Yf Reykers and John Karlsrud (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, NUPI) published an article on ad hoc coalitions in international security.
They claim that ad hoc coalitions have so far been treated as a uniform category, which does not capture empirical reality. By introducing a new typology, they offer a tool to better understand how ad hoc coalitions may affect organisations such as the European Union and African Union.
While the increasingly thick web of global, regional and sub-regional security arrangements and institutions has received ample scholarly attention, the phenomenon of ad hoc military coalitions and how they impact these institutions has been relatively little explored.
The authors examine ad hoc coalitions in international security responses and develop a tentative typology of military responses that takes ad hoc coalitions into consideration, where they differentiate in terms of institutionalisation and duration. They raise attention for the phenomenon of ‘institutional exploitation’. They illustrate this by showing how states apply a pick-and-choose approach in which institutional products but not frameworks are used. Intervening states often use the interoperable forces, a common culture and mainstreamed doctrine that were developed in the context of the African Union, European Union or North Atlantic Treat Organization, but not the formal deployment of rapid response mechanisms of these organisations.
The authors observe that institutional proliferation in international security facilitates a functionalist approach mainly inspired by national self-interest. They highlight that future research should therefore examine whether this could result in dwindling relevance of international institutions, first in the domain of security, but later also in other domains.
