International Organizations Ian Hurd Pdf

[Lauren Redder]

Whetherinternational institutions are seen as legitimate or not is important to whether they are able to exercise authority. An institution that is seen as legitimate finds it easier to gain acquiescence with its rules and decisions and so relies less on outright coercion. From the point of view of the organization therefore legitimacy is a useful property worth cultivating, defending, and deploying. Most studies of legitimacy in International Relations take the perspective of the ruling institution. In this article turn the tables and consider global legitimacy with an eye on political controversy and opposition: how do legitimacy studies look if we begin by assuming a gap between what the people want and what rulers want?

International organizations (IOs) are ubiquitous in international politics, in roles ranging from setting rules for governments and defining rights for individuals, to acting as settings for inter-state negotiations, to supplying some of the discursive concepts and resources taken up by governments and activists in domestic and international society. From landmines to bankruptcy law and beyond, there is compelling evidence of the practical influence of international institutions over the conditions of life for many people (on power politics see Lipscy 2017; on markets see Block-Lieb and Halliday 2017; more widely see Halliday and Shaffer 2015). International organizations sometimes exercise political authority over their subjects and as such they deserve the same kind of attention as is given to other governing institutions in society. Questions that one might ask about a government - is it transparent? it is accountable? to what ends does it deploy its authority? what follows from its governance and for whom? - are now increasingly also asked about IOs.

The collection opens fresh lines of inquiry in the field of international law and politics by bringing novel tools and questions to bear on global institutionalization. I take advantage of one of these openings to engage with the broad theme of the place of legitimacy in the politics of social order: I am interested in the political content that is revealed in debates about legitimacy, global governance, and international order. This is facilitated by the work of the contributors as they spell out models of how legitimacy works, how it is contested, and how it can be measured and studied with tools of social science.

My focus in this essay is on how contestation and opposition are modeled in relation to legitimacy and legitimation. The behavioralist study of legitimacy in global governance often infers the level of legitimation in an institution by assessing the degree of visible contestation around it: high legitimacy is predicted to produce low contestation; high compliance may be evidence of high legitimacy; heavy contestation is seen as a sign that the organization is lacking in legitimacy and may therefore find it harder to accomplish its goals. This complex of ideas uses the absence of protest as a proxy for the unobservable quality of legitimacy. It aims to be value-neutral by noting that subjects may seen an institution as legitimate in a sociological sense even if an outside observer finds it morally indefensible (Tallberg and Zrn 2019, 12). This builds a fence around the political content of legitimacy as a concept and makes it possible for outsiders to treat it as an objective fact (either subjects believe in its legitimacy or they do not) that has certain effects in society, amenable to analysis regarding its causes and effects and independent of any normative judgment about its worth or goodness.

Tallberg and Zrn (2019) neatly summarize this logic as they set out the premise of the research program. They join a long tradition of sociological research on legitimacy and legitimation in both domestic social theory and in international relations, from Weber on to today. The legitimacy model that they set out explains an outcome (i.e. acquiescence or support for an institution) with a causal variable (legitimacy) that generates the outcome but is itself unobservable. The causal relationship is widely assumed to be true and many scholars find it useful in making sense of empirical patterns as well as anomalies but the unobservable nature of the core concept is a central topic of discussion among legitimacy scholars from Max Weber through to now.

The turn away from addressing the substantive effects of IOs is evident when Schmidtke suggests that the contestation around global governance - by which he means growing criticism of international organizations in public media - has undermined the legitimacy of international organizations (2019, 2). He goes on to identify the forces that affect discourses of legitimacy around international organizations and focuses on measurable features of the organization itself such as its bureaucratic structure and procedures and its performance against its professed goals, its degree of formal authority, and on cultural features of the society in general. Substantive disagreements over political choices and the distribution of gains are pushed out of the conversation in favor of attention to how people can be socialized to the rightfulness of the authority of the institutions. The discussion does not touch on the substantive political choices or tradoffs that come with global governance, or their effects on the lives, interests, and distributions of those affected by them.

In sum, if legitimation is a social force that induces compliance when interests do not, then the legitimacy paradigm in global governance hides a substantive politics by which global governance institutions are at odds with their subjects. Moments of resistance to international organizations - for instance, protests against UN peacekeepers in Haiti, legal claims against the World Bank in India, and anti-NATO protests in Chicago (Pillinger et al. 2016; EarthrightsInst

Proponents of global governance maintain an enchanted view of actually existing IOs that sees them as inherently desirable in the pursuit of good governance on a global scale (Hurd 2016). It leads to the view that compliance with international rules amounts to good global citizenship, and resistance or opposition is regressive, anti-global, and anti-social. IR liberals and constructivists are particularly in danger of falling for this myth since they often find themselves defending international institutions as both a political and disciplinary imperative in the face of realist skepticism that institutions have meaningful political power.

Global governance studies can resist the temptation to celebrate its subject and should instead remain attentive to the specific political content of the rules and to the relations of power into which it is an intervention. This means that content-independent research design is unlikely to give insight into the politics of global institutions. A better path is to see global governance as governance, with winners and losers who are mobilized use the system to advance their goals, and who support or opposition to various rules, institutions, and rulers cannot be understood in isolation from how those forces affect their lives.

Governance is a relation of power. It should be seen within the context of social contestation over who wins and who loses. It is neither apolitical nor neutral among outcomes nor an inherently progressive contribution to social order. Global governance, just like governance in any context, entails a world of nuance, trade-offs, distributional fights, and tragic choices. Legitimation is about getting people to believe that a given arrangement of these tradeoffs is appropriate. It entails the application of power in defense of the status quo. When it works, it causes opposition to disappear. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on how one feels about what is being disappeared.

Simon Chesterman, editor of the Asian Journal of International Law, calls International Organizations "one of the most accessible and insightful textbooks on this important topic. Offering a world tour of the UN, the WTO, and other key institutions, it dives deeply into the daily practice of those institutions with thoughtful and thought-provoking examinations of the interplay of law and politics."

In this brief Q & A, Hurd discusses the new edition of the book, its relevance to the current global situation, and how it informs a new research project he is spearheading on the COVID pandemic and global governance.

The new edition is updated to address some of the most pressing events in world politics in recent years. It looks directly at how international institutions have responded to pollution, global warming, and environmental collapse, and it includes new case studies involving Brexit and other current events where the law and politics of international organizations are at center-stage.

It also has a new focus on global migration. With so many people around the world on the move, we need to understand the institutions and rules that govern how they move, where they can stay, and who decides their fate. The new chapter looks at the International Organization for Migration, the Convention on Refugees, and the High Commissioner for Refugees. The effort of governments to prevent migration into their countries shows the hard edge of international organizations: the universal language of rights and freedom gives way as these institutions are deployed by governments prevent people from moving from one country to another. To understand how this happens we need to look closely at the rules and structure of these crucial international organizations.

The main theme of the book is that international organizations are tools that people use to try to accomplish their goals. For instance, governments use the World Trade Organization to shape trade rules in favor of their interests and they use the International Court of Justice to constrain the policy choices of other governments.

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