Existing research on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council is conceptual or theoretical, for the most part, as scholars tend to make legitimacy assessments with reference to objective standards. Whether UN member states perceive the Security Council as legitimate or illegitimate has yet to be investigated systematically; nor do we know whether states care primarily about the Council's compliance with its legal mandate, its procedures, or its effectiveness. To address this gap, our article analyzes evaluative statements made by states in UN General Assembly debates on the Security Council, for the period 1991–2009. In making such statements, states confer legitimacy on the Council or withhold legitimacy from it. We conclude the following: First, the Security Council suffers from a legitimacy deficit because negative evaluations of the Council by UN member states far outweigh positive ones. Nevertheless, the Council does not find itself in an intractable legitimacy crisis because it still enjoys a rudimentary degree of legitimacy. Second, the Council's legitimacy deficit results primarily from states' concerns regarding the body's procedural shortcomings. Misgivings as regards shortcomings in performance rank second. Whether or not the Council complies with its legal mandate has failed to attract much attention at all.

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The ability to violate and the duty to protect human rights have traditionally been ascribed to states. Yet, since international organizations increasingly take decisions that directly affect individuals, it has been alleged that they, too, have human rights obligations. Against this background, we can witness a trend among international organizations establishing provisions to prevent human rights violations and to enable individuals to hold them accountable for such violations. This can be seen as a specific manifestation of a more general trend that has been described as the spread of good governance standards to, or the constitutionalization of, international organizations. The purpose of this article is to reveal the mechanisms that can account for the introduction of human rights protection provisions in international organizations. The empirical basis of the article forms a case study on the evolution of such provisions in United Nations sanctions policy. I first develop a conceptual framework that draws on diffusion mechanisms that have been used to explain the spread of norms and institutional design among states and to trace reform processes in international organizations. The empirical analysis suggests that shaming, defiance, litigation and instances of learning can account for the advancement of human rights protection provisions in United Nations sanctions policy: the Security Council was exposed to and responded to various forms of pressure from a variety of different actors. At the same time, it was approached with arguments concerning why it should institute reforms and advice in terms of how such reforms should look and engaged in a learning process.

Human rights violations by international organisations (IOs) are a possible side effect of their growing authority. Recent examples are the cases of sexual exploitation by UN peacekeepers and violations caused by IMF austerity measures. In response, IOs increasingly develop safeguards to protect human rights from being violated through their policies to regain legitimacy. We argue that this development can be accounted for by a mechanism we call ‘authority-legitimation mechanism’. We test this theoretical expectation against ten case studies on UN and EU sanctions policies, UN and NATO peacekeeping and World Bank and IMF lending. Next, we demonstrate inductively that the authority-legitimation mechanism can evolve through different pathways, depending on which actors get engaged. We label these pathwayslegislative institution-buildingif parliaments in member states put pressure on their governments to campaign for human rights safeguards in IOs,judicial institution-buildingif courts demand human rights safeguards,like-minded institution-buildingif civil society organisations, middle powers and IO bodies with little formal power push for human rights safeguards, oranticipatory institution-buildingif IOs adopt such safeguards from other IOs without having violated human rights themselves. Finally, we argue that which of these pathways are activated and how effective they are depends on specific conditions.

Exceptional times call for exceptional measures—this formula is all too familiar in the domestic setting. Governments have often played loose with their state's constitution in the name of warding off an urgent threat. But after decades of increasing interconnectedness and emerging transnational governance, today one sees new forms of emergency politics that are cross-border in range. From the European Union to the World Health Organization, from supranational institutions to state governments acting in concert, the logic of emergency is embraced in international contexts, with Covid-19 the latest occasion. This Forum offers an entry-point into this emerging phenomenon. Taking as its point of departure two recent books, it examines the origins, forms, effects and normative stakes of emergency politics beyond the state. Among the matters discussed are the concept of emergency politics, the historical context of its contemporary forms, the patterns of decision-making associated with it, the implications for the legitimacy of transnational institutions, and the constitutional and political ways in which it might be contained. Transnational emergency politics seems likely to remain a central feature of the coming years, and our aim is to further its study in international relations.

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The UN and EU sanctions regimes against suspected terrorists at first clearly violated commonly accepted due process standards. Both organizations gradually reformed the procedures that regulated which individuals and entities were subject to sanctions, yet the UN procedures in particular still evince important shortcomings. While international law scholars have debated how the sanctions regimes must be designed to be consistent with international law, political science scholars have, as yet, largely held back from looking into why the regimes evolved in the way they did. This article suggests that court decisions and proceedings and, in the case of the UN, falling commitment from member states, have prompted the UN Security Council and the Council of the EU to implement limited reforms. However, courts did not challenge the sanctions regimes per se and there was no substantial pressure from civil society actors. Moreover, owing to the competences and working methods of the UN Security Council and the Council of the EU, powerful member states could fairly easily deflect reform proposals from disaffected states and other UN and EU bodies.

Despite repeated calls for reform, the UN Security Council has as yet resisted to satisfy the demands of a group of rising powers-Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan (G4)for a permanent seat. We focus on one strategy of institutional adaptation to power shifts mentioned in the introductory article to this special issue and examine why the G4's rhetorical coercion strategy has failed to resonate with the Council's permanent members and the wider UN membership. Looking at the key debate on Security Council reform in the General Assembly in 2005, we examine the justifications the G4 have offered to support their proposal and whether these have been accepted as legitimate by UN member states. We show that the G4's rhetorical coercion strategy has failed to resonate with the targeted audience because the G4 have justified their demand strongly in terms of how their material contributions would enhance the UN's performance. In contrast, the G4's opponents provided justifications predominantly based on fair and democratic procedures, generating higher levels of expressed support. The importance of procedural fairness is consistent with findings in social psychology and challenges the prominent argument that performance is the main path to legitimacy for international institutions. Policy Implications • States seeking institutional reform cannot just state their demands, they need to justify why their demands are legitimate. For these justifications to resonate with the targeted audience and, in particular, with veto players who can thwart their reform attempts, states must appeal to widely accepted norms. • Improving the performance matters for the legitimacy of international institutions, but member states place as much, if not more, value on procedural fairness. Hence, states that strive for institutional reform cannot just point to resulting increases in the institutions' performance. They must be able to appeal to gains in procedural fairness that result from their proposed reforms. • Investing political capital and resources in a campaign for institutional reforms at the UN Security Council that cannot be justified with a view to enhancing procedural fairness does not pay off for states. Not only does it deflect attention from other pressing issues that need to be addressed at the UN, but states that do so also risk alienating states whose support they need for other initiatives at the UN or elsewhere.