Legitimacy and post-conflict state-building: the undervalued role of performance legitimacy

Legitimacy is essential to state-building after conflict. Yet, the prescribed path to gaining legitimacy is often a narrow one that borrows heavily from the experiences of Western states. Elections are prescribed as an essential first step on the logic that this means gaining process legitimacy can rebuild a social contract between citizens and the state, a social contract that is rooted in democratic norms and values. This article proposes an alternative path, one that emphasises the critical role of performance legitimacy and its non-exclusive nature. Performance legitimacy is granted when citizens perceive that some or all of their basic needs are being met. The article offers a new analytical framework for understanding a state’s potential source of performance legitimacy, how non-state actors may vie with the state to seize this form of legitimacy, and what consequences this has for processes of state institution-building after conflict. In this respect, this article seeks to reorient theory and practice to a broader view of legitimacy and its critical role in post-conflict state-building.     

How authoritarian rulers seek to legitimize repression: framing mass killings in Egypt and Uzbekistan

How do authoritarian rulers legitimate repressive actions against their own citizens? Although most research depicts repression and legitimation as opposed strategies of political rule, justified coercion against some groups may generate legitimacy in the eyes of other parts of the population. Building upon this suggested link between legitimation and repression, this article studies the justifications of mass killings. To this end, framing theory is combined with recent research on the domestic and international dimensions of authoritarian rule. We contend that frames are directed towards specific audiences at home and abroad. Moreover, given the common threats at the global level and the diffusion of repressive tactics, we assume that learning processes influence discursive justifications of repression in authoritarian regimes. We provide an analysis of government rhetoric by comparing the protest crackdowns of Rabi’a ‘Adawiya Square in Egypt and Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan, taking into account the audiences and the sources of the frames that justify repression. In both cases, we find the terrorism frame to emerge as dominant.     

Kantei diplomacy? Japan's hybrid leadership in foreign and security policy

This article operationalizes Japanese leadership in foreign and security policy, specifically the Abe administrations’ consistent China balancing. It will do so to dispel instances of Premier-centered diplomacy and posit that Abe's diplomatic agenda has rested on a ‘hybrid’ policy-making authority, where the leverage enjoyed by the Prime Minister's office (the Kantei) rested on little-appreciated politicized personnel appointments and demotions within the bureaucratic apparatus, specifically the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Moreover, successful Japanese leadership has functioned especially when operating within the scope of the US strategic framework towards East Asia. While structural constraints, such as the ever-present influence of the USA and bureaucratic coordination, may constrain options, effective leadership in foreign policy-making can indeed make a difference within those boundaries.     

Semiotising the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education

This article presents a semiotic analysis of the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education. It centres on three annotated images in Frank Furedi’s article “The Unhappiness Principles”, published in Times Higher Education in 2012. Drawing upon Peircean semiosis and iconicity, it provides a rhetoric-infused interpretation of the word–image complementarity exhibited in student participants’ written commentaries on the three images. This leads to a dialectical view of formative and summative assessment, in which process and product create each other through the same continuum of learning and teaching. In highlighting intellectualism as central to the ethnography of university life, this article argues that learner autonomy and the potential for transformation is deemed essential to the student experience in higher education.     

Picture–text congruence in translation: images of the Zen master on book covers and in verbal texts

The study aims to demonstrate how cover pictures and verbal texts are congruent with each other in presenting the Zen master Huineng in two English translations of the Platform Sutra. The focus is on the interpersonal/interactive meanings and the analytical tools adopted are systemic functional linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual social semiotics. Results show that the visual techniques employed to depict Huineng on the book covers are in consistency with the verbal choices adopted to present Huineng in the translated texts. While the medium to close shot and eye-level angle complement the choice of speaker-plus “we” as dominant interactive subject person, and qualified statements and polite suggestions/commands in Wong’s translation, the very long shot matches the use of speaker “I” and addressee “you”, and categorical statements and direct commands in Cleary’s translation. In this way a consistent image of Huineng is presented in each translation: friendly and willing to be close to the viewer/audience in Wong’s translation, but authoritative and distant in Cleary’s translation.     

Politics of power and hierarchies of citizenship in Angola

This article discusses citizenship and belonging with reference to processes of post-war state formation, namely: the MPLA’s political hegemony and the centralisation of power in the presidency. It argues this political arrangement imposes upon individuals an oscillation between different ‘levels’ or hierarchies of citizenship with a tendency towards marginalisation, formally allowing them to access both but under the specific circumstances dictated by the MPLA party state. Without a strong political opposition with a plausible alternative citizenship doctrine and with little incentives to improve the terms of citizenship it provides to the population, the Angolan government constructed a system of interests whereby the MPLA functions as a gatekeeper. Both in control of the state and of the distribution of citizenship, the regime regulates the flow of resources to the bottom through strategies of poverty and dependency, which increase the distance between the state and the population and sponsors the marginalisation of the majority.     

Conceptions of the good,rivalry, and liberal neutrality

Liberal neutrality is assumed to pertain to rival conceptions of the good. The nature of the rivalry between conceptions of the good is pivotal to the coherence, scope and realisation of liberal neutrality. Yet, liberal theorists have said very little about rivalry. This paper attempts to fill this gap by reviewing three conceptions of rivalry: incompatibility rivalry, intra-domain rivalry and state power rivalry. I argue that state power rivalry is the morally relevant conception of rivalry, and that it has significant implications for the scope and realisation of liberal neutrality. I conclude that in the light of state power rivalry, the only feasible liberal neutral state is a very minimal one.     

Centers of Gravity: Regional Powers,Democracy, and Trade

Classic studies on hegemonic stability and power transition suggest that concentration of capabilities favoring a single state can promote economic cooperation and discourage militarized conflict. However, tests of these arguments have been primarily limited to examining temporal variation in global capability distributions and corresponding levels of system-wide cooperation; few have examined the impact of capability concentration at the region level. In this article, we contend that concentration of regional military capabilities corresponds to lower trade costs for states throughout a region and to an incentive for weaker states to de-prioritize expenditure on the military, freeing resources that can be used to promote trade. As a result, this condition promotes higher levels of trade, particularly within the region. We also argue that democratic regional powers are better able to foster confidence in the sustainability of cooperation; thus, the trade-enhancing impact of concentrated regional capabilities is stronger when the predominant state is more democratic. We find evidence in support of our expectations in statistical models examining state trade between 1960 and 2007.