The word 'legitimacy' is seldom far from the lips of practitioners of international affairs. The legitimacy of recent events - such as the wars in Kosovo and Iraq, the post-September 11 war on terror, and instances of humanitarian intervention - have been endlessly debated by publics around the globe. And yet the academic discipline of IR has largely neglected this concept. This book encourages us to take legitimacy seriously, both as a facet of international behaviour with practical consequences, and as a theoretical concept necessary for understanding that behaviour. It offers a comprehensive historical and theoretical account of international legitimacy. It argues that the development of principles of legitimacy lie at the heart of what is meant by an international society, and in so doing fills a notable void in English school accounts of the subject. Part I provides a historical survey of the evolution of the practice of legitimacy from the 'age of discovery' at the end of the 15th century. It explores how issues of legitimacy were interwoven with the great peace settlements of modern history - in 1648, 1713, 1815, 1919, and 1945. It offers a revisionist reading of the significance of Westphalia - not as the origin of a modern doctrine of sovereignty - but as a seminal stage in the development of an international society based on shared principles of legitimacy. All of the historical chapters demonstrate how the twin dimensions of legitimacy - principles of rightful membership and of rightful conduct - have been thought about and developed in differing contexts. Part II then provides a trenchant analysis of legitimacy in contemporary international society. Deploying a number of short case studies, drawn mainly from the wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and the Kosovo war of 1999, it sets out a theoretical account of the relationship between legitimacy, on the one hand, and consensus, norms, and equilibrium, on the other. This is the most sustained attempt to make sense of legitimacy in an IR context. Its conclusion, in the end, is that legitimacy matters, but in a complex way. Legitimacy is not to be discovered simply by straightforward application of other norms, such as legality and morality. Instead, legitimacy is an inherently political condition. What determines its attainability or not is as much the general political condition of international society at any one moment, as the conformity of its specific actions to set normative principles.

This is a study of the theory and history of international norms. How does international society come to adopt certain norms in particular? This book shows how ideas of international legitimacy have evolved, and makes us rethink the nature of international society.

This book develops a conceptual model of legitimacy as a value-judgement in international relations in contrast to Weberian and legal approaches. The model is based on the interaction of the states-systemic value of order with a liberal ideal of the state and a free-market, liberal international economy. Whilst formulated as a principally Western model, the analysis of the rise and fall of Yugoslavia and the international response points towards a wider applicability as well as confirming the value of the concept as an analytical tool.

In spite of the lack of plausible alternatives to liberal democracy, the age of globalization has ushered in serious challenges to the democratic legitimacy of the nation state. The contributors in this collection explore the frontiers of normative and empirical legitimacy research, drawing upon a range of key conceptual and methodological issues.

In International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy Andrew C. Gilbert argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. He discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identifies key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. Gilbert highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds. Drawing upon nearly two years of fieldwork studying in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gilbert's probing analysis identifies previously overlooked sites, processes, and effects of international intervention, and suggests new comparative opportunities for the study of transnational action that seeks to save and secure human lives and improve the human condition. Above all, International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy foregrounds and analyzes the open-ended, innovative, and unpredictable nature of international intervention that is usually omitted from the ordered representations of the technocratic vision and the confident assertions of many critiques.

There has been intense debate in recent times over the legitimacy or otherwise of international law. This book contains fresh perspectives on these questions, offered at an international and interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law and International Law. At issue are questions including, for example, whether international law lacks legitimacy in general and whether international law or a part of it has yielded to the facts of power.

Although there is no international government, and no global police agency enforces the rules, nations obey international law. In this provocative study, Franck employs a broad range of historical, legal, sociological, anthropological, political, and philosophical modes of analysis to unravel the mystery of what makes states and people perceive rules as legitimate. Demonstrating that virtually all nations obey most rules nearly all of the time, Franck reveals that the more legitimate laws and institutions appear to be, the greater is their capacity for compliance. Distilling those factors which increase the perception of legitimacy, he shows how a community of rules can be fashioned from a system of sovereign states without creating a global leviathan.