Special Issue Workshop: How States and International Organizations Respond to Non-Cooperation
Workshop
Start date: Saturday 30 August 2025
Time: 10.00
End date: Sunday 31 August 2025
Time: 16.00
Location: Vår Gård, Saltsjöbaden
Lisa Dellmuth, SCGG Co-Director, and Stefanie Walter, University of Zurich, organize a two-day workshop in Stockholm gathering 20 International Relations scholars. The participants will discuss research about the causes and consequences of international non-cooperation for a special issue.
Although the world is governed by a tight web of international institutions that facilitate international cooperation, states often engage in non-cooperative actions as well. Such behavior – from non-compliance with international regulations over exit from international organizations (IOs) to outright war – confront the international community with the difficult question of how to respond to such behavior.
Should states, IOs and other actors accommodate the non-cooperative state and continue to cooperate? Or should they instead punish such defection?
Responding confronts states with an “accommodation dilemma”, because both types of responses have costs and benefits: Accommodation allows states to continue mutually beneficial exchange, but means that the distribution of cooperation gains shifts in the defecting country’s favor and creates reputational risks that may
encourage of similar challenges in the future. Non-accommodation, on the other hand, has the advantage of deterring such attempts, but can be costly when it leads to a significant loss of cooperation gains.
The goal of the workshop is to assemble a special issue that covers a wide array of issue areas and geographies, analyze different types of responses, and examine these questions at different levels of analysis. In doing so, the papers probe both the usefulness, the scope conditions, and the of the limits of the “accommodation dilemma” framework.
The workshop is generously funded by Stiftelsen Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and co-funded by the Stockholm Center on Global Governance.
Last updated: August 26, 2025
Source: SCGG