The Law and Politics of International Legitimacy

The book explores how international law constructs a sense of legitimacy, what its limitations are and how to improve it.

Jean-Marc Coicaud (Author)

9781107008274, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 July 2025

544 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 3 cm, 0.998 kg

'A timely and ambitious contribution to international legal scholarship and global policy debates. Its ability to merge law and politics without collapsing one into the other, while drawing on history, sociology, and political theory, is particularly impressive.' Kyra Wigard, Global Policy Journal

The book examines the significance of the issue of political legitimacy at the international level, focusing on international law. It adopts a descriptive, critical and reconstructive approach. In order to do so, the book clarifies what political legitimacy is in general and in the context of international law. The book analyses how international law contributes to a sense of legitimacy through notions such as international membership, international rights holding, fundamental principles and hierarchy of rights holding, rightful conduct and international authority. In addition, the book stresses the serious limitations of legitimacy of international law and of the current international order that it contributes to regulate and manage. This leads the book to identify the conditions under which international order and international law could overcome their problems of legitimacy and become more legitimate. The book is inter-disciplinary in nature, mobilizing international law, political and legal theory, philosophy, history, and political science.

Introduction
Part I. Setting the Stage: 1. Political legitimacy as an intellectual journey
2. Orders in transition and implications for political legitimacy
3. The legitimacy-law nexus
Part II. Political Legitimacy and Theory of Politics: 4. Theory of politics and political legitimacy
5. Political legitimacy as evaluation and judgment
6. Implications for political legitimacy and the theory of legitimacy
Part III. The Question of Legitimacy at the International Level: 7. Political legitimacy: from the national to the international
8. specificities of the international community and legitimacy
Part IV. Construction of Legitimacy in International Law: 9. Legitimacy and international membership
10. Legitimacy and international rights holding
11. Key principles of international law and hierarchy of rights holding
12. International legitimacy and rightful conduct
13. International legitimacy and international authority
Part V. International Legitimacy and Change: 14. International legitimacy as a system of reference and meaning
15. Scope and depth of International legitimacy, modernity, and the west
16. Change and international legitimacy
17. Change of international order and legitimacy
18. Change in international order and legitimacy
19. Evaluation of the validity of international legitimacy
Part VI. Criticism and Reconstruction of the Legitimacy of International Law: 20. Elements of a critical history of international law
21. Elements of a critical philosophy of international law
22. Toward a more just international law
23. From international legitimacy to global justice
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: United Nations & UN agencies [JPSN1]