Survival Politics: International organisations amid the crisis of multilateralism

International organisations (IOs) have never been more authoritative and potentially agential while simultaneously faced more intense threats to their continued existence. Amid these unprecedented conditions, this article identifies a novel type of IO behaviour: Survival Politics. IO Survival Politics occurs when senior institutional actors perceive the organisation to be in existential crisis and, in response, employ unprecedented strategies to ensure the organisation’s continued existence. Survival Politics thus differs both in degree and kind from the ways in which secretariats exercise influence during conditions of normal policymaking. Three case studies serve to illustrate the concept and advance a tentative theory of when IOs successfully engage in Survival Politics: the European Commission’s response to Brexit; NATO secretariat’s response to the Presidency of Donald Trump; and the OSCE secretariat’s attempted response to its post-2014 legitimacy crisis. Relying on a novel dataset of more than 90 interviews with senior officials and multiple methods, the article shows that IO Survival Politics can be a crucial factor in determining the fate of IOs in crisis, which challenges prevailing state-centric and structural arguments in the literature.