{"title":"The discursive (de)legitimisation of global governance: political contestation and the emergence of new actors in the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body","authors":"Michael Strange","doi":"10.4324/9781315174426-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315174426-4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":182354,"journal":{"name":"Contending Legitimacy in World Politics","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114554971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do Catalans have ‘the right to decide’? Secession, legitimacy and democracy in twenty-first century Europe","authors":"K. Crameri","doi":"10.1080/23269995.2015.1083326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1083326","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTSecession is normally viewed as legitimate only as a last resort for oppressed peoples, but contemporary independence movements in Europe are working hard to shift perceptions of the legitimacy of secession as a democratic phenomenon. In this context, the recent growth of the independence movement in Catalonia has given rise to a direct confrontation between two opposing conceptions of the legitimacy of secession in democratic nation-states. On one hand, pro-referendum Catalans claim that a vote on the matter would be entirely consistent with the basic principles of democracy. On the other, the Spanish government rests its denial of a referendum on the legal authority of the Spanish Constitution, which states that Spain must remain united. This article traces the two competing discourses of democratic and legal legitimacy (what we might call the ‘right to decide’ vs. the ‘duty to abide’) through an examination of the rhetoric of key political actors. It concludes that the Catalan government’s atte...","PeriodicalId":182354,"journal":{"name":"Contending Legitimacy in World Politics","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133475512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Body politics and legitimacy: towards a feminist epistemology of the Egyptian revolution","authors":"L. Sorbera","doi":"10.1080/23269995.2016.1188461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1188461","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTIn this essay, I discuss political legitimacy from a feminist perspective, analysing the experience of women political activists in Egypt. Building on Linda Alcoff’s work on memory, testimony and decolonizing epistemology, my analysis focusses on two intertwined issues: women’s political representation and the public debate about sexual harassment. Data collected by Egyptian feminist organizations reveal that, after one century of women’s political participation and 60 years after universal suffrage, the gender gap remains wide. Furthermore, both feminist and human rights organizations denounce that authoritarian regimes use sexual harassment to intimidate democratic activists. Although the right to equal political participation has been a main concern for the Egyptian feminists since 1923, the achievement of universal suffrage in 1956 did not provide a viable solution to the gender gap in Egypt, and women are still fighting to find a way out from the binary co-optation/exclusion. Significantly, a...","PeriodicalId":182354,"journal":{"name":"Contending Legitimacy in World Politics","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126771120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Debating legitimacy transnationally","authors":"A. Meine","doi":"10.1080/23269995.2016.1175084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1175084","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTAs modes and institutions of governance proliferate beyond the state, legitimacy has become a key concept for assessing, supporting or contesting not only the domestic but also the international political order. Often, however, it tends to be used as an umbrella term encompassing different standards of evaluation. How we are to understand legitimacy beyond the state systemically and to relate the different discussions on legitimacy to each other or to the legitimacy of our political order in its entirety are questions yet to be answered.Against this background, I aim to systematise the underlying issues and questions discussed in contemporary politics and in academic debates by means of a relational conception of political legitimacy. This conception stresses the importance of a constructive relation between institutions and those subject to them, i.e. between objects and subjects of legitimacy. They form the frame of the norms and processes, implied in conceptions of legitimacy. By foregrounding ...","PeriodicalId":182354,"journal":{"name":"Contending Legitimacy in World Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114136869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women’s human rights and Tunisian upheavals: is ‘democracy’ enough?","authors":"B. Winter","doi":"10.1080/23269995.2016.1155299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1155299","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThe regimes that came to power (in some cases ephemerally) in the wake of the so-called ‘Arab spring’ claimed democratic legitimacy as a primary means of credentialling their political agenda in international and even local eyes. Yet, how legitimate some of these new regimes have been is open to question. So-called ‘moderate’ Islamist movements have been criticised as using democratic processes to introduce new forms of theocratic authoritarianism and/or for not paying sufficient attention to strengthening and resourcing the political, legal and civic institutions, which make democracy effective. Moreover, women’s rights have been under fire in both overt and covert ways. Through a study of Tunisia, touted as one of the success stories – indeed the only one for the moment – of the ‘Arab spring’, this article investigates the question of ‘democratic legitimacy’ from a feminist perspective.","PeriodicalId":182354,"journal":{"name":"Contending Legitimacy in World Politics","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128262892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resisting legitimacy: Weber, Derrida, and the fallibility of sovereign power","authors":"Thomas Clément Mercier","doi":"10.1080/23269995.2016.1151729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1151729","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTIn this article, I engage with Derrida’s deconstructive reading of theories of performativity in order to analyse Max Weber’s sovereignty–legitimacy paradigm. First, I highlight an essential articulation between legitimacy and sovereign ipseity (understood, beyond the sole example of State sovereignty, as the autopositioned power-to-be-oneself). Second, I identify a more originary force of legitimation, which remains foreign to the order of performative ipseity because it is the condition for both its position and its deconstruction. This suggests an essential fallibility of the performative, which implies a ‘mystical’ legitimacy and a paradoxical, divisible and self-differential representation of sovereignty. The structural differentiality of legitimacy and sovereignty signifies an irreducible coloniality of law and language, but also suggests the possibility of an unconditional resistance located in the radical interpretability of the law, beyond determined representations of powers, dominations...","PeriodicalId":182354,"journal":{"name":"Contending Legitimacy in World Politics","volume":"128 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128115612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The evolving and interacting bases of EU environmental policy legitimacy","authors":"M. Leann Brown","doi":"10.1080/23269995.2016.1153826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1153826","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTSome recent scholarship has focused on concerns that implementation and compliance difficulties are undermining the legitimacy of European Union environmental policies and even the EU itself. Other officials and analysts, however, contend that environmental policy is one of the EU’s most successful policy areas. While most discuss ‘legitimacy’ in unspecified or dichotomous terms, it is instead a more nuanced and contested concept. This study investigates several evolving and interacting bases of legitimacies associated with ’permissive acceptance’ (based upon functional need, scientific and technical authority, and policy effectiveness), ‘appropriateness’ (based upon normative consensus, legalization, and adjudication), democracy (based upon representation, participation, and deliberation), and identity (based upon global leadership and ‘othering’). These legitimacies vary in terms of their strength, stability, and durability among the multiple European actors and institutions.","PeriodicalId":182354,"journal":{"name":"Contending Legitimacy in World Politics","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127143187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Looking for a new legitimacy: internal challenges within the Israeli Left","authors":"G. Daniele","doi":"10.1080/23269995.2016.1152789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1152789","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTConsidering current Israeli society in terms of the asymmetric power relations and privileges experienced by its heterogeneous population, this paper aims at questioning the role played by Israeli left-wing parties and grassroots organizations since the failure of the Oslo ‘peace process’, with a focus on the aftermath of the legislative elections of 2015. In general, most of the political initiatives led by the Zionist Left can be seen to have lost the internal legitimacy they need in order to challenge the assumptions underpinning the power asymmetries. By taking account of those narrative identities excluded from the mainstream Zionist Left discourse, among which are the Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahi Jews, women’s feminist activists and African asylum seekers, I attempt to problematize the ethnic, national, class and gender cleavages emerging in a situation which includes some complex instances of dispossession and marginalization. In a settler colonial context such as the one prevail...","PeriodicalId":182354,"journal":{"name":"Contending Legitimacy in World Politics","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122243422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Building authoritarian ‘legitimacy’: domestic compliance and international standing of Bashar al-Asad’s Syria","authors":"Aurora Sottimano","doi":"10.1080/23269995.2016.1152790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1152790","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThis paper will cast a closer look at the alleged ‘legitimacy’ of the Syrian regime and will show that the two main legitimating credentials of Bashar al-Asad – namely, his nationalist and reformist missions – carry with them an array of implicit norms and commitments, which shape the Syrian state–society relationship in such a way as to draw non-state actors into the spheres of power. Moreover this paper will examine various regional and international framings of legitimacy in relation to the Syrian war, charting the transition between diplomatic narratives of negotiation and intervention, humanitarian and security imperatives, religious conflict and war on terror. In so doing, the paper will question the common understanding of legitimacy as an evaluative concept embracing a variety of issues which play a role in justifying and maintaining effective political authority. Rather than exploring the legal validity or the moral justification for existing political institutions – as the notion of legi...","PeriodicalId":182354,"journal":{"name":"Contending Legitimacy in World Politics","volume":"13 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132736963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}