Autocratic legitimation in Iran: Ali Khamenei’s discourse on regime “insiders” and “outsiders”

The article analyses Ali Khamenei’s discourse on insiders and outsiders in the Islamic Republic of Iran, arguing that it shows the leader of an electoral revolutionary regime striving to counter elite fragmentation and growing democratic demands. It studies identity demarcation as a tool of autocratic legitimation. In a political system where the possibility to access political positions depends on supporting a belief-system, all cadres share a basic identity, which rulers can exploit to draw boundaries between “us” and “them”. The analysis reveals how Iran’s leader capitalizes on the existence of an insider-outsider divide to promote ideas about an imagined “we” of the regime. The “we” is portrayed as an Islamic we, fully committed to his rule. The article maintains that Khamenei developed this discourse in response to the challenge of the Iranian reform movement. It analyses, first, the context in which the discourse emerged and, second, the discursive strategy itself, to substantiate the claim. It concludes that the discourse had two essential aims in the containment (1997–2003) and crushing (2009–2010) of the pro-democracy reformist and Green movements: to de-legitimate Khamenei’s opponents through othering and to legitimate the counter-mobilization of repressive agents.     

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.     

UN Peace Operations and Conflicting Legitimacies

ABSTRACT

Analyses of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping increasingly consider legitimacy a key factor for success, conceiving of it as a resource that operations should seek and use in the pursuit of their goals. However, these analyses rarely break down legitimacy by source. Because the UN is an organization with multiple identities and duties however, different legitimacy sources – in particular output and procedural legitimacy – and the UN’s corresponding legitimation practices come into conflict in the context of peacekeeping. Drawing on a range of examples and the specific case of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), this article argues that looking at different legitimacy sources and linking them to the institutional identity of the UN is thus critical, and it shows how the UN’s contradictory legitimation practices can reduce overall legitimacy perceptions.     

Security in the name of human rights: the discursive legitimation strategies of the war on terror in France

This article aims to question the discourse on “the war on terror” developed by the French President in the wake of the two terrorist attacks that occurred in France in 2015. Drawing from critical discourse analysis, it explores the discursive legitimation strategies deployed by President Hollande to legitimate France’s securitarian response to the two attacks. It reveals how the defence of human rights served as an overall justificatory framework, through rationalisation, appeals to authority, and moralisation. It argues that Hollande implemented a discursive manipulation of reality to shield his actions from criticisms of illiberalism, all the while reframing the notion of human rights, undermining it and paving the way for an authoritarian-driven executive.     

What autocracies say (and what citizens hear): proposing four mechanisms of autocratic legitimation

ABSTRACT

Autocratic governments make claims about why they are entitled to rule. Some autocracies are more talkative than others, but all regimes say something about why they deserve power. This article takes seriously these efforts by introducing and interrogating the concept of autocratic legitimation. After engaging in a definitional discussion, it traces the development of autocratic legitimation in modern political science by identifying major turning points, key concepts, and patterns of inquiry over time. Ultimately, this introductory article aims to not only argue that studying autocratic legitimation is important, but also to propose contexts, concepts, and distinctions for doing so productively. To this end, the article proposes four mechanisms of autocratic legitimation that can facilitate comparative analysis: indoctrination, passivity, performance, and democratic-procedural. Finally, the essay briefly introduces the five original articles that comprise the remainder of this special issue on autocratic legitimation. The article identifies avenues for further research and identifies how each article in the issue advances down productive pathways of inquiry.     

试论邓小平政治合法性维护的实践及其启示

合法性是关系到党和国家政权生死存亡的根本问题,"文革"结束后,党和国家政权的合法性问题凸现出来,邓小平正确处理了毛泽东的意识形态遗产,开始重建法理权威,并通过促进经济发展和反腐败树立政府形象的方法,维护了政治的合法性。新时期我们仍面临着合法性维护的问题,邓小平的实践为整个现代化进程中的合法性维护提供了诸多有益启示。     

“沟通理性”与全球化时代的法律哲学——凡·豪埃克《作为沟通的法律》述要

20世纪60年代以来,西方社会的变迁为法理学提供了新的课题。豪埃克教授以哈贝马斯的沟通行为理论为指导,提出一种沟通视角的法理学。他认为,法律在本质上是基于沟通:立法者与国民间的沟通,法庭与诉讼当事人间的沟通,立法者与法官间的沟通等。这种沟通现在被认为是法律合法化的来源:法律人之间的理性对话是“正确”地解释和适用法律的最终保证。     

民事诉讼证据交换制度的立法探讨

证据交换的正当性虽然无可置疑,但其被规避适用却是实务中的普遍现象。设置证据交换制度有诉讼效率的考量,但其首要的价值目标却是公平和公正。审判效率得以提高的秘密不在于证据交换本身,而在于证据交换制度所依存的具有不可逆性的二元性诉讼结构。在制度层面上,司法解释与《民事诉讼法》的不兼容及司法解释技术自身的问题应当予以检讨。完整的具有实效性和可操作性的证据交换规则的确立包括两个大的方面：一是包含有实体性因素的证据交换规则;二是包含有程序性因素的证据交换规则。     

UNAMID and the Legitimation of Global-Regional Peacekeeping Cooperation: Partnership and Friction in UN-AU Relations

ABSTRACT

The ‘hybrid' United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) was initially hailed as a model for peacekeeping cooperation between the UN and African regional organizations. However, UNAMID soon faced contestation from different stakeholders, and the UN and the AU have now essentially abandoned the hybrid approach. The article reconstructs how the mission’s deteriorating legitimacy relates to changing self-legitimation strategies by the two organizations. The UN and the AU pursued mutual legitimation when establishing UNAMID, but later mobilized historical narratives and diverging normative standards to promote competing authority claims. The article thus advances an understanding of inter-organizational relations as inherently political.     

Militarizing peace: why did the Israeli military spearhead the Oslo Accords?

This article deals with the question of why the Israeli military played a major role in the design and implementation of the Oslo Accords in the years 1993–2000 even though this process was originally initiated as a diplomatic move. It is argued that the explanation lies in the army's role in politically mobilizing the anti-Oslo front comprised of religious and peripheral groups, most of whom had a nationalist agenda, as a strategy to counter their resistance to the Accords. The ‘people's army’, through which many of these groups attained social mobility and which they had traditionally trusted, was inherently the most effective mechanism for achieving this goal. This role was further intensified in light of the government's social policies that made these groups ‘peace losers’. Political recruitment took the form of the army's role in designing the Oslo arrangements as military ones.