Adaptation-exaptation in international politics: UNRWA as the substitutive-compensatory pivot of the Palestinian condition

This article advances a substitutive-compensatory analytic for theorising how international organisations (IOs) evolve where sovereignty is absent or contested. We conceptualise this as adaptation-exaptation complexes through which relief is repurposed into administrative, political and paradiplomatic capacity. The case is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), a UN body for a single refugee population that has operated continuously since 1950 and is staffed largely by refugees. UN and international human-rights reports document occupation-related constraints and systematic efforts to silence, undermine or close it. Contra pooled or hybrid sovereignty, hybrid governance, mandate-expansion and constructivist accounts, UNRWA’s trajectory unfolded through contingent, crisis-driven and non-design repurposing. Drawing on 53 interviews and 1,659 UN and related documents (2001–2025), we show how repeated adaptation and exaptation embedded UNRWA as an institutional pivot of the Palestinian condition.