Institutional Constraints as Sources of Organisational Autonomy: The Impact of Doctrines and Delegation to Sanctions Committees on Decision-Making within the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)

The paper explores, whether and how international organizations like the UNSC can gain organizational autonomy despite their intergovernmental nature and lack of a powerful bureaucracy. First, it develops a theoretical concept of organizational autonomy emerging from institutionally created incentives that change the payoffs of available opportunities for action of utility maximizing actors within organizational decision processes. Second, it explores the consequences of implementation decisions to subsidiary bodies composed of the organization’s member states and probes theoretical insights with evidence from the UNSC Iraq sanctions regime. Third, it examines theoretically, how precedents and doctrines based upon previous decisions within the same organization affect opportunities of member states to pursue their interests within the decision process and probe results with evidence from the Council’s activity on terrorism. We conclude that international organizations can in fact gain organizational autonomy from structuring organizational decision processes and shaping actors’ opportunities for action within such processes.