Self-Legitimation by International Organizations

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Recent crises in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine, as well as the current refugee crisis in Europe have highlighted the difficulties national governments have in working collaboratively with international organizations (IOs). Governments and other policymakers often view IOs as inefficient and overly bureaucratic, and therefore engage with them only selectively and superficially (Malloch-Brown 2015, Gowan 2008). However, these interactions are partly unproductive because of a misunderstanding of the conflicting obligations IOs face, how they take decisions, and how they gain and maintain legitimacy in the international system (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, Zaum 2013, Allison & Zelikow 1999, Hanrieder 2010, Rittberger, Zangl, & Kruck 2012).Indeed, across the social sciences, legitimacy is increasingly conceived of as sought-after and instrumental, as not only a static attribute but also a resource that actors seek and draw upon for strategic reasons. Within International Relations specifically, interest in how actors generate, maintain, and use legitimacy has grown in tandem with the rise of authority that exists beyond or in opposition to the state, among non-state actors, transnational movements, and IOs. However, to date most analyses of legitimacy and legitimation in International Relations focus on perceptions of the legitimacy of one actor by another (Coleman 2007, Hurd 1999). In so doing, they fail to account for self-legitimation, where an actor undertakes practices of legitimation not for external audiences, but internally, as a way of developing and reinforcing its identity (Barker 2001). Moreover, many understandings of legitimacy neglect the fact that identities are rarely uniform and instead are multiple and conflicting, and thus that legitimacy cannot be treated as a binary characteristic, but must instead be conceived of as variable, inconsistent, and contested.This project addresses these two omissions by examining self-legitimation by IOs, and looking in particular at how self-legitimation affects IO behaviour for organizations with multiple institutional identities that may conflict. Indeed, many IOs are at once operational actors that participate actively in combat, peacekeeping, development, and global political and economic processes and normative actors that develop and promote international norms. These different identities sometimes dictate contradictory goals and practices, forcing the institutions to violate the principles and activities considered appropriate to one of their identities, thus complicating legitimation. Accordingly, IO self-legitimation often entails the use of discourse and symbolic acts to convey or 'package' actions a certain way in a bid to affirm a coherent institutional identity. However, this implies that IOs often 'say one thing and do another,' and these contradictory discursive and operational practices have negative implications for perceptions of legitimacy, both internal and external.The project will undertake a comparative analysis of the self-legitimation practices of three IOs-the UN, the World Bank, and NATO. It will make a two-fold contribution, one theoretical and one practical. First, it will add to existing theories of IO behaviour and of legitimacy in International Relations, which focus primarily on external assessments of IO legitimacy and neglect the multiple and at times contradictory identities of IOs. Second, it will lead to a greater understanding among policymakers of how and why such bodies take certain decisions, how they interact with other actors in the international system, and how they can be effective actors in international affairs. While it is unlikely that the contradictions they face can be eliminated, a greater understanding of why these contradictory behaviours exist and how IOs seek to overcome them will enable more constructive and efficient cooperation, avoiding the inconsistency that has plagued recent interaction with IOs.