How Do Crises Affect International Organizations?

The newly DFG-funded project VARICRISIS, jointly led by Christian Kreuder-Sonnen (Friedrich-Schiller University Jena) and Christian Rauh (WZB , University of Potsdam), will examine why some international organizations (IOs) gain authority and capacity in times of crisis while others lose influence.

The project combines international relations and public administration approaches and focuses especially on varying characteristics of crises such as their intensity, their duration and, importantly, their transboundariness across countries and policy areas. To this end, the WZB team will develop a global crisis dataset based on quantitative text analyses of international news agency reports from 1992 to 2024.

The project will link these data to in-depth case studies and comparative quantitative analyses, to shed light on the conditions supporting or constraining the management of complex crises on the international level.

To support this collaborative effort between the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and the WZB Berlin which will kick-off in early 2026 and run for three years, we will soon be hiring a postdoctoral researcher and a doctoral researcher to join the team.

11/6/2025 kes