How States and International Organizations Respond to Non-Cooperation
Lisa Dellmuth, SCGG Co-Director, and Stefanie Walter, University of Zurich, organized a Special Issue workshop in Stockholm on August 30-31, gathering 20 International Relations scholars. The participants discussed 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 was to assemble a special issue that covers a wide array of issue areas and geographies, analyzed different types of responses, and examined these questions at different levels of analysis. In doing so, the papers probed both the usefulness, the scope conditions, and the limits of the "accommodation dilemma" framework.
The workshop was generously funded by Stiftelsen Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and co-funded by the Stockholm Center on Global Governance.
Last updated: September 2, 2025
Source: SCGG