Thursday 15 October, 15.30
Nuffield College Lecture Theatre
NATO Adapts: Geopolitical Crises and Strategic Change in International Security Organizations
Heidi Hardt, University of California
NATO's more than seven decades of survival has hinged on an ability to adapt despite numerous geopolitical crises. Research in both organizational theory scholarship and international organization studies suggest such crises are critical catalysts of change, however, the conditions under which crises do or do not adapt are undertheorized. In security studies, relevant literature has focused more on explaining military innovation and transformation rather than adaptation of international security organizations. NATO-specific studies of adaptation have offered historical overviews and one-off case studies. By contrast, this paper introduces a novel argument for why international security organizations, such as NATO, sometimes adapt, sometimes accommodate and other times stagnate. I argue two factors matter for adaptation: 1) a crisis’ low proximity to the organization’s mission and 2) a strong signal from a potential lead nation. Employing content analysis and statistical analyses, respectively, the paper introduces two original datasets: first, hand-coded interview data from my interviews with 96 political and military officials working at and on NATO, and, second, a novel dataset of NATO organizational reforms, created via hand-coding and LLM-assistance. The paper examines the impact of salient NATO crises, selected from ICB and NAVCO data. Results indicate that a crisis’ proximity to NATO’s mission - and its borders - are significant predictors of adaptation. Findings challenge assumptions in both alliance politics and organizational scholarship, which suggest crises prompt those changes most relevant to the crisis at hand.
Heidi Hardt is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on NATO, US, transatlantic and European security and defense, alliance politics, organizational change, global governance and international organizations, gender and climate security. She has authored two books with Oxford University press: NATO's Lessons in Crisis: Institutional Memory in International Organizations and Time to React: the Efficiency of International Organizations in Crisis Responses. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in Security Studies, Review of International Organizations, Journal of Politics, PLOS One, European Security, EJIR, PS, JGSS, and CSP among others, as well as in edited volumes. Additionally, Dr. Hardt is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council , a non-resident fellow with the Council on Strategic Risks in the Center for Climate Security, and a member of Sweden's Folke Bernadette Academy (FBA) International Research Working Group on NATO.
