International Authority and Autonomy of Peoples

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

As a result of international institutions’ growing influence, their legitimate authority has shifted from a peripheral concern to playing a central role in political discussions. On one hand, there is an observable increase in public challenges, questioning the legitimacy of these institutions (Zürn 2014; Lake, Martin, and Risse 2021). On the other hand, the demand to coordinate collective action through international institutions in order to address pressing global concerns, such as poverty, human rights, migration and global warming, is greater than ever. It is therefore all the more urgent to establish systematic legitimacy standards to assess them. One particular concern is how international institutions need to respect the autonomy of individuals and collectives to exercise legitimate authority (Scherz 2021; 2022). Individuals have agency: they make plans, consider options, and can be held responsible for their choices. Over the last decade, philosophers such as Philip Pettit and Christian List (2008) have emphasized that the same is true for groups: they intend, plan, and act. This allows us to speak of their freedom and autonomy, to hold them morally responsible and to ascribe duties and rights to them. In particular, democratic states have often been described as enabling collective self-determination by retaining the freedom of their members through democratic participantion and creating a normatively valuable group agent – a people (Habermas 1996, Chapter 3; Stilz 2009; Forst 2012, 125–37; Applbaum 2019).
One way in which international institutions can be understood to respect individual and collective autonomy is through human rights of individuals and state consent. However, there are several issues with this “simple approach”. First, state consent and human rights protection are often at odds. Second, given the drastic variation in democratic credentials of states, it is questionable what normative significance should be attributed to the consent of non-democratic governments (Buchanan 2002; Pettit 2010; Christiano 2012). Third, the reliance on state consent and a state-based international system can be further criticized from the perspective of post-colonial theory (Stilz 2015; Lu 2018; Getachew 2019) and because state boundaries may not demarcate the relevant collective groups (Arrhenius 2005; Scherz 2013; Beckman 2019). In this sense, international institutions are often seen as the historical legacy and a tool of power structures, leading to ongoing domination as they entrench unequal integration and racial hierarchies. Therefore, it is important to rethink the relevance of personal and political autonomy for the legitimacy of international institutions. This panel critically assesses the significance of autonomy, in terms of personal autonomy and collective self-determination of peoples, for the legitimacy of international institutions and thereby further develops the foundations of political legitimacy beyond the state.

Sub Unit

• Division 3: Normative Theory

Individual Presentations

• Collective Self-Determination and International Climate Governance - Anna Stilz, Princeton University

• Racial Hierarchy, Multilateralism, and the Crises of Liberal International Order - Catherine Lu, McGill University

• Multilateral Democracy: Making the Autonomy of Peoples Compatible - Antoinette Scherz, Stockholm University

Chair

• Shuk Ying Chan University College London

Discussant

• Melissa S. Williams University of Toronto