The simple horizontal and vertical alignment of multiple legitimacies into common, central authorities as the basis for an evolved and ethical peace appears to be an oversimplification of a very complex process. Too much substance is lost in its simplification, as is well illustrated in Roger Mac Ginty and Kristina Tschunkert's chapter on Lebanon, which follows Boege’s deployment of hybridity in understanding the realities of legitimate authority in modern conflict-affected societies. Visoka's chapter on Kosovo underlines the relationality of contemporary legitimate authority, something which peacebuilding has mostly missed, and all of the other chapters confirm variations of this theme. Much of this argumentation indicates that effective peacebuilding needs to understand the special complexities of relational political legitimacy across life-worlds and levels of analysis far better if it is to be more successful. A localised view of legitimacy creates a number of different and contradictory demands in the context of the nature of the state and its performance, as well as towards the international community. These point beyond the usual understandings of modern legitimacy emanating from civil society and within a liberal social contract, which may be weakly extended to international institutions and law, however, including the balancing of social justice and human rights with identity, long-standing institutions, patterns of authority and law.

It is clear that social legitimacy – perhaps linked to kinship, religion or identity – is not always aligned with the state or with international norms. Yet, international actors have intervened in the post-Cold War environment as if local and state forms of legitimacy authority should be aligned with international law and norms. Indeed, enormous efforts have been made by international actors in multiple contexts to try to train, mentor and encourage local forms of legitimacy to adapt to internationally-recognised forms. This institutional isomorphism seems to have failed to recognise that different types of legitimacy are at work in different domains and that all of them contribute to a complex assemblage of power, legitimacy, patronage and logics. The empirical evidence amassed so far shows that convergence is an unlikely goal, if not impossible, and that in fact the multiple forms of legitimacy at work in post-war contexts normally diverge. This implies that legitimacy is likely to rest on a divergence rather than convergence between custom, practice, national or international law, a very tricky proposition indeed for any rationality-based international order.