When the United Nations was founded in 1945, peacekeeping was not on the agenda. In the corresponding UN Charter chapters VI and VII, the term ‘peacekeeping’ does not appear once. The writers of the Charter of the United Nations (UN) did not envision the iconic blue helmets, which would later become the best-known symbol and instrument of the UN. Peacekeeping had yet to be invented. Similarly, when the first unarmed peacekeeping missions were deployed in 1948, they bore little resemblance to the ‘robust’ and ‘multidimensional’ UN missions active in numerous conflicts worldwide today. Hence, the history of UN peacekeeping is a history of change.

But how do international organizations (IOs) – such as the United Nations – change? Kseniya Oksamytna tackles this big question in Advocacy and Change in International Organizations. Few questions have been discussed as intensively in the IO literature in recent years. However, Oksamytna makes an innovative and highly fruitful contribution to this debate. In short, she argues that “advocacy is an important yet overlooked source of change in IOs” (p. 1). While the focus on advocacy in IOs is not entirely new (e.g., Bode, 2015; Karlsrud, 2013), Oksamytna provides a comprehensive explanation for “when and how advocacy aimed at IO change succeeds” (p. 1). Drawing on insights from three case studies in the context of UN peacekeeping, she shows that advocacy success depends on whether advocates’ specific strategies are matched by favorable conditions: Only if the strategies chosen by advocates fit the conditions at hand can advocacy lead to IO change.

To make this argument, Oksamytna develops an ‘advocacy-focused framework’ (chapter 1) that distinguishes three advocacy strategies (social pressure, persuasion, ‘authority talk’) and four conditions that affect their success (strategy-specific characteristics of advocates, targets, issues, and context). Social pressure involves the “manipulation of social rewards and punishments” (p. 16), for example, through (the threat of) public shaming or exclusion from a peer group. Persuasion entails a “change of mind in response to advocates’ arguments” (ibid.), which can appeal to both logic and emotions. Authority talk means an advocate’s message is accepted “because of its source rather than its content” (ibid.), e.g., due to their epistemic authority or position in the social hierarchy. The key to Oksamytna’s argument is that she then links these three advocacy strategies to specific conditions for success. These conditions relate to the characteristics of the advocates, their targets, the issue they are trying to promote, and the context in which advocacy takes place. For example, according to Oksamytna, the success of social pressure relies on the concerted efforts of a substantial coalition, whereas the impact of ‘authority talk’ is heightened when the proponent serves as a sole source of information (advocates’ characteristics). Social vulnerability renders targets open to the impact of social pressure but not to ‘authority talk’ (targets). Issue salience can hinder ‘authority talk’ but does not necessarily impede persuasion (issues). And while the effectiveness of social pressure hinges on a public forum or a credible risk of disclosure, persuasion thrives best in a closed and private setting (context). Thus, the same advocacy strategy can be successful in one case and fail in another, depending on the respective conditions.

Chapters 2 to 4 present three empirical case studies that demonstrate the advocacy-focused framework’s added value. Based on interviews, UN documents, memoirs, public and private archives, and data on UNSC mandates, Oksamytna uses process tracing to identify the links between advocacy and issue emergence (and, later on, institutionalization) in three cases in UN peacekeeping: strategic communications, protection of civilians, and quick impact projects.

Chapter 2 looks at strategic communications – a case of bottom-up persuasion. It reconstructs how different advocates, mostly staff and supportive leaders from UN field missions, pushed for establishing professional communication campaigns aimed at the local population in host governments to explain the mission’s mandate and counter fake news. From early attempts in the Congo to information posters in Namibia and the first UN radio station in Cambodia, the analysis shows how various advocates played a crucial role in convincing skeptics in the Secretariat – including then Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali (“It ‘took three months to change his mind’”, p. 71) – about the issue’s importance and paving the way for its institutionalization in the early 2000s.

Chapter 3 analyzes the development of the protection of civilians (PoC) policy – a case of top-down advocacy through social pressure and persuasion. While the idea that the protection of civilians should be an explicit responsibility of peacekeeping operations is a central element of today’s peacekeeping missions, Oksamytna’s analysis demonstrates that this was not always the case. After the corresponding ideas of Dag Hammarsjköld were dismissed in the 1960s, it was the social pressure by a coalition of elected Security Council member states during the genocide in Rwanda and, above all, Canada’s strong advocacy and persuasion efforts during its tenure in the Security Council in 1999–2000 that led to the first thematic PoC resolution.

Chapter 4 studies quick impact projects – a case of outside-in change via ‘authority talk.’ It shows how quick impact projects – small-scale reconstruction and development activities – entered UN peacekeeping practice as the result of a recommendation by the Brahimi panel in 2000. Due to the panel’s perceived expertise and impartiality, the framing of quick impact projects as intuitive and straightforward, as well as the absence of alternative voices on the subject, the idea to allocate a small amount of money for quick impact projects was quickly taken up and implemented by the UN Secretariat. In Chapter 5, Oksamytna summarizes her findings, discusses their implications for the IO literature, and reflects on the practical consequences of IO change, especially IO expansion.

Advocacy and Change in International Organizations is a theoretically well-developed and empirically rich contribution to the study of IO change. Although many contributions could be highlighted, I would like to emphasize three points that, for me, stand out from this work:

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    Advocacy matters. Oksamytna convincingly argues that advocacy is a crucial variable for understanding IO change – and that advocates “must choose their strategies wisely” (p. 1–2), depending on the advocacy conditions at hand. The book is at its strongest when it specifically traces how individual actors engage as advocates, for example, by reconstructing how the head of the information unit convinced the head of mission in Cambodia, who then persuaded the Secretary-General that the mission would benefit from having its own radio station (p. 70–76). By reconstructing these advocacy practices, Oksamytna empirically shows that change in IOs does not ‘simply happen’ but is always actor-driven: “[W]hat appears as a natural response to new challenges in fact required successful advocacy” (p. 63).

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    Change as gradual institutionalization. However, the book not only tells a story of innovation and issue emergence but also offers a fascinating account of IO change through institutionalization. Oksamytna rightly argues that advocacy “matters beyond the stage of issue emergence and can advance institutionalization or fend off contestation” (p. 14). A one-off innovation does not necessarily lead to lasting change in organizations. Instead, innovations have to be institutionalized – and this needs continuous advocacy. The three case studies make it clear that IO change requires staying power and, in some cases, several generations of advocates (e.g., in the case of strategic communications). In my opinion, this is a finding that cannot be overstated: IO change is rarely the result of the brilliant advocacy of one individual but the outcome of what Max Weber called the ‘slow drilling through thick boards’ by collective actors. The advocacy efforts of one actor are often the starting point for the advocacy efforts of the next actor – and this ‘chain’ of advocates (who often do not even know each other) ultimately contributes to institutionalization and change in IOs.

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    The value of empirical detail. In addition, the extremely rich and detailed empirical case studies presented in this book also have value in themselves, as they produce “concrete, context-dependent knowledge” (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 223) through which we learn something new about the world, in this case, UN peacekeeping. Thanks to the variety of material used, especially the memoirs, readers of Oksamytna’s book gain fascinating insights into the history of peacekeeping. These include more light-hearted anecdotes, such as the story of the creation of the first UN radio station in Cambodia, which “became the most popular station in the country” (p.72–73), or the story of the UN mission in Sierra Leone, which at times hired a “comedy troupe, […] a DJ, and, on one occasion, one of Sierra Leone’s biggest pop star, Jimmy B” (p. 89) for its information programs. But it also includes serious illustrations of problematic phenomena such as brain drain and corruption, for example, when a local journalist in Liberia who uncovered a rise in child prostitution possibly linked to the blue helmets’ arrival was subsequently poached by the UN mission for 16 times her previous salary (p. 92–93). These concrete stories are of great value to scholars of UN peacekeeping, as they provide important insights into how UN peacekeeping works ‘on the ground.’

Despite this comprehensive engagement with advocacy and change in three cases, some questions remain for future research. Again, I want to highlight the three that I find most interesting. First, I wonder to what extent the picture changes if one also includes failed advocacy attempts in the analysis. Even though Oksamytna justifies her focus on successful cases well (and also looks at smaller advocacy episodes that failed, such as Hammarskjöld’s PoC efforts), an explicit perspective on unsuccessful attempts in future analyses could help to get us even closer to understanding success and failure of advocacy. Without question, it is reasonable to infer failure from the absence of “favorable conditions” (p. 195). Yet the empirical analysis in this book also shows that advocates might overcome the lack of certain favorable conditions. Future studies could, therefore, build on Oksamytna’s work by asking where particular advocacy strategies have failed and then looking explicitly for inhibiting factors: for example, the fact that advocacy is often associated with risk for individuals could be addressed in more detail (Christian, 2022) and the varying types of contestation could also be conceptually explored in more depth (Zimmermann et al., 2023).

Second, it could be fruitful for future analyses to study how the four conditions that affect advocacy success (advocates’ characteristics, targets, issues, and context) might themselves be the object of deliberate change attempts. After all, the four conditions are not fixed once and for all: Advocates might also work on changing them – e.g., by improving their credibility or epistemic authority through legitimation strategies or increasing the salience of ‘their’ issue – to succeed in their advocacy efforts. Such a perspective could help to deepen our understanding of the complex and long-term interplay of advocacy strategies, favorable conditions, and IO change.

Third, it might be worth looking more closely at the nature of ‘authority talk’ by expert panels. While ‘authority talk’ is defined as a “near-automatic acceptance of recommendations from an authoritative source” (p. 196) – as a message that is accepted “because of its source rather than its content” (p. 16) – the empirical analysis shows that whether the Brahimi panel’s recommendation is taken up and implemented (as in the case of the quick impact projects) or not (as in the case of the information unit) depends very much on the content. As much as this highlights the value of the advocacy-focused framework, which looks at characteristics of advocates, targets, issues, and context together, it also raises questions about ‘authority talk’ as a strategy. Future studies could look at IO expert panels in more detail, e.g., by analyzing how they are set up in the first place: If ‘authority talk’ is an advocacy strategy, how do advocates employ it? How exactly do actors ‘use’ expert panels to put forward their arguments?

Overall, Advocacy and Change in International Organizations is a highly significant contribution to the literature on IOs. The book provides readers with an innovative theoretical framework that will help many scholars tackle related questions in the future. At the same time, it gives sufficient space to the complexity (and messiness) of the empirical reality without ‘squeezing’ it too much into a predeveloped framework. This approach makes this book special and a contribution that offers enormous added value, both theoretically and empirically. Scholars interested in IO change, international norms, and peacekeeping should, therefore, closely examine Oksamytna’s arguments and findings. Yet the results are also highly relevant for practitioners in and around IOs. While the book’s conclusion primarily highlights the potentially harmful effects of IO change and institutionalization (incoherence, overcommitment, inflexibility), the empirical case studies also show how adaptive and innovative IOs can be if actors are committed to change and choose the appropriate advocacy strategies. Oksamytna’s book thus gives hope to practitioners who want to reform IOs and make them fit for purpose in a rapidly transforming world: change is difficult – but possible.