School of Law

Dates: January 2007 - Ongoing

The project evaluates the implications of the fact that the globalisation of governance has resulted in the removal of many issues from the domestic contestation and the political control of citizens.

This is the now widely recognised "democratic legitimacy deficit" in international law, which encompasses both traditional forms of inter-nation law, and new forms of international governance by non-state actors (the Security Council and World Bank, for example).

The standard response is to argue for the replication of domestic institutions at the global level (elected assemblies, etc.), restructuring the international order along cosmopolitan democratic lines.

In contrast, this project accepts the extant, fragmented system, and develops the idea that the counterfactual model of deliberative democracy can provide the basis for thinking about the exercise of political authority beyond the state.

In doing so, it explores an alternative view of the nature and purposes of the modern system of international law grounded in philosophical understandings of the idea of global legal pluralism and (following Joseph Raz and Jules Coleman) the 'democratic' authority of law - a democratic rule of international law.