We the Peoples of the United Nations

Abstract The democratic deficit of international organizations (IOs) partly resides in the lack of constituent authorship of the people subject to their law. A key point in proposals for the reform of IOs pertains to the re-institution of their instituent peoples into instituted publics. Most proposals suffer from two blind spots, however. First of all, they situate the instituent powers of IOs ‘beyond the state’ as if IOs’ Member States’ peoples and publics were not themselves re-instituted at the same time. Second, they overlook the representative, and hence re-institutive, dimension of the participation of multiple civil society organizations in IOs. In so doing, they neglect not only the potential of ‘multi-public’ representation in and by IOs but also the compensatory role of civil representation therein. The proposal to reorganize IOs as ‘multipartite’ representation system is illustrated in two UN specialized agencies: the International Labour Organization and the World Health Organization.