The OSCE and the Minsk Process for Ukraine How Diplomatic Innovation Transforms International Organisations

The article aims to shed light on how international organisations are transformed through creative diplomatic agency. Mobilising the theoretical tools of pragmatist sociology, and taking the empirical example of the OSCE and its involvement in the management of the crisis in Ukraine between late 2013 and early 2022, the study shows how diplomats, international civil servants, politicians and other actors, related to the Organisation, seize the international issues, define problems, propose and negotiate solutions, and put them in practice within a dynamic process, through which the role and identity of the Organization itself is transformed. Practices understood as deliberative processes of recombining institutional resources in novel ways, underscore the change which is not necessarily strategic, nor can be placed in causal sequences, but is always creative, and unpredictable.