Project Description

This Leibniz Junior Research Group is motivated by the question: When, how and with what effects do regional organizations claim legitimacy? Regional organizations have grown enormously in their political authority in recent decades, and this expansion has led them to become increasingly active in justifying their right to rule vis-a-vis relevant audiences. A growing literature addresses the nature, sources and consequences of legitimacy beliefs and legitimation dynamics in major global organizations and the European Union, but our knowledge of such processes in regional organizations outside of Europe is limited. Studying non-Western regional organizations offers the unique opportunity to generate new insights into the dynamics of legitimacy and legitimation in international organizations, and to assess whether existing findings travel beyond the organizations in which they were initially developed.

The contribution of this Research Group is threefold. First, it maps the discursive and institutional legitimation strategies of 30 regional organizations from 1980 to 2015. Second, it develops a novel theoretical account of the sources and consequences of legitimation strategies of regional organizations by drawing on work in a variety of disciplines including comparative politics, political theory, sociology and psychology. Third, it provides a rigorous and systematic test of theoretical expectations against new data in a mixed-methods research design that combines statistical analysis and comparative case studies of regional organizations in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

More information on the project can be found here.