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

IOs increasingly “go public” and pursue a pro-active public communication – how does this trend changes the terms under which global public debates on international issues take place? In this paper, my focus is on global political (in)equality in terms of discursive inclusiveness, that is the access of different voices to an emerging global public spheres. According to the main argument of the paper, IOs consist of a plurality of voices that compete for internal as well as external attention. While IO communication is necessarily selective and promotes internal voices to different degrees, important biases to a standard of discursive inclusiveness are induced by three imperatives of IO communication – 'public information', 'governance' and 'self‐legitimation': First, 'public information' leads to a strong focus on IO leaders declaring the official viewpoint of organizational goals, decisions and operations. Second, 'governance' leads to a strategic siding with norm entrepreneurs and the active orchestration of campaigns. In this reading, IO public 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. Third, 'self‐legitimation' drives the symbolic construction of a fair and 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 combined reconstructive and quantitative text analysis of communication practices of the United Nations in the Arms Trade Treaty process.