Introduction: the politics of public justification

ABSTRACT

Introducing the special issue, this introduction sketches a broad frame for studying public justification. Addressing the relevance of studying this phenomenon, we contend that justificatory processes are very much at the core today’s politics. Defining the concept inclusively, we highlight the relevance of communicative agency and, at the same time, the salience of communicative contexts that enable this agency. Casting our net widely, we show how public justification is related to other, more thoroughly studied concepts, such as legitimacy, authority and power. Encouraging students of public justification to add to our understanding of justificatory processes, we highlight multiple fruitful methodological avenues for studying the concept.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication
• context
• legitimacy
• power
• public justification
• reasoning

Acknowledgements

This special issue started with a weekend workshop, hosted by the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination (LISD) at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. We thank the LISD Director, Professor Wolfgang Danspeckgruber and his team for their help and insights. Furthermore, we would like to thank the editors and reviewers of Contemporary Politics for excellent feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Uriel Abulof is a Senior Lecturer (US rank Associate Professor) of Politics at Tel-Aviv University and a research fellow at Princeton University’s LISD/Woodrow Wilson School and at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace. His books include The mortality and morality of nations (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Living on the edge: The existential uncertainty of Zionism (Haifa University Press, 2015), which received Israel’s best academic book award (Bahat Prize). He is also the co-editor of Self-determination: A double-edged concept (Routledge, 2016). Abulof is the recipient of the 2016 Young Scholar Award in Israel Studies. He studies political legitimation, existentialism, social movements, nationalism and ethnic conflicts. His articles have appeared in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of International Relations, Ethnic and Racial Studies and International Politics.

Markus Kornprobst is Professor of International Relations at the Vienna School of International Studies. Before coming to Vienna, he researched and taught at the Mershon Center at the OhioState University, the Department of Politics and International Relations at OxfordUniversity, and the School of Public Policy at University College London. His research interests encompass Diplomacy and Governance, International Communication, International Peace and Security, International Relations Theory, European Politics, and African Politics. His research appears in leading journals including International Organization, European Journal of International Relations and the Journal of Modern African Studies. He is the author of Irredentism in European Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2008), co-author of Understanding International Diplomacy (Routledge, 2013) as well as co-editor of Arguing Global Governance (Routledge, 2010) and Metaphors of Globalization (Palgrave, 2007).

Notes

1. More sophisticated – and less parsimonious – conceptualizations of rational choice have been around for a while, for instance, evolutionary game theory (Smith, 1972). But they continue to remain marginalized by their simpler variants.

2. Bourdieu’s field theory borrows heavily from rhetorical theory as well. Concepts such as nomos and doxa are taken from classic works on rhetoric, especially Aristotle (1995) and Sophistic thought (see Sprague, 1972).

3. In French (justifier) and German (rechtfertigen), this broader meaning of the term is more established than in the English language.

4. We borrow the term ‘constellations’ from Bernstein (1991), who is interested in how different sets of background ideas crisscross among communities.

5. While the assumption of ‘rationality’ is pivotal in Weber, his conceptualization of rationality clearly goes beyond material calculation to encompass morality (‘value-rationality’).

6. Conducting discourse-tracing may, but need not, be driven by the attempt to uncover ‘the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context’ (Van Dijk, 2003, p. 352).

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this special section was provided by the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination (LISD) at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, and the Vienna School of International Studies, Diplomatische Akademie Wien.