ABSTRACT World politics are changing with important implications for international peace processes. We argue that recent changes in world order have led to transactionalism becoming more pronounced in peace processes. This is because increased geopolitical competition often leads to a conflation of warmakers and peacemakers: States that provide military support to belligerents also engage in peacemaking. This renders peace processes political marketplaces with transactionalism as main modus operandi. Transactional peacemaking has three features: It prioritizes bilateral over multilateral approaches; is interest-based and exclusive rather than value-based and inclusive; and focuses on short-term deals instead of long-term outcomes. Drawing on over 70 interviews, we empirically demonstrate our argument with the peace processes in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. We conclude by discussing the consequences of transactionalism for the global peacemaking landscape. By providing a new conceptualization of an emerging phenomenon in contemporary peace processes, we contribute to the literature on changing peacemaking approaches.

ABSTRACT Stalemated peace processes are indicative of serious problems for international order, relating to its legitimacy and viability. They may indicate potential opportunities or herald revisionist moments. Yet, the dominant research methodologies, conceptual, and practical doctrines of the post-Cold War order, related to peacemaking, have indicated a convergence around limited goals for peacemaking, peace missions, international mediation, and conflict resolution. At best, this has led to negative forms of peace, stalemates, or a victor's peace in many conflict-affected states and regions. Such problem-solving approaches, which operate within the often contradictory frameworks of the liberal international order, Realism, multipolarity, and geopolitical pragmatism, have led to unintended consequences because of such parsimony. This article examines the post-Cold War consequences of these developments in peacemaking and related UN and other peace approaches in practice and in theory. It focuses on the emergence of the concept of “stalemated peace”.

ABSTRACT How do second-tier suppliers adapt to defense-industrial globalization and expand their weapons sales in different regions? We offer a demand-side explanation of arms procurement. As the first-tier suppliers focus on advanced power projection weapons, two types of qualitative structural gaps emerge in the global arms market either due to excessive superiority or utter neglect of certain platforms. Consequently, buyer states turn to weapon systems produced by second-tier suppliers as they are proximate to their qualitative needs in terms of strategic/technical and doctrinal requirements. Through case studies of South Korea’s weapons sales to India and Indonesia, we show how a second-tier supplier is able to outbid its first-tier counterparts on qualitative grounds to fill the structural gap left by global power disparity.

ABSTRACT How do international organizations (IOs) respond to global normative change and shifting power distributions among their member states? In this article, I argue that the discourse of IOs at the micro-level adapts in imperfect ways to such macro-level changes: discursive shifts will display a compromise between adapting to macro-level pressures and catering to more sticky organizational values. I test this argument by studying how the human rights discourse of two large UN peace operations adapted to a macro-level paradigm shift from liberal peacekeeping to stabilization. I observe a change in discourse in line with the macro-level paradigm shift, which, however, displayed significant aspects of continuity in order to uphold core organizational norms. This gives reason to believe that, in the current era of (emerging) multipolarity and normative change, IOs will continue to be responsive to such macro-level changes, but will nevertheless display imperfect adaptation.

ABSTRACT Protection, uncommon in peacekeeping before the 1990s, has become the norm. This article takes issue with this normative shift and explores how the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Protection of Civilians (POC) have normalized peacekeepers’ protection duty in particular ways. Taking a discursive rather than functionalist approach to norms, I develop the concept of productive contestation to emphasize the polysemic, interactive, and relational essence of norms as social processes with unintended and not necessarily positive consequences. Revisiting the narrative around protection norms and analyzing changes in the peacekeeping principles, I argue that the cosmopolitan R2P helped construct peacekeepers as militarized protectors of individual bodies, while its currently prevalent state-centric version remade them into police protectors of order and stability. This article reinterprets how “robust” protection has transformed in peacekeeping, offering a new way to theorize contestation by making visible the political productivity of contested norms.

ABSTRACT Capacity building (CB) assistance for digital development has climbed the foreign policy agendas of powerful states, yet its strategic significance remains opaque. Particularly, while CB is believed to reduce a recipient’s vulnerabilities to weaponized interdependence, three major financiers of such assistance—the United States, China, and the European Union—have been accused of exploiting global interdependence for strategic gains. How do powerful donors perceive CB assistance provisions as shaping their strategic advantage? Which factors have shaped variation in their provision of CB assistance to developing states? This paper argues that donors have perceived CB assistance as a way to outcompete geopolitical rivals and to (re)shape global digital networks through forming strategic alignments. This logic is supported with evidence from American, EU, and Chinese CB for digital development in Africa. By foregrounding CB's strategic dimension, this study contributes to emerging scholarship on (digital) networked, geopolitical competition in the current digital era.

ABSTRACT The global regime for climate change was formed under the leadership of powerful states in the West who faced the challenge of bringing emerging powers in the developing world on board. The established powers used a strategy of cooptation whereby they offered a series of institutional concessions in return for support. These included adopting principles favored by the established powers, such as sustainable development and common but differentiated responsibilities, and agreeing to channel resources from North to South to address climate change. The effect of these concessions was to secure the participation of emerging powers, not only taming their opposition but also coopting them as allies in the regime to help bring other developing countries on board. Cooptation facilitated the establishment of the regime and helps explain why global climate cooperation has been relatively stable, unlike some domains of global governance that have fallen prey to intense competition and securitization between established and rising powers.

ABSTRACT After being rather moderate throughout the post-Cold War period, great power rivalries are gaining steam again. Yet, in contrast to past rivalries they are characterized by complex interdependencies which prompt the rivals to engage in order-building within and across rival “blocs.” We argue that this order-building is frequently done by means of “cooptation,” i.e., the trading of institutional privileges for order support. To prepare the conceptual ground for studying cooptation in great power rivalries, we conceptualize cooptation as a specific mode of cooperation and distinguish between four types: taming opposition, securing partners, seeking patronage, and wooing leaders. We demonstrate (1) how great power rivalry shapes cooptation in institutional orders; (2) that cooptation can exacerbate great power rivalry; and (3) that cooptation can tame great power rivalry under certain conditions. We thereby show that theories of cooptation, usually used to analyze domestic politics, help explain international order(ing) in great power rivalries.

ABSTRACT Cooptation provides a strategy for powerful states to manage power rivalries through institutional change. It entails coopting weaker (and possibly rising) states to support the institutional order by granting them a greater say in that order. However, the ability of states to broker such arrangements depends on the willingness of rivals to be coopted and on the properties of institutions through which cooptation is pursued. In this article, I contrast the comparative efficacy of pursuing cooptation through formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs) such as the UN or IMF, with pursuing cooptation through informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) such as the G20, which are not legalized and have no independent operational capacity. I argue that while FIGOs have a comparative advantage for managing and maintaining a prevailing institutional order through adaptation, IIGOs often offer a more propitious institutional setting for achieving peaceful transformation of an institutional order in response to power rivalry.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the great power rivalry of the US and China at the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the lens of cooptation dynamics. First, it argues that the accession of China to the WTO is a case of top-down cooptation meant to tame opposition to the US-led international order and to restrain China from security competition. Second, it explains why this cooptation deal was not durable and led to feedback effects that fueled the US’ loss of interest in maintaining a powerful WTO. Third, it shows how the WTO crisis triggers a current bottom-up effort by middle powers to re-stabilize the WTO through the mechanism of Joint Statement Initiatives, which attempt to re-commit the US to leadership. The article shows that the US’ undermining of the WTO and the institutional reaction it evokes in other members are part of a reactive sequence dynamic driven by failed cooptation bargains.