Wolfgang Minatti

Researching Legitimacy, Governance and Civil War

In my research, I explore the role of legitimacy in governance relations, all the way from international politics to civil war. I am particularly interested in studying how governance relations become legitimised and seen as “rightful” by people subordinated to them. For example, I have investigated how the Western military coalition sought to legitimise themselves via the local population in Afghanistan, and compared their legitimation efforts to that of the Taliban insurgency. I argued that the Western legitimation strategy was ultimately at odds with a majority of Afghanistan’s rural population.

In my dissertation, I ask: how do governing armed actors within civil war become legitimised on a local level? Current theorisations of legitimacy in International Relations face difficulties in grasping processes of legitimation in contexts of complex governance systems as they treat legitimacy as a unidirectional and static process which neglects how legitimacy is always embedded in relationships. Proposing an alternative approach, I develop a relational theory of legitimation that allows to map the micro-dynamics of legitimacy and elaborates on the processes that lead to the legitimation of certain actors in the eyes of a population.

I empirically illustrate this theory by investigating the legitimation of the FARC rebel group within the Colombian conflict, using a qualitative methodology. I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Colombia, where I interviewed inhabitants of two communities within the Sumapaz region about their experiences with the various governance providers to study the congruence between the communities’ normative expectations and those propagated by the Colombian state and the FARC insurgency.