The UN Security Council, normative legitimacy and the challenge of specificity

Abstract

specialisation include human rights law (in particular the ECHR), international criminal law (in particular crimes against humanity and genocide), and legal and political theory (in particular human rights theory, democratic theory, and criminal law theory). He is the author of The ECHR and Human Rights Theory published by Routledge in 2016.

Can transparency strengthen the legitimacy of international institutions? Evidence from the UN Security Council

“…While working methods reform proponents have argued that increasing the transparency of working methods could be a more feasible solution to enhance the legitimacy of the Council than compositional reform (e.g. Scherz & Zysset, 2020;Sievers & Daws, 2014;Wilson, 2019), my data from UNGA debates 1990-2018 show that the 2006 transparency reform enacted with Note 507 has led to an overall decline in UN member-states' perceptions of procedural legitimacy. On the upside, the reform has led to a substantial decrease in transparency criticism and a slight increase in states' perceptions of participation.…”

“…The literature on the legitimacy of international institutions can be divided into a normative and an empirical strand, as with the concept of legitimacy more generally. In the normative sense, an institution's legitimacy is evaluated with reference to a set of external criteria and is said to be legitimate when it operates in a manner that corresponds with these (Scherz & Zysset, 2020). In the empirical sense, on the other hand, legitimacy refers to a (widely) shared perception among a relevant audience that an institution has the right to rule (Hurd, 2018).…”

“…(UNGA, 2012). Transparency and participation are two key principles in the procedural legitimacy literature (Keohane, 2011;Scherz & Zysset, 2020); others include (but are not limited to) deliberation, accountability, representation, impartiality, expertise, and voluntary consent in decisionmaking (Buchanan & Keohane, 2006;Caney, 2006;Johnstone, 2008;Scherz & Zyssets, 2020).…”

“…However, while normative legitimacy scholars have frequently made the case for Council reform (e.g. Scherz & Zysset, 2020), existing Council literature has not yet evaluated the empirical legitimacy effects of such a reform: that is, whether Council reform affects UN member-states' perceptions of the Council as a rightful authority. Second, this article also contributes more generally to the growing literature on international institutions' legitimation strategies (Gronau & Schmidtke, 2016;Tallberg & Zu ¨rn, 2019;Rocabert et al, 2019) by assessing the potential of transparency as a legitimation strategy in the context of a major international institution.…”

You can't tell me what to do! Why should states comply with international institutions?

“…It starts from legitimate authority as content‐independent and exclusionary reason‐giving and outlines conceptual issues with the instrumental conception of legitimacy. Proposing an autonomy‐based conception of legitimacy (see also Scherz, 2021; Scherz & Zysset, 2020), it argues that self‐regarding reasons cannot be the basis for authority but that there is a right to personal pursuits for issues that only affect oneself. The second part turns to how such reasons apply to states.…”