Jens Steffek
Biographic Data
| ID | 1667584 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jens Steffek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jens |
| FAMILY NAME | Steffek |
| SIGNATURE | STEFFEK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Technische Universität Darmstadt |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1751-8004 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 345 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Narratives in a nutshell
Solidarity in the European Union and the resilience of the state as a communicative frame
The rise and fall of liberal aspirations in international politics
The concept of aspirational politics has intrigued scholars of international policy fields in which noble goals contrast with poor performance. In this article, we examine two aspects of aspirational politics that have found little attention so far. First, as aspirations are formulated vaguely we need to trace their shifting meaning over time. To shed light on such shifts we analyse the career of ‘good governance’ at the United Nations (UN) betwe…
Steve Bannon on ‘productive capitalism
In this article we explore the economic thinking of the American populist right and the reservoir of ideological tropes that it draws on. We start with Steve Bannon and show how he narrates a binary distinction between a healthy, productive capitalism and a perverted, speculative capitalism. While speculative capitalism is attributed to globalist elites and parasitic minorities in the US, productive capitalism is defined as the home-grown America…
Salient discourses in international society
Triangulating the Legitimacy of International Organizations
It is commonplace to say that international organizations (IOs) face a legitimacy crisis because they are perceived as undemocratic, unaccountable, and inefficient. Plausible as it may seem, this still must count as a conjecture. In this article, I review the rapidly growing literature that has explored this connection empirically. I follow three strands of research that approach the legitimacy of IOs from different angles. The first strand explo…
Is There Still a German IR Discourse? Investigations in the Semi-Periphery of an Academic Discipline
In non-English-speaking countries, international relations (IR) scholars often face considerable pressure to publish in international journals and address international debates. At the same time, they are expected to cater to national publics, politicians, and funding agencies. In this article, we investigate how German IR scholars navigate this terrain and whether a national IR discourse still exists in Germany. To answer this question, we analy…
Emergency Politics After Globalization
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…
It's Ordered Chaos
This forum reimagines polycentric governance. It develops ideas of “ordered polycentrism” that can help international relations scholarship make fuller sense of contemporary governance of global affairs. How can we theorize the implicit bonding forces that bring deeper order to the surface disorganization of polycentric governance? We offer a key corrective to actor-focused institutionalist understandings by showing how polycentrism also involves…
International Organization As Technocratic Utopia
The Standardization of “Good Governance” in the Age of Reflexive Modernity
Standards, indicators, and benchmarks are well-studied instruments of global governance. What has received less attention so far is the trend toward the standardization of governance itself. Catalogs of “good governance” are drawn up for universal use and promise to optimize the processes of governance. International organizations, development agencies, and academics compile such catalogs to make the quality of governance measurable, comparable, …
Terminological Entrepreneurs and Discursive Shifts in International Relations
The disciplinary history of international relations (IR) is usually told as a succession of theories or “isms” that are connected to academic schools. Echoing the increasing criticism of this narrative, we present in this article a new perspective on the discipline. We introduce concepts from linguistics and its method of digital discourse analysis (DDA) to explore discursive shifts and terminological entrepreneurship in IR. DDA directs attention…
The limits of proceduralism
‘Throughput legitimacy’ is among the most successful conceptual innovations that scholars of public policy and administration have produced in recent years. I argue that this new understanding of legitimacy needs to be seen in the context of an increasing proceduralism in political science and public administration. Throughput legitimacy attracted so much attention because it is the perfect normative companion to the analytical concept of governa…
The social-democratic roots of global governance
Welfare internationalism was and still is one of the most powerful justifications for establishing international organizations. It suggests that public international organizations should cater to the material needs of individuals, rather than solve conflicts among states. In this article, we trace the origins of welfare internationalism, challenging the dominant narrative that depicts it as a projection of the British welfare state or the America…
International Organizations and Bureaucratic Modernity
Experiments in international administration
In this article, we reintroduce the political thought of James Arthur Salter (1881–1975), a British diplomat, politician, and university professor, who made a seminal contribution to the emergence of International Relations theory in the interwar years. His academic writings were informed by his professional engagement with the Allied Maritime Transport Council (AMTC) during the First World War and the technical branches of the League of Nations.…
The output legitimacy of international organizations and the global public interest
In this article I seek to expand our understanding of the output legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). At the conceptual level, I refute the widespread view that output legitimacy is just a synonym for organizational effectiveness or efficiency. I argue instead that output legitimacy has an important democratic dimension. The touchstone of ‘democratic output legitimacy’ is the extent to which systems of governance produce results that …
Fascist Internationalism
In 1934, the Italian diplomat and scholar Giuseppe de Michelis (1872−1951) published a programmatic book that in English was called ‘World Reorganisation on Corporative Lines’. In this study, de Michelis suggested transferring the socio-economic model of fascist Italy to the global level. He thus envisaged global economic governance by a powerful international organisation and a strict limitation of national sovereignty over the factors of produc…
Max Weber, modernity and the project of international organization
In this essay I discuss programmatic proposals for international organization in the light of Max Weber's account of modernity. I argue that the authors known in international relations (IR) as 'functionalists' have pursued the extension of the modernization process that Weber analysed in national societies into the international sphere. Between 1900 and 1945, functionalists advocated a transformation of international politics, at that time still…
The cosmopolitanism of David Mitrany
In this article, I engage with the normative foundations of David Mitrany's international political theory. My aim is to show that there is more to be found in Mitrany's approach to international organization than the technocratic problem-solving often associated with his name today. To pinpoint the essence of Mitrany's normative thought, I introduce the term 'functional cosmopolitanism'. This variety of cosmopolitan theorizing starts from the eq…
Explaining cooperation between IGOs and NGOs – push factors, pull factors, and the policy cycle
The ever closer collaboration between intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is empirically well described but poorly theorised. In this article I develop a general theoretical framework for analysing emergent patterns of cooperation between IGOs and NGOs, which may be used to generate hypotheses or guide comparatives studies. The starting point is a conception of organisational actors as purposeful but r…
Do members make a difference? A study of Transnational Civil Society Organizations
Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play an active role in European and global governance, and many commentators see them as a link that connects the international level with citizens. But not all CSOs active at the international level do have a substantial number of members. The question we investigate in this article is to what extent membership distinguishes these CSOs from other transnational actors. To what extent do member and non-member CSO…
Introduction
As non-governmental organisations (NGOs)1 are playing an increasingly important role in international governance, their legitimacy and accountability have become issues of concern to academic researchers, public commentators and activists alike. While early academic studies on the influence of NGOs in world politics saw them as being — at least on some issues — 'the conscience of the world' (Willets, 1996, p. 11), attitudes towards these organisa…
Evaluating Transnational NGOs
The pages you are holding have been regulated for you. Not by government, but by a web of organisations which are not directly accountable to you. If you are reading these words in a book, look at the inside cover. Was the pulp from a forest with socially and environmentally sound management practices? Many responsible publishers now only use paper endorsed by an international not-for-profit and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) called the Fores…
Civil Society in World Politics
Transnational civil society organizations (CSOs) are often said to lack accountability. Taking issue with this claim, we report the results of a study on the accountability regimes of 60 transnational CSOs engaging in political advocacy. We scrutinize their transparency, opportunities for internal participation, evaluations and self-regulation, complaint procedures, and their independence from the state and intergovernmental organizations. We fin…
Global Governance, Participation and the Public Sphere
We argue that the democratization of global governance will ultimately depend upon the creation of an appropriate public sphere that connects decision-making processes with transnational constituency. The emergence of such a public sphere would require more transparency in international organizations as well as institutional settings in which policy-makers respond to stakeholders’ concerns. Organized civil society plays a key role by exposing glo…
The Legitimation of International Governance
This article presents a discourse approach to the study of legitimacy of governance beyond the democratic state. It starts from the empirical question of how international organizations legitimate their own activities and how they create perceptions of legitimacy in the absence of democratic participation and control. In answering this question the article draws on elements from Max Weber's theory of rational legal domination and on Jürgen Haberm…
Accountability or “Good Decisions”? The Competing Goals of Civil Society Participation in International Governance
Civil society participation in international and European governance is often promoted as a remedy to its much-lamented democratic deficit. We argue in this paper that this claim needs refinement because civil society participation may serve two quite different purposes: it may either enhance the democratic accountability of intergovernmental organisations and regimes, or the epistemic quality of rules and decisions made within them. In comparing…
Assessing the Democratic Quality of Deliberation in International Governance
Discursive legitimation in environmental governance
The output legitimacy of international organizations and the global public interest
In this article I seek to expand our understanding of the output legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). At the conceptual level, I refute the widespread view that output legitimacy is just a synonym for organizational effectiveness or efficiency. I argue instead that output legitimacy has an important democratic dimension. The touchstone of ‘democratic output legitimacy’ is the extent to which systems of governance produce results that …
Public Accountability and the Public Sphere of International Governance
In much of the current literature on global and European governance, “public accountability” has come to mean accountability to national executives, to peers, to courts, and even to markets. I argue that such a re-conceptualization of “public accountability” as an umbrella term blurs a crucial dimension of the original concept: the critical scrutiny of citizens and the collective evaluation of government through public debate. In this article I c…
The limits of proceduralism
‘Throughput legitimacy’ is among the most successful conceptual innovations that scholars of public policy and administration have produced in recent years. I argue that this new understanding of legitimacy needs to be seen in the context of an increasing proceduralism in political science and public administration. Throughput legitimacy attracted so much attention because it is the perfect normative companion to the analytical concept of governa…
Fascist Internationalism
In 1934, the Italian diplomat and scholar Giuseppe de Michelis (1872−1951) published a programmatic book that in English was called ‘World Reorganisation on Corporative Lines’. In this study, de Michelis suggested transferring the socio-economic model of fascist Italy to the global level. He thus envisaged global economic governance by a powerful international organisation and a strict limitation of national sovereignty over the factors of produc…
Explaining cooperation between IGOs and NGOs – push factors, pull factors, and the policy cycle
The ever closer collaboration between intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is empirically well described but poorly theorised. In this article I develop a general theoretical framework for analysing emergent patterns of cooperation between IGOs and NGOs, which may be used to generate hypotheses or guide comparatives studies. The starting point is a conception of organisational actors as purposeful but r…
Emergency Politics After Globalization
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…
Incomplete agreements and the limits of persuasion in international politics
It's Ordered Chaos
This forum reimagines polycentric governance. It develops ideas of “ordered polycentrism” that can help international relations scholarship make fuller sense of contemporary governance of global affairs. How can we theorize the implicit bonding forces that bring deeper order to the surface disorganization of polycentric governance? We offer a key corrective to actor-focused institutionalist understandings by showing how polycentrism also involves…
The Standardization of “Good Governance” in the Age of Reflexive Modernity
Standards, indicators, and benchmarks are well-studied instruments of global governance. What has received less attention so far is the trend toward the standardization of governance itself. Catalogs of “good governance” are drawn up for universal use and promise to optimize the processes of governance. International organizations, development agencies, and academics compile such catalogs to make the quality of governance measurable, comparable, …
Triangulating the Legitimacy of International Organizations
It is commonplace to say that international organizations (IOs) face a legitimacy crisis because they are perceived as undemocratic, unaccountable, and inefficient. Plausible as it may seem, this still must count as a conjecture. In this article, I review the rapidly growing literature that has explored this connection empirically. I follow three strands of research that approach the legitimacy of IOs from different angles. The first strand explo…
Civil Society in World Politics
Transnational civil society organizations (CSOs) are often said to lack accountability. Taking issue with this claim, we report the results of a study on the accountability regimes of 60 transnational CSOs engaging in political advocacy. We scrutinize their transparency, opportunities for internal participation, evaluations and self-regulation, complaint procedures, and their independence from the state and intergovernmental organizations. We fin…
Max Weber, modernity and the project of international organization
In this essay I discuss programmatic proposals for international organization in the light of Max Weber's account of modernity. I argue that the authors known in international relations (IR) as 'functionalists' have pursued the extension of the modernization process that Weber analysed in national societies into the international sphere. Between 1900 and 1945, functionalists advocated a transformation of international politics, at that time still…
The cosmopolitanism of David Mitrany
In this article, I engage with the normative foundations of David Mitrany's international political theory. My aim is to show that there is more to be found in Mitrany's approach to international organization than the technocratic problem-solving often associated with his name today. To pinpoint the essence of Mitrany's normative thought, I introduce the term 'functional cosmopolitanism'. This variety of cosmopolitan theorizing starts from the eq…
Do members make a difference? A study of Transnational Civil Society Organizations
Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play an active role in European and global governance, and many commentators see them as a link that connects the international level with citizens. But not all CSOs active at the international level do have a substantial number of members. The question we investigate in this article is to what extent membership distinguishes these CSOs from other transnational actors. To what extent do member and non-member CSO…
Terminological Entrepreneurs and Discursive Shifts in International Relations
The disciplinary history of international relations (IR) is usually told as a succession of theories or “isms” that are connected to academic schools. Echoing the increasing criticism of this narrative, we present in this article a new perspective on the discipline. We introduce concepts from linguistics and its method of digital discourse analysis (DDA) to explore discursive shifts and terminological entrepreneurship in IR. DDA directs attention…
Experiments in international administration
In this article, we reintroduce the political thought of James Arthur Salter (1881–1975), a British diplomat, politician, and university professor, who made a seminal contribution to the emergence of International Relations theory in the interwar years. His academic writings were informed by his professional engagement with the Allied Maritime Transport Council (AMTC) during the First World War and the technical branches of the League of Nations.…
Why IR Needs Legitimacy
No abstract available
Steve Bannon on ‘productive capitalism
In this article we explore the economic thinking of the American populist right and the reservoir of ideological tropes that it draws on. We start with Steve Bannon and show how he narrates a binary distinction between a healthy, productive capitalism and a perverted, speculative capitalism. While speculative capitalism is attributed to globalist elites and parasitic minorities in the US, productive capitalism is defined as the home-grown America…
Salient discourses in international society
Is There Still a German IR Discourse? Investigations in the Semi-Periphery of an Academic Discipline
In non-English-speaking countries, international relations (IR) scholars often face considerable pressure to publish in international journals and address international debates. At the same time, they are expected to cater to national publics, politicians, and funding agencies. In this article, we investigate how German IR scholars navigate this terrain and whether a national IR discourse still exists in Germany. To answer this question, we analy…
The Legitimation of International Governance
This article presents a discourse approach to the study of legitimacy of governance beyond the democratic state. It starts from the empirical question of how international organizations legitimate their own activities and how they create perceptions of legitimacy in the absence of democratic participation and control. In answering this question the article draws on elements from Max Weber's theory of rational legal domination and on Jürgen Haberm…
Global Governance, Participation and the Public Sphere
We argue that the democratization of global governance will ultimately depend upon the creation of an appropriate public sphere that connects decision-making processes with transnational constituency. The emergence of such a public sphere would require more transparency in international organizations as well as institutional settings in which policy-makers respond to stakeholders’ concerns. Organized civil society plays a key role by exposing glo…
Why IR Needs Legitimacy
No abstract available
Incomplete agreements and the limits of persuasion in international politics
Assessing the Democratic Quality of Deliberation in International Governance
Embedded Liberalism and its Critics
Focusing on the development of justificatory discourse on global governance, Steffek examines how differing conceptions of distributive and social justice have played a role in negotiations in the domains of security, economics, and protecting the environment. The nuanced discussion of the interaction between the United States and other countries enhances understanding of the dynamics of international relations.
Embedded Liberalism and Its Critics
Focusing on the development of justificatory discourse on global governance, this book examines how differing conceptions of distributive and social justice have played a role in negotiations in the domains of security, economics, and protecting the environment
Legitimacy in an Age of Global Politics
In spite of the lack of plausible alternatives to liberal democracy, the age of globalization has ushered in serious challenges to the democratic legitimacy of the nation state. The contributors in th
Civil Society Participation in European and Global Governance
It is often argued that the enhanced consultation of civil society contributes to the democratization of European and global governance. This collection investigates whether this theoretical argument
Discursive legitimation in environmental governance
Accountability or “Good Decisions”? The Competing Goals of Civil Society Participation in International Governance
Civil society participation in international and European governance is often promoted as a remedy to its much-lamented democratic deficit. We argue in this paper that this claim needs refinement because civil society participation may serve two quite different purposes: it may either enhance the democratic accountability of intergovernmental organisations and regimes, or the epistemic quality of rules and decisions made within them. In comparing…
Introduction
As non-governmental organisations (NGOs)1 are playing an increasingly important role in international governance, their legitimacy and accountability have become issues of concern to academic researchers, public commentators and activists alike. While early academic studies on the influence of NGOs in world politics saw them as being — at least on some issues — 'the conscience of the world' (Willets, 1996, p. 11), attitudes towards these organisa…
Evaluating Transnational NGOs
The pages you are holding have been regulated for you. Not by government, but by a web of organisations which are not directly accountable to you. If you are reading these words in a book, look at the inside cover. Was the pulp from a forest with socially and environmentally sound management practices? Many responsible publishers now only use paper endorsed by an international not-for-profit and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) called the Fores…
Civil Society in World Politics
Transnational civil society organizations (CSOs) are often said to lack accountability. Taking issue with this claim, we report the results of a study on the accountability regimes of 60 transnational CSOs engaging in political advocacy. We scrutinize their transparency, opportunities for internal participation, evaluations and self-regulation, complaint procedures, and their independence from the state and intergovernmental organizations. We fin…
Public Accountability and the Public Sphere of International Governance
In much of the current literature on global and European governance, “public accountability” has come to mean accountability to national executives, to peers, to courts, and even to markets. I argue that such a re-conceptualization of “public accountability” as an umbrella term blurs a crucial dimension of the original concept: the critical scrutiny of citizens and the collective evaluation of government through public debate. In this article I c…
Explaining cooperation between IGOs and NGOs – push factors, pull factors, and the policy cycle
The ever closer collaboration between intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is empirically well described but poorly theorised. In this article I develop a general theoretical framework for analysing emergent patterns of cooperation between IGOs and NGOs, which may be used to generate hypotheses or guide comparatives studies. The starting point is a conception of organisational actors as purposeful but r…
Do members make a difference? A study of Transnational Civil Society Organizations
Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play an active role in European and global governance, and many commentators see them as a link that connects the international level with citizens. But not all CSOs active at the international level do have a substantial number of members. The question we investigate in this article is to what extent membership distinguishes these CSOs from other transnational actors. To what extent do member and non-member CSO…
The output legitimacy of international organizations and the global public interest
In this article I seek to expand our understanding of the output legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). At the conceptual level, I refute the widespread view that output legitimacy is just a synonym for organizational effectiveness or efficiency. I argue instead that output legitimacy has an important democratic dimension. The touchstone of ‘democratic output legitimacy’ is the extent to which systems of governance produce results that …
Fascist Internationalism
In 1934, the Italian diplomat and scholar Giuseppe de Michelis (1872−1951) published a programmatic book that in English was called ‘World Reorganisation on Corporative Lines’. In this study, de Michelis suggested transferring the socio-economic model of fascist Italy to the global level. He thus envisaged global economic governance by a powerful international organisation and a strict limitation of national sovereignty over the factors of produc…
Max Weber, modernity and the project of international organization
In this essay I discuss programmatic proposals for international organization in the light of Max Weber's account of modernity. I argue that the authors known in international relations (IR) as 'functionalists' have pursued the extension of the modernization process that Weber analysed in national societies into the international sphere. Between 1900 and 1945, functionalists advocated a transformation of international politics, at that time still…
The cosmopolitanism of David Mitrany
In this article, I engage with the normative foundations of David Mitrany's international political theory. My aim is to show that there is more to be found in Mitrany's approach to international organization than the technocratic problem-solving often associated with his name today. To pinpoint the essence of Mitrany's normative thought, I introduce the term 'functional cosmopolitanism'. This variety of cosmopolitan theorizing starts from the eq…
Experiments in international administration
In this article, we reintroduce the political thought of James Arthur Salter (1881–1975), a British diplomat, politician, and university professor, who made a seminal contribution to the emergence of International Relations theory in the interwar years. His academic writings were informed by his professional engagement with the Allied Maritime Transport Council (AMTC) during the First World War and the technical branches of the League of Nations.…
International Organizations and Bureaucratic Modernity
The limits of proceduralism
‘Throughput legitimacy’ is among the most successful conceptual innovations that scholars of public policy and administration have produced in recent years. I argue that this new understanding of legitimacy needs to be seen in the context of an increasing proceduralism in political science and public administration. Throughput legitimacy attracted so much attention because it is the perfect normative companion to the analytical concept of governa…
The social-democratic roots of global governance
Welfare internationalism was and still is one of the most powerful justifications for establishing international organizations. It suggests that public international organizations should cater to the material needs of individuals, rather than solve conflicts among states. In this article, we trace the origins of welfare internationalism, challenging the dominant narrative that depicts it as a projection of the British welfare state or the America…
Political science (35 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Politics (31 works) · Law (29 works) · Law (24 works) · Economics (17 works) · Public Administration (17 works) · Political economy (16 works) · Corporate governance (15 works) · Public Administration (15 works)