Continuing the strands of discussion laid out in chapter 7, this chapter will focus on an international administration's capacity to engender normative change in order to affect the belief system upon which legitimacy is said to be founded. This is necessary as we have approached legitimacy in terms of political assessment but have neglected normative points of convergence on which it might be possible to appraise the legitimacy of a particular institution or action in terms of their ‘lawfulness’. For the legitimacy of UN imperium and its legal order another formal characteristic is important – the positivity of enacted law. As a criterion that contributes to the legitimation of governance, legal formalism is believed to offer precise and unambiguous rules prescribing obligatory conduct and thus a technical–rational process for decision-making. Following an understanding of the concept of legitimacy which we hold to be posited at the intersection of norms and their perception, the following exposé complements the ‘perspectival’ view with a more rule-based approach.