Fighting with words? IO communicative responses to elite criticism

Political elites signal their non-cooperation through fighting words, understood as speech acts that criticize the normative foundation of an IO’s process, performance, or pedigree. Such verbal attacks create an accommodation dilemma for IOs as they have the potential to undermine cooperation gains and rally other states to engage in non-cooperation. Responding to fighting words requires IOs to carefully maneuver along the full spectrum between accommodating fighting words or rejecting them, seeking a balance between maintaining the gains from cooperation and minimizing risks of contagion. We argue that IO responses to fighting words are shaped by IOs’ bureaucratic imperatives of political neutrality and professionalism. Combining theoretical insights on formal and informal constraints from principal-agent and sociological approaches to IOs, we offer an account for why IOs responses avoid repeating the content of the fighting words and instead frame their responses in terms of the benefits of cooperation. We investigate our theoretical argument on the case study of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY 1993-2017). Using a mixed methods approach, we rely on two new datasets, one of media reports of the ICTY to trace fighting words, and the other comprising all public communications by the ICTY. We pair this data with elite interviews with former ICTY staff. Using congruence analysis, we demonstrate that bureaucratic imperatives lead ICTY staff to rarely directly accommodate or reject fighting words and to instead favor “middle-ground” responses, conditioned by the role of bureaucratic subunits and leadership within the ICTY.