Communication, Legitimation and Morality in Modern Politics: Studying Public Justification

Why? This question drives scientific inquiry, not least in the social sciences: why war, revolution, racism and inequality? Asking and debating about ‘why?’, however, is not the prerogative of scholars; social actors, endowed with thought, reflection and speech, do it too. While we all dance to the beat of genes, emotions, identities and habituated norms, we occasionally stop to ask ‘why?’ The social sciences have been long preoccupied with the ostensibly objective ‘why’ while sidelining the social, intersubjective ‘why?’ This book focuses on the latter, analysing the social actors’ search for justification in their public, political sphere. Justifications, broadly understood, are answers to why-questions given and debated by social actors. The chapters focus on public justifications. While the contributors do not submit that private encounters addressing why-questions do not matter, they choose to put public encounters addressing these questions under scrutiny. Given the ongoing telecommunications revolution, and new political practices associated with it, these public encounters become increasingly pertinent in our evolving political orders.

This book originally published as a special issue in Contemporary Politics.

Uriel Abulof is a Senior Lecturer of Politics, teaching at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, and Princeton University, USA. He is the author of The Mortality and Morality of Nations (2015) and Living on the Edge: The Existential Uncertainty of Zionism (2016), which won Israel’s best academic book award (Bahat Prize). 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 holds the Chair in International Relations at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, Austria. He previously taught at the School of Public Policy at University College London and Magdalen College at Oxford University, UK. His research appears in leading journals in the discipline, such as International Organization, European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Review, Review of International Studies, and Millennium. He is the author of Irredentism in European Politics and co-editor of Metaphors of Globalization.