TY - JOUR A1 - Gehring, Thomas A1 - Dorsch, Christian A1 - Dörfler, Thomas T1 - Precedent and doctrine in organisational decision-making BT - the power of informal institutional rules in the United Nations Security Council’s activities on terrorism JF - Journal of international relations and development N2 - We examine how and under what conditions informal institutional constraints, such as precedent and doctrine, are likely to affect collective choice within international organisations even in the absence of powerful bureaucratic agents. With a particular focus on the United Nations Security Council, we first develop a theoretical account of why such informal constraints might affect collective decisions even of powerful and strategically behaving actors. We show that precedents provide focal points that allow adopting collective decisions in coordination situations despite diverging preferences. Reliance on previous cases creates tacitly evolving doctrine that may develop incrementally. Council decision-making is also likely to be facilitated by an institutional logic of escalation driven by institutional constraints following from the typically staged response to crisis situations. We explore the usefulness of our theoretical argument with evidence from the Council doctrine on terrorism that has evolved since 1985. The key decisions studied include the 1992 sanctions resolution against Libya and the 2001 Council response to the 9/11 attacks. We conclude that, even within intergovernmentally structured international organisations, member states do not operate on a clean slate, but in a highly institutionalised environment that shapes their opportunities for action. KW - decision-making KW - doctrine KW - international organisations KW - precedent KW - Security Council KW - terrorism Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-017-0101-5 SN - 1581-1980 SN - 1408-6980 VL - 22 IS - 1 SP - 107 EP - 135 PB - Palgrave Macmillan CY - Basingstoke ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gehring, Thomas A1 - Dörfler, Thomas T1 - Constitutive mechanisms of UN Security Council practices BT - precedent pressure, ratchet effect, and council action regarding intrastate conflicts JF - Review of International Studies N2 - Based upon the current debate on international practices with its focus on taken-for-granted everyday practices, we examine how Security Council practices may affect member state action and collective decisions on intrastate conflicts. We outline a concept that integrates the structuring effect of practices and their emergence from interaction among reflective actors. It promises to overcome the unresolved tension between understanding practices as a social regularity and as a fluid entity. We analyse the constitutive mechanisms of two Council practices that affect collective decisions on intrastate conflicts and elucidate how even reflective Council members become enmeshed with the constraining implications of evolving practices and their normative implications. (1) Previous Council decisions create precedent pressure and give rise to a virtually uncontested permissive Council practice that defines the purview for intervention into such conflicts. (2) A ratcheting practice forces opponents to choose between accepting steadily reinforced Council action, as occurred regarding Sudan/Darfur, and outright blockade, as in the case of Syria. We conclude that practices constitute a source of influence that is not captured by the traditional perspectives on Council activities as the consequence of geopolitical interests or of externally evolving international norms like the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P). KW - Security Council KW - International Practices KW - Constitutive Mechanism KW - Responsibility to Protect KW - Precedent KW - Ratchet Effect Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210518000268 SN - 0260-2105 SN - 1469-9044 VL - 45 IS - 1 SP - 120 EP - 140 PB - Univ. CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Dörfler, Thomas A1 - Gehring, Thomas T1 - Analogy-based collective decision-making and incremental change in international organizations JF - European journal of international relations N2 - We examine how analogy-based collective decision-making of member states contributes to the endogenous emergence of informal rules and the incremental change of international organizations (IOs). Decision-making by analogy is an important characteristic of day-to-day decision-making in IOs. Relating current decisions to previous ones through analogies drives incremental change and simultaneously reinforces organizational resilience. Whereas the foreign policy analysis literature shows that analogies can be used as cognitive shortcuts in fuzzy and complex foreign policy situations, we focus on their use to overcome social ambiguity (indeterminacy) of coordination situations in IOs. Drawing on psychological conceptions, we develop two micro-level mechanisms that elucidate the effects of analogy-based collective decision-making in member-driven IOs. Analogy-based collective decisions emphasizing similarity between a current situation and previous ones follow an established problem schema and produce expansive and increasingly well-established informal rules. Collective decisions that are analogy-based but emphasize a crucial difference follow different problem schemas and trigger the emergence of additional informal rules that apply to new classes of cases. The result is an increasingly fine-grained web of distinct organizational solutions for a growing number of problems. Accordingly, an IO can increasingly facilitate collective decision-making and gains resilience. Empirically, we probe these propositions with a documentary analysis of decision-making in the Yugoslavia sanctions committee, established by the United Nations Security Council to deal with a stream of requests for exempting certain goods or services from the comprehensive economic embargo imposed on Yugoslavia in response to the War in the Balkans. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120987889 SN - 1354-0661 SN - 1460-3713 VL - 27 IS - 3 SP - 753 EP - 778 PB - Sage CY - London ER -