Kseniya Oksamytna. 2023. Advocacy and Change in International Organizations: Communication, Protection, and Reconstruction in UN Peacekeeping. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

When the United Nations was founded in 1945, peacekeeping was not on the agenda.In the corresponding UN Charter chapters VI and VII, the term 'peacekeeping' does not appear once.The writers of the Charter of the United Nations (UN) did not envision the iconic blue helmets, which would later become the best-known symbol and instrument of the UN.Peacekeeping had yet to be invented.Similarly, when the first unarmed peacekeeping missions were deployed in 1948, they bore little resemblance to the 'robust' and 'multidimensional' UN missions active in numerous conflicts worldwide today.Hence, the history of UN peacekeeping is a history of change.But how do international organizations (IOs) -such as the United Nations -change?Kseniya Oksamytna tackles this big question in Advocacy and Change in International Organizations.Few questions have been discussed as intensively in the IO literature in recent years.However, Oksamytna makes an innovative and highly fruitful contribution to this debate.In short, she argues that "advocacy is an important yet overlooked source of change in IOs" (p. 1).While the focus on advocacy in IOs is not entirely new (e.g., Bode, 2015;Karlsrud, 2013), Oksamytna provides a comprehensive explanation for "when and how advocacy aimed at IO change succeeds" (p. 1).Drawing on insights from three case studies in the context of UN peacekeeping, she shows that advocacy success depends on whether advocates' specific strategies are matched by favorable conditions: Only if the strategies chosen by advocates fit the conditions at hand can advocacy lead to IO change.