•  13
    New perspectives on the legitimacy of international institutions and power
    with Gordon Arlen and Martin Vestergren
    Journal of Social Philosophy 54 (4): 445-449. 2023.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  5
    International institutions are facing increasing criticism of the legitimacy of their authority. But what does it mean for an international institution to be legitimate? Arthur Applbaum’s latest book provides a convincing new concept of legitimacy, namely, the power-liability view, and a new normative conception, the free group agent account. However, it is not clear how they can be applied to the international level. First, this paper examines how different concepts of legitimacy can be applied…Read more
  •  6
    Courts are often criticised as undemocratic. The backlash against international courts in the last decade is also partly driven by this concern. Human rights courts’ legitimacy is particularly challenged because they aim to protect human rights against the very states that need to comply with and implement the courts’ judgements. Therefore, several international courts have developed mechanisms of deference to states. One especially interesting tool is the European Court of Human Rights’ margin …Read more
  •  240
    The tension between the authority of states and the authority of international institutions is a persistent feature of international relations. Legitimacy assessments of international institutions play a crucial role in resolving such tensions. If an international institution exercises legitimate authority, it creates binding obligations for states. According to Raz’s well-known service conception, legitimate authority depends on the reasons for actions of those who are subject to it. Yet what a…Read more
  •  295
    In the last seven years, close to twenty thousand people have died trying to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Rescue missions by private actors and NGOs have increased because both national measures and measures by the EU’s border control agency, Frontex, are often deemed insufficient. However, such independent rescue missions face increasing persecution from national governments, Italy being one example. This raises the question of how potential migrants and dissenting citizens s…Read more
  •  249
    The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) has a new mechanism to receive individual complaints and issue views, which makes the question of how the Committee should interpret the broad articles of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights more pressing than ever. Most commentators on the legitimacy of the CESCR’s interpretation have argued that interpreters should make better use of Articles 31–33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT)…Read more
  •  16
    This volume addresses the normative legitimacy of the international order, asking how we can make sense of legitimacy claims of increasingly diverse global governance institutions and practices and how their legitimacy relates to and differs from state legitimacy. State legitimacy is a central concern of modern political thought but is inadequate when applied to institutions that differ from the state in type, level of governance, scope, and much else. We need a new, tailored approach to the leg…Read more
  •  345
    Legitimacy beyond the state: institutional purposes and contextual constraints
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23 (3): 281-291. 2020.
    The essays collected in this special issue explore what legitimacy means for actors and institutions that do not function like traditional states but nevertheless wield significant power in the global realm. They are connected by the idea that the specific purposes of non-state actors and the contexts in which they operate shape what it means for them to be legitimate and so shape the standards of justification that they have to meet. In this introduction, we develop this guiding methodology fur…Read more
  •  1198
    The UN Security Council, normative legitimacy and the challenge of specificity
    with Alain Zysset
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 371-391. 2020.
    This paper discusses how the general and abstract concept of legitimacy applies to international institutions, using the United Nations Security Council as an example. We argue that the evaluation of the Security Council’s legitimacy requires considering three significant and interrelated aspects: its purpose, competences, and procedural standards. We consider two possible interpretations of the Security Council’s purpose: on the one hand, maintaining peace and security, and, on the other, ensur…Read more
  •  585
    The democratic criteria for representation in the European Union are complex since its representation involves several delegation mechanisms and institutions. This paper develops institutional design principles for the representation of peoples and individuals and suggests reform options of the European Union on the basis of the theory of multilateral democracy. In particular, it addresses how the equality of individuals can be realised in EU representation while guaranteeing the mutual recognit…Read more
  •  68
    Despite being fundamental to democracy, the normative concept of the people, i.e. the demos, is highly unclear. This article clarifies the legitimacy of the demos’ boundaries by structuring the debate into three strains of justification: first, normative membership principles; second, its democratic functionality and the necessity of cohesion for this essential function; and third, a procedural understanding of the demos. It will be shown that normative principles can only justify its expansion …Read more
  •  460
    Union Citizenship Revisited: Multilateral Democracy as Normative Standard for European Citizenship.
    with Rebecca Welge
    Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41 (8). 2014.
    Union Citizenship as currently implemented in the European Union introduces a distinct concept of citizenship that necessitates an adequate normative approach. The objective of this paper is to assess EU Citizenship against the theoretical background of multilateral democracy. This approach is specifically suited for this task, as it does not rely on a nation-state paradigm or the presumption of a further transformation into a federation or union. We propose three criteria by which to assess mul…Read more