As we approach the five year anniversary of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, please join the Centre for International Law for a discussion of Dr Farsan Ghassim’s recent paper on member state challenges to international organisations.

Abstract: Member states’ challenges to international organizations (IOs) are at the heart of the supposed crisis of our multilateral order – from the “African bias” debate surrounding the International Criminal Court, to the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” from the European Union, to Trump’s attacks on the World Health Organization during the COVID-19 pandemic. IOs are regularly challenged by their member states in different ways, ranging from verbal criticisms to withdrawals. But why are some IOs challenged more than others? An important – but so far largely theoretical – academic debate relates to the authority of IOs as an explanatory factor for why some face more challenges: Authoritative IOs may invite more challenges (for example, due to domestic contestation) or fewer challenges (due, in part, to the investment of member states and their greater capacity to resolve conflicts internally). Our article assesses these explanations using the Andersen-Gill approach for analyzing recurrent events of member states’ public criticisms and withdrawals. We do not find strong and consistent evidence that more authoritative IOs are more regularly challenged by their own member states. There is some evidence that authoritative IOs experience fewer withdrawals, but we find stronger evidence for alternative factors such as preference heterogeneity between members, the existence of alternative IOs, and the democratic composition of an IO’s membership. Our study is significant for scholarly debates and real-world politics, as it implies that granting IOs more authority does not make them more prone to member state challenges.

Dr Farsan Ghassim bio: Dr Farsan Ghassim is the Junior Research Fellow in Politics at The Queen’s College (University of Oxford), holding a John Fell Fund grant at the Department of Politics and International Relations. His research concentrates on global governance and survey methods. Through his work, he aims to find out how people want the world to be governed, and to help other scholars conduct better public opinion research. Before joining The Queen’s, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the universities of Lund and Maastricht. A former management consultant at Bain & Company, he also worked at the German Foreign Ministry, for the President of the European Parliament, and at the United Nations headquarters in New York. He holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford, an MA in Global Affairs from Yale University, and a BSc in Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).