International Studies Quarterly
From Differentiation to Nexus Governance—Dynamics of Change in the UN’s Inter-Institutional Governance of Terrorism and Violent Extremism
2025-11-11
Despite far-reaching changes in the United Nations’ (UN) counterterrorism architecture, there has been only limited attention to what this means for global and inter-institutional governance dynamics. In this paper, I assess the evolution of the UN’s inter-institutional counterterrorism architecture since the early 2000s through a focus on institutionalized gendered logics between the UN’s three pillars of work—security, development, and human rights. The analytical approach combines postmodern discourse theory and feminist institutionalism to analyze the often informal and unspoken shifts in and across institutional discourses and practices, which are obscured by more traditional approaches to inter-institutional relations. Analyzing nearly 500 documents by 32 entities of the UN Global Counterterrorism Coordination Compact through an innovative combination of discourse analysis with Natural Language Processing tools, I identify changes towards a proliferation and hybridization of institutional discourses and a balancing of logics across the three pillars of work. I argue that these changes indicate a move away from a functionally differentiated mode of governance towards a more dynamic and networked cross-sectoral form of “nexus governance,” which offers explanations for both inter-institutional integration as well as a subtle, networked form of securitization.