International Organisations as Order-Making Practices: Towards Practice Understanding of the Post-Cold War Transformation of International Security Organisations

One of the main scholarly debates in the study of international organizations (IOs) is the one about the nature of their behavior. Regime, neorealist and neoliberal institutionalist theories attribute the IOs behavioral outcomes to their rational originators – the states. Contrastingly, constructivists reject the rationalist paradigm by focusing on the impact of social norms, simultaneously engage with agents other than states. For example, Barnett and Fennimore conceptualize IOs as norm-producing bureaucracies. Drawing on insights offered by the practice theory the thesis abandons the “essentialist” understanding of agents’ behavior. Instead, it takes social practices, with all of their idiosyncratic characteristics, as the primary unit of analyses arguing that practices are constitutive or agents rather than the other way around. Additionally, many scholars who work within practice theory paradigm suggest that social practices should primarily be understood as social structure/order making sites (e.g. Bruno Latour, Theodor Schatzki, and Harold Garfunkel). Drawing on this suggestion, this paper advances an idea of international security organizations (ISO) as social sites/practices whereby state representatives and bureaucracies engage in a process of negotiations of international security orders. These orders are, however, only discursive constructions advancing a particular ordering logic. They are an “imagined security orders” - a cognitive maps- whose function is to (1) build, (2) reflect, (3) reinforce or (4) to transcendent the “external” security order. The thesis argues that the fluctuation of ISOs between these four “types” of imagined security orders is the main characteristic of their transformation. The post-Cold War transformation of NATO, the OSCE and the UN is the empirical puzzle the thesis tackles in the light of these theoretical considerations.