UN - a competitive arena
In the article "The UN as a competitive arena for linked ecologies: The case of UN peacekeeping", Karlsrud argues that the UN, in the area of peacekeeping, can be understood as a competitive arena, where informal policy alliances are competing to frame issues and build support for new norms, concepts and rules.
You can read the full text article in the journal Political Perspectives.
To theorise these phenomena, the article turns to the sociology of professions to describe how different professional environments, or ecologies, can link up and make policy alliances to advance new norms, prescripts, rules and concepts.
To exemplify these theoretical arguments, the article uses the advancement of the norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as an example.