How to deal with the rotten apple in the basket? Exploring membership suspension in regional councils of the Baltic Sea and the Arctics
Date
2023
Authors
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Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Regional Councils (RCs) in the Baltic
Sea, Barents Sea, and Arctic region suspended Russia’s membership. These are only three
instances of an overall increasing use of membership suspension as a means of dealing with
non-compliance among member states in International Organisations (IOs). Given their relatively
high costs and the lack of scholarly evidence indicating that suspensions have an accountability
impact, this growing application is puzzling, posing the central research question
of why the member states of the three RCs suspended Russia. To answer the question, the
thesis adopts an exploratory approach to identify factors determining the decision to suspend.
This is done by conducting empirical research on membership suspension in the context of
three regional soft law organisations — the Council of the Baltic Sea States, the Barents
Euro-Arctic Council, and the Arctic Council. Conceptually, the study relies on existing literature
on membership suspension. For theoretical guidance, the state’s decision to suspend is
assumed to follow a logic of appropriateness or consequences. Drawing on empirical data
from 12 expert interviews, the presence or absence of one or the other logic will be analysed
along indicators, reflecting factors and considerations that motivate states to suspend. Since
the research goal is to come up with more general explanations as to why IO member states
suspend a non-compliant, the results have been compared across the three cases to ensure
more generalisable findings. The thesis finds that the logic of appropriateness prevails in the
RC member states’ decision to suspend. Furthermore, three explanatory indicators, namely
cohesive identity, international symbolism and severity, have been explored, which deliver
more widely applicable explanations of why IO members suspend. These findings bring more
clarity to why states suspend and to understand the ongoing developments in the three RCs.