Introduction

Legitimacy, along with security and democracy, is arguably one of the most widely used global buzzwords of our new millennium. The most dramatic focus of the battle for political legitimacy has been the Middle East and North Africa in the wake of the 2010–2011 Arab uprisings, yet that battle began well before the Tunisian trigger event on 17 December 2010, when street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in Sidi-Bouzid. It has been waged, often violently, in countries as diverse as Algeria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Palestine and Israel since at least the 1990s and in many cases earlier.

Intellectuals have long been targeted by authoritarian regimes whose legitimacy they challenge, and those targetings are impacting directly on us as we prepare this special issue of Global Discourse. Severe restrictions of academic freedom are experienced by our colleagues in Egypt, where strategies of intimidation of academics, journalists and intellectuals range from bans on entering the country (for those living abroad) to bans on travelling, intimidation, attempts to co-opt and even forced disappearances, detentions, torture and assassination. While the period from 2011 to 2013 witnessed an eruption of freedom and pluralism in Egypt, since 2013 there has been a restriction of the public sphere under neo-authoritarian rule (Jaquemond 2016; Fahmy 2016). However, Egypt is not the only country where academic freedom is under threat. Turkish colleagues are being persecuted by their government for speaking out against the latter’s treatment of Turkey’s Kurdish citizens. Several international petitions in protest have been launched in both cases. Within the international political science community, the decision by the executive of the International Political Science Association, concerned about the security of delegates, to relocate its 2016 conference from Istanbul to the Polish city of Poznań has sparked considerable controversy, having been seen by some Turkish colleagues as desolidarisation and by others as a signal of solidarity. Even within our own intellectual communities, legitimacy has become a vexed question.

It would be an error, however, to consider that the question of political legitimacy is simply a ‘Middle Eastern and North African’ problem. Debates over legitimacy have been waged in recent years in places as distant and different from each other as Argentina, Japan and the Philippines. Moreover, these debates have gripped the West since the beginning of our millennium as the ‘War on Terror’ waged by the US state and its allies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Southeast Asia has been challenged. More recently, the Global Financial Crisis, the World Social Forum and Occupy movements and Indignados movements in North America and Europe – and their recent reawakenings in France as ‘Nuit Debout’ – have led to questioning of the legitimacy of global capitalism and its echoes in the neoliberalisation of national institutions. Most recently, the legitimacy of the European Union’s responses to the Syrian refugee crisis and to terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels – a permanent ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2003) – has been called into question – as has the legitimacy of the EU itself, as the 23 June 2016 ‘Brexit vote’ has driven home.

Yet, the idea of political legitimacy is not new and has been constructed in different ways at different moments of modern history. Moments of great upheaval or structural change have been significant in shifting meanings of legitimacy, such as during the passage from the Ancien Régime to the First Republic in France, or at the moment of debates over succession to the Prophet in the Islamic world. State and non-state actors alike assert their own legitimacy and denounce the illegitimacy of their rivals.

The very term ‘legitimacy’ is polysemic. Although it derives etymologically from the Latin term legitimus, itself derived from lex (law), it has developed sociological, political and ethical connotations well beyond the juridical sphere. Today, ‘legitimacy’ variously denotes what is lawful, authorised or willed (by states, by various institutions, by ‘the people’, however constructed); accepted as conforming to agreed standards and practices; justified or reasonable (by various political, legal, cultural, social or ethical yardsticks) or indeed authentic – or all of these things at once. It imparts significant moral clout to any social or political actor that is perceived to be characterised by it. In our modern world, legitimacy is frequently allied to claims of national sovereignty and electoral mandates. Once posited, legitimacy is tacitly assumed to inhere in the action or institution so described and to need no further justification – or indeed, definition. Yet clearly, as the above examples show, what is legitimate for one will be illegitimate for others, and claims to democratic legitimacy of sovereign (or aspiring) states are no longer self-evident.

The contributors to this issue of Global Discourse, then, problematise this notion, from various contextual, standpoint, disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Why does the idea have such quasi-unimpeachable moral weight? Who is using the term, to what end, in what contexts? Within what logical, political, legal, economic, cultural or ideological frameworks are actions deemed to be legitimate or illegitimate? How do factors such as gender, culture, religion and socioeconomic or geopolitical status impact on how legitimacy is determined? Can one ever speak of an absolute legitimacy or illegitimacy? Or is legitimacy always contextual and contingent?

As can be expected, the role of the state looms large in all contributions, whether they are examining the functioning of states and their institutions, the state in relation to civil society or to subnational claims for self-determination, within a context of international or regional regulation, or indeed the state qua state, as a locus of legitimacy by definition. Anna Meine (2016) and Michael Strange (2016) ask how legitimacy is to be understood, politically and juridically, in a transnational context. Taking a relational approach, Meine (2016) examines the problems raised in considering legitimacy beyond the state, notably as concerns norms and as concerns democratic processes. Building on Linda Lyu’s critical approach to the politics of universalism in the Declaration of Human Rights, Jessica Whyte’s (2016) response to Meine emphasises that forms of resistance to the norm are emerging from outside Europe and America, and she suggests to overcoming colonial theoretical paradigms to further enrich the debate about transnational legitimacy. Michael Strange (2016) then discusses critiques of the World Trade Organisation’s claims to legitimacy through an examination of its dispute-settlement body and the discursive role of non-state actors, notably as concerns environmental and consumer protections. In reply, John Mikler (2016) argues that non-state actors have not managed to fundamentally change the conversation between the WTO and its state members.

Thomas Mercier’s (2016) article focuses on the legitimacy of the state qua state, with his Derrida-inspired discussion of the assumed relationship between legitimacy and sovereignty through the performative articulation of ‘legitimacy’ as a self-positioned sovereign authority. He contests this assumed relationship, which he suggests is dominant in International Relations theory, and posits a different articulation of legitimacy which lies in resistance to this performed sovereignty. In reply, Paul Rekret (2016) argues that such resistance nonetheless remains within the logic of the very sovereignty it contests and that overcoming this problem necessitates further reflection on the historical conditions in which the modern state came into existence.

The following two articles take a European focus. The first, by Leann Brown (2016), looks at European Union environmental policy. Brown argues that there is not one absolute yardstick of legitimacy in this area but ‘several evolving and interacting bases of legitimacies’ associated with different evaluation criteria, themselves in turn associated with different stakeholders. Rudi Wurzel (2016) welcomes this analysis as timely and insightful, although notes that the association of different types of legitimacy with different moments in the evolution of the EU can be problematic. He also suggests that perhaps Brown is over-optimistc in her conclusions, and draws attention to external actors’ evaluations of the legitimacy of EU environmental policy. Kathryn Crameri (2016) shifts the focus from EU-wide to subnational level, by examining the cases for and against a referendum on Catalan secession from Spain as two opposing legitimacy claims. In response, Neil Davidson (2016) reflects more closely on the Scottish case, to which Crameri also refers, in particular as regards the political and legal bases of nations and nationalism.

The four remaining articles in this special issue focus on the Middle East and North Africa, which is no doubt unsurprising, given the ongoing and often long-standing political contestations within this region, which have had often dramatic and indeed tragic impacts for populations. Aurora Sottimano’s (2016) article discusses various legitimacy claims within the Syrian civil conflict, in particular those made by the Assad regime and by external actors intervening in the country. Sottimano argues that the very notion of legitimacy within this context ‘is misleading because it downplays those power practices of discipline and normalisation which shore up the Syrian authoritarian regime and enforce compliance and acquiescence.’ Mathieu Rey (2016) agrees with this analysis, and he enriches the study of the Syrian crisis, situating it in a broader historical and regional perspective, where the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a turning point. Both Sottimano and Rey emphasise that the category of sectarianism is misleading and does not shed light on the Syrian case. They invite us to focus our political analysis on structural elements and discursive logics. In contrast, Giulia Daniele (2016) takes not the state but oppositional movements as her starting point. Her discussion of the Israeli left suggests that its claims to oppositional legitimacy are undermined by its lack of attention to the most marginalised groups, representing and promoting issues of intersectional injustice. Daniele’s analysis, which is grounded in feminist postcolonial theories, is questioned by Lana Tatour (2016), whose focus is rather on demands for decolonisation and deracialisation.

The final two articles in this issue are authored by its co-editors. They focus on the two key sites of the Arab uprisings and their aftermath: Egypt and Tunisia, in particular as concerns the experience of, and outcomes for, women. Tunisia was the trigger site for the uprisings, and the ostensible ‘success story’ of the ‘Arab spring,’ while Egypt became internationally emblematic of both the Arab world’s revolutionary potential and the violence of counterrevolution. Yet, Lucia Sorbera’s (2016) article on Egypt and Bronwyn Winter’s (2016a) article on Tunisia reveal some remarkable similarities between the two countries, and show that the legitimacy of states is always questionable when the full effects of citizenship are not enjoyed by women. Sorbera and Winter both focus on women’s political participation and violence against women as key yardsticks by which the success or otherwise of revolution, and the legitimacy or otherwise of states, can be assessed. Winter’s feminist approach to the concepts of democracy, human rights, legitimacy and women’s rights is further elaborated by Hajer Ben Hadj Salem (2016), whose response to Winter’s article is grounded in empirical studies published by Tunisian leading feminist organisations. Building on these data, Ben Salem’s response confirms the link between violence against women and lack of political representation. In addition, the two scholars share a critical vision on women’s participation in patriarchal organisations, such as the Islamist parties.

The book reviews, by Lori Allen (2016) (The Human Right to Dominate by Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon [2015]), Angela Joya (2016) (The Muslim Brotherhood: evolution of an Islamist Movement by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham [2013]), Mauro Moretti (2016) (Il Nemico in Politica. La delegittimazione dell’avversario nell’Italia contemporanea, by Fulvio Cammarano and Stefano Cavazza [2010]), Cai Wilkinson (2016) (Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia, by Valerie Sperling [2014]) and Bronwyn Winter (2016b) (Jewish Voices in Feminism: Transnational Perspectives by Nelly Las [2015]), survey the breadth of the literature on legitimacy, highlighting a range of contexts within which the concept is deployed and contested.

Taking a comparative, transnational and bottom-up approach to the study of political legitimacy, this special issue sheds light on multiple perceptions by different actors (institutions, civil society, majoritarian and minority subjects), analysing the notion of political legitimacy from a critical perspective. Questioning received wisdom or one-size-fits-all analyses, it leads to a reassessment of the link between legitimacy and sovereignty, and emphasises the demand by transnational civil societies to go beyond identity politics, which produce logics of violence.