Eva Erman, Department of Political Science, SU
Despite the broad consensus on the value of political legitimacy in global politics, there is still little agreement on what the specific regulative content of the principles of legitimacy ought to be. Two main paths have thus far been taken in the academic literature to respond to the legitimacy deficit in the global domain: one via the ideal of democracy, another via the ideal of justice. However, both have run into problems. The overall purpose of this paper is to examine these two paths in the endeavour to explore the possibilities of a third path, which investigates global political legitimacy as a value that is at a basic level distinct from democracy and justice. The paper aims to fulfil two tasks. The conceptual task consists in identifying some characteristics of the concept of global political legitimacy that makes it distinct from political legitimacy generally, as well as showing its usefulness for normative theorizing. The normative task is twofold: first, to demonstrate that the value of global political legitimacy is reducible neither to democracy nor to justice; and second, to develop the contours of a dual account of global political legitimacy, in which both justice and democracy play essential roles.
Eva Erman is full Professor at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University. She works in the field of political philosophy, with special interest in democratic theory and critical theory. Lecturer and later full Professor at Uppsala university, she returned to Stockholm in 2014. Erman is the author and editor of several books on human rights and transnational democracy, and has published numerous articles. Furthermore, Erman is the founder and Chief Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Ethics & Global Politics.