The long-winded attempts to find a multilateral solution for Kosovo's microcosm demonstrated that an impasse on the international negotiation plane regularly led to an institutional deadlock and the slowing down of reforms and standards implementation at the local level. The task of an international administration in managing an open-ended situation became more complex; its legitimacy in the eyes of the people it administers waned accordingly. Given the scope of authority the UN has taken upon itself to exercise in a territorial context, it is, however, surprising that the issue of the ‘legitimacy’ of the internationalisation of state structures through international post-conflict governance has so far inspired little debate beyond the old peacekeeping discourse. This chapter and chapter 8 hence turn ‘inwards’ in an attempt to define more succinctly the properties of a temporary coercive order established by an international territorial administration. Both are generally concerned with phenomena accompanying an international legal and political authority as it ‘meets’, and interlaces with, a municipal legal and political order.

Upon consideration, the metaphor of ‘encounter’ is not at all ill conceived.