The demands and criticism with which a growing number of actors address governance beyond the nation-state 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. Moreover, it applies its theoretical propositions to a preliminary empirical examination.
The paper focuses on the following questions: In which context can we expect autocracies to criticize the structures and functioning of global governance? What kind of criticism may be particular to authoritarian regimes – as opposed to democracies – and around which international institutions are they most likely to emerge? Apart from insights into the specifics of “authoritarian” forms of challenging global governance, the paper seeks to understand whether contestation, its motives and its specific forms of expression vary among different types of autocracies. If so, how can such variation be explained? Furthermore, the paper seeks to contribute to the nascent literature on authoritarian regimes’ commitments to and compliance with international institutions. It does so by analyzing the terms and conditions under which autocracies’ critique of global governance institutions acquires credibility – and may thus provoke behavioral consequences in terms of commitment to said institutions.
