Introduction

This chapter zooms in on the dynamics of competition that shape interorganizational relations (IOR) in world politics. More specifically, it probes into the competition over authority that pervades global governance: the quest by various actors to become epistemic authorities – the key knowledge producers – on the objects that are governed in world politics, such as international security, the global economy or the climate. Does this competition make the epistemic practices of these actors more similar or more distinct?

This question is key to understanding how IOR affect the ordering of world politics. If the competition fosters a diversity in the epistemic practices, this may make the objects more ambiguous, thus complicating efforts to develop frameworks and tools for their governance. One example for such an ambiguity is the world-wide level of armaments, for which military expenditures are a prominent indicator. Several organizations produce international statistics on military expenditures, vying for attention and influence in debates about security politics. Their statistics, though, diverge. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), for instance, estimates that the military spending of the US in 2019 (US$732 billion) far surpassed the combined spending of China (US$261 billion) and Russia (US$65 billion) (Tian et al, 2020). The US State Department, in turn, publishes a range of estimates on the patterns of military expenditures for the same year, with the upper end of the estimates suggesting that the combined spending of China (US$417 billion) and Russia (US$170 billion) was much closer to the US spending (US$730 billion) than the SIPRI figures indicate (US State Department, 2021a).

The chapter builds on and further develops theorizing on organizational fields to explain the effects of the competition over authority. Sociological neo-institutionalists have developed and used the concept of organizational fields to study how the interaction of organizations generates field dynamics that shape the form and practices of these organizations (for overviews, see Scott, 2008: 181– 209; Wooten and Hoffman, 2017). Isomorphism, for instance, denotes field dynamics that make the forms and practices of the organizations more similar over time (see Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2017). Scholars in international relations (IR) have drawn on this theorizing to probe into different aspects of world politics, such as isomorphism among states (Farrell, 2005) or among governance institutions (Dingwerth and Pattberg, 2009), processes of policy change (Vetterlein and Moschella, 2014) and the evolution of ecologies of governance institutions (Lake, 2021).