The Quest for Legitimacy in World Politics – International Organisations’ Self-Legitimations

In the face of rising contestation and resistance international organizations take increasing interest in their legitimacy. They respond to potential crises of legitimacy by adopting a diverse range of measures such as communication policies, transparency regimes, accountability measures, procedures to include civil society organizations and efforts to improve their performance. The concept of self-legitimation comprises a diverse range of efforts made by international organizations to establish and maintain a reliable basis of diffuse support. Self-legitimations address different audiences with diverse interests and normative reference points. Addressees of self-legitimations may be international organization’s staff, member state governments and its citizens and even external audiences of non-member states. What is more, 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 or on the level of practices examining more substantive forms of behavioral adaptation and change. A deepened knowledge of 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. The aim of the workshop is to contribute to empirical legitimacy research in the field of International Relations by gaining deeper insights into the empirics of self-legitimations of particular international organizations, by inquiring into the similarities and differences of self-legitimations in different international organizations and by assessing the effects of self-legitimations.