According to Professor Hurd, “legitimacy is a belief on the part of people in the right of an institution to issue commands. It’s a belief in the rightfulness of an authority -- either an institution or a rule.” As a collection of subjective (and thus contested) beliefs, legitimacy is a source of power for political organizations like the UN which depend on persuasion -- rather than market-based incentives or military-based coercion -- to exercise influence. Professor Tyler, citing recent research, argued that legitimacy’s “rightfulness” comes from fair procedures in the creation of authorities. Professor Sterling added to these ideas by emphasizing the importance of accountability to democratic institutions’ legitimacy. And Mr. Riche cast UN legitimacy -- which stems from its “universal” representativeness -- as closely linked to effectiveness: “legitimacy is not a cure for ineffectiveness and ineffectiveness will eat away at legitimacy.”
As the panelists’ varying viewpoints illustrate -- and indeed, the reason Professor Hurd and Mr. Coicaud launched the UN legitimacy series -- the language of legitimacy is multifaceted and rife with tensions.
PANEL: Jean-Marc Coicaud, Co-organizer of the Legitimacy Series, Director of United Nations university in New York, and former speechwriter for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; Ian Hurd, Co-organizer of the Legitimacy Series, Professor of international relations at Northwestern University and visiting fellow at the Niehaus Center on Globalization and Governance at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton university; Roland Paris, Director of the Center for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa; and Leanne Smith, Deputy Chief of UN Peacekeeping Best Practices, Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).
PROFESSOR HURD kicked off the series’ third installment by reiterating his definition of legitimacy, “the belief that a rule or institution ought to be respected, the belief in a person that authority is rightfully located in a rule or in an institution.” One thread that follows from this conception, he argues, is that “it gives people a reason to acquiesce to powerful institutions. And so in one lens it is a tool for social order, a social control mechanism for those in power. But it can also be a tool for resistance to those in power where the belief vanishes as we see in many domestic settings [i.e. North Africa and the Middle East], and those in power lose a good deal of their influence.” From this view, then, legitimacy rests with an authority’s followers, whose beliefs are multiple and complicated since different audiences necessarily hold different beliefs.
With respect to peace operations there are at least two main audiences, according to Professor Hurd: players at the UN and players in capitals, both of whose conceptions of legitimacy and the process of legitimation differ greatly. Indeed, a closer look reveals a more nuanced landscape of audiences, as panelists point out below.
Mr. COICAUD laid out two reasons for discussing legitimacy and peace operations. First, collective security is a fundamental aim of the UN mandate, and peacekeeping operations are a key tool for implementing collective security in the UN context. To demonstrate the significance of peacekeeping missions, Mr. Coicaud recalls that their underperformance became a sort of proxy for the legitimacy of the UN as a whole during the 1990s, largely due to media coverage. Second, post-peacekeeping activities, or state-building, have become a key part of ensuring conflict regions do not relapse into violence.
These considerations raise a number of questions: Whose conception of legitimacy is the UN aspiring to build in host countries? Is it compatible with local traditions? Should it be compatible with local traditions, if they contradict UN ideas about human rights?
PROFESSOR ROLAND PARIS, the guest academic of the day, took up some of Mr. Coicaud’s questions, offering a pragmatic, if not gloomy, view of the prospects for UN legitimacy in peace operations. Regarding peacebuilding, he notes, the UN has had a tendency to emphasize liberal democracy as a means of legitimating budding governments. Yet “if we determine legitimacy in terms of rightful authority in the eyes of those who are subject to that authority, then by that definition at least, it’s entirely possible for governments to be legitimate without being western democratic.” In his eyes, peacebuilders would be better off supporting nascent governments “through the process of articulating and reconciling their own internally competing vision of political legitimacy while at the same time mediating between this domestic process and international standards of legitimacy, including fundamental human rights.”
According to Professor Paris, four implications stem from the idea that legitimacy is a confluence of multiple, competing beliefs about what constitutes rightful political authority. First, legitimacy problems are unlikely to be resolved in any kind of final way; more likely, their resolution will be provisional and subject to revision and adjustment. Peacebuilders would thus be better served, he suggests, thinking about ways to promote an ongoing dialogue between competing factions instead of focusing on one-shot, inflexible constitutional fixes.
Second, the tendency to over-rely on liberal democracy as a means of legitimation should be reexamined: hybrid political regimes of traditional and imported components should be studied for their contribution to legitimacy and effectiveness, rather than viewed as incomplete because they do not reflect model western political systems. However, he cautions, the hybrid approach should not be used as an excuse to condone repressive practices; nor should it be romanticized. Third, a more experimental approach (in contrast to the relying on “best practices”) may be better suited to state-building’s complexities, many of which are as yet unknown. Finally, actors in the peacebuilding community must calibrate their expectations, keeping in mind that state-building is not a science; setbacks are inherent to the process.
LEANNE SMITH, the panel’s guest practitioner, offered an inside perspective on UN legitimacy and peace operations. From her vantage point as Deputy Chief of Peacekeeping Best Practices, all peace operations enjoy two sources of legitimacy from the outset. First, since missions are deployed on the basis of Security Council resolutions, they have a high degree of legitimacy under international law. Second, peacekeeping missions have historically benefitted from a uniquely broad-based representation of Member States, both in terms of personnel and funding.
Nonetheless, peace operations face a storm of legitimacy challenges. First and foremost is the need to cater simultaneously to a number of diverse audiences, some of which include the Security Council; the C-34 Special Committee on Peacekeeping (an oversight body); the host government; parties to the conflict; and host populations.
Other challenges to legitimacy include the UNSC’s tendency to draft unachievable mandates; an emerging trend whereby peace operations’ contributors are drawn more and more from the global South, thus undermining the broad-based participation angle that has legitimated missions of the past; “getting the footprint right,” or balancing the need to supply adequate resources to meet conditions on the ground while not appearing or acting overly intrusive; and finally, fostering positive relations between host country populations and UN personnel, especially after the well-documented sexual abuse of local women by peacekeepers.
Efforts are being undertaken to address these and other challenges, according to Ms. Smith: DPKO has implemented a zero tolerance policy regarding sexual exploitation; her office is creating new incentives to attract more broad-based contribution to peace operations, as well working with the Security Council and the Secretariat to produce more realistic mandates; and hybrid missions--such as UNAMID in Darfur, a joint UN/African Union (AU) operation--are being used as a novel approach (in line with Professor Paris’s suggestion) to achieve the right footprint in the field.
Settling on Legitimacy
Panelists identified multiple audiences -- with differing conceptions of legitimacy -- as one of the greatest challenges to the legitimacy of peace operations. To overcome this Herculean challenge, Professor Paris suggested the need for domestic audiences to articulate and reconcile their divergent views of legitimacy, while at the same time mediating those views with international standards such as fundamental human rights. Another key audience is the global public (i.e. the collection of national publics), whose perception of peace operations is largely shaped by “if it bleeds, it leads” media coverage. In effect, Mr. Coicaud pointed out, widely publicized peacekeeping failures can reflect negatively on the UN as a whole.
Nevertheless, according to Ms. Smith, broad-based support from Member States and UNSC authorization endows a degree of legitimacy to all peace operations. However, maintaining this legitimacy in the face of a multitude of challenges -- ranging from the need to pacify divergent audiences to ensuring operations are adequately supplied -- is a challenge in itself. Thus, it is difficult to say whether peace operations spend more time attempting to build legitimacy or trying not to lose it. A few of things are certain: peace operations are highly susceptible to delegitimation, impervious to quick fixes, and fundamentally factional.
Next Week: Part IV of the legitimacy series will explore legitimacy of the Security Council.
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The UN Legitimacy Series, Part III: Peace Operations
July 19, 2011
According to Professor Hurd, “legitimacy is a belief on the part of people in the right of an institution to issue commands. It’s a belief in the rightfulness of an authority -- either an institution or a rule.” As a collection of subjective (and thus contested) beliefs, legitimacy is a source of power for political organizations like the UN which depend on persuasion -- rather than market-based incentives or military-based coercion -- to exercise influence. Professor Tyler, citing recent research, argued that legitimacy’s “rightfulness” comes from fair procedures in the creation of authorities. Professor Sterling added to these ideas by emphasizing the importance of accountability to democratic institutions’ legitimacy. And Mr. Riche cast UN legitimacy -- which stems from its “universal” representativeness -- as closely linked to effectiveness: “legitimacy is not a cure for ineffectiveness and ineffectiveness will eat away at legitimacy.”
As the panelists’ varying viewpoints illustrate -- and indeed, the reason Professor Hurd and Mr. Coicaud launched the UN legitimacy series -- the language of legitimacy is multifaceted and rife with tensions.
PANEL: Jean-Marc Coicaud, Co-organizer of the Legitimacy Series, Director of United Nations university in New York, and former speechwriter for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; Ian Hurd, Co-organizer of the Legitimacy Series, Professor of international relations at Northwestern University and visiting fellow at the Niehaus Center on Globalization and Governance at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton university; Roland Paris, Director of the Center for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa; and Leanne Smith, Deputy Chief of UN Peacekeeping Best Practices, Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).
PROFESSOR HURD kicked off the series’ third installment by reiterating his definition of legitimacy, “the belief that a rule or institution ought to be respected, the belief in a person that authority is rightfully located in a rule or in an institution.” One thread that follows from this conception, he argues, is that “it gives people a reason to acquiesce to powerful institutions. And so in one lens it is a tool for social order, a social control mechanism for those in power. But it can also be a tool for resistance to those in power where the belief vanishes as we see in many domestic settings [i.e. North Africa and the Middle East], and those in power lose a good deal of their influence.” From this view, then, legitimacy rests with an authority’s followers, whose beliefs are multiple and complicated since different audiences necessarily hold different beliefs.
With respect to peace operations there are at least two main audiences, according to Professor Hurd: players at the UN and players in capitals, both of whose conceptions of legitimacy and the process of legitimation differ greatly. Indeed, a closer look reveals a more nuanced landscape of audiences, as panelists point out below.
Mr. COICAUD laid out two reasons for discussing legitimacy and peace operations. First, collective security is a fundamental aim of the UN mandate, and peacekeeping operations are a key tool for implementing collective security in the UN context. To demonstrate the significance of peacekeeping missions, Mr. Coicaud recalls that their underperformance became a sort of proxy for the legitimacy of the UN as a whole during the 1990s, largely due to media coverage. Second, post-peacekeeping activities, or state-building, have become a key part of ensuring conflict regions do not relapse into violence.
These considerations raise a number of questions: Whose conception of legitimacy is the UN aspiring to build in host countries? Is it compatible with local traditions? Should it be compatible with local traditions, if they contradict UN ideas about human rights?
PROFESSOR ROLAND PARIS, the guest academic of the day, took up some of Mr. Coicaud’s questions, offering a pragmatic, if not gloomy, view of the prospects for UN legitimacy in peace operations. Regarding peacebuilding, he notes, the UN has had a tendency to emphasize liberal democracy as a means of legitimating budding governments. Yet “if we determine legitimacy in terms of rightful authority in the eyes of those who are subject to that authority, then by that definition at least, it’s entirely possible for governments to be legitimate without being western democratic.” In his eyes, peacebuilders would be better off supporting nascent governments “through the process of articulating and reconciling their own internally competing vision of political legitimacy while at the same time mediating between this domestic process and international standards of legitimacy, including fundamental human rights.”
According to Professor Paris, four implications stem from the idea that legitimacy is a confluence of multiple, competing beliefs about what constitutes rightful political authority. First, legitimacy problems are unlikely to be resolved in any kind of final way; more likely, their resolution will be provisional and subject to revision and adjustment. Peacebuilders would thus be better served, he suggests, thinking about ways to promote an ongoing dialogue between competing factions instead of focusing on one-shot, inflexible constitutional fixes.
Second, the tendency to over-rely on liberal democracy as a means of legitimation should be reexamined: hybrid political regimes of traditional and imported components should be studied for their contribution to legitimacy and effectiveness, rather than viewed as incomplete because they do not reflect model western political systems. However, he cautions, the hybrid approach should not be used as an excuse to condone repressive practices; nor should it be romanticized. Third, a more experimental approach (in contrast to the relying on “best practices”) may be better suited to state-building’s complexities, many of which are as yet unknown. Finally, actors in the peacebuilding community must calibrate their expectations, keeping in mind that state-building is not a science; setbacks are inherent to the process.
LEANNE SMITH, the panel’s guest practitioner, offered an inside perspective on UN legitimacy and peace operations. From her vantage point as Deputy Chief of Peacekeeping Best Practices, all peace operations enjoy two sources of legitimacy from the outset. First, since missions are deployed on the basis of Security Council resolutions, they have a high degree of legitimacy under international law. Second, peacekeeping missions have historically benefitted from a uniquely broad-based representation of Member States, both in terms of personnel and funding.
Nonetheless, peace operations face a storm of legitimacy challenges. First and foremost is the need to cater simultaneously to a number of diverse audiences, some of which include the Security Council; the C-34 Special Committee on Peacekeeping (an oversight body); the host government; parties to the conflict; and host populations.
Other challenges to legitimacy include the UNSC’s tendency to draft unachievable mandates; an emerging trend whereby peace operations’ contributors are drawn more and more from the global South, thus undermining the broad-based participation angle that has legitimated missions of the past; “getting the footprint right,” or balancing the need to supply adequate resources to meet conditions on the ground while not appearing or acting overly intrusive; and finally, fostering positive relations between host country populations and UN personnel, especially after the well-documented sexual abuse of local women by peacekeepers.
Efforts are being undertaken to address these and other challenges, according to Ms. Smith: DPKO has implemented a zero tolerance policy regarding sexual exploitation; her office is creating new incentives to attract more broad-based contribution to peace operations, as well working with the Security Council and the Secretariat to produce more realistic mandates; and hybrid missions--such as UNAMID in Darfur, a joint UN/African Union (AU) operation--are being used as a novel approach (in line with Professor Paris’s suggestion) to achieve the right footprint in the field.
Settling on Legitimacy
Panelists identified multiple audiences -- with differing conceptions of legitimacy -- as one of the greatest challenges to the legitimacy of peace operations. To overcome this Herculean challenge, Professor Paris suggested the need for domestic audiences to articulate and reconcile their divergent views of legitimacy, while at the same time mediating those views with international standards such as fundamental human rights. Another key audience is the global public (i.e. the collection of national publics), whose perception of peace operations is largely shaped by “if it bleeds, it leads” media coverage. In effect, Mr. Coicaud pointed out, widely publicized peacekeeping failures can reflect negatively on the UN as a whole.
Nevertheless, according to Ms. Smith, broad-based support from Member States and UNSC authorization endows a degree of legitimacy to all peace operations. However, maintaining this legitimacy in the face of a multitude of challenges -- ranging from the need to pacify divergent audiences to ensuring operations are adequately supplied -- is a challenge in itself. Thus, it is difficult to say whether peace operations spend more time attempting to build legitimacy or trying not to lose it. A few of things are certain: peace operations are highly susceptible to delegitimation, impervious to quick fixes, and fundamentally factional.
Next Week: Part IV of the legitimacy series will explore legitimacy of the Security Council.
