School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 12
-
ItemPolitical legitimacy in international border governance institutions(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2015-10)In this article, I address the question: what kind of normative principles should regulate the governance processes through which migration across international borders is managed? I begin by contrasting two distinct categories of normative controversy relating to this question. The first is a familiar set of moral controversies about justice within border governance, concerning what I call the ethics of exclusion. The second is a more theoretically neglected set of normative controversies about how institutional capacity for well functioning border governance can best be achieved, concerning what I call the constitution of control of international borders. I argue that progress can be made in resolving controversies of the latter kind by applying a new normative theory of political legitimacy, distinct from the moral theories of justice routinely applied to ethics of exclusion controversies. On the ‘collective agency’ model of political legitimacy that I propose here, principles of political legitimacy have the regulatory role of combating complex collective action problems that may otherwise impede an institution’s collectively valuable functions. Through applying this theory, I sketch some provisional prescriptions for the design of international border governance institutions that may follow from the demand for strengthening their political legitimacy.
-
ItemSovereignty, democracy, and global political legitimacy(Oxford University Press, 2018-04-05)
This chapter argues that the normative theories of democracy invoked in debates about global democracy construe the institutional ingredients of democracy’s political legitimacy too narrowly: they focus on contributions to political legitimacy made by institutions of democratic social choice-making, such as elections and public deliberative structures, while neglecting those made by institutionalized governance capabilities, of the kind historically embodied in sovereign states. This narrow focus becomes problematic when we shift our focus to democratization at the global level, where key governance functions of sovereign institutions are weak or absent. To understand the institutional prerequisites for political legitimacy within a global democracy, I argue that we therefore need to build and apply a broader theoretical understanding of political legitimacy that can more systematically account for its governance capability dimensions.
-
ItemInstitutional facts and principles of global political legitimacy(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2016-06)How should the content and justification of action-guiding normative ‘principles’ in political life be responsive to social ‘facts’? In this article, I answer this question by sketching a contextualist methodology for identifying and justifying principles for guiding international institutional action, which is based on an original account of the regulative role and conceptual structure of principles of political legitimacy. I develop my argument for this approach in three steps. First, I argue that a special non-utopian category of normative political principles has the regulatory role of helping solve collective action problems that emerge in practice among actors engaged in shared institutional projects. Next, I argue that analysis of such normative political principles can be helpfully framed by what I call a collective agency conception of political legitimacy. Finally, I draw out the implications of these claims to show how the content and justification of normative political principles should vary across institutional contexts, in response to a particular set of motivational and empirical social facts. This contextualist methodology has useful applications to international politics insofar it can help to account for the widespread intuition that standards of political legitimacy for institutions may vary both across domestic and international levels and among international institutions operating in different functional domains.
-
ItemGlobal public power: The subject of principles of global political legitimacy(Routledge, 2012-12-01)This paper elaborates the concept of global public power as the subject of principles of political legitimacy in global politics, and defends it through a critical comparison with other concepts widely employed to depict this regulative subject: states, global basic structure, and global governance. The goal underlying this argument is to bring some greater unity and integration to conceptual understandings of the subject of principles of political legitimacy within analyses of global politics, and in doing so to frame a broader research agenda for locating in practice the concrete political agencies and institutions that are appropriate targets for demands of political legitimation under the prevailing empirical conditions of global pluralism.
-
ItemGlobal political justice(Wiley, 2016)Scholarly debate on the subject of global justice has been overwhelmingly focused so far on the socio-economic aspects of justice. Much less attention has been given to those political aspects of global justice concerned with arrangements for public decision-making and the collective exercise and control of power. This gap is not adequately filled by literatures on global democracy, either, since these do not incorporate sufficient analysis of whether the democratic institutions that deliver political justice within states can achieve the same result when dealing with the very different forms of power and political agency that structure the domain of global politics. This collection brings together scholars from across the disciplines of political theory, normative ethics, and International Relations to undertake a fresh examination of some fundamental theoretical questions about the nature and significance of global political justice. Contributors tackle several dimensions of this complex theoretical topic, exploring questions about: the relationship of global political justice to other normative standards like ‘legitimacy’,‘democracy’, and ‘socio-economic’justice; the nature of global ‘public power’and the prospects for global political community; the justice and continued significance of traditional ordering principles of sovereignty and territoriality; and the relevance of standards of political justice (like political equality) to the regulation of international violence and principles of just war. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
-
ItemAntipower, Agency, and the Republican Case for Global Institutional Pluralism(Routledge, 2015)One notable contribution made by recent work in republican theory has been its push to shift the focus of normative political analysis away from the structure of institutions that distribute social goods , and towards the structure of power relationships among individuals and groups within a social order. The republican political ideal prescribes combating power within social relationships that takes a particular pernicious form-generally called “arbitrary,” or “alien”—in which control is exercised by one actor over another without appropriate political endorsement or contestability. 1 This focus on power within republican theory equips it well to contribute to contemporary debates about institution-building in the global domain, where dynamics of power relationships are prominent features of the political landscape.
-
ItemIntroduction to special issue: Real-world justice and international migration(SAGE Publications, 2015-10-01)In this article, we introduce the project developed in this special issue: a search for principles of ‘real-world’ justice in international migration that can offer practical guidance on real political problems of migration governance. We begin by highlighting two sources of divergence between the principal topics of theoretical controversy within literatures on migration justice and the animating sources of political controversy within real national and international publics. These arise first in the framing of the problems on which normative theory is purported to offer guidance, and second in the character of the normative reasons that are invoked as grounds for settling the controversies. In response to these divergences, we propose that the development of action-guiding normative theories of international migration can be supported with resources from broadly ‘realist’ approaches to political theory. We outline three key dimensions in which the ‘real-world’ theoretical approaches developed in this collection of papers connect up with important themes in the wider theoretical literature on political ‘realism’: first, a problem-centred methodological strategy; second, a focus on the value of political legitimacy; and third, a commitment to reconciling systematic engagement with real political problems and circumstances with a critical normative orientation towards political problems.
-
ItemCorporations and global justice: Rethinking ‘public’ and ‘private’ responsibilities(Routledge, 2013-01-01)This chapter argues that corporate accountability rather than corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies are more suitable for the inclusion of homeworkers in organizing, policy and ethical supply chain regulation issues. It also argues that the collective organization of homeworkers, and community-union alliances combined with corporate accountability features legislative and voluntary mechanisms to regulate the supply chain increase the likelihood of codes being relevant to informal and formal workers. The chapter begins with a discussion of homework in the global context, and examines informal employment, and contrasts CSR to the emergent theme of corporate accountability. It includes a detailed case study of the FairWear campaign, an example of an Australian community-union campaign with links to grassroots organizing through the campaign partners Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA) and Asian Women at Work (AWATW). The chapter focuses on the Australian homework context and the FairWear campaigns role in promoting homeworker rights through campaigns to maintain legal protection and supply-chain regulation.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableDemocratizing Global 'Bodies Politic': Collective Agency, Political Legitimacy, and the Democratic Boundary Problem(Global Justice Network, 2017)This article outlines a new approach to answering the foundational question in democratic theory of how the boundaries of democratic political units should be delineated. Whereas democratic theorists have mostly focused on identifying the appropriate population-group – or demos – for democratic decisionmaking, it is argued here that we should also take account of considerations relating to the appropriate scope of a democratic unit’s institutionalized governance capabilities – or public power. These matter because democratically legitimate governance is produced not only through the decision-making agency of a demos, but also through the institutionally distinct sources of political agency that shape the governance capabilities of public power. To develop this argument, the article traces a new theoretical account of the normative and institutional sources of collective agency, political legitimacy, and democratic boundaries, and illustrates it through a democratic reconstruction of the classical body politic metaphor. It further shows how this theoretical account lends strong prescriptive support to pluralist institutional boundaries within democratic global governance.
-
ItemLiquid authority and political legitimacy in transnational governance(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2017-07)In this article we investigate the institutional mechanisms required for ‘liquid’ forms of authority in transnational governance to achieve normative political legitimacy. We understand authority in sociological terms as the institutionalized inducement of addressees to defer to institutional rules, directives, or knowledge claims. We take authority to be ‘liquid’ when it is characterized by significant institutional dynamism, fostered by its informality, multiplicity, and related structural properties. The article’s central normative claim is that the mechanisms prescribed to legitimize transnational governance institutions – such as accountability or experimentalist mechanisms – should vary with the liquid characteristics of their authority structures. We argue for this claim in two steps. We first outline our theoretical conception of political legitimacy – as a normative standard prescribing legitimizing mechanisms that support authorities’ collectively valuable governance functions – and we explain in theoretical terms why legitimizing mechanisms should vary with differing authority structures. We then present an illustrative case study of the interaction between liquid authority and legitimizing mechanisms of public accountability and pragmatic experimentalism in the context of transnational business regulation. We conclude by considering broader implications of our argument for both the design of legitimate transnational governance institutions, and future research agendas on transnational authority and legitimacy.