Contending Legitimacy in World Politics

<p>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 <i>Global Discourse.</i></p>