ABSTRACT
How can we know whether a military intervention is or not legitimate? Why are, for instance, wars of self-defense deemed legitimate, but not interventions for stopping acts of genocide or mass killing? What rules, norms, or principles should one consider in making this judgment? Equally important, who has the power to make such judgments, on what basis, and how? In short, what conditions should a decision to use force meet in order to be reckoned as legitimate in international relations (IR)? The relevance of this question has only grown in importance within the past decade or so in consequence of the humanitarian crises from the Balkans and Africa and of the United States’ reactions to the tragic events of September 11, 2001. However, the implications of this question for international politics are more profound. Not only does legitimacy represent the moral and legal platform on which political authority is constructed and harnessed in international politics, but also it shapes the very structure of the international system by helping define its ordering principle – that is, its prevalent culture of anarchy (Wendt 1999). In sum, the idea of the legitimacy of the use of force is not empty rhetoric, but an important driving force in international politics. The question about how to assess the legitimacy of the use of force in international politics lacks a coherent answer, however. The various positions expressed so far on this issue are not only ambiguous, but often conflicting. Supporters of international law claim, for instance, that adherence to the provisions of international treaties and conventions is sufficient for legitimating the use of force. On the other hand, scholars of international ethics argue that moral, and not necessarily legal, criteria are critical for securing the legitimacy of military interventions. Questions have been also raised about whether legitimacy should be determined by reference to substantive principles – that is, the legal or moral criteria used for justifying the decisions to use force – or to the processes and procedures by which participants arrive at their decision. Equally important, should the examination of the issue regarding the legitimacy of the use of force be driven by considerations of merely describing social reality or also of prescribing that reality? In other words, what exactly is the ontological and
epistemological context of the concept, what kind of theoretical and methodological problems does this raise for the examination of the issue, and how can these challenges be best addressed? The goal of this chapter is to review current theoretical approaches to the concept of legitimacy in international relations, to identify and discuss the ontological and epistemological tensions surrounding the term, and to examine the analytical contribution that two concepts, fairness and tractability, can make to the study of legitimacy in international politics. The chapter is divided into two main sections. The first will inspect the main points of debate surrounding the concept of legitimacy within the IR context in general, as well as in relation to the use of force. This discussion will focus on three key issues: the question of the impact of legitimacy on actors’ behavior, concern regarding the elusiveness of the legal and moral basis of legitimacy in international relations, and the epistemological debate on the descriptive/prescriptive tension underlying the definition of the concept. The second section will scrutinize the possibility of articulating a constitutive theory of legitimacy that combines both normative and explanatory arguments.
