Legitimation by Differentiation : How Do International Organizations Claim Legitimacy in Complexity?

With the proliferation of international organizations (IOs), legitimacy has become a key for IOs to stay relevant, and to retain their focal places or leadership in the regime complex. While increasing attention is given to institutional overlap and regime complexity in the international relations (IR) literature, there is hardly any work that addresses the question of legitimacy and legitimation in Complexity. This paper contributes to this gap by addressing the question: How do International Organizations claim Legitimacy under conditions of overlap? To answer this question, I have identified a new legitimation strategy, which I refer to as Legitimation by Differentiation (LegD), a discursive strategy that IOs implement to claim legitimacy by making use of their competitive advantage. I theorize the relationship between IOs and their environment in terms of a business environment, where overlapping IOs are compared to business units working in the same market. I take it one step further arguing that IOs are likely to use the LegD strategy when they are threatened in the centrality of the role they play. To test this argument, I present a case study in which I analyze the legitimation claims of both the League of Arab States and the African Union in Libyan conflict in 2011 drawing on data from the communiques of both organizations covering the first year of the Libyan conflict, in addition to preliminary data from interviews with a number of former and current officials