The termination of membership in an international organization (IOs) is commonly assumed as the ultimate act of contestation and fundamental challenge to its authority. While we agree that exit poses a challenge to IOs’ authority, we argue that this shock can potentially also facilitate authority transfers to IOs. We theorize that exit, on average, has a positive effect on IO authority transfers because of learning, homogenization, cohesion effects (Hypothesis 1). Only in cases where members states that are very important for the IO due to their material or immaterial contributions exit an IO, we expect a constraining effect on future IO authority transfers (Hypothesis 2). We assess our theoretical expectations by employing a multi-method approach. A survival analysis on the impact of different states’ exit on IOs’ authority between 1945 and 2019 corroborates our expectation that member states’ withdrawal is positively associated with IO authority transfer (H1). Remarkably, and against our expectation that exit by important states constrains IO authority transfers (H2), we also find a positive effect for the exit of founding states and no effect for powerful states. We then demonstrate the theorized mechanisms in the cases of Brexit and the ICC. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom about the relationship between contestation and IO authority and yields optimistic implications for the resilience of IOs vis-à-vis membership terminations.