Do Intergovernmental Organizations Promote Peace?

Abstract

A basic debate in world politics involves the impact of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) on international conflict. Liberals, functionalists, and others see IGOs as capable of transforming global anarchy, while realists emphasize the essential irrelevance of IGOs in managing such fundamental processes as war and peace. Recent quantitative studies also yield disparate conclusions depending on particular econometric assumptions, implying variously that IGOs foster pacific relations among states, have no impact on dispute behavior, or even increase dispute propensity. At least part of the problem is a lack of theoretical and empirical specificity. The authors apply bargaining theory to develop a “middle path” between the realist and liberal perspectives. Only some IGOs, those with security mandates and the most sophisticated institutional structures, are likely to influence dispute behavior. The authors combine the theory with two improvements in research design. First, IGOs vary in capability, mandate, and cohesion. The authors construct a dataset of IGO institutional heterogeneity and member cohesiveness. Second, states join IGOs for reasons that are not unrelated to why states fight. The authors control for the level of international involvement among countries and find support for their arguments in initial tests.

The Dual World Polity: Fragmentation and Integration in the Network of Intergovernmental Organizations

“…Recent work also suggests that international organizations-and IGOs in particularmatter for trade (Ingram , Robinson, and Busch 2005), neoliberal restructuring (Henisz, Zelner, and Guillen 2005), international conflict (Boehmer, Gartzke, and Nordstrom 2004;HafnerBurton and Montgomery 2006), and transnational social movement organizations (Smith and Wiest 2005). This newer work, following John Oneal and Bruce Russett (1997), has used the tools of network analysis to understand how dyadic ties among states through their memberships in international organizations influence a range of outcomes.…”

“…That is, research demonstrates that the network structure matters, but this work has not yet considered the theoretical implications for network structure. Moreover, although research on the effects of world polity ties has begun to disaggregate the IGO field into distinct sets of organizations (Boehmer et al 2004;Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer 2001;Ingram et al 2005;Kim and Barnett 2000), work on the structure of the world polity has not gone far in this direction. This article moves further toward disaggregating the world polity by employing two sets of IGOs for the analysis: a set of highly visible IGOs identified by editors of international handbooks, and the complete population of IGOs identified by the Correlates of War project.…”

“…The 1950 network includes 119 IGOs and 82 states; the 2000 network, 330 IGOs and 190 states. These data are commonly employed by international relations scholars who study interstate dyads (Boehmer et al 2004;Oneal and Russett 1997;Russett, Oneal and Davis 1998). For both the list of prominent IGOs and the population of IGOs identified by Pevehouse and associates (2004), the raw data are simply IGO membership lists, which are transformed by the UCINET network analysis software package 8.…”

A Choice between Dependence and Interdependence: The Baltic States in Quest for Peace and Prosperity

“…Most of the studies agree that international and intergovernmental organisation matter in certain context but the final outcome might differ, stemming from the fact that international organisations vary in their mandate, structure, etc., which also leads to the varying impact of international and intergovernmental organisation on interstate disputes (Boehmer, Gartzke & Nordstrom 2004). However, the linkage between economic interdependence and peace is seen as one of the central questions to be studied in this context.…”

From Democratic Peace to Democratic Distinctiveness: A Critique of Democratic Exceptionalism in Peace and Conflict Studies

“…Drawing on Fearon's rationalist theory of war, Boehmer, Gartzke and Nordstrom (2004) emphasize that institutions enable signaling and help to make commitments more credible. Finally, from a constructivist perspective, institutions may contribute to peace by creating trust (Bearce/Omori 2005), by generating narratives of mutual identification (Diez/Stetter/Albert 2006) and by 11 Kant's cosmopolitan law is virtually absent from the Democratic or "Kantian" peace debate as discussed here but has instead been widely acknowledged by philosophers and political theorists who discuss his merits for concepts of a "cosmopolitan democracy".…”