School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemLegitimacy, authority and global governance institutions: a case study of the International Monetary Fund( 2018)Global governance institutions play an increasingly important and influential role in global politics. Despite a growing focus in the literature on global governance institutions’ legitimacy, the applicability of both standard conceptions and newer theories of political authority and political legitimacy to these actors remains an unresolved issue. In this thesis I address this shortcoming in the literature by engaging in an investigation of the authority and legitimacy of global governance institutions. I demonstrate the incompatibility of standard conceptions of political authority and legitimacy with the current roles of these actors in the international political order. Drawing on Stephen Perry’s (2013) task-efficacy account of legitimacy and Martha Nussbaum’s approach to social justice, I provide accounts of, and standards for, authority and legitimacy. I contend that the promotion of the condition for subjects’ wellbeing, understood as Nussbaum’s ten capabilities, is a sufficiently good or valuable end to justify public authority. Finally, to test the applicability of the proposed account of legitimacy, I undertake a case study of the International Monetary Fund to investigate the ways real world global governance institutions exercise political authority, establish the usefulness of my proposed definition of legitimacy, measure the IMF’s efficacy and consider areas for reform.
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ItemCrime or governance?: challenging the modern discourse on the (il)legitimacy of organised crime( 2011)Authors in the state failure school of thought in the literature on organised crime routinely fail to acknowledge the potential legitimacy of organised crime as a form of governance in weak states. This is in spite of providing evidence that organised crime often performs functions similar to that of the state. The unwillingness of authors in the state failure school of thought to acknowledge the potential legitimacy of organised crime as a form of governance results from their use of a state-centric modernist discourse to frame the issue. This discourse routinely privileges the state’s claim to the monopoly on the use of violence and concomitant right of extraction at the expense of other social groups, including organised crime, even in weak states. This thesis challenges the dominant discourse in the state failure school by arguing that organised crime can be a legitimate form of governance in weak states when it exists in some way as a functional equivalent of the state. To test this claim, the thesis uses a historical-sociological approach to state formation and legitimacy to compare the supply of protection by the medieval state with that by contemporary criminal protection rackets in post-Communist Russia and Bulgaria in the 1990s. The results of a focused comparison between Russian and Bulgarian criminal protection rackets indicate that the legitimacy of organised crime as a form of governance in contemporary weak states is contingent on its ability to provide protection to certain social groups in the absence of effective state forms of governance.
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ItemMaking a meal of it: the World Food Programme and legitimacy in global politics( 2008)The world faces many complex and difficult problems at the global level – problems that are increasingly recognised as requiring political as much as technical solutions. While such issues are often taken to concern, in broad terms, global governance, more specifically, the political aspects of such governance are fundamentally linked to interactions between the United Nations system and the power exercised by the United States of America (US). One important and distinctive arena within which these interactions can be viewed is the international food aid regime, and its central organisation, the World Food Programme (WFP) - an area lacking in concerted political science study in recent years. This thesis is concerned with the role of the US in shaping the legitimacy of the WFP within the institutional context of the international food aid regime. Legitimacy is defined as deriving from the three elements of inclusion, accountability and effectiveness. The WFP and international regime are, it is argued, well respected, relatively effective, and enjoy high levels of legitimacy. At a micro level there are many specific historical and localised factors resulting in this legitimacy; at the macro level many of these factors can be linked to the interaction of norms and interests between the US and the regime. In particular, the regime’s development and success has been closely related to both a congruence between the US domestic feed-the-hungry norm and the regime’s international feed-the-hungry norm, and a process of divergence between those norms. It is this normative interplay that has enabled US power to be deployed and constrained in a manner resulting in high levels of legitimacy for the WFP. While in many respects this has limited WFP’s capacity to do more with the problem of global hunger than merely ameliorate it, the nature of the problem is much bigger than the capacities of any single operational agency of the United Nations.