Democratic Representation in International Organizations

International organizations (IOs) play a central role in contemporary international law-making: they institutionalize most of the processes through which international law is adopted today. From the perspective of the democratic legitimacy of international law, this raises the question of the conditions under which those IOs may be regarded as democratic representatives of their Member States' peoples. Curiously, given its important international and domestic stakes, however, the democratic representativeness of IOs, but also of States and other public and private institutions within those IOs does not seem to be much of a concern in practice. Even more curiously, and by contrast to other issues of democratic legitimacy it is necessarily related to, such as participation or deliberation inside IOs, representation has only rarely been addressed as such in scholarly debates. It is this gap in theory and practice that this volume purports to fill. It is the first one bringing global democracy theorists and international lawyers into dialogue on the topic and in English language.

This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.