The EU's profound crisis has drawn into sharp relief the challenges of reconfiguring national democratic processes around regional political communities. Over the same period for which the EU has fractured, however, other regional organizations have intensified integration. These divergent trends raise urgent questions regarding how regional organizations seek to legitimate integration and associated measures to regionalize decision-making, and how these legitimation processes can be compared across regional organizations. This article focuses not on specifying how regional organizations should legitimate their activities, but instead on explaining how and why legitimation processes have been crafted in particular ways. Drawing on recent contributions in state theory and political geography, as well as political participation and de-politicisation, the article advances an innovative approach to understanding how regional integration is (de)legitimated by, first, analysing state-making and regionalism as ongoing and mutually constituted processes, and second, examining the design and function of participatory innovations.
Recently, R2P and the ICC have been mobilised in different forms to respond to state-directed mass atrocities in Sudan, Libya and Syria. Notably, this has generated debate over the capacity and legitimacy of using R2P and the ICC to facilitate ‘regime change’ in those cases and beyond. This article critically examines where regime change, as an aim and outcome, sits within R2P and ICC doctrine and practice. We demonstrate the ambiguous position of regime change in R2P and ICC doctrine, where it is not explicitly endorsed as an objective but actions that may lead to it are permitted. In practice, R2P and the ICC have been used to starkly different ends in the three cases. Such ambiguity—about what regime change is, and about how far international intervention can legitimately go—and inconsistency in application, can undermine global support for R2P and the ICC as tools for preventing and responding to atrocities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.