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This article argues that rising economic inequality and the decline in political trust across Western countries have systematic normative implications for Western governments' pursuit of climate justice. The article argues that it is an essential but neglected task of nonideal political theory to identify political feasibility constraints on the pursuit of climate justice and reflect on how to overcome them. The article identifies two feasibility constraints in contemporary Western countries, the inequality constraint and the legitimation constraint, as important elements of a nonideal theory of climate justice. It argues that the French Gilets Jaunes (yellow vests) movement arose as a form of bottom-up motivational resistance to President Macron's decarbonization policies, precisely because those policies did not take sufficient heed of the inequality and legitimation constraints. Furthermore, the article sketches elements of a roadmap for a feasible pathway for Western governments to decarbonize and observe their citizens' duties of climate justice and argues that the framework of feasibility constraints offers a coherent, novel and urgent rationale for adopting redistributive measures such as the Carbon Fee and Dividend and participatory-democratic measures such as Citizen Assemblies as component parts of a feasible pathway to a decarbonized economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological identity involves all aspects of how individuals or collectives identify themselves with nature. This paper aims to examine the discursive construction of corporate ecological identities in corporate sustainability reports in China and evaluate how these identities are legitimated through the lens of ecolinguistic discourse analysis. Our data was drawn from a collection of English-language sustainability reports of Huawei Technologies Corporation (2016–2020). The findings suggest a mix of ecological identities across all texts, among which stewarding nature dominates and it relates to the belief that humans are obligated to steward nature for the sake of sustainability. These ecological identities are discursively legitimized in terms of defining characteristics, social roles, and community memberships. Innovativeness, leadership and ethicalness are legitimated as the corporation's dominant characteristics which serve as moral identity standards, allowing further legitimation of the social roles and community memberships that the corporation claims. In the case of social roles, green manufacturing depends on green technologies, and both of them point to the instrumentality and rightness of technology in advancing sustainability. These construals uncover the ecological sustainability in the Chinese cultural context, that is, achieving the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. In legitimizing community memberships, hierarchical relationships between the corporation and other participants are revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do states and their agents abuse citizens? Traditional explanations focus on contentious politics, the presence of institutions, and international pressures. Despite this, accounts dissecting the state and its agents in this context of abuse remain largely theoretic in nature. This article offers a breakthrough for within-the-state accounts of human rights abuses by focusing on state leaders and their relationship to broader government institutions and function. We posit that personalist leaders have fundamentally different relationship with institutions that foster human rights respect, arguing that leaders relying on their own merits and qualities are less likely to either activate or manipulate institutions of accountability for human rights abuses. Using data from 1991 to 2019, we show that the presence of leaders legitimizing themselves within personalist framing can worsen human rights conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the mutual relations between education, biopolitics and authority. The objective is to deconstruct authority in relation to three biopolitical issues: abortion, sexual orientation, and IVF. This deconstruction is performed by analysis of the manifestations and strategies of authority employed in Polish textbooks for four subjects at secondary school: social studies, family life education, ethics, and religion. This provided an answer to the question both about the significance of biopolitical issues in the education process and about the role of authority in their construction. The main rhetorical practices for the construction of authority were science, using the strategy of "stating facts"; law, with the strategy of "establishing order"; and religion, whose strategy is "initiating opposition". In the article, I conduct a qualitative analysis of each of the three rhetorical practices and make conclusions on the role of authority in the process of teaching biopolitical issues in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the under-researched area of discursive tactics employed in terrorist threat texts that exploit moral values to constantly justify violence, fostering a 'discourse of justification', disaffiliation and conflict. Employing a discursive pragmatic analysis, it delves into the tactics of violent extremists associated with jihadism and far-right ideologies. Utilising the Appraisal framework and the 'moral disaffiliation' strategy, the study uncovers verbal practices shaping a dynamic of justification. Findings reveal threateners' involvement in regulatory discursive functions – manipulation, deontic-retaliation, and boulomaic effect – and practices of ideologically positioning functions – discrediting, blaming, denying and (de)legitimating. The analysis highlights the construction of negative victim individuals and societies while praising the threatener/in-group, anchored predominantly in values of propriety, capacity, valuation and veracity, as the primary dynamic of threatener-victim disalignment. This study contributes insights into threatener profiling, motivations of violence and future research on threat-genre rhetorical structure analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commenting on the future development of China, President Xi Jinping said, 'China's children today are not only undergoing and witnessing the realization of the country's first centenary goal, they are also a new force for achieving the second centenary goal and building China into a great modern socialist country.' This statement reflects a socially shared belief that Chinese children and youth are expected to shoulder the responsibility of nation-building. This study explores how the ideology of nationalism is disseminated through the popular Chinese reality TV show, X-Change, via the legitimation of the model Chinese youth. Using Rowan Mackay's multimodal legitimation framework to analyse six episodes from Season 18 of X-Change, this article explores how the model Chinese youth is semiotically constructed and legitimized. Findings from the analysis reveal how the model Chinese youth represents a specific normalized national identity. This is promoted through the embodiment of the urban–rural binary by the show's main characters and the representation of the exchange journey as the inner transformation of 'problematic' citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper underscores how articulations of/about affect establish the 'how' and 'why' of what is authorized, encouraged, redeemed, or prohibited within discourses that legitimate neoliberal governmentality. Through an exemplary analysis of LGBTQ diversity discourse data, I demonstrate how institutionalized 'endorsements' of diversity frame employees' selves entirely as resources for capital, and legitimate ways that LGBTQ workers conduct themselves as feeling actors (and productive workers). This has implications far beyond the realm of LGBTQ inclusion. Building upon descriptions of discursive legitimation suggesting that strategies function in combination with one another, the process I describe, 'affective legitimation', is one where they cohere. Financial, bureaucratic or political-economic concerns are imbued with emotion, becoming something 'more-than'. Diverse subjects' authentic selfhood, innermost desires, productivity, personal and professional fulfilment, and idealized self-sufficient citizenship are grafted together – treated as equivalent, thus affirming rationales of corporate profitability and entrepreneurial self-actualization. As one speaker quoted here remarks, 'for business it boils down to one thing'. It is vital to apprehend how contemporary discourses about workers' capacity to feel entwine with discourses about how it feels to have ones' labour rewarded: how sanctioned outcomes endorse certain 'feeling rules', and how such rules strengthen the authority and legitimacy of capitalist exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities are specific local entities, and as such are in competition with one another for resources and prestige. The general tone of the literature—which sees universities mainly as specific organizations—is quite negative, with competition leading to destructive market and political forces. The tone is surprising, given the extraordinary worldwide university expansion over the last seven or eight decades. This inconsistency is resolved with the perspective of neo-institutional theory: the university is a stunningly successful global institution from which specific cases derive their accredited standing and legitimacy. The enlarged and grand institutional canopy has supported thousands of expanded and rationalized organizations, which then suffer from competition. But in their struggles, the contending organizations produce further elaborations of the domain of the overall institution. The university grows, though the instances it flowers may sometimes suffer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term ethos is common within schools, describing culture and 'feel' of the institution. Ethos is also a contested term, and one that becomes more problematic the more one tries to understand it. Because ethos is founded within philosophical, structural and geographical aspects of the community and associated power balances, it is argued here that it provides an opportunity to study one aspect of the Bordieuan field of power, more specifically doxa. This paper posits that it may be beneficial to consider the term ethos through the lens of doxa, specifically when considering elite schools, and that doing so helps to further link the research into elite English boarding school ethos and discussions surrounding power, inculcation, authority, elitism and class within such schools. An analysis of the Head's Welcome from the websites of English independent boarding schools was undertaken, which identified both institutional and sector‐wide doxa, which were used to construct descriptive pictures of legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen an intensification of international organizations' (IOs) attempts to justify their authority. The existing research suggests that IO representatives have scaled up self-legitimation to defend their organizations' legitimacy in light of public criticism. In contrast, this article demonstrates that IOs intensify self-legitimation to mobilize additional support from relevant audiences when their authority increases. We argue that self-legitimation aims primarily to achieve proactive legitimacy expansion instead of reactive legitimacy protection. We develop this argument in three steps. First, we draw on organizational sociology and management studies to theorize the connection between self-legitimation and an organization's life stages. Second, we introduce a novel dataset on the self-legitimation of 28 regional IOs between 1980 and 2019 and show that the intensity of self-legitimation evolves in phases. Third, we provide a multivariate statistical analysis and a brief vignette on the African Union, both of which indicate that IOs that shift from unanimity or consensus to majority voting tend to intensify self-legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop a concept of "site entrepreneurship." Distinct from other forms of entrepreneurship, site entrepreneurship is the transformation of remote desolate sites with low commercial value into profitable destinations. The primary theory used to explain how entrepreneurs draw customers to remote locations is the regulatory engagement theory. The primary driver in our concept is the entrepreneur with a vision of what a remote site could be as well as the entrepreneurial passion and hustle to pursue and develop the idea. The phenomenon that we are interested in is how popular destinations in remote areas are designed, developed, and sustained. The primary causes of mechanisms underlying relationships in our concept are (1) the entrepreneur's vision, passion, and hustle in establishing customer, human capital, and supplier flows to the destination and (2) the mediators in our concept of legitimation, logistics, and transportation, experience design, and sequence effects that enable destination development. Using examples from actual site entrepreneurs, we delineate how these entrepreneurs transform desolate sites into destinations, provide the key aspects involved in the projects, explain the vital role logistics and transportation play in such development, and emphasize the importance of experience design and promotion in attracting customers to remote locations. We conclude the paper with suggestions for future research to expand and apply the concept. Plain English Summary: How does an entrepreneur turn desolate, low-value locations into remarkable destination sites? We introduce the term "site entrepreneurship" to represent such activity in this context and analyze the key factors that are critical in developing priceless pieces of real estate that emerge from once desolate, low-value locations. In other words, we show how certain entrepreneurs turn the unique context of desolate sites into tourist destinations that impact not only the venture but the entire community. A classic example would be Walt Disney with his "Florida Project," later named Walt Disney World and the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). Tourism worldwide is estimated to be a 1.31 trillion-dollar market. Therefore, examining what specific factors are involved in the value creation accomplished through the transformation of remote sites into destinations which constitute a concept of "site entrepreneurship" is important to understand. The principal implication of this study is to impact research and policy as we demonstrate why it is important to differentiate this specific categorization of entrepreneurship in order to better understand the context within which this type of entrepreneurial activity takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the argumentative legitimation of discriminatory attitudes against Silvia Romano on Italian newspapers front pages. A volunteer-aid worker and activist, Romano was kidnapped in northeast Kenya in 2018 and eventually released after 18 months of captivity. Upon her return to Italy, a jilbāb-covered Romano declared she converted to Islam while held hostage and changed her name to Aisha. Romano’s conversion triggered a wave of exclusionary rhetoric across Italian media and opened the dam to a deluge of misogynous and Islamophobic attacks against the newly liberated activist, accused of having betrayed Catholic religion and Italian culture. Our corpus comprises 86 front pages from mainstream Italian newspapers of different ideological backgrounds, collected during the first week after Romano’s release in May 2020. Following the agenda of Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies and drawing on van Leeuwen’s language of legitimation, we study the recontextualization of social practice on the front pages and the main argumentation strategies, namely topoi, that emerge on the basis of this recontextualization, ending up argumentatively legitimizing discriminatory attitudes against the intended target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frank Michelman's recent book Constitutional Essentials. On the Constitutional Theory of Political Liberalism is discussed from a specific angle, related to how Rawls's 'deflection procedure' – called by Michelman 'justification by constitution' – is affected by two recent innovations in the paradigm of political liberalism: first, the extension of reasonable pluralism to a family of liberal political conceptions of justice that coexist in a liberal-democratic society; second, the idea of legitimation based on the criterion of reciprocity, aimed at supplementing the liberal principle of legitimacy. In the attempt to probe Michelman's assessment of the impact of these two innovations, three critical points are mentioned, for each of them, that suggest a somewhat more sceptical attitude than Michelman's about the capacity of 'justification by constitution' to remain substantially unaltered, once these innovations are in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines social media discourses to unravel how moral evaluation can be used to legitimize and delegitimize state violence. Based on a Colombian case of police violence targeting protesting students at the University of Cauca, this study unravels the role of moral evaluation of social actors and their actions in affirming or contesting state violence. It underlines the use of dichotomies (i.e., "bravery-cowardice," "honesty-dishonesty," and "evilness-goodness"), the attribution of immoral character traits, and inciting negative emotions as ways of attributing morality or immorality to victims and perpetrators to legitimize or delegitimize political violence. It especially underlines the use of religious references in moral evaluations. By examining social media discourses about state violence, this article aims to contribute to a greater understanding of how political violence can be legitimized and delegitimized based on morality and emotions, which can help in developing ways to promote a culture of nonviolence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Biden administration sought to legitimate the wide-ranging chip export controls on China (introduced on 7 October 2022) and to convince allies to adopt similar measures. Grounded in a qualitative analysis of US official documents, this study not only draws out the overarching rationale advanced by US officials: China's unregulated access to advanced chips constitutes a major threat to the US and allied security. More importantly, leveraging insights from frame alignment, it uncovers the underlying patterns and dynamics of the legitimation-cum-securitization process. Substantively, US officials insisted on viewing US technological leadership and the escalation of export controls through the security lens, associated China's (mis)use of advanced chips with the erosion of US technological supremacy, military security and national security at large, and framed blocking China's access to advanced chips as critical for the security of the US and allies. This analysis offers broad insights into the contestation and legitimation of an increasingly common yet potentially pernicious phenomenon in US-China relations: enacting techno-economic sanctions in the name of national security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China built internment camps officially referred to as training centres within the scope of a policy for countering extremism and terrorism in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2017. While the repression imposed by China on Uyghurs in these camps has attracted the response of the international community, there has been neither a public protest nor a meaningful government response to China in Turkey, despite it having been the voice of Uyghurs on international platforms before 2017. This study aims to identify the reasons for Turkey's silence on the persecution of Uyghurs by utilizing the legitimation and co-optation strategies of the authoritarian stability framework. The Turkish government's legitimation strategies of "rallying around the flag" via anti-Americanism and the economic expectations of China to boost its performance-based legitimacy are evaluated as reasons for the government's silence on the Uyghur cause. Moreover, it is also discussed how formal and informal co-optation strategies of the government with nationalist and Eurasianist parties are playing a role as a bolstering mechanism of its silence policy on Uyghurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite calls for examining how authoritarian regimes employ state structures to prolong their rule and evidence that they regulate religion to shape the behaviour of religious elites, there has been little attention devoted to religious affairs ministries, which are key sites of interaction between religious actors and the state, and are often the primary institution through which regimes manage religion. This study identifies and describes eight core areas these ministries regulate that can be used as instruments for repression and co-optation of regime opponents, and state legitimation: prayer, appointments, education, religious advice and decisions, religious endowments, media, registration, and charity. In this analysis, we seek to bridge the gap between the literatures on religion, the Middle East, and authoritarianism by synthesizing recent research and analysing religious affairs ministries in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. We argue that by fulfilling these functions, religion ministries are not benign bureaucracies but impactful institutions of political control. In highlighting key questions that remain unanswered, we outline a research agenda for continued advances towards theorizing how authoritarian regimes might make use of state resources to protect their rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines tweets about state violence targeting student protesters at the University of Cauca in December 2018. Its objective is accounting for the role of dehumanization of actors in legitimizing and delegitimizing state violence. It analyzes 8421 tweets to unravel specific mechanisms of dehumanization based on following sub-categories: (a) animalization, (b) classism, (c) racism, (d) religious discrimination, (e) sanitation, (f) sexism, (g) wishing for or celebrating injuries, and h) other. It shows how dehumanization a) attributes lack of rationality, morality, or agency to social actors; (b) trivializes their lives; and (c) defines them as sources of contamination. After arguing that dehumanizing discourse makes it extremely difficult to establish dialogue and promote nonviolence, it suggests future research on possible ways of re-humanization of dehumanized actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the legitimation processes underpinning the implementation of specific urban policies in cities grappling with socio-economic challenges, such as in a post-industrial context. Focusing on Europe, where public authorities are seeking to enhance the socio-economic dynamics of post-industrial cities through cultural initiatives like branch museums, our research is based on a historical study of media relating to the establishment in 2012 of the Louvre-Lens museum in northern France. Within this framework, we reveal how institutional actors have performed strategies of legitimation to develop the Louvre-Lens. Our findings underscore the confluence of two primary strategies – economic and cultural –in an effort to navigate the complexities and tensions inherent in establishing a cultural offer in a disadvantaged post-industrial region. We conclude with a discussion about the broader implications of these strategies within the realm of macromarketing. We provide practical recommendations for practitioners and policy makers involved in the development of branch museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In paradoxical situations, organizational actors face various demands that are contradictory and interdependent at the same time. While the current literature focuses on how organizational actors respond to these paradoxical demands, it does so in a depersonalized manner with little attention to the stakeholders behind these demands. Therefore, it fails to explain how organizational actors legitimize their responses to paradox to those stakeholders who bring up the paradoxical demands. Using a narrative sensemaking approach, we study how social entrepreneurs legitimize their efforts to respond to paradoxical stakeholder demands for both delivering and measuring social impact. We find that social entrepreneurs legitimize their responses to this paradoxical situation through a narrative mechanism of folding. Through folding, narrators construct legitimizing accounts by narratively producing temporary alignments with some stakeholder interests, while opposing others. Through the recurring and consistently inconsistent use of the narrative practices of embodying and positioning, narrators produce a legitimizing account that overall portrays their responses to paradox as balanced and non-biased. As our main contribution, we offer a model of folding as a narrative, interest-based mechanism that explains how organizational actors legitimize their efforts to navigate paradoxical situations by portraying themselves as attending to paradoxical demands through a temporary and fluid shift between momentary alignments and oppositions of stakeholder interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to describe the perspectives of the Acehnese people on Qanun Putroe Phang. The theoretical approach employed is legal linguistics, utilising Critical Discourse Analysis. The focus of the research is on public opinion regarding the qanun, which is a regional regulation governing government administration and community life in Aceh, Indonesia. This qanun is known for prioritising the protection of women and children in Aceh since the reign of Sultan Iskandar Muda (from 1607 until 1636). The study involved interviews with 50 informants aged 20-80 years old, with 10 informants from each of the following districts: Aceh Besar, Pidie, North Aceh, South Aceh, and West Aceh. The interviews explored the participants’ perceptions of Qanun Putroe Phang and their understanding of its role in protecting the rights of women and children within Acehnese society. The results indicated that 84% of respondents believe the qanun is, and will continue to be, relevant even in contemporary life. However, 16% of respondents viewed the qanun as a burden for families, particularly those with many daughters or economic difficulties. Many respondents suggested that the qanun should be revised to encourage its implementation in a manner that is not mandatory but persuasive for the Acehnese people.

This special section aims to examine the relationship between succession and legitimation in post-Soviet Eurasia. Presidential successions in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan offer valuable insights into the intricate nature of regime gaining and losing legitimacy in the aftermath of political succession. Since the early 2000s, the leaders of the four nations have advocated for constitutional amendments that have substantially enhanced presidential authority. In Kyiv, Minsk, Astana, and Baku, the established personal politics have favored the president, operating on principles of loyalty, cooptation, and clientelism, rather than relying solely on institutional regulations and electoral procedures. Elections in these states helped both to legitimize authoritarian rule and to spark violent uprisings against incumbent regimes. The coordinated succession in post-Soviet autocracies indicates that the reservoir of support to regime founders is robust, at least in the short term. The occurrence of post-electoral protests in Ukraine in 2004 and Belarus in 2020 and the Bloody January riots in Kazakhstan in 2022 serves as evidence of the erosion of personalistic rule. The lack of policy innovation or performative legitimation fosters a persistent desire for change, critical voices, and inter-elite rivalry. The incumbent regimes in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan used the guise of democratic legitimation to conceal their autocratic inclinations; Ukraine broke this cycle of personalistic tendencies and adhered to a democratic path. Autocratic stability aligns with the compulsion to reevaluate policy priorities and patronage networks during periods of succession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the anti-Japanese textbook issue, a diplomatic controversy from 1914 to 1937 between Japan and China over whether the Chinese government was inciting hatred against Japan by promoting school textbooks with offensive and xenophobic content. I argue that the issue represents a legitimation process, whereby Japan's concern about the content of these textbooks was determined by, and fluctuated with, its need to mobilise domestic and international audiences for its China policy in changing geopolitical contexts. Such an approach helps to explain why the anti-Japanese textbook issue persisted for more than two decades after 1914 and why Japan's approach to the matter inconsistently oscillated between interventionist and non-interventionist principles. More broadly, the article illustrates the value of paying closer attention to the internal inconsistencies of Japanese imperialism rather than merely its expansionist tendencies, and of analysing education and the writing of textbooks in early modern East Asia not just as a means of nation-building but also as part of Japan's efforts to build its empire in a broader, transnational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After twenty years of Putin's rule, Russia has become a full-fledged autocracy, with regional governors subordinate to the federal center, serving as agents of the president-principal. The country thus provides vivid empirical evidence for agency relations between the national leader and regional elites in a multi-level autocracy. This study focuses on the relationship between the federal center and regions after the 2012 revival of the direct gubernatorial election in Russia. It argues that within the general political contract, different principal-agent relationships coexist between the Kremlin and regional governors. Combining the problems of information asymmetry and goal conflict, discussed in the principal-agent theory, this article formulates theoretical expectations for four agency relations, with three of them having empirical evidence in Russia. It also shows that for each type of agency relations the president-principal develops a toolkit to handle the agents, which is based on repression, co-optation, and legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Villages are stated to be the smallest government structure in Indonesia. A village is an area that has certain boundaries, as a legal community unit that has the right to regulate and manage the affairs of local communities based on their origins. Apart from that, the village government also has the authority to determine legislative products mentioned in village regulations. However, this form of legal regulation is not included in the hierarchy of legal regulations in Indonesia, and in practice it is rarely known by the public. Therefore, this research will focus on identifying the legality of the position of regulations in villages as part of the national legal and regulatory framework. The research method used is a normative legal research method which discusses the position and legality of regulations in the village based on applicable laws and regulations as primary legal material. Apart from that, the discussion is also complemented by secondary legal materials in the form of books and articles published in journals based on theories, concepts, as well as legal principles and adages. The research results show that the village government is the smallest unit in the government system in Indonesia. The village government, like other governments in the region, has the authority to regulate and manage its government affairs autonomously based on the division of affairs and rights according to the origins of the village. Regarding this authority, the village government has the authority to form village regulations and village head regulations. The status and legitimacy of village regulations and village head regulations are recognized as statutory regulations and have binding legal force as long as they are formed based on higher statutory regulations or based on their authority over the village's original rights.

Communication professionals have a paramount role in global crisis. What did they learn during the covid pandemic that could be used in future global crisis? The aim of this article is to identify and analyze strategy changes among communicators in municipalities and how their conceptions of communicated knowledge transformed during the pandemic. Retrospective interviews and textual material are analyzed with a framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis in combination with Legitimation Code Theory. The analysis shows that the work of the communicators was characterized by collaboration with other professional groups and the civil society, and that the complexity and important time aspects during this crisis gave birth to semi-new, reinvented, discursive tools in the shape of text genres. The communicators' conceived relevant knowledge as concept-driven and developed the conception that conveyance of knowledge should be thoroughly planned in a way that takes complexity into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the discursive practices used by secular social work educators when teaching ultra-Orthodox students, whose strict interpretations of Jewish religious law often clash with professional values. Utilizing data from a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 16 social work faculty members, the paper elaborates van Leeuwen’s framework for analyzing legitimation in discourse. The findings indicate that the lecturers often encounter controversial situations that require them to abandon their professional ethics in order to accommodate the differential needs of their ultra-Orthodox students. I contend that in order to legitimize and camouflage conflictual pedagogic actions, such as the exclusion of women, self-censorship or the acceptance of discriminatory attitudes, the interviewees use social work concepts and terminology, such as cultural sensitivity, discretion or rapport. That is, the lecturers paradoxically use their professional identity to suspend social work principles in an attempt to implement multicultural politics in the classroom. The study uses identity construction as a complementary analytical lens to van Leeuwen’s approach and illuminates the use of discursive legitimation in educational and professional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to describe the perspectives of the Acehnese people on Qanun Putroe Phang. The theoretical approach employed is legal linguistics, utilising Critical Discourse Analysis. The focus of the research is on public opinion regarding the qanun, which is a regional regulation governing government administration and community life in Aceh, Indonesia. This qanun is known for prioritising the protection of women and children in Aceh since the reign of Sultan Iskandar Muda (from 1607 until 1636). The study involved interviews with 50 informants aged 20-80 years old, with 10 informants from each of the following districts: Aceh Besar, Pidie, North Aceh, South Aceh, and West Aceh. The interviews explored the participants' perceptions of Qanun Putroe Phang and their understanding of its role in protecting the rights of women and children within Acehnese society. The results indicated that 84% of respondents believe the qanun is, and will continue to be, relevant even in contemporary life. However, 16% of respondents viewed the qanun as a burden for families, particularly those with many daughters or economic difficulties. Many respondents suggested that the qanun should be revised to encourage its implementation in a manner that is not mandatory but persuasive for the Acehnese people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of hegemonic masculinity maintains a distinctive status within the social sciences and humanities. Yet there never has been an examination of Connell's changing conceptualization of the term throughout her scholarship, and specifically when and why she integrated 'legitimation' into her definition of hegemonic masculinity. The authors address this oversight by providing a detailed retrospective on the concept from its embryonic conceptualizations to its eventual reformulation. Within this historical assessment, the authors further consider Connell's broader feminist theory of gender and how legitimation of the hegemonic masculinity/emphasized femininity relationship is central to that theory. The concepts of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity and the theory in which they are embedded developed in tandem over time. The paper emphasizes that during this dual development, legitimation of unequal gender relations became the theoretical linchpin for conceptualizing hegemonic masculinity and eventually its relationship to emphasized femininity as a part of Connell's larger gender theory. The paper also demonstrates that over time Connell progressively changed the meaning of hegemonic masculinity in significant ways and concludes with a discussion of recent 'legitimation processes' that have appeared in the literature, and how each contributes unique ways of conceptualizing the legitimation of unequal gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine tests the resilience of the authoritarian regime in Russia. Most of the elites showed their commitment to the autocrat by publicly supporting the "special military operation". However, the intensity of their support has varied across the ranks. By examining Russian governors, I propose that elites vary their communicative responses to the war strategically, depending on their personal considerations and the structural characteristics of their regions. I apply text-as-data methods to analyze gubernatorial posts on the social network VKontakte in 2022–2023. I find that governors up for election, outsiders, with weaker political standing, and from poorer regions communicate more support measures for combatants and their families, and humanitarian aid to the annexed territories, when discussing the war in Ukraine. Therefore, by co-opting war-affected groups and emphasizing performance legitimacy, governors minimize the threat of anti-regime mobilization without resorting to large-scale repression and contribute to authoritarian resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in political economy suggests that autocratic regimes have been moving from an approach of mass repression based on violence, towards one of manipulation of information, where highlighting regime performance is a strategy used to boost regime popularity and maintain control. While the evolving strategies autocratic governments use to legitimise their rule have been the subject of much analysis, the role of third parties in adding to such strategies is less examined. This paper argues that corporations confer legitimacy on autocratic governments through a number of material and symbolic activities, including by praising their economic performance. We trace out the implications of adopting legitimation as a key concept in the analysis of corporate relations to autocratic regimes. We identify the ethically problematic aspects of legitimation, present new quantitative evidence suggesting that corporate legitimation of regimes matters empirically and outline a research agenda on legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do international organizations (IOs) and their proponents claim legitimacy, and how do their opponents undermine such legitimacy? This article develops a framework that accounts for the links between legitimation and delegitimation strategies and how they regularly produce 'legitimation struggles'. Drawing on the case of the African Union between 2015–2020, the study goes beyond existing research in three ways. First, legitimation struggles are not simply related to input and output legitimacy but are deeply related to the social purpose of the organization. Second, legitimation struggles do not only involve IO representatives and member-states but are strengthened by a range of other non-state agents. Third, while discursive strategies are essential, legitimation struggles are reinforced when they are combined with behavioural or institutional legitimation strategies. Future research would do well to go beyond the current Western-centric bias and draw on our findings to investigate legitimation struggles under different conditions around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do governing actors in international politics become legitimised? Current approaches to the study of legitimation do not fully account for the complexities of governance in contemporary international and global politics because they pre-specify 'sources' of legitimacy and treat change in audience expectations towards rightful rule as exogenous to legitimation processes. Instead, this article synthesises existing models of legitimation with relational theory to argue that constellations of institutional complexities necessitate an analytical focus on audiences and their expectations as embedded in governance networks. It then provides a relational theory of legitimation, emphasising the mechanisms undergirding legitimation: legitimation should be conceptualised as a process of congruence-finding between actors' normative expectations. A governance relation might be influenced towards greater or lesser congruence via several mechanisms working at the level of the relation and the wider network, with more congruence giving rise to stabler governance practices. In this way, the theory builds upon legitimation scholarship by developing pathways to investigate legitimation across the varied contexts of international politics: it avoids a normative background theory of legitimacy sources and provides an improved framework for understanding change in the legitimacy of institutions over time by considering endogenous mechanisms of legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, after presenting some moments in the history of the ideas of ideology and utopia, I refer to the binomial ideology-utopia in the vision of Paul Ricoeur. According to the French philosopher, ideology and utopia form a diptych, because in a certain way they respond to each other and the hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to these notions is remarkable. From Ricoeur's perspective, if the pathology of ideology manifests itself through its "affinity for illusion, dissimulation, lies", the specific of utopia manifests itself through "the loss of the real itself, in favor of perfectionistic, borderline unrealizable schemes", that replaces the logic of action aware of the elementary distinction between the desirable and the achievable. Beyond the "negative" dimensions, Ricoeur still recognizes the liberating function of utopia, because "to imagine the out of place means to keep open the field of the possible". He considers, in Kantian language, that "ideology and utopia are figures of the reproductive imagination and the productive imagination". In Paul Ricoeur's terms, as expressions of the political and social imaginary, ideology and utopia together with new symbols, rituals or mythologies are assumed by political power for the purpose of legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, we have seen a proliferation of research on discursive legitimation, which has shed light on how legitimacy is established through communication. However, this body of work remains fragmented, and there is a need to synthesize and develop a more comprehensive and in-depth theoretical understanding of this vibrant area of research. This article aims to address this need by providing an integrative theoretical framework and outlining an agenda for future research. The framework encompasses five key elements of discursive legitimation: strategies, positions, foundations, temporality, and arenas. Drawing on this framework, we present a research agenda that highlights key topics related to these elements along with theoretical and methodological considerations cutting across them. Our contribution lies in conceptualizing discursive legitimation as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon, offering a complementary framework to existing models and paving the way for future studies, and placing discursive strategies—which have been the focus of prior research—in context by highlighting the critical role of key discursive elements in enabling or constraining legitimation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractScholarly research on the role of digital activism in authoritarian settings has largely centered around debates on “liberation technology” versus “networked authoritarianism”. In this article we aim to extend existing research by linking authoritarian legitimation theories with emerging scholarship on digital activism. We examine Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, two autocracies in post-Soviet Central Asia, and show how non-democratic regimes use digital activism for legitimation purposes. Our study draws on 33 qualitative in-depth interviews with digital activists and state officials in both countries to generate critical comparative insights into how modern autocracies function in the digital age. Our analysis suggests that autocracies use four mutually inclusive and escalating legitimation mechanisms (limited participation, outputs legitimation, regime discourse, and targeted repression) in their interactions with digital activists to become more resilient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NSO Group is an Israeli cyber surveillance firm notorious for Pegasus – an intrusive malware capable of covertly taking control of smartphones and remotely extracting their contents. In 2019, after a series of unflattering reports on governments' use of Pegasus to infiltrate the phones of activists and journalists, NSO embarked on an uncharacteristically public legitimation campaign. This article focuses on this campaign and explores how this otherwise secretive spyware company publicly legitimizes its surveillance. Based on an empirical analysis of hundreds of public documents across various media, we explore NSO's legitimacy management practices and identify the audiences and contexts of this legitimation. Our analysis identified four legitimation practices: securitization, Zionist patriotism, ethics washing, and normalization. We argue that these legitimation strategies operate across two interrelated axes of legitimation: a local axis that echoes a particularly Israeli 'security-driven populism'; and a universal axis that follows Silicon Valley's ethics washing. We show that these legitimation axes are designed to simultaneously ensure the company's survivability and to sustain surveillance realism – the perception of surveillance as the only viable option This article contributes to the emerging literature on cyber surveillance firms and to the burgeoning research on the legitimation of surveillance by shedding light on the discursive infrastructures behind contemporary cyber espionage. Moreover, while surveillance is often understood as a global phenomenon, this article highlights the need to focus on the local contexts from which surveillance originates to understand its sustainability, expansion, and vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rulers often use a mythologised understanding of the past to further their political interests in the present. In authoritarian societies, rulers often manipulate collective memory to justify their hold on power. When rulers manipulate specific aspects of the past, they can shape the collective memory of ordinary people and thus have a significant impact on everyday politics. Using the case of North Korea, one of the world's most authoritarian societies, I theorise everyday politics from the standpoint of the state by focusing on legitimation and collective memory. Based on the New Year statements issued by North Korean rulers between 1946 and 2019, I use thematic coding through qualitative text analysis to analyse how these rulers have portrayed specific aspects of the past in their political discourse. The article focuses on how legitimation claims about the 'Chollima Work Team' within the 'Chollima Movement' have used memory politics to shape the everyday lives of North Koreans. Because these claims have been invoked consistently in propaganda for decades, a comparative examination over time shows the propagandistic tools that North Korean rulers have drawn on for mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of research on the leading role of radical and populist parties to situate 'sovereignty' as an increasingly central element of political discourse. However, there is much less said about the response of pro-EU actors, and how they can accommodate, modify, or reject the notion of 'sovereignty'. The article begins with the following research question: what role does 'European sovereignty' play in the legitimation strategies among pro-EU executive actors? Through a framing analysis of Spanish, French, German, and EU executive actors, we uncover the way in which they articulate (European) sovereignty in their speeches. We argue that the resignification of the concept of sovereignty as 'European' plays a relevant role in the rearticulation of European politics, mostly led by French President Emmanuel Macron. The mainstreaming of 'European sovereignty' has implications for power relations, as it orients European political debates towards a geopolitical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore the question of why and how autocrats update their diaspora policy. Building on scholarship that deals with states' motivations to engage with 'their' diasporas, alongside scholarship that has focused on authoritarian regimes' durability, the article demonstrates how a regime's legitimation process takes place in the transnational sphere and illuminates how authoritarian consolidation strategies maintain a constant interaction with the transnational sphere and are fed by it. Presenting an extended case study of Egypt's diaspora policy under 'Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, this article demonstrates how the updated policies and discourse, which include positive and negative engagement, are part of regime legitimation strategies and are designed to mobilize support for the post-June 2013 regime and its narrative, both domestically and abroad, and constitute part of the regime's strategies for consolidating its power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing research on and conceptualization of the public presence of religion usually builds on the Habermasian understanding of the public sphere. This has centered the discussion on the public presence of religion around the question of where such a presence is justified. Discourse theories offer an alternative understanding, stating that the public sphere is an area of struggles where diverse discourses compete to establish a definition of social reality as taken for granted and hegemonic. This shift opens the question of how a given definition of social reality becomes taken for granted, pointing to the role of legitimation. Against this background, our article argues that religion's ability to serve as a valuable "resource" for building justifications in discursive struggles for hegemony could serve as indicators of its presence in the public sphere. Along these lines, we analyze religion's legitimizing role in abortion policy-making in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The governance of Indigenous people is in many contexts a combination of political ambitions to promote self-governance, and more traditional policies and governance practices. These combinations often carry unintended contradictions and exclusionary processes. In this article, we investigate the consequences of one such contradiction: the aspiration for self-determination and self-governance on the one hand and the aspiration for broader political influence in decisions about resources to Sámi sport on the other. Since legitimation of governance structures and practices is essential for their overall functionality, we constructed the research question: What strategies are used to legitimise the policy and governance practices of Sámi sport? To explore this research question, we employed Sámi sport in Finland as an empirical case. Results show that authorisation as a legitimation strategy is prominent and used at institutional and individual levels. Moral evaluation as strategy is based on authoritative actors' personal choice. Inclusion and integration in mainstream policy is seen as a rational legitimation strategy, which is supported by narratives where smallness and uniqueness are dominant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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