C&C member, Dr Inken von Borzyskowski (UCL), and Dr Felicity Vabulas (Pepperdine University) received the Best Article Award from the American Political Science Association (APSA) Section on International Collaboration for their 2019 article “Hello, goodbye: When do states withdraw from international organizations?”, Review of International Organizations 14: 335-366, which is available here.
The APSA Award Committee said: "In this path-breaking article, von Borzykowski and Vabulas take up a critical question in international relations: under what conditions do states leave international organizations? Their findings push back against the conventional narrative that nationalism drives withdrawal from international organizations. Carefully laid out, with impressive data collection and analysis, von Borzykowski and Vabulas have made a significant contribution to the literature and laid the groundwork for future scholarship in this area. Especially in light of current concerns around the future of the liberal international order, understanding the changing membership of international organizations is critically important today.”
The Award will be recognized at the Section Business Meeting at APSA 2020.
Hello, goodbye: When do states withdraw from international organizations?
Under what conditions do states withdraw from intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)? Recent events such as Brexit, the US withdrawal from UNESCO, and US threats to withdraw from NAFTA, NATO, and the World Trade Organization have triggered widespread concern because they appear to signify a backlash against international organizations. Some observers attribute this recent surge to increasing nationalism. But does this explanation hold up as a more general explanation for IGO withdrawals across time and space? Despite many studies of why states join IGOs, we know surprisingly little about when and why states exit IGOs. We use research on IGO accession to derive potential explanations for IGO withdrawal related to domestic politics, IGO characteristics, and geo-politics. We quantitatively test these potential explanations for withdrawal using an original dataset of 493 IGOs since 1945, documenting about 200 cases of withdrawal. We find that nationalism is not the key driver of IGO withdrawals in the past. Instead, we show that geo-political factors – such as preference divergence and contagion – are the main factors linked to IGO withdrawals, followed by democracy levels in the country and organization. These findings have important implications for research on the vitality of international organizations, compliance, and the liberal world order.