Legitimacy is a central concern for defining and developing public policy in response to covert
and illegal networks. However, while scholarship on violent conflict has identified legitimacy as
a critical concern for the success and resilience of both violent insurgencies and the governments
fighting them, the relevance of this insight for policy development suffers from two critical
limitations. First, the effects of legitimation vary widely from case to case, resulting in a broad
consensus that legitimacy is a purely local phenomenon, and limiting the generalizability of
insights gained from any given case. Second, conceptualizations of legitimacy are widely
inconsistent within the literature on violent conflict, and are often too abstract to be effectively
applied in the context of policy analysis. In this research we address these two critical problems
in the study of legitimacy by developing a framework for evaluating variations in the effects of
legitimation as the product of different configurations of sources, forms, and bases for the
legitimation of actors involved in conflict. We demonstrate the utility of our framework through
in-depth analyses of legitimacy and resilience for two violent non-state actors: the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, and Jemaah Islamia, which operates in Indonesia.
Publication Information
Moaddel, Mansoor (2013) Configuring Legitimacy: A Framework to Legitimation in Armed Conflict. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (Jan). http://www.appam.org/assets/1/7/Configuring_Legitimacy_A_Framework_for_Legitimation_in_Armed_Conflict.pdf. (April 2, 2014)