In a recent article in JPAM on the resilience of dark networks (illegal and covert networks) that were insurgencies, Bakker, Raab and Milward (2012)[i]found that the legitimacy of the network was a key variable predicting how resilient a dark network would be over time.  Thus, in our research, legitimacy is a central concern for defining and developing public policy in response to violent conflict. 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 three violent non-state actors: the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Colombia, and Jemaah Islamia, which operates in Indonesia. We show that consistencies in the effects of legitimation are a function of similar configurations of sources, forms, and bases, as opposed to similarities between the local contexts of specific cases. Further, we show that different configurations of sources, forms, and bases of legitimation have different effects. For example, legitimation in the form of material support by an external state provided for pragmatic reasons should have a different effect than legitimation in the form of verbal support by an international governmental organization for moral reasons.

By treating legitimation as a configuration of key conditions rather than as a uni-dimensional construct, this research addresses the key concern that legitimacy is too illusory to offer meaningful insights into the dynamics of violent conflict. Our framework introduces a concrete basis for assessing the effects of legitimation in violent conflict, providing an effective means of addressing questions of legitimacy in policies that address issues of conflict and global security.