The Global Legitimacy Game

There is a heated debate underway on the legitimacy of global activists, a war of words (and sometimes stones and teargas) that is rarely examined from top to bottom. This latest book by Canadian commentator Van Rooy scrutinizes the new legitimacy rules, arguing that they have real impact on how our world is governed. In dissecting representation, rights, experience, expertise, moral authority and other evolving rules of legitimation, Van Rooy points to her own proposals for global supplementary democracy.

There is a heated debate underway on the legitimacy of global activists, a war of words (and sometimes stones and teargas) that is rarely examined from top to bottom. This latest book by Canadian commentator Van Rooy scrutinizes the new legitimacy rules, arguing that they have real impact on how our world is governed. In dissecting representation, rights, experience, expertise, moral authority and other evolving rules of legitimation, Van Rooy points to her own proposals for global supplementary democracy.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Global Legitimacy Crises addresses the consequences of legitimacy in global governance, in particular asking: when and how do legitimacy crises affect international organizations and their capacity to rule. The book starts with a new conceptualization of legitimacy crisis that looks at public challenges from a variety of actors. Based on this conceptualization, it applies a mixed-methods approach to identify and examine legitimacy crises, starting with a quantitative analysis of mass media data on challenges of a sample of 32 IOs. It shows that some, but not all organizations have experienced legitimacy crises, spread over several decades from 1985 to 2020. Following this, the book presents a qualitative study to further examine legitimacy crises of two selected case studies: the WTO and the UNFCCC. Whereas earlier research assumed that legitimacy crises have negative consequences, the book introduces a theoretical framework that privileges the activation inherent in a legitimacy crisis. It holds that this activation may not only harm an IO, but could also strengthen it, in terms of its material, institutional, and decision-making capacity. The following statistical analysis shows that whether a crisis has predominantly negative or positive effects depends on a variety of factors. These include the specific audience whose challenges define a certain crisis, and several institutional properties of the targeted organization. The ensuing in-depth analysis of the WTO and the UNFCCC further reveals how legitimacy crises and both positive and negative consequences are interlinked, and that effects of crises are sometimes even visible beyond the organizational borders.

In spite of the lack of plausible alternatives to liberal democracy, the age of globalization has ushered in serious challenges to the democratic legitimacy of the nation state. The contributors in this collection explore the frontiers of normative and empirical legitimacy research, drawing upon a range of key conceptual and methodological issues.

The conventional view of international society is that it is interested only in co-existence and order amongst states. This creates a puzzle. When the historical record is examined, we discover that international society has repeatedly signed up to normative principles that go well beyond this purpose. When it has done so, it has built new normative constraints into international legitimacy, and this is most conspicuously so when it has espoused broadly humanitarian principles. This suggests that the norms adopted by international society might be encouraged from the distinct constituency of world society. The book traces a series of historical case studies which issued in international affirmation of such principles: slave-trade abolition in 1815; the public conscience in 1899; social justice (but not racial equality) in 1919; human rights in 1945; and democracy as the only acceptable form of state in 1990. In each case, evidence is presented of world-society actors (transnational movements, advocacy networks, and INGOs) making the political running in support of a new principle, often in alliance with a leading state. At the same time, world society has mounted a normative case, and this can be seen as a degree of normative integration between international and world society. Each of the cases tells a fascinating story in its own right. Collectively, they contribute to the growing IR literature on the role of norms, and especially that written from a broadly English School or constructivist perspective. The book thereby puts some real historical flesh on the concept of world society, while forcing us to reconsider traditional views about the 'essential' nature of international society.

Palgrave Advances in Global Governance is an authoritative collection devoted to clarifying established understandings of global governance as a distinct form of political activity. Ranging across the actors, arenas, means and purposes of global governance, this incisive collection brings order and clarity to a burgeoning literature.

An innovative view of the changing geopolitical landscape that draws on the science of complex adaptive systems to understand changes in global interaction. Liberal internationalism has been the West's foreign policy agenda since the Cold War, and the West has long occupied the top rung of a hierarchical system. In this book, Hilton Root argues that international relations, like other complex ecosystems, exists in a constantly shifting landscape, in which hierarchical structures are giving way to systems of networked interdependence, changing every facet of global interaction. Accordingly, policymakers will need a new way to understand the process of change. Root suggests that the science of complex systems offers an analytical framework to explain the unforeseen development failures, governance trends, and alliance shifts in today's global political economy. Root examines both the networked systems that make up modern states and the larger, interdependent landscapes they share. Using systems analysis—in which institutional change and economic development are understood as self-organizing complexities—he offers an alternative view of institutional resilience and persistence. From this perspective, Root considers the divergence of East and West; the emergence of the European state, its contrast with the rise of China, and the network properties of their respective innovation systems; the trajectory of democracy in developing regions; and the systemic impact of China on the liberal world order. Complexity science, Root argues, will not explain historical change processes with algorithmic precision, but it may offer explanations that match the messy richness of those processes.