A Claim-Making Model of the Legitimation of Post-War Governance

Theories interested in the trajectories of governance after internal conflict must explain processes of legitimation, how a population can come to normatively accept their governance. Some of these theories (Illiberal Peacebuilding and Political Settlements) overlook the question; the dominant Liberal and Emancipatory schools generally address it prescriptively. I find that the explanatory theories the literature offers either argue that pre-existing ideas dictate how new governance will be perceived or, contrarily, that new governance changes ideas to legitimate itself.

In this dissertation, I submit a relational claim-making model of legitimation. Relational means a reconceptualisation of legitimation as the continuous product of the dynamic interaction between governance and ideas about governance. Governance will not produce its own legitimacy where ideas are against it, but equally ideas are not essential properties. Claim-making is based on Saward’s (2010) mechanism but constrained by the ideational and material-institutional conditions of success—’Resonance’ and ‘Credibility’ respectively. This respects context while embracing agency because successful claims change those conditions, innovating on widely-held ideas, so those innovations become part of them, and alter perceptions of material-institutional external world. Legitimating Claim theory thus enables the analyst to theorise the interaction between ideas and governance through agency.

I apply my model to the case studies of the Albanian and Serb communities of post-war Kosovo, which serves to illustrate the interaction between developing ideas and institutions. I show how the emergence of patronage-based authoritarian systems in Pristina and among the Kosovo Serbs are the result of monopolies of credibility that could only be built thanks to the resonant claims of the monopolists. However, contradictions between the Legitimating Claims and lived realities do not automatically produce resistance. I explain how the opposition LVV have managed to de-legitimate the dominant Kosovar Albanian parties and why no such credible counter-claim can emerge among the Kosovo Serbs.