Political Science Book Launch: Exit from International Organizations

Join us for the launch of Exit from International Organizations with co-author Felicity Vabulas!

Vabulas will discuss the findings of her research and the implications for contemporary geopolitics in conversation with Professor Benjamin A T Graham and Professor Margaret Peters.

About the book:

Why do states exit international organizations (IOs)? How often does exit from IOs – including voluntary withdrawal and forced suspension – occur? What are the effects of leaving IOs for the exiting state? Despite the importance of membership in IOs, a broader understanding of exit across states, organizations, and time has been limited. Exit from International Organizations addresses these lacunae through a theoretically grounded and empirically systematic study of IO exit. Von Borzyskowski and Vabulas argue that there is a common logic to IO exit which helps explain both its causes and consequences. By examining IO exit across 198 states, 534 IOs, and over a hundred years of history, they show that exit is driven by states' dissatisfaction, preference divergence, and is a strategy to negotiate institutional change. The book also demonstrates that exit is costly because it has reputational consequences for leaving states and significantly affects other forms of international cooperation.

About the participants:

Dr. Felicity Vabulas is the Blanche E. Seaver Associate Professor of International Studies at Pepperdine University. Her research focuses on the political economy of international cooperation. Specifically, she is interested in when and why states change how they cooperate internationally and the implications this has for international relations. Her research includes examining states’ exit from international agreements, states’ engagement in informal modes of global governance, and states pushing for different foreign policy strategies through foreign lobbying. Her research is published in the Review of International Organizations, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, Global Perspectives, Global Policy, European Journal of International Relations, International Politics and multiple edited volume chapters. She has been awarded a Seaver College Endowed Professorship and the Howard A. White Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her earlier research received a best paper award from the American Political Science Association and has been supported by the World Bank, the National Science Foundation, and the International Studies Association. She serves as the Vice President of the Board of Directors for the Culver City Education Foundation.

Margaret Peters is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. Her research focuses broadly on international political economy with a special focus on the politics of migration. Her book, Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization (2017, Princeton University Press) examines the relationship between trade policy, outsourcing, and immigration policy and received the Lowi award for the best first book from APSA and IPSA, and the Best Book Award from the IPE and Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Sections of the International Studies Associations and the Migration and Citizenship section of APSA.

Benjamin A T Graham is an associate professor of international relations at USC. He is one of three principal investigators in the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab. He is also the coordinating principal investigator of the Everyday Respect research project.

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