International Studies Professor Felicity Vabulas speaks about why states exit from international organizations in the Surfboard Room on Sept. 10. Panelists Amanda Rizkallah and John Taden, both International Studies professors, joined Vabulas for her discussion. Photos courtesy of Jeffrey Bowen
On Wednesday, Sept. 10, students and faculty gathered to hear International Studies Professor Felicity Vabulas speak about her recent book, “Exit from International Organizations.” Vabulas’s speech launched the David Baird Distinguished Lecture Series for the 2025-26 academic year and aimed to address the question of why states exit from international organizations.
Vabulas discussed three main questions in her speech: why do states exit from international organizations, how do they do so and what are the effects of states leaving international organizations?
“They’re all aimed at advancing our knowledge related to international relations, which is the field that studies how states interact all the way from conflict to peace,” Vabulas said.
In addition to Vabulas, professors of International Studies Amanda Rizkallah and John Taden were panelists during the presentation to help pose questions for Vabulas.
Vabulas began her speech by using recent real-world examples to illustrate what exiting from an international organization looks like.
“In 2016, the United Kingdom had a referendum to leave the European Union, which has been called Brexit,” Vabulas said. “More recently, President Trump has withdrawn the United States from international organizations in both administrations, including the World Health Organization, UNESCO and the International Coffee Organization.”
Vabulas said her book talks about suspensions from international organizations, as well.
“The book is equally about suspensions, and you probably also know some examples of those,” Vabulas said. “When Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2022, it was suspended from several different international organizations as a punishment.”
Rizkallah then asked Vabulas what got her interested in such a niche topic.
Vabulas said in 2011, her husband and her were leaving an airport and they happened to see on the news Libya and Syria were being kicked out of the Arab League.
“My husband, who is not a political scientist and rarely asks me about my work, kind of cheekily looked at me and said, ‘What do you political scientists know about that?'” Vabulas said. “I realized that most of our research spent a lot of time looking at why countries join organizations and what benefits they get, but nobody had looked at the reasons for when and why countries would exit.”
Vabulas said it ended up being a really interesting question as to why countries would want to go through all kinds of policy adjustments to join an international organization just to later leave.
Taden then asked if Vabulas could speak a little about the scope of what international organizations do.
“The analogy, which is not my own, is that a lot of them operate like oxygen,” Vabulas said. “When it’s there, you don’t really know it’s there until it’s taken away.”
Vabulas then mentioned other organizations in which countries and states work together are the World Bank, IMF and the World Trade Organization.
Vabulas said even though it’s easy to think that these international organizations don’t do anything effective in the world, that is far from the truth.
“It is very easy to think of these as sort of bloated bureaucracies that exist somewhere overseas to serve other people,” Vabulas said. “But they do, they affect you in a lot of different ways. So, a couple of those ones I mentioned before, Interpol, I mentioned, it’s not a global police force. It’s an information-sharing organization where domestic police share information to help with cross-border criminals.”
Vabulas ended her speech by talking about why states will choose to leave international organizations.
Vabulas (middle) smiles with with fellow panelists Rizkallah (right) and Taden (left) in the Surfboard Room on Sept. 10. After the discussion ended, all three stuck around to answer questions.
Vabulas said people are quick to rush to conclusions that with so many states exiting, international organizations are going to collapse.
“But when you look over time, this has actually been happening for a really long time,” Vabulas said. “This graph shows the number of withdrawals and suspensions. Turns out, when you normalize this, it’s flat. So the number of exits has actually been pretty steady over time.”
Vabulas said that the reason for states choosing to exit international organizations is because it’s a way to push for change.
“This is usually happening when there’s sort of a breakaway country that has preferences that diverge from the average member that’s still there,” Vabulas said. “And they’ve kind of run out of other options. It’s an ultimatum, a Hail Mary type of strategy, right? A last-ditch effort to say, ‘I’m leaving, I’m packing up my toys and leaving, unless you make some changes.'”
Vabulas said exiting from international organizations, whether voluntarily or through a suspension, is costly for states.
“The costs that we focus on are twofold,” Vabulas said. “We look at the reputational damage, and we look at the chance of cooperation in the future.”
Vabulas ended her discussion by opening up the floor for a question-and-answer session. Students also had the opportunity to get their copies of Vabulas’s book signed.
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Contact Alicia Dofelmier via email: alicia.dofelmier@pepperdine.edu
