The limits of international organization: systematic failure in the management of international relations

Abstract

Contributors to the literature on international organization (IO) have traditionally been overly optimistic about the ability of multilateral management to stabilize in-ternational relations and have tended to ignore the destabilizing effects of IO. While recent revisionist scholarship has acknowledged both the potential for organizational failure and the conditionality of management, it has tended to focus on how IO fails within specific issue-areas and institutions. This article offers a typology of the inherent (systematic) failures of IO across issue-areas and institutions and thereby seeks to bridge the gaps in our understanding of why many different institutions and managerial schemes have adverse effects. It argues that IO is prone to failure (1) when it attempts to manage complex, tightly coupled systems of relations and issues; (2) when it serves as a substitute either for more substantive and long-term resolutions to international problems or for responsible domestic or foreign policy; (3) when it intensifies international disputes; and (4) when it generates moral hazard. In offering a general theoretical approach to understanding the destabilizing effects of IO, the analysis is intended to serve both as a focal point for understanding critical approaches to the study of IO and as an alternative rationale for eliminating the excesses of multilateral management.