Scholars of international organizations (IOs) have disproportionately focused on nationalist backlash to explain why states withdraw from IOs. In their new book, Exit from International Organizations: Costly Negotiations for Institutional Change, von Borzyskowski and Vabulas offer a fresh challenge to such narratives. Drawing on 488 examples of IO exit from 1913 to 2022, the authors argue that exits are neither novel nor driven by a recent resurgence of nationalist sentiment. Instead, states and institutions use exit as a costly, high-risk bargaining strategy to negotiate institutional reform or influence a violating state’s domestic policy.
The authors ambitiously apply this unified theory to both voluntary withdrawals and suspensions, although their findings suggest distinct causal logics for each. Declining state power and divergence in preferences between the exiting state and the other IO members influence voluntary exits, whereas political backsliding and alliances with regional powers influence suspension decisions. While their choice to examine both exits and suspensions makes sense, the theoretical mechanisms they employ flip the story for each. For withdrawal, they model collective action stories of domestic politics, whereas for suspension, the collective action lies among other IO members.
Applying Hirschman’s (1970) Exit, Voice and Loyalty framework, the authors theorize that states first voice their dissatisfaction within the IO’s established processes and use available flexibility mechanisms. Given the difficulty of negotiating change in large, bureaucratic IOs, states may threaten exit to negotiate institutional change. Actual exit, however, is “usually” off the equilibrium path, which introduces an element of arbitrariness into their theoretical approach that treats the most critical event, withdrawal, as bargaining failure. Strikingly, the authors find that half of withdrawing states eventually rejoin (rising to 80% for suspended states), and only 9% of exit threats result in formal IO withdrawal. While the authors have identified what exit is (bargaining gone wrong), the field still requires modeling the intra-IO bargaining process directly to identify when these bargaining breakdowns regularly emerge.
The authors also focus on the reputational impacts of IO exit, for which they use three common building blocks of IO theory: signaling, credible commitments, and stigmatization. IO exit may involve direct costs through lost material benefits, but it also unravels the signaling benefits that states accrue by joining IOs, creating an additional reputational penalty. While the benefits of withdrawal remain relatively constant (namely, institutional reform), reputational costs may vary by IO. Much room remains to investigate the benefits of withdrawal for domestic politics beyond populism and whether reputation losses differ across IOs and states.
The book’s biggest contribution updates the authors’ earlier IO exit dataset to cover 387 voluntary exits and 101 suspensions from 524 IOs, enabling them to conduct a comprehensive quantitative analysis of IO exits—a significant improvement from the field’s predominantly case study-based foundations. However, missing data for key explanatory variables, preference divergence, and nationalism truncate the analysis to the relatively stable post-1945 rules-based order. Some limitations also exist due to the authors’ reliance on preexisting indicators to operationalize key concepts. For example, “state power” relies on the Correlates of War’s Composite Index of National Capability (CINC), which has been critiqued by Beckley (“The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters,” International Security, 43(2), 2018) for overestimating the capabilities of highly populated developing countries, and by Gleditsch and Ward (“A Revised List of Independent States since the Congress of Vienna,” International Interactions, 25(4), 1999) and others for its sensitivity to the composition of the international system. Similarly, the authors UN General Assembly voting data as a proxy for “preference divergence.” While this provides a reliable indicator of a state’s broad foreign policy leanings, it may fail to capture specific divergence within specialized, topic-specific organizations outside of the UN system.
Given these limits, the quantitative results are informative, but somewhat eclipsed by the book’s original qualitative research, which unearths factors that the models do not fully capture. For example, the analysis of Japan’s withdrawal from the International Whaling Commission suggests that exits by leading states can have a “contagion” effect—prior US withdrawals from other IOs likely emboldened Japan and reduced international backlash. Contagion is in keeping with their descriptive statistics, which show that withdrawals cluster around geopolitical shocks. While contagion was a central measure in the authors’ 2019 work, it is surprisingly sidelined in their 2025 analysis. Omitting contagion risks obscures the impact of lead-state behavior and calls for future research to explore how withdrawals in one venue shift expectations and strategies in others.
The book opens exciting avenues for further inquiry. First, as Carnegie notes (Alison Carnegie, “Review of Exit from International Organizations,” The Review of International Organizations, 2025), research is needed on how IOs respond to withdrawal and what happens after states return. Second, conceptualizing exit as the final bargaining stage raises promising opportunities to test their model across a spectrum of disengagement, including withholding funds and withdrawing delegations. Finally, extending their work to informal intergovernmental organizations would clarify whether the bargaining logic holds when institutional barriers to exit are lower.
Von Borzyskowski and Vabulas deserve credit for producing the most systematic analysis of IO exit to date. Their novel dataset provides the empirical foundation required to move the field beyond anecdotal case studies toward a more comprehensive understanding of IO exit. Their analysis is persuasive, demonstrating that even with the inevitable limitations in data availability, scholars have much to gain by considering exits systematically with data. By decoupling IO exit from the narrative of resurging nationalism, the authors seek to remind us that exits are a recurring and strategic feature of international cooperation, not necessarily a signal of its decline. While their story is plausible for the post-war international liberal order, recent geopolitical shifts offer a sober reminder that future developments may still upturn our understanding of IO exit. Ultimately, Exit from International Organizations is of significant value to scholars of IOs and global studies more broadly, providing an important framework for understanding how states navigate, and occasionally abandon, international commitments in an increasingly volatile world.
