Research on legitimacy in international organization (IO) has developed fast in recent years. This chapter surveys the proliferating and partially incommensurable normative and empirical scholarship in this field. It reveals conflicting interests among scholars who approach legitimacy with different conceptualizations and methodologies and explores the potential for learning and convergence across perspectives. This chapter also provides an overview of empirical findings, including case studies on political behaviour, survey research on citizen attitudes, and research on public communication and mass protests. It identifies patterns of legitimacy over time and across organizations that do not support the popular claim of a systemic crisis. The authors synthesize insights on drivers of IO legitimacy, from the process- and performance-related features to strategic interventions by political entrepreneurs and social movements which legitimate or de-legitimate IOs. This chapter concludes with the observation that in times of growing contestation of multilateralism, existing levels of legitimacy will make it more and more difficult for an IO to reach ambitious goals.

The age of cities is an unexplored factor in democratic research. What may it reveal about democracy that we did not know before? What new approaches to explain or manage crises of democracy may it suggest? This chapter argues that explanations of democracy in an age of cities should take into consideration how democracy extends beyond individual states. Democracy beyond the state refers to a democracy constituted by the people of more than one state, e.g. all human beings, or by people whose politics is significantly independent of their individual state for other reasons, e.g. because they inhabit a powerful city. Originally constructed to explain outcomes of international politics, the concept of democracy beyond the state holds a unique capacity to register how democracy is transformed in the age of cities. Both concepts describe structures at a global level of analysis, including all humans in single descriptions of their political rule (varying levels of democracy) and their life place (spread variously across cities and the country). This chapter thus offers a conceptualization of democracy that supports a full engagement with the age of cities in democratic research. As a preliminary proof of concept, the chapter also provides an original and parsimonious explanation of today’s crisis of democracy, as observable in democratic backsliding within many countries across the world.  

This paper introduces and elaborates on a distinctively political approach to study and manage existential risks with artificial intelligence (AI). In contrast to research in ethics, economics, and computer science, a political approach to interactions between AI and humans emphasizes the possibility and effects of persisting disagreements. The paper introduces issues of how humans and AI exercise power while neither side is able to control, or enslave, the other (1); how persisting disagreements between humans and AI may induce either mutual learning and value-creation, or destructive conflicts and large-scale violence (2); how knowledge of political dynamics between states, classes and sexes/genders applies to imagine models for safe co-existence between humans and AI at present as well as in a post-singularity future with super-human AI (3); how human/AI relations should be constructed to reap the opportunities of AI while minimizing existential risks for humans (4).

This chapter traces democracy in Sweden during the past decade and looks at factors that might conceivably make this democracy more vulnerable in the future. It assesses stability and change in Swedish democracy at the level of central institutions and the party system in view of the emergence of the right-wing anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party and the challenges this poses for Swedish political parties in general. In particular, the challenge of remaining representative in the face of competition by parties considered to be anti-democratic and developing workable interaction by crafting new political alliances. The chapter then goes on to assess Swedish democracy in the wider context of globalisation, digitalisation, increasing global inequality and the individualisation of political cultures, factors commonly explaining the backsliding of democracy by asking why Sweden, despite being highly sometimes uniquely exposed to these processes, does not show signs of weakening of its democracy. 

This insightful and timely book introduces an explanatory theory for surveying global and international politics. Describing the nature and effects of democracy beyond the state, Hans Agné explores peace andconflict, migration politics, resource distribution, regime effectiveness, foreign policy and posthuman politics throughthe lens of democratism to both supplement and challenge established research paradigms.