The Institution That Outlives Its Purpose

The Internet Governance Forum convened again in 2025. Delegates attended. Reports were produced. Recommendations were published. None of them are binding. None of them set agendas. The governments that once participated in shaping internet policy now legislate it unilaterally — through security regimes, trade instruments, and sovereignty assertions that bypass multistakeholder consensus entirely.

The IGF still exists. It simply no longer does what it was built to do.

In January 2026, the United States announced withdrawal from sixty-six international organizations — the WHO, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Climate Agreement, and dozens of others. The post-1945 multilateral architecture, eighty years in construction, faced not erosion but demolition. Not neglect, but policy.

These look like opposite events. One institution persists while emptying of function. Others are dismantled while their functions remain unperformed. But both arrive at the same destination: form without function. And knowing which failure mode you are witnessing — or inhabiting — changes everything about what you can do next.

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Two Modes of Institutional Death

The first mode is hollowing. The institution continues to operate — convening, reporting, credentialing — but authority has migrated elsewhere. The work happens in other rooms. The decisions are made by other actors. The institution becomes what political scientists call legitimation theater: its persistence signals that governance is occurring, even as governance has moved to venues the institution cannot reach.

The Internet Governance Forum is a textbook case. It received institutional permanence through WSIS+20 — a formal upgrade that, as one analyst observed, "has not translated into authority." Governments now route internet policy through security legislation and trade agreements, prioritizing speed and enforceability over the consensus-seeking that multistakeholder models require. The IGF convenes diverse actors, produces dialogue, and influences nothing. The form persists. The animating force has departed.

The second mode is dismantling. The institution is not hollowed — it is actively defunded, withdrawn from, or stripped of mandate. The function it performed may still be needed, but the political will to maintain it has evaporated. Withdrawal from sixty-six organizations in a single executive action is not institutional decay. It is institutional demolition — driven by what the Munich Security Report called Zerstörungslust, a lust for destruction rooted in the conviction that gradual reform cannot deliver meaningful change.

The distinction matters because the causal mechanisms are opposite. Hollowing happens from below: authority drains out slowly, migrating to wherever decisions actually get made, while the institution continues its rituals. Dismantling happens from above: political actors decide the institution no longer serves their purposes and cut the connections deliberately. In one case, nobody kills the institution — it just stops mattering. In the other, someone decides it should stop existing.

Same destination. Opposite directions of arrival.

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The Historical Pattern

The late Roman Senate met for centuries after real power had migrated to the emperor, the military, and the provincial governors. Senators debated, voted, issued decrees. The Senate’s continued existence was useful — it provided a veneer of republican legitimacy for imperial rule, a place where the forms of deliberation could be performed without the substance of authority. Nobody abolished the Senate. Nobody needed to. It hollowed so gradually that its irrelevance became invisible to the people inside it.

The League of Nations died in both modes. It hollowed first — major powers ignored its resolutions, walked out of sessions, pursued bilateral arrangements that bypassed its machinery. Then it was formally dismantled, not by an enemy but by its own architects, who created the United Nations as a replacement that would, they believed, avoid the structural flaws of its predecessor. The hollowing preceded the dismantling. The form had been empty for years before anyone acknowledged it.

The French parlements before the Revolution offer a subtler case. These judicial bodies had accumulated enormous procedural authority — the right to register royal edicts, to remonstrate, to delay. They used these powers to block reforms that would have reduced aristocratic privilege. The parlements were functioning institutions. They simply no longer functioned in the public interest. The form was intact. The alignment between form and purpose had inverted. The Revolution didn’t hollow them. It dismantled them — because the hollowing of purpose had already occurred while the machinery ran perfectly.

In each case, the lag between functional death and formal death created a window of confusion. The institution’s continued existence was read as evidence that its function was being performed. The senators were still debating. The League was still convening. The parlements were still registering edicts. The form became a substitute for the function, and the substitution was invisible precisely because the form looked so much like the real thing.

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The Diagnostic Difference

Here is where the distinction earns its weight: misdiagnosis produces exactly the wrong response.

Defend a hollowed institution and you become part of the theater. You invest energy maintaining a form that has decoupled from its function, and your defense becomes evidence that the institution still matters — which makes the hollowing harder to see. Every delegate who attends the IGF, every report it publishes, every stakeholder who participates in good faith, adds a layer of legitimacy to a structure that has lost the authority to act on their input. The defense sustains the form. The form obscures the absence of function.

Dismantle a functioning institution — even a damaged one — and you destroy capacity that took generations to build. The post-1945 multilateral architecture is imperfect, slow, and increasingly unable to address problems at the speed they propagate. It is also the only existing framework for coordinated response to pandemics, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. Dismantling it before alternatives exist doesn’t create space for something better. It creates a vacuum. And vacuums don’t stay empty — they fill with whatever force is nearest, which is usually the transactional bilateralism that the architecture was designed to prevent.

The prescriptions are opposite:

For hollowed institutions, the honest move is to name the hollowing — to acknowledge that the form has decoupled from the function and ask whether the function can be rebuilt inside the existing form or needs a new one entirely. This is painful because it requires the people inside the institution to admit that their work may be performative. But the alternative is indefinite legitimation theater, which consumes resources, talent, and attention that could be directed toward functional governance.

For institutions facing dismantling, the urgent move is to identify which functions must survive and build coalitions to sustain them — through reformed structures, variable-geometry partnerships, or new institutional forms — before the old ones are torn down. Defense of the existing structure is insufficient. As the Toda Peace Institute’s analysis concluded, invested parties must become "bolder builders," not just defenders.

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Ritual Without Resonance

Coherenceism holds that living traditions are those where forms adapt while patterns persist — where the relationship between form and function remains alive, responsive, capable of adjustment. A singing bowl resonates because someone strikes it and the bowl’s structure converts the impact into sustained vibration. The relationship between the strike and the resonance is the tradition. The bowl alone is an object.

When a form stops adapting, it becomes ritual without resonance. The IGF is a singing bowl that nobody strikes. The motions continue — the convening, the reports, the stakeholder participation — but the resonance has stopped. Authority no longer vibrates through the structure. It has migrated to venues where decisions produce consequences, where the strike and the vibration are still connected.

The sixty-six organizations facing defunding represent the opposite failure. Someone has decided the bowl itself is the problem — that the form must be destroyed. But shattering a bowl doesn’t eliminate the need for resonance. It just leaves you without the structure to produce it.

Both failures are failures of the same relationship. In hollowing, the relationship between form and function dies quietly, and the form persists as a memorial to a function it no longer performs. In dismantling, the relationship is declared dead by fiat, and the function is left without a form to inhabit. One error is sentimental — preserving the form out of attachment to what it once did. The other is destructive — eliminating the form out of frustration with what it no longer does.

Neither error asks the question that matters: What function must persist, and what form can carry it?

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Every institution you inhabit is somewhere on this spectrum. The committee that still convenes but no longer decides. The review process that still operates but no longer improves. The organization whose purpose has quietly migrated to informal channels and workarounds while the official structure keeps meeting.

Across G7 nations, only minimal populations now believe their government’s policies will make future generations better off. That is the soil in which both modes accelerate. When reform feels impossible, hollowed institutions lose their last defenders — and functioning ones face demolition by people who have concluded that destruction is more honest than pretending.

The window between functional death and formal death is where both the confusion and the opportunity live. Every historical instance of this pattern closed that window the same way: not by choosing wrong, but by failing to diagnose which mode they were in until the choice was no longer available.

The form endures. The function migrates. And the hardest question is whether you are preserving something alive or maintaining something dead — because from the inside, they look exactly the same.

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