Organizational Learning and the Containment of Violence. The Police Missions in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia

Abstract

It is generally agreed that political actors can learn. If we define international organizations as political actors, and not as instruments as most theories of international relations do this, than they should also have the ability to learn. But how do international organizations learn? In the article, I answer this question by using a model of organizational learning. I examine the trigger for learning, actors of learning, the learning process and the objective of learning.
Against this background, I identify two research gaps: the one is the question, why individual learning becomes organizational learning, and the other is, why an organization learns in the quality of a double-loop. By analyzing different successful and unsuccessful learning processes in the police missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina (UNMIBH, EUPM) and Macedonia (Proxima) concerning the containment of violence between 1995 and 2006, I verify structural
differences concerning hierarchy, centralization and the division of labor which have an impact on the connection between individual and organizational learning, and I show which external factors influence double-loop learning.