Diversification's legitimation challenges: ASEAN and its Myanmar predicament

Abstract

Abstract International organizations (IOs) confront complex legitimation challenges with the diversification of audiences and actors asserting judgment and input. Drawing on Lenz and Söderbaum's agents-audience-environment (AAE) conceptualization of legitimation strategies, this discussion advances understandings of how diversification affects IO legitimation and legitimation strategies. Particular attention is given to their special sensitivity to internal IO diversification processes whose constitutive changes affect both the agent and audience ends of strategy. It especially highlights three commonly found sources of internal IO diversification: domestic change, new membership and new purposes. Providing illustration is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its 30+ year-long efforts to defend and legitimate the organization's choices vis-à-vis its most internationally criticized member, Myanmar, and to manage the delegitimating effects of association. The discussion highlights three periods of contrasting internal diversification and effects on ASEAN's legitimation strategies: the first characterized by the least diversification and defiant affirmation of internal founding norms; the second by membership-, purpose- and audience-diversification, and strategies of reconciliation; and the third by diversification's accentuation of member-states' dual roles as agents and audiences of legitimation with growing reliance on informal workarounds, strategic ambiguation and defensive depoliticization as especially illustrated by ASEAN's responses to Myanmar's 2021 coup.