Intergovernmental Organizations and the Possibility of Institutional Learning: Self-Reflection and Internal Reform in the Wake of Moral Failure

Abstract

AbstractOne type of change that has lurked at the edges of scholarly discussions of international politics—often assumed, invoked, and alluded to, but rarely interrogated—is learning. Learning entails a very particular type of change. It is deliberate, internal, transformative, and peaceful (in the sense of being uncoerced). In this contribution to the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” I ask whether intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) can learn in a way that is comparable to the paradigmatic learning of individual human beings. In addressing this question, I take three steps. First, I explore references to corporate entities “learning” within the discipline of international relations (IR) and ask whether what is being proposed is, in fact, genuine learning by the organizations themselves. Second, I attempt to construct a robust account of institutional learning that departs from these conceptions and acknowledges instead the self-reflection and structural transformation that I argue learning at the corporate level requires. Third, for the purpose of illustration, I turn briefly to the UN following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the slaughter of more than eight thousand men and boys outside Srebrenica in 1995 to identify examples of each stage of institutional learning. Finally, I offer three provisional claims about my proposed conception of institutional learning that warrant attention in future work. Namely, I suggest that institutional learning: (1) cannot be equated with moral progress; (2) is possible despite formal organizations being incapable of emotional responses such as shame or regret; and, perhaps most controversially, (3) can occur at the level of the IGO without prior or parallel learning taking place at the level of the state or individual human actor.