Civil society legitimacy and nuclear non-proliferation

During recent years, civil society legitimacy has generated a growing interest in scholarly research. The present article therefore proposes four normative criteria, namely, independence, transparency, participation, and inclusion, in order to start assessing civil society legitimacy empirically. It does so by using the non-proliferation regime as a field of inquiry. In this context, four different advocacy NGOs active during the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty's review processes - MPI, IPPNW, WILPF, and the Friedenswerkstatt - are analysed. The results give a fairly good score for CSO legitimacy, but show that what seems to matter most in this regard is the organizational culture, rather than the organizational structure of an organization.