How to solve a crisis of legitimacy? Empirical insights into the WTO Public Forum

Anne Reiff

doi:10.22151/politikon.23.7

Authors

Anne Reiff Goethe University of Frankfurt

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.23.7

Keywords:

global governance, international organizations, legitimacy, legitimation, NGOs, power, quantitative text analysis, World Trade Organization (WTO)

Abstract

Who participates in the discourse of legitimation taking place in the WTO Public Forum and how do the participants evaluate the World Trade Organization (WTO)? This paper offers two empirical insights into the phenomenon of Global Governance. Firstly, the discourse of legitimation is analyzed with a quantitative text analytical tool. Secondly, as the framework of the discourse is a forum founded by the WTO to start dialogue with civil-society after the crisis of legitimacy in the 1990s, it sheds light on a strategy of Re-legitimation. The empirical results show that (1) the discourse in the forum is “emptying-out” as NGOs are largely replaced by Academia and national politicians and (2) that it is limited by power inequalities between the actors.

Author Biography

Anne Reiff, Goethe University of Frankfurt

Anne Reiff, 24, is a graduate student at Goethe University of Frankfurt in the Master Programme “International Studies/Peace- and Conflict Research”. She has a Bachelor degree of Bremen University in “Political Science” since 2013. She worked several times as student research assistant, currently for Professor Nicole Deitelhoff. Anne ́s main research interests are North-South relations, IR theory, Latin American politics, power and resistance.