Theorising the Politicisation of International Authority as Social Mobilisation

Why does the exercise of authority by international institutions sometimes incite political action by those over whom authority is exercised? As global governance increasingly seems to provoke critical reactions, a growing literature in IR suggests that the rising authority of global governance institutions (GGIs) leads to politicization and contestation in the form of increasing awareness and mobilization. However, thus far the politicization thesis has mainly been conceptualized in terms of a functionalist theory of exchanges between functionally differentiated sub-systems of modern society and correlations between abstract categories at the macro level. This raises a set of questions about the agents and causal mechanisms that actually propel the process of politicization. In order to address this challenge, this paper employs social mobilization theory to provide an account of politicization that takes questions of causality seriously, specifying a set of more detailed hypotheses on the conditions under which international authority may lead groups in civil society to mobilize or not and to choose one form of mobilization over another, and what shapes their likelihood of success. Specifically, we suggest that politicization can be conceptualized and operationalized as a process through which social groups mobilize to influence political outcomes and which is primarily shaped by how they frame the issues at stake, what mobilization resources they have at their disposal and the opportunities they face. We further expand the concept of opportunity by differentiating between political, legal and media opportunity as structurally distinct, multi-level arenas that may be more or less open and responsive to groups that seek to place political issues on the public agenda. This theoretical framework allows not only for a better understanding of the complex causal pathways governing the politicization of international authority but should also prove a valuable tool-kit for future empirical investigations of such processes.