Structural Power and Political Authority: A Neglected Nexus in the Study of Global Order

With the dominant understanding of “the international” shifting from an anarchic system to the idea of a multi-level political order, authority has become a key concept in International Relations (IR). Authority – the capacity to make binding decisions accepted by the addressees – is the crucial analytical tool to investigate how state and non-state actors interact in the (hierarchical) processes of rule-based coordination that constitute global order. Although the literature regards the notion of authority as strongly related to the concepts of power and legitimacy (i.e. the recognition by those who are asked to obey), the specific nexus between structural power and political authority has hardly been discussed in the current debate. Addressing this deficit, we employ a discourse-theoretical perspective to explore on a conceptual level the relationship between structural power and political authority in the formation of global order. From this perspective, structural power is exerted through discursive structures that discipline and direct social interaction and that are therefore constitutive for social order. Authority, in contrast, is conceptualized as social relationship between a norm-setting or decision-making body and its audience that rests on legitimacy performatively generated in social interaction. This reading of the concepts allows us to show that the structuring power of discourses and the instances of political authority are in fact intimately linked. Since recognition by the audience is in large parts an affair of unquestioned acceptance, structural power is key to understand how the legitimacy of political authority is established and maintained. By stabilizing hierarchies and suppressing critique, discursive structures exert the very power that creates unquestioned acceptance. This new perspective on the relationship of several key concepts in the current debate on political order beyond the nation state finally allows us to highlight points of departure for adjusting empirical research on authority.