The Consequences of IO Suspension for Exiting States
Inken von Borzyskowski, Felicity Vabulas · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025
Chapter 7 details and tests our argument about the consequences of IO suspension. We argue that suspension can lead to negative reputational and cooperative consequences because suspension acts as a heuristic for international actors that the state has violated an international commitment. Suspension sends a signal that the state has been ostracized from a peer club, which removes the seal of approval that comes from membership. Suspension can also make it easier for other international actors to implement sanctions that might otherwise be hampered by collective action or legitimacy challenges. We test our expectations about the consequences of suspension by analyzing 71 IO suspensions for political backsliding from democratically committed IOs but also show some effects for the full set of 101 suspensions from all IOs. We show that ousted states incur reputational harm: This worsened perceptions of political stability and investor confidence scores. We also show that suspended states incur negative cooperative consequences: They have a lower chance of being elected as a non-permanent member in the UNSCand suspension facilitates subsequent sanctions by other international actors. Some suspended states use rhetoric to reject and counter stigmatization, and preemptively withdraw to frame the narrative in their favor. The analyses also show that domestic institutional change following suspension is usually shallow.