Workshop: Democratic Governance and International Law: 25 Years Later

On November 3-4 2017, the Manchester International Law Centre will hold a workshop on "Democratic Governance and International Law: 25 Years Later." The program is here. Here's the idea:

In the second half of the 20th century, discourses about the requirement for States to comply with standards of democratic governance have acquired prominence in international thought and practice. Such discourses came to be nurtured by a dramatic wave of writings in the 1990s and 2000s. It is commonly said that such a turn in international legal scholarship was triggered by, inter alia, the 1992 seminal article The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance of Thomas Franck in the American Journal of International Law. The scholars concerned argued that the legitimacy of governments would increasingly be evaluated through democratic standards. They also advocated that the democratic character of the government is determinative of the effects of some key international legal rules.

Twenty-five years after the burgeoning in international legal thought and practice of discourses centred on democratic governance, the time has come to re-evaluate the debates, both in legal practice and legal scholarship, about the places, roles, agendas, successes, failures of democratic governance. This is why the Manchester International Law Centre (MILC) is organising a workshop dedicated to the question with a view to revisiting the state of the practice and debates about democratic governance in international law twenty-five years after this narrative gained grounds in international legal scholarship. The workshop aims to foster the debate about current problems surrounding the theory of democratic governance. The workshop will take a critical look at international legal discourses and practice pertaining to democratic governance, including the practice of the European Union.