Speaker: Professor Brad R. Roth, Wayne State University 
Chair: Professor Colin Harvey, Queen’s University Belfast

The Cold War’s end prompted a wave of assertions that compliance with liberal-democratic norms would soon become the sine qua non of political legitimacy globally, with adverse consequences for non-compliant governments’ standing to assert sovereign prerogatives in the international order.  Authoritarianism’s resurgent appeal demonstrates that political legitimacy is not subject to such formulaic assessments. 

Moreover, international legal institutions, by appearing to subordinate state-level decision making at the behest of elites, may play a role in eroding popular regard for liberal-democratic values.  The international legal order’s interpreters might helpfully rediscover that order’s role as a framework of accommodation among non-like-minded actors.

Professor Brad R. Roth

Brad R. Roth is Professor of Political Science and Law at Wayne State University in Detroit. His scholarship applies political theory to problems in international and comparative public law, with a special focus on crises of political authority.  He is a Visiting Scholar at the Mitchell Institute. 

Brad is the author of Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law (Oxford University Press, 1999), Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement (Oxford University Press, 2011),  and a wide range of book chapters, journal articles, and commentaries dealing with questions of sovereignty, constitutionalism, human rights and democracy. 

Professor Colin Harvey

Mitchell Institute Fellow: Rights and Social Justice Colin Harvey is Professor of Human Rights Law and Director of the Human Rights Centre at Queen’s University Belfast and a Commissioner on the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission.