Human Rights, Legitimacy, and Global Governance

Abstract This contribution examines the relationship between the protection and promotion of human rights and the legitimacy of global governance institutions. In doing so, the essay sketches an account of legitimacy in critical dialogue with Buchanan and Keohane’s 2006 piece ‘The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions’. These authors, it is argued, make a number of illustrative errors in setting out their own conception of the legitimacy of global governance institutions, which leads them to an incoherent position on authority, which misstates the role that human rights can play as legitimacy reasons. In response, the argument is made for a conception of legitimacy for governance beyond the state that takes permissible action as primary; and a new account of the normative force of actual individual consent in helping to establish legitimacy and vindicate democratic values, examining the interplay between consent and human rights is proposed.