The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League
Chapter 6 The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC),1 with 57 member states and representing approximately 1.5 billion Muslims, is the second largest intergov- ernmental organization in the world after the UN.2 The OIC was accepted as an ‘observer member’ in the UN General Assembly and of its subsidiary organs in 1975 and it is the only UN group whose unifying denominator is religion. The League of Arab States (Arab League; LAS) is a much smaller grouping in comparison. It consists of 22 member countries and represents an estimated 356 million inhabitants of diverse confessions.3 The Arab League is one of the oldest regional groupings in the UN setting, having been present at the 1945 San Francisco Conference. The LAS Secretary General was invited to attend sessions of the General Assembly as an observer in 1950.4 This chapter will outline the group composition, function, internal dynam- ics and key issues for these two different organizations within the framework of the UN. It will use the analytical framework developed by Laatikainen (chapter 2) on the role of political and informal groups in multilateral settings to derive further insights. The chapter is structured in the following manner. The first section will provide insights into group composition and functioning. 1 OIC member states: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Benin, Brunei-Darussalam, Burkina-Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Maldives, Mali, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Suriname, Syria (suspended since 2012), Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Togo, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
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