Future-Talk as a Practice of Legitimation?

Future-oriented statements permeate the language of global activism. This is evinced in demands for reforms, banners engendering hope in the possibility of different ways of living and being and manifestoes articulating the normative bases and institutional building blocks of a yet-to-come global order. At the same time, also international organizations (IOs) frequently outline promises of reforms as well as their own vision of such a future global order as prominent ways of legitimating themselves. How international organizations, however, speak about the future, or about their own place within it, has so far received little scholarly attention. In particular, within existing research on legitimacy and (self-)legitimation, future-oriented statements and promises are often glossed over, or are even excluded from the analysis on methodological grounds. Drawing on a comparison of a number of organizations belonging to the “UN family”, the paper contributes to this literature by demonstrating how “future-talk” can be conceived and studied as a discursive practice of legitimation both conceptually and methodologically. More specifically, we argue that what IOs promise to do, become and the future they envisage provides a particularly fruitful lens to study the norms they, their constituencies and audiences, uphold in the present. To do so, the paper presents the findings of a comprehensive content analysis of annual reports published between 1985 and 2017.