The quest for legitimacy in world politics international organizations selflegitimations Outline of the topic International organizations (IOs) take increasing interest in their legitimacy. They employ a broad variety of self-legitimations in order to convince different social constituenc[ies] of legitimation (Reus-Smit 2007: 164) of the rightfulness of their authority. In contrast to more normative oriented legitimacy research which deals with the rightfulness or acceptability against the backdrop of external normative standards, this workshop s objective is to contribute to empirical legitimacy research in the field of International Relations by focusing on selflegitimations of international organizations. The need for a broader understanding of international organizations self-legitimations has arisen in the context of recent developments in International Relations. First, a general interest in the topic of legitimacy and international organizations was fuelled by the acknowledgement that international organizations exercise different types of authority (Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Steffek 2003; Zürn et al. 2012). The rise of authority beyond the state put the issue of legitimacy high on the agenda. Second, various empirical studies document that international organizations increasingly face contestation and resistance (della Porta 2007; Ecker-Ehrhardt 2011; O Brien et al. 2000). In the face of growing politicization, international organizations responses and their attempts at resolving crises of legitimacy take centre stage. Thus, a deepened knowledge of international organizations self-legitimations can help us to comprehend the complex processes of legitimation and delegitimation in the international sphere and is crucial for understanding why some international organizations are more legitimate than others. Generally, the concept of self-legitimation (Barker 2001) comprises a diverse range of efforts made by international organizations to establish and maintain a reliable basis of diffuse support, i.e. a form of political support that is enduring and not solely reliant on the generation of particular outputs (Easton 1975: 444). As such, self-legitimations can be distinguished from other types of activities designed to win specific support, for instance, those relying on one-time inducements and payments or those that try to achieve compliance by means of coercion. What is more, in order to build up a reliable basis of political support international organizations have to
address a variety of audiences with different interests and normative reference points(clark 2003: 79; Seabrooke 2007: 254; Zaum 2013: 16-19). Addressees of self-legitimations may be international organization s staff, member state governments and its citizens and even external audiences of non-member states. The proposed concept of self-legitimation is broad enough to take into account these different forms of self-legitimations and the interactions between them. Finally, self-legitimations can be analyzed on the level of (verbal or non-verbal) discourses scrutinizing the meanings of legitimacy and structure of legitimacy claims made by international organizations (Biegoń 2013) or on the level of practices (see Zaum 2013: 223-224) examining more substantive forms of behavioral adaptation and change, such a IOs communication policies, transparency regimes, accountability measures, procedures to include civil society organizations an efforts to improve the performance of IOs. Besides the aim of contributing to conceptual clarifications and to gain deeper insights into the empirics of self-legitimations of particular international organizations, the workshop s objective is to inquire into the similarities and differences of self-legitimations in different international organizations and the effects of self-legitimations. While we still need better insights into the fine details of self-legitimations this workshop will also benefit from comparative research going beyond individual cases. Pertinent questions are for instance: What factors account for similarities and differences of self-legitimations in different IOs? Does the type of authority exercised by IOs play a role or can we rather observe certain trends of self-legitimations across a variety of different IOs? What impact do self-legitimations have? Can self-legitimations moderate processes of politicization? What types of self-legitimations are more successful than others etc.? Relation to existing research The workshops objective is to contribute to research on the empirical legitimacy of international organizations. While most of the exiting researchin this field operationalizes legitimacy as a credential attributed bottom-up to international organizations by social constituencies, we argue that this perspective is too narrow as it misses the genetic aspect of legitimation (Offe 2006: 26). Legitimacy is and can only be the result of an interactive political process (Barker 2007: 20; Hurrelmann, Schneider, and Steffek 2007: 8). These complex processes of legitimation culminating in the (non-)attribution of legitimacy comprise both the bottom-up attribution of
legitimacy by social constituencies and the top-down cultivation of legitimacy by rulers (Bourricaud 1987; Brassett and Tsingou 2011). At the core of this interactive understanding of legitimation lies the observation that individuals do not attribute legitimacy to international organizations in a societal vacuum but are constantly influenced by a broad variety of legitimacy claims (Beetham 1991: 4). These legitimacy claims are the lifeblood of politics of legitimation, and such politics are essential to the cultivation and maintenance of an actor s or institutions legitimacy (Reus-Smit 2007: 159). By proposing to concentrate on self-legitimations we want to facilitate research on top-down processes of legitimation and want to contribute to a deepened understanding of legitimation processes. Likely participants We welcome scholars working in the field of empirical legitimacy research in particular in the field of International Relations and European Integration Studies as well as scholars from the field of organizational studies dealing with processes of legitimation within elite circles of IOs. Type of papers The workshop will profit from three types of papers: we welcome papers addressing methodological issues of studying the practices and discourses of self-legitimations as well as conceptual papers clarifying, for instance, the relation between legitimacy claims and legitimacy beliefs or outlining typologies of self-legitimations etc. What is more, empirical papers providing in-depth studies of self-legitimations or more comparative papers focusing on a range of different IOs - we define international organizations broadly to include regional and global organization, clubs of governance, regimes, and networks governed by formal international agreements constitute a valuable contribution to this workshop. Biographical notes The Workshop is collectively organized by Matthias Ecker-Erhardt, Jennifer Gronau, Henning Schmitke and Dominik Zaum. The workshop director is Dominik Zaum.
Dominik Zaum is Professor of Governance, Conflict, and Security at the University of Reading, and a Senior Research Fellow in Conflict and Fragility at the UK's Department for International Development (DFID). He has written widely on international organisations, in particular the UN, and on questions of legitimacy in international order. Recent relevant publications include The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (OUP 2008), Selective Security: War and the UN Security Council since 1945 (Routledge/IISS 2009), and Legitimating International Organizations (OUP 2013). References Barker, Rodney. 2001. Legitimating Identities: The Self-Presentation of Rulers and Subjects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.. 2007. Democratic Legitimation. What Is It, Who Wants It, and Why? In Legitimacy in an Age of Global Politics, edited by Achim Hurrelmann, Steffen Schneider, and Jens Steffek. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Barnett, Michael, and Martha Finnemore. 2004. Rules for the World. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Beetham, David. 1991. The Legitimation of Power. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Biegoń, Dominika. 2013. Specifying the Arena of Possibilities: Post-Structuralist Narrative Analysis and the European Commission s Legitimation Strategies. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 51 (2): 194 211. Bourricaud, François. 1987. Legitimacy and Legitimization. Current Sociology 35 (2): 51 67. Brassett, James, and Eleni Tsingou. 2011. The Politics of Legitimate Global Governance. Review of International Political Economy 18 (1): 1 16. Clark, Ian. 2003. Legitimacy in a Global Order. Review of International Studies 29 (1): 75 96. Della Porta, Donatella. 2007. The Global Justice Movement: Cross-National and Transnational Perspectives. Easton, David. 1975. A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support. British Journal of Political Science 5 (4): 435 57. Ecker-Ehrhardt, Matthias. 2011. Cosmopolitan Politicization: How Perceptions of Interdependence Foster Citizens Expectations in International Institutions. European Journal of International Relations: 1 28. Hurrelmann, Achim, Steffen Schneider, and Jens Steffek. 2007. Introduction. Legitimacy in an Age of Global Politics. In Legitimacy in an Age of Global Politics, edited by Achim Hurrelmann, Steffen Schneider, and Jens Steffek. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. O Brien, Robert, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc Williams. 2000. Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Offe, Claus. 2006. Political Disaffection as an Outcome of Institutional Practices? Some Post- Tocquevillean Speculations. In Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies: Social Capital, Institutions, and Politics, edited by Mariano Torcal and Jos Ram n Montero. London: Routledge. Reus-Smit, Christian. 2007. International Crises of Legitimacy. International Politics 44 (2-3): 157 74. Seabrooke, Leonard. 2007. Legitimacy Gaps in the World Economy: Explaining the Sources of the IMF s Legitimacy Crisis1. International Politics 44 (2): 250 68. Steffek, Jens. 2003. The Legitimation of International Governance: A Discourse Approach. European Journal of International Relations 9 (2): 249 57. Zaum, Dominik. 2013. Legitimating International Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zürn, Michael, Martin Binder, and Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt. 2012. International Authority and Its Politicization. International Theory 4 (01): 69 106.