Contested Multilateralism  Robert O. Keohane & Julia Morse

“’Contested multilateralism’ describes the situation that results from the pursuit of strategies by states, multilateral organizations, and non-state actors to use multilateral institutions, existing or newly created, to challenge rules, practices, or missions of existing multilateral institutions.”

Morse, J and R. O. Keohane. (2014): “Contested Multilateralism” The Review of International Organizations 9: 385.

Keohane and Morse develop the concept of “contested multilateralism" to describe challenges to existing multilateral regimes through the means and practices of multilateralism, without questioning multilateralism itself in its generic form. If the internal mechanisms of a regime do not offer reform perspectives to actors dissatisfied with the status quo, conflicts arise not within but between multilateral institutions, with the challenger using "multilateralism against multilateralism". "Contested multilateralism" thereby describes both the situation and the strategies employed by revisionist state or non-state actors to bring it about. Among these, Keohane and Morse identify "regime shifting" – in which challengers seek to shift the focus of the regime to an alternative, pre-existing multilateral forum – and "competitive regime creation," in which new institutions or informal forms of cooperation are deliberately created to compete with existing institutions.

Robert O. Keohane (* 1941 in the USA) is a professor emeritus of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University and a key figure in the development of liberal institutionalism. 

Julia C. Morse is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.