governance complexes—that is, clusters of overlapping institutions and actors that govern specific policy issues—differ widely. The number and types of rulesets and actors involved, the degree of overlap between them and the extent to which overlapping rules conflict vary markedly across governance complexes and over time. The same is true for institutional responses to regulatory conflict. The broad trend towards growing institutional complexity in global governance is thus subject to important variation.

Scholars have studied international NGOs as advocates and service providers, but have neglected their importance in autonomously enforcing international law. We have two basic aims: first to establish the nature and significance of transnational NGO enforcement, and second to explore the factors behind its rise. NGO enforcement comprises a spectrum of practices, from indirect (e.g., monitoring and investigation), to direct enforcement (e.g., prosecution and interdiction). We explain NGO enforcement by an increased demand for the enforcement of international law, and factors that have lowered the cost of supply for non-state enforcement. Increased demand for enforcement reflects the growing gap between the increased legalization of international politics and states' limited enforcement capacity. On the supply side, the diffusion of new technologies and greater access to new legal remedies facilitate increased non-state enforcement. We evidence these claims via case studies from the environmental and anti-corruption sectors.

Theoretical work on networked organization informs a large swathe of the current literature on international organized crime and terrorism in the field of international relations. Clandestine networks are portrayed as large, fluid, mobile, highly adaptable, and resilient. Many analysts have concluded that this makes them difficult for more stable, hierarchical states to combat. The prevailing mood of pessimism about the ability of states to combat illicit networks, however, may be premature. International relations scholars working in the area have often been too quick to draw parallels to the world of the firm, where networked organization has proven well adapted to the fast-moving global marketplace. They have consequently overlooked not only issues of community and trust but also problems of distance, coordination, and security, which may pose serious organizational difficulties for networks in general and for illicit networks in particular. Closer attention to a wider body of historical and contemporary research on dynamics of participation in underground movements, the life cycle of terrorism and insurgency, and vulnerabilities in organized crime reveals that clandestine networks are often not as adaptable or resilient as they are made out to be. An analysis of the al-Qaida network suggests that as al-Qaida adopts a more networked organization, it becomes exposed to a gamut of organizational dilemmas that threatens to reduce its unity, cohesion, and ability to act collectively.

We seek to establish the conditions in which binding international institutions can serve as a solution to preventive war. Scholars of international integration portray institutions as a response to problems of incomplete information, transaction costs and other barriers to welfare improvement for their members. In contrast, we show that international institutions can have binding properties that solve credible commitment problems among member states — even in the case of volatile preventive war dilemmas. Our primary case is post-war Europe. We show that European integration since the early 1950s was conceived as a means of committing a temporarily weakened West Germany not to use its future power to pursue military ends in Europe, thereby obviating a preventive war against it. The various institutions that form part of the European Communities, now the European Union, still bear the mark of this goal. In this article, we establish the game theoretic conditions for the existence of binding international institutions as a solution to preventive war. We also provide evidence that the model is a good approximation of what political elites had in mind in the wake of World War II.