Since the end of the Cold War, crises from the Balkans to Central Asia and Africa have forced international organizations to adapt, expand, and cooperate to end civil wars, manage humanitarian challenges, and contain terrorist threats. The Power of Dependence explores the dynamics of collaboration between two of these organizations: NATO and the United Nations. Comparing NATO and the UN's engagement in three major post-Cold War conflicts-Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan-the book finds that the level of the organizations' resource dependence chiefly determines the level of interorganizational cooperation.

The Power of Dependence puts forward an innovative resource-dependence approach (RDA) to explain the stark variation in cooperation among international organizations (IOs), combining insights from international relations theory and organizational science into a comprehensive theoretical framework.