UN Public Communication in the Arms Trade Treaty Process: Transparency, Advocacy or Self-Legitimation?

IOs increasingly “go public” and pursue an explicitly more strategic public communication policy – how does this trend changes the terms under which global public debates on international issues take place? According to the main argument of the paper, IOs consist of a plurality of voices that compete for internal as well as external attention and IO communication is necessarily selective and promotes internal and external voices to different degrees. Important biases to a standard of organizational “transparency” are induced by two strategic imperatives of IO communication – issue advocacy and self-legitimation: First, issue advocacy implies strategic siding with norm entrepreneurs and the active orchestration of campaigns. In this reading, IO communication significantly fosters the “whitewashing” of policies and decisions because it camouflages critical voices that point to hypocritical deficiencies in terms of regulatory loopholes, negative effects or IO inaction. Second, self-legitimation drives the symbolic construction of an inclusive global governance process, which fosters “whitewashing” IO policy-making processes in terms of seemingly democratic credentials of the political game. The argument is illustrated using results from a reconstructive text analysis of communication practices of the United Nation Public Information Department in the Arms Trade Treaty process.