Rivalry Among International Organizations

This paper is designed as a further building block to arrive at a theory of networking among international governmental organizations. It is inspired by the puzzle that theoryoriented IR research has so far neglected rivalry as a constitutive pattern of relations among international organizations although rich empirical case studies of networking among the Euro-Atlantic security institutions point to the ubiquity of this phenomenon. The reason, it is argued, is a dual normative bias: the realist neglect of institutions, which prevents them from employing their toolbox to analyze institutions in depth; and the institutionalist neglect of conflict within institutions, which prevents them from analyzing dysfunctions challenging the very raison d’être of institutions. Consequently, I employ a synthetic approach that combines realist (particularly the ‘enduring rivalries’ research program) and institutionalist literatures (particularly organizational and network theory) to theorize inter-organizational rivalry, mainly focusing on causation and effects. The empirical background is the networking among United Nations, NATO, EU, WEU, OSCE and Council of Europe since 1989/90. 1 A first building block (‘Towards A Theory of Inter-Organizational Networking. The Euro-Atlantic Security Institutions Interacting’ ) was recently accepted by Review of International Organizations and will soon be published (also on-line).