Who Gets to Live Forever? On the Decline and Death of International Organisations

Many international organisations (IOs) are under significant pressure. The World Health Organization was heavily criticized over its handling of the Ebola outbreak. The United States has not contributed to the UNESCO budget since 2011 and plans to quit in 2018. The United Kingdom is negotiating its exit from the EU and Burundi left the International Criminal Court. The ultimate way for states to show their discontent is to disband IOs: no less than a third of the IOs, created between 1905 and 2005, has formally ceased to exist. While academics have analysed how IOs are designed and develop, we know virtually nothing about decline and death. This review paper seeks to provide the conceptual foundations for a research agenda on the decline and death of international organisations. It thus explicitly puts international organisations "in time" by proposing a the concept of a life cycle. The paper does two things. First, it takes stock of extensive literature on the decline and death of a diverse range of forms of governance – empires, city states, kingdoms, public agencies, alliances and international regimes. Scholarly insight developed by historians, public administration and international relations scholars provides a basis to better understand the life cycle of international organizations. Second, it develops a theory on the decline and death focusing on external factors placing the cause of decline/death outside international organisations themselves as well as considering the relevance of endogenous-institutional explanations that focus on the internal characteristics of international organisations. As such, the paper seeks to address the question within a broader governance debate as well as embed the question within IR theory.