Legitimation by Differentiation: Institutional Overlap between the League of Arab States and the African Union

With the proliferation of international organizations (IOs), the question of legitimacy has become a key for IOs to stay a relevant forum. There is an increasing attention to institutional overlap and regime complexity in the literature of IR, however, we do not know yet how IOs behave to claim legitimacy under conditions of overlap. This paper studies the relation between institutional overlap and legitimation strategies employed by regional organizations. I focus on the institutional overlap between the League of Arab States (LAS) and the African Union (AU), two regional organizations that are hardly studied in relation to each other despite the substantial overlap between them. The aim of the paper is to unpack institutional overlap as an independent variable that could explain the variations of legitimation strategies adopted by an individual IO to remain relevant in a complex context. The main question that the paper addresses is: Under conditions of overlap, how the League of the Arab States and African Union behave to claim legitimacy and remain a relevant actor for the targeted audience? I conceptualize the relationship between IOs and their environment by drawing an analogy in which overlapping IOs are compared to competing for business suppliers that provide similar products/services. I borrowed the concept of competitive advantage from the business literature to argue that an IO reacts to overlap by employing legitimation practices that make use of its competitive advantage, i.e. the advantage that one IO has relative to the overlapping IOs. I call this concept legitimation by differentiation (LegD). The aim of this paper is to develop conceptually this concept while using an in-depth case study. It also aims at contributing to the literature on institutional overlap and empirical research on legitimation, while focusing on a case study from the global south.