Introduction

Legitimacy continues to dominate a wide range of political and social debates. In peacebuilding and statebuilding studies, securing local legitimacy is considered crucial for the success of peacebuilding interventions. Across scholarly and policy community, the legitimacy of peacebuilding interventions is measured based on static frameworks, which consist of three major layers: the quality of good intentions; the successful performance in practice; and the perceived positive impact in overcoming conflict legacies and preventing the recurrence of violence. However, evidence from conflict-affected societies experiencing international intervention show that peacebuilding efforts have not managed to reach their desired goals, have not performed as expected, and often have contributed to adverse outcomes.If peacebuilding interventions are not managing to achieve their desired goals, how do they sustain their political legitimacy and justify their rule? To make sense of this condition of governing through failure, we must rethink the politics of legitimation in the context of peacebuilding and understand the social and political dynamics that underpin this mode of ruling. This chapter argues that legitimation is deeply relational and dialectical process. Contrary to many claims, legitimacy is not normative; rather, it is deeply anti-foundational. This, though, does not exclude the possibility that norms and values are used for the legitimation purpose. At best, legitimacy is a circular process of relational validation, acceptance and refusal. Relations are the source of agential empowerment and disempowerment. They are the essence of legitimation and delegitimation. Thus, only when conceiving legitimacy as relational, we can account for the complex and multi-dimensional dynamics of political acceptance, legitimation, validation, resistance and rejections in the context of peace interventions. This perspective contributes to and complements the concept of hybrid legitimacy put forward in the introduction of this volume to offer both conceptual nuances and empirical examples.

The international, the state and post-conflict subjects are all relational entities by nature. They are interdependent and constantly legitimise and delegitimise one another intentionally and unintentionally. Their meaning and identity derives from their relationships and the quality of relationships dictates their actions. Legitimacy in the context of post-conflict societies is essentially about balancing political dependency among competing power sources. Local legitimacy and consent is considered as important to foreign interveners because they justify interventions on the grounds of protecting local subjects in the aftermath of the conflict.