The demands and criticism with which a growing number of actors address international structures and organizations has acquired significant scientific attention. However, the strong Western bias of research on the (de-)legitimation of international institutions has led to the negligence of important “agents of contestation”: authoritarian regimes. While emerging powers like China serve as a prominent example of an autocracy questioning current global governance arrangements, there is far more variation in the forms and types of criticism and (de-)legitimation of international institutions by authoritarian states.
Above all, autocracies constitute a significant share of the membership of various international organizations, rendering insights into their specific perceptions of institutional (il-)legitimacy particularly relevant. The paper proposed here seeks to generate a theoretical framework for the analysis of authoritarian regimes as agents of contestation of global governance. It inquires the particularities and conditions of autocracies’ criticism of global governance structures and their functioning, and examines whether and why patterns of contestation may vary among different types of autocracies. Furthermore, the paper seeks to link these insights to the analysis of autocracies’ commitment to and compliance with international institutions.
