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Purpose
Wars, and violent conflicts generally, can generate significant institutional dynamics and new legitimacy pressures for multinational enterprises (MNEs). The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature or source of institutional pressures facing MNEs in war and to examine how MNEs respond and navigate these institutional pressures.


Design/methodology/approach
This is a conceptual paper.


Findings
Through the theoretical lens of institutional theory and drawing on insights from the devastating Russian–Ukrainian war in Europe, the study provides a framework that explains the nature of institutional pressures impacting MNEs in a major war conflict and how MNEs respond to these pressures. Central to the framework is the impact of formal and informal institutions on MNEs during war. As a result of regulatory and social pressures, MNEs have to make important strategic decisions either to protect their legitimacy or to defend their economic objectives against institutional demands.


Originality/value
As the paper situates the pressures of war for MNEs in a formal and informal institutional context, this offers a new approach to understanding the costs and pressures of war on MNEs.

International relations specialists who have been examining transgovernmental processes in the contemporary international system may be surprised to learn that at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 conscious efforts were made to organize the League of Nations along transgovernmental lines. Key British and French officials, most notably Sir James Arthur Salter and Jean Monnet, supported by Americans involved in implementing the Covenant, hoped to employ both the Secretariat and the organs designed for functionally specific cooperation to bring officials of national social and economic ministries into direct contact with one another, without the intermediation of their respective foreign ministries. While these officials only partially realized their objectives, sections of the League's Secretariat, an elaborate system of expert committees, and the League of Nations Assembly did provide transgovernmental linkages during the interwar period.

A remarkable document in the history of international organization is a detailed constitution for a league of nations which was given limited distribution in March 1915 under the title "Proposals for the Avoidance of War". Prepared by British liberal and socialist critics of prewar British diplomacy headed by Lord Bryce, the historian, jurist, and retired ambassador to the United States, it undoubtedly was the single most influential scheme for a league of nations produced during the First World War. Although the "Proposals" recommended neither international social or economic cooperation nor measures of international administration, it was known to the authors of the major league schemes prepared in the United Kingdom and the United States during the First World War and to officials in both countries. Indeed, the document was the source of key concepts and language embodied in 1919 in the Covenant of the League of Nations and subsequently in the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) and of its successor, the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Yet discussion of the "Proposals" in the literature on the origins of the League of Nations is both cursory and imprecise. Even such writers as Henry R. Winkler and Alfred Zimmern who recognize its importance seem not to understand how the "Proposals" evolved and how early and pervasive an influence it had.