Contending Legitimacy in World Politics
Legitimacy, along with security and democracy, is arguably one of the most widely used global buzzwords of the new millennium. Yet, the idea of political legitimacy is not new and has been constructed in different ways at different moments in history. This book problematizes this notion, from various contextual standpoints, disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Taking a comparative, transnational and bottom-up approach to the study of political legitimacy, this book sheds light on multiple perceptions by different actors (institutions, civil society, majoritarian and minority subjects), analysing the notion of political legitimacy from a critical perspective. Questioning received wisdom or one-size-fits-all analyses, it leads to a reassessment of the link between legitimacy and sovereignty, and emphasises the demand by transnational civil society to go beyond identity politics, which produce logics of violence. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Discourse.
Bronwyn Winter is Deputy Director of European Studies at the University of Sydney. Her publications include September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives (Spinifex 2002), Hijab and the Republic (Syracuse UP 2008), and Women, Insecurity and Violence in a Post-9/11 World (Syracuse UP 2017).
Lucia Sorbera is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney. Her publications include: Challenges of thinking feminism and revolution in Egypt between 2011 and 2014’, in Post-Colonial Studies, 17, 1 (2014); ‘Early Reflections of an Historian on Feminism in Egypt in Times of Revolution’, in Genesis, XII/1, 2013; ‘Between Cooptation and Resistance: Women’s Leadership and Gender Discourse in Contemporary Egypt’, in Luca Anceschi, Gennaro Gervasio, Andrea Teti (eds.), Hidden Geographies. Informal Powers in the Greater Middle East, Routledge, UK (2014).