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How should the content and justification of action-guiding normative 'principles' in political life be responsive to social 'facts'? In this article, I answer this question by sketching a contextualist methodology for identifying and justifying principles for guiding international institutional action, which is based on an original account of the regulative role and conceptual structure of principles of political legitimacy. I develop my argument for this approach in three steps. First, I argue that a special non-utopian category of normative political principles has the regulatory role of helping solve collective action problems that emerge in practice among actors engaged in shared institutional projects. Next, I argue that analysis of such normative political principles can be helpfully framed by what I call a collective agency conception of political legitimacy. Finally, I draw out the implications of these claims to show how the content and justification of normative political principles should vary across institutional contexts, in response to a particular set of motivational and empirical social facts. This contextualist methodology has useful applications to international politics insofar it can help to account for the widespread intuition that standards of political legitimacy for institutions may vary both across domestic and international levels and among international institutions operating in different functional domains.

In this article, I address the question: what kind of normative principles should regulate the governance processes through which migration across international borders is managed? I begin by contrasting two distinct categories of normative controversy relating to this question. The first is a familiar set of moral controversies about justice within border governance, concerning what I call the ethics of exclusion. The second is a more theoretically neglected set of normative controversies about how institutional capacity for well functioning border governance can best be achieved, concerning what I call the constitution of control of international borders. I argue that progress can be made in resolving controversies of the latter kind by applying a new normative theory of political legitimacy, distinct from the moral theories of justice routinely applied to ethics of exclusion controversies. On the 'collective agency' model of political legitimacy that I propose here, principles of political legitimacy have the regulatory role of combating complex collective action problems that may otherwise impede an institution's collectively valuable functions. Through applying this theory, I sketch some provisional prescriptions for the design of international border governance institutions that may follow from the demand for strengthening their political legitimacy.