Context and Introduction

Political theorists and philosophers have long been interested in the question of the legitimacy of political authority, where it comes from and how it may be maintained or improved, from both instrumental and ethical perspectives. Normally, such debates were focused upon the state and the fulcrum of power, legitimacy and authority. They then extended to the development of international institutions and law to cement the architectures of legitimacy at the state level.

Legitimacy within the state is generally taken to refer to the justification for rule, which has normative and sociological dimensions, the first pointing to the importance of standards and, the second, to beliefs. In an ideal situation, standards and beliefs are mutually reinforcing and populations consent to those who claim authority over them. At the international level, legitimacy rests on the general consent of states, international law and the capacity of any agreement, organisation or treaty to deliver its objectives.Both levels are concerned with inducing a ‘constitutional moment’ at national and international levels (the latter emerging through the UN system, different types of international law, and regional organisations such as the European Union or, alternatively, African Union). Security actors are closely connected to this evolution, such as NATO, along with the development of supranational forms of foreign policy. Connecting both perspectives has long been thought to represent a virtuous circle for an otherwise opaque and imprecise concept. Likewise, policymakers and scholars from around the world have recently become more interested in these matters, especially in the light of various interventions in the post-Cold War world, to bring about peace, development, and to build better states.

However, legitimacy is far from being vague or imprecise and it can be disaggregated across scales and issues with some precision according to normative conceptions of historical, distributive, and social justice in and between societies. Contradictions creep in when these various scales are connected into a united whole at state level, or a universal framework at international level, distorted by power relations. This radically re-orients traditional conceptions of state legitimacy and state–society relations in the mould of Hobbes, Rousseau or Locke, or efficiency, or even international law.