Life on the Legitimacy Frontier: understanding the authority struggle between the UN Security Council and the Office of the Ombudsperson Speakers: Dr Anette Stimmer and Professor Christian Kreuder-Sonnen

At this CGLG event, we will discuss Professor Christian Kreuder-Sonnen's (Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena) and Anette Stimmer's (University of St Andrews) paper on the relationship between the UN Security Council (UNSC) and the Office of the Ombudsperson (OO).

Since its creation in 2009, the UNSC's Office of the Ombudsperson (OO) has been locked in a protracted struggle with its principal. While the Council repeatedly sought to curtail the Ombudsperson's autonomy, through restrictive mandates, poor working conditions and delayed appointments, the eminent jurists heading the Office have learned to ‘fight back' through subtle institutional maneuvers, public reporting and quiet diplomacy. Despite recurrent attempts at undermining it, the OO has become a surprisingly solid and effective corrective in the UN's counterterrorism regime.

This dynamic is puzzling: rather than a clear-cut case of principal control or agency slack, the relationship between the UNSC and the OO unfolds as a tacit and iterative contest over authority. Christian and Anette argue that this pattern results from the mediation of the principal/agent relationship by external legitimacy audiences, notably courts and advocacy networks, that constrain the Council's capacity for control while providing the OO with normative resources to resist. These audiences define the bounds of acceptable action, within which both actors navigate a precarious equilibrium — what we call the legitimacy frontier.

Drawing on semi-structured elite interviews with Ombudspersons, UN officials and state representatives, Christian and Anette's paper traces this legitimacy-mediated struggle to theorize how IO authority evolves under normative constraint.