Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: No abstract available at this time.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: As non-sovereign bodies, international organizations like the United Nations lack the power to coerce, bribe or buy compliance with international norms. Their only source of power is their capacity to mobilize support on the basis of legitimacy. The paper examines theories of power to set out the role of legitimate power in governance and looks at how it has been and could be used by international organizations and civil society to constrain the actions of hegemons. By examining the role of legitimation as part of the creation and maintenance of international regimes, the paper will argue that evidence will show that hegemons have needed international legitimacy in order to maintain their own power and that, as a result, organizations that can convey it will have their own kind of power.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This contribution seeks to find a fruitful synthesis between Max Weber’s legitimacy theory and the conception of legitimacy in the so-called ‘communicative paradigm’. At first sights such a synthesis seems unlikely to be fruitful, for Weber analyses legitimacy as an ideal-type whereas it is generally conceived of as a discursive phenomenon in the communicative paradigm. It will be argued however that Weber offers a number of insights that are useful to the development of communication oriented legitimacy theory. In Economy and Society, for example, he states that “…in principle, a system of rationally debatable ‘reasons’ stands behind every act of bureaucratic administration.” This means that in Weber's view modern government must always (in ideal-typical sense) be accompanied by processes of rational justification; discourses in which the legitimacy of acts of bureaucratic administration is defended. More importantly the author gives incentives to understanding how these processes of rational justification take place. More specifically, Weber’s claim that formal rationality is accompanied by anti-formal (substantive) tendencies will prove to be a crucial insight, for example to understand the discourse in which the legitimacy of European governance is at stake.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Strict adherence to the written word is, on Weber?s account, a feature that accounts for bureaucracy?s efficiency. Yet writing carries a risk that the linguistic sign might arrest the gaze, introducing contingency and ambiguity in administration.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Anti-Muslim/anti-Arab racism is an important ideological weapon of US imperialism today. Anti-Muslim racism demonizes one-fourth of the world's population, many of whom live in societies where two-thirds of the world's oil is located. It also justifies increasing police state measures at home.

During the Cold War, the United States supported Islamic political movements as anti-communist forces. As Mahmoud Mamdani has shown (in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim), the US created armed terrorist groups of Muslims to bring down the Soviet backed government in Afghanistan. Similarly, Israel encouraged Islamic groups to weaken secular nationalist opponents of Zionist domination of Palestine.

In the post 9/11 world, however, the US and Israel are using an ideology of anti-Muslim racism in their efforts to consolidate hegemony in the Middle East. This recycles the orientalist ideology that has long served the interests of Western imperialism in the region.

The intellectual godfather of this ideology in the social sciences is Max Weber, which thus imposes upon sociologists a particular obligation to critique this ideology in its contemporary manifestations. The claim that Western culture possess a unique universality, the argument that Muslim societies have been unable to modernize and develop democratic institutions because Islam, unlike Christianity, never underwent a reformation, and the portrayal of Israel as a Western democracy surrounded by Palestinian/Arab/Muslim terrorists, are examples of the ideological assertions that are built upon the Eurocentric ideological constructions of Max Weber.