Resurgent Authoritarianism’s Challenge to Democracy’s Status as an International Norm
Professor Brad R. Roth, Wayne State University
Notes & Changes
Please register using the link above if you would like to join this event, either in person or online. If you specify that you will join online, you will be sent a Teams link prior to the seminar before the event. Please note that if you do not register before 5:30pm on Wednesday 20 November 2024, you may not receive a link.
Lunch will be available in the Wharton Room from 12:15 PM, and the talk will begin in the Old Library at 12:45 PM. We look forward to your participation in what promises to be an insightful event.
Abstract
The Cold War’s end prompted a wave of assertions that compliance with liberal-democratic norms would soon become the sine qua non of political legitimacy globally, with adverse consequences for non-compliant governments’ standing to assert sovereign prerogatives in the international order. Recent years, however, have seen a significant shift in the discourse, as a “democratic recession” has been perceived to afflict not merely nascent liberal-democratic systems, but also the norms’ traditional standard bearers. Populism, operating most potently on the Right but also present on the Left, increasingly calls into question liberal-democratic institutionalism’s claim to represent the popular will and thereby to exercise legitimate authority. Meanwhile, the seemingly ineluctable dynamics favoring transfers of authority from states to international institutions have become problematized, as critics reassert, in the name of democracy, the state’s status as a site of struggle over the direction of social life.
Authoritarianism’s resurgent appeal demonstrates that political legitimacy defies formulaic assessment. Moreover, international legal institutions, by appearing to subordinate state-level decision making at the behest of elites, may play a role in eroding popular regard for liberal-democratic values. The international legal order’s interpreters might helpfully rediscover that order’s role as a framework of accommodation among non-like-minded actors.
Speaker
Brad R. Roth is Professor of Political Science and Law at Wayne State University in Detroit , and a Visiting Scholar for Fall 2024 at the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. His scholarship applies political theory to problems in international and comparative public law, with a special focus on crises of political authority. He is the author of Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law (Oxford University Press, 1999), Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement (Oxford University Press, 2011), and a wide range of book chapters, journal articles, and commentaries dealing with questions of sovereignty, constitutionalism, human rights and democracy. Much of his work focuses on legal aspects of conflicts that have occasioned the use of force (e.g., Israel-Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, and Ukraine) and on retrospective and extraterritorial applications of criminal law to conflict participants.
Professor Roth served from 2010 to 2018 as one of three American Branch representatives to the International Law Association’s Committee on Recognition/Non-Recognition of States and Governments, and currently serves on the ILA Committee on Military Intervention on Request.
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The Public International Law (PIL) Discussion Group at the University of Oxford is a key focal point for PIL at Oxford and hosts a weekly speaker event. Topics involve contemporary and challenging issues in international law. Speakers include distinguished international law practitioners, academics, and legal advisers from around the world.
The Discussion Group's meetings are part of the programme of the British Branch of the International Law Association and are supported by the Law Faculty and Oxford University Press.
The speaker will commence at 12:45pm UK time and speak for about forty minutes, allowing about twenty-five minutes for questions and discussion. The meeting should conclude before 2:00 pm UK time.
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