Man versus State: Contested Agency in the United Nations

Abstract

The research on international organisations (IOs) continues to be dominated by two distinctions: on the one hand, the distinction between rational choice and social construction; on the other hand, the distinction between IOs as arenas for states and IOs as actors in their own right. In this article I argue that these two distinctions structure not only our theoretical debates on IOs, but also what our theories aspire to explain: political conflicts in IOs. Through an in-depth study of two debates during a conflict in the world food organisations, I show how the distinctions were used to create lines of dispute. I conclude that research that itself establishes the distinctions on a theoretical basis is unable to grasp what conflict in IOs, since it fixes theoretically what is contested politically. What is called for is instead a practice-theoretical approach.