Contestation is defined as an observable practice of challenging the validity and the meaning-in-use of constitutional norms, principles or procedures that appears either implicitly and explicitly. The implicit practice of contestation includes neglect, negation or disregard. The explicit practice of contestation consists of objection, dissidence, questioning and critical deliberation. While the concept has a central role as a routine practice in jurisprudence as the process which considers notions in favour and against a judicial argument that leads to a decision in a case (Lessig 1996), its meaning-in-use in political science is of a different quality and purpose as a practice that establishes legitimacy following the normative practice of negotiation (Tully 2000). The concept’s use in International Relations theory (IR) has only been established recently with reference to norms research that considered contested compliance with norms as a condition for legitimacy (Wiener 2004). Drawing on the emergence and use of the concept of contestation in IR, the paper notes that contestation is a sine qua non for legitimacy in global governance, and argues, that in order to establish the contestedness as an organising principle in the global realm, a question about the constituent power/s that is addressed and enabled by the norm, needs to be raised. The paper concludes that in order to make full use of the concept of contestation as a legitimacy enhancing practice in the global realm, IR will benefit from the theory of global constitutionalism.
