International Political Legitimacy: Normative Theory for Real World Politics

Much work in recent normative political theory has focused on articulating ideals of justice and democracy for political institutions. For the purpose of offering theoretical guidance for action in the real political world, however, we need to design institutions that can help manage the non-ideal fact that political power is unequally held, routinely abused, and often deployed in the service of narrow political interests rather than moral or democratic ideals. The call for normative theories that can engage systematically with these realities is especially pressing in the domain of international politics, where political inequality and domination are such prominent features of the social and institutional order, and principled guidance is required on the design of institutions for managing these problems. The concept of political legitimacy – which has been a fundamental theme within ‘realist’ traditions of political theory – provides a promising framework for developing new normative theories that can grapple with these enduring practical and normative problems of power and domination in global political life. Interest in the notion of political legitimacy as a substantive value is currently growing across a range of literatures within political theory and International Relations, through a deepening awareness of its possible independence from established ideal theories of justice and democracy, and its connection to central ‘realist’ political values of order, stability, and security. Yet much of the work done so far on this topic has involved critique of existing ‘ideal’ political theories; more progress must be made in the development of a positive, theoretically robust, and substantively action-guiding normative theory of political legitimacy. This section will provide a forum for normative theorists of politics to develop the theory of political legitimacy with a range of analytic tools, and with applications to a variety of conceptual and practical problems in contemporary global political life.