An Eye for an Eye? International Organization Response to Delegitimation

• In Event: Crisis of the Liberal International Order: Resilience, Adaptation, or Collapse?

Abstract

Scholars of international organizations (IOs) have increasingly recognized that IOs employ legitimation strategies as a matter of standard practice in order to build and maintain elite and popular support. At the same time, recent events challenging IOs has sparked research on delegitimation, or efforts to undermine and challenge the perceived appropriateness of these institutions. This paper seeks to understand if, how and under what conditions IOs respond to delegitimation. For this purpose, we develop the concept of re-legitimation, distinguishing it from legitimation that has become part of ordinary practice for IOs. Re-legitimation is conceptualized as practices that IOs develop and use to respond to specific instances of delegitimation in order to reconstitute elite and popular beliefs about its appropriateness. It is differentiated from routine legitimation by IOs on the basis of the content and timing of the statements. We theorize possible conditions that influence if and how IOs employ re-legitimation. The paper empirically examines these conditions using a new dataset of legitimacy statements by international criminal tribunals, namely, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Both of these institutions have faced significant delegitimation by regional elites and the broader public.

Authors

• Theresa J Squatrito, London School of Economics

• Birte Gippert, University of Liverpool