Fifteen Eighty Four

Exiting from international organizations (IOs) seems to be the strategy du jour in international relations. This is underscored by recent high-profile events: the implementation of Brexit in 2020, Russia’s IO exits after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, and US President Trump’s announced withdrawals from IOs starting in 2017. By February 2025, Trump issued an executive order for the US to “conduct a review of all international intergovernmental organizations of which the United States is a member … and provide recommendations as to whether the United States should withdraw from any such organizations, conventions, or treaties.” Trump provided a 180-day deadline to do so. Some have even called Trump’s approach to IOs a “withdrawal doctrine.”

Lest one think that IO exits are just a US or an industrialized-country phenomenon, it is important to remember that the last few years have seen several Sahel states suspended from African regional organizations (after coup d’etats). Many of these countries have since doubled-down and subsequently withdrawn from these important IOs.

It therefore goes without saying that in 2025 and contemporary world politics more generally, IO exit (including both withdrawal and suspension) is an important phenomenon. It is surprising, then, that previous scholarship has paid little attention to why IO exit happens, how often it occurs, and the effects it might have for states that leave IOs. Our new book, Exit from International Organizations, sets out to change that. The book puts these much-discussed cases of IO exit in context, with an eye towards achieving a systematic, historical study.

Yes, we too were motivated to study the topic of IO exits due to salient events. When we first met in 2011, the Arab League had just suspended Libya and Syria for government-sponsored violence against peaceful protestors. It was the beginning of the Arab Spring, and we found the suspensions surprising. We wanted to understand how the mostly autocratic governments in the Arab League, which might face similar popular uprisings, decided to punish their peers for government repression. This seemed puzzling, and we were hooked to better understand IO exit.

We have since been fascinated with what these sanctions might mean for exiting countries and for international cooperation more broadly. But in understanding IO exits, it was important to us that we not draw sweeping conclusions from limited data points. Some observers worry – appropriately – about prominent cases of IO exit. It is not every day that states leave IOs in which they have long participated. Yet we thought the historical record could illuminate previously hidden facts.

In order to understand whether some of these withdrawal and suspension cases are typical of other cases where states left IOs, our book focuses on a comprehensive dataset of IO withdrawals and suspensions that we collected primarily from media sources, supplemented by IO archives and other secondary sources. We had to tackle our data collection this way because IOs all have their own processes for announcing membership changes, but one thing was common: the news media picks up on membership exits (perhaps also underscoring their importance). Using Lexis Nexis (a meta search engine), we ended up finding close to 500 cases of IO exits that have occurred from 198 states and 534 IOs since 1914. Rather than risking generalizations from a few prominent cases, the book leans on this dataset to show broad patterns in IO exits across states, organizations, issue areas, and time. The book meticulously analyzes the data using statistical tests as well as undertaking rich, qualitative case studies.

What did we find? Perhaps surprisingly, even though we were motivated by some headline cases of IO exit, we found that exit is infrequent and has not increased over time. We also show that IO exits are a negotiation strategy as states seek institutional change at the international and domestic levels. IO exit is by and large triggered by states’ dissatisfaction, their divergence in preferences from other member states, and their power.

Of course, we have previous scholarship to thank for helping us to build our understanding of IO exits. Many readers will know the seminal “exit, voice, and loyalty” framework from Hirschman (1970) upon which we lean to show that exit is just one way for states to address their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Before escalating dissatisfaction to the point of exit, we describe that states have a lot of different mechanisms of “voice” that they usually use to push for institutional change from inside the IO. This includes debating, deliberating, arguing, consensus building, voting, making backroom deals, and engaging in flexibility mechanisms. Indeed, these strategies are the everyday diplomatic tools that states use to bargain for their preferred outcomes in IOs.

A big takeaway of the book is that exit often occurs when these mechanisms of voice fail. IO exit then becomes a brinksmanship strategy to push other actors to the edge. It forces states to recognize that severing IO membership could be costlier than making some institutional adjustments.

But how is this different than other contemporary understandings of IO exit? Our research contrasts with those who wish to link IO exit with an increasing backlash against globalization, more delegated authority to IOs over time, and a rise in populist-nationalism. We show that these factors are not the prominent factors driving IO exits. This is an important correction to many current journalistic accounts of IO exit, and also a range of scholarly anecdotes.

For those who think that membership in IOs is meaningless for international affairs, our study underscores just how costly IO membership (and leaving it) can be. This is because it involves states reneging on international commitments so the international community penalizes exiting states with reputational and cooperative consequences: political risk firms are more likely to downgrade countries after exit, countries are less likely to sign future treaties with countries that exit, and exiting states are punished in diplomatic arenas like the UNSC where they are less likely to earn non-permanent seats.

Many of us are looking at the current state of international cooperation and wondering if we are at a critical juncture. Will countries continue to politically backslide, resulting in more countries being suspended from IOs that include commitments to democracy? Will the US exit IOs en masse in the near future? None of us has a crystal ball but Exit from International Organizations shows us that a sharp increase in IO exits would diverge from the pattern of infrequent exits we have seen in the past. Nonetheless, a massive spike would align with some historical inflection points where both suspension and withdrawal peak around other times of global reckoning, such as surrounding world wars or other times of geopolitical upheavals.

The book also provides a sobering reminder that states might think twice about IO exit and the actions that trigger it. This is because states may not want to lose the material benefits of IO membership but also the social benefits it provides – like signaling a shared community identity or the credibility of a state’s commitments. Some observers deride IOs for not having “hard” enforcement capabilities, but we show that IO exit can act as a diffuse enforcement mechanism on state behavior. Whether this pattern remains might well be affected by the changing nature of international cooperation, democratic decline, and polarized domestic politics.