Deliberative and Discursive Practices in International Organizations

Abstract

In recent years, scholarship on international organizations (IOs) has increasingly turned towards discourses and speech production, either produced within IOs or produced by IOs and their international bureaucracies. From debates in the United Nations General Assembly (UNSC) or the UN Security Council (UNSC) to deliberations between diplomats in other IOs, discursive and deliberative practices are often looked at with IOs as the arenas for discourse of mainly state actors. Institutional design may shape those deliberations as much as external events such as conflicts or geopolitical shifts. At the same time, IOs themselves, through their bureaucracies and through collective decision making, also produce genuine IO discourses. These are used to legitimize IO actions or, in times of significant contestation, their existence as such. IOs as organizations thus produce speeches, press releases or other textual output directed at various audiences of IOs. The contributions in this panel reflect these dimensions and look at discursive practices in a variety of IOs, from the UNSC to the UNFCCC, from the Council of Europe to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Methodologically, the papers in this panel represent text-as-data approaches, critical discourse analysis, expert interviews, and surveys, both in single case or comparative designs. This variety of cases, empirical materials, and approaches underlines that studying deliberative and discursive practices in IOs can profit from a diverse mix of data and methods.

Title	Details
International Bureaucrats in Global Policy Debates: Actor Prominence and Topic Salience in the UN Security Council Debates on Afghanistan (1996-2017)	View Paper Details
'Acting Under Chapter 7': Rhetorical Entrapment and Authorization of Force in the United Nations Security Council, 1995-2017	View Paper Details
On or Off the Table? Explaining the Politics of Agenda-Setting in International Security	View Paper Details
Discursive Self-Legitimation of Emerging Power-Led Global Governance Institutions: the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)	View Paper Details