Armed groups and the politics of international legitimation / Stephan Hensell, Klaus Schlichte.

Chapter 1: Fighting for Legitimacy: Armed Groups and the Politics of International Legitimation.

Chapter 2: Decolonization and the Cold War: The Superpowers and the Anti-colonial Insurgencies in Indonesia and Vietnam.

Chapter 3: Western Sahara, the Polisario, and the Struggle for International Legitimacy.

Chapter 4: The FSLN and the Politics of Legitimation in the Cold War: Sandinista Revolutionaries and Transnational Activism.

Chapter 5: Tequila Diplomacy: Mexican–FMLN Relations in the Early Salvadoran Civil War.

Chapter 6: ‘When we became stronger, they listened more’: The Politics of Legitimation of the NRA in Uganda (1981–1986).

Chapter 7: The Politics of Mutual Legitimation: UNITA, Lobbyists, and Washington in the Angolan Civil War.

Chapter 8: Between the ‘Dome of the Rock’ and a Hard Place: Fatah and the Trade-off between Armed Struggle and International Legitimacy.

Chapter 9: From Government to Armed Struggle: Hamas’s Legitimation Politics.

Chapter 10: Recognition on their Own Terms?: The Paradox of the Taliban’s Quest for International Legitimacy.

Chapter 11: The Astonishingly Easy Path to International Legitimacy of Khalifa Haftar’s LAAF.

Conclusions.

Some Further Thoughts.

Index.

Non-state armed groups - rebels, guerrillas, militias, liberation movements - not only fight for state power but also for international legitimacy. Why are some armed groups successful in turning the power of the gun into legitimate authority that is internationally recognized while others fail? Contributing to a vibrant scholarly debate, this book is the first comparative study of armed groups that try to gain international legitimacy. It analyses how and when these attempts are successful. The volume presents a new framework for analysing the politics of legitimation that evolve around armed groups. Based on practice theory and global history, it highlights the interaction of practices and publics in the process of legitimation and introduces four different historical times, spanning from 1945 to the present, that have set different structural conditions for armed groups' pursuit of international legitimacy. Armed Groups and the Politics of International Legitimation encompasses in-depth case studies on Indonesia, Vietnam, Western Sahara, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Uganda, Angola, Palestine, Afghanistan, and Libya. Written by experts on these contexts, it suggests a research strategy of 'reiterative case comparison' that bridges the gap between political science, history, and sociology. It advances a new theoretical understanding of armed groups as international actors that co-shape international politics and as forces with a genuine quest for legitimacy, which allows us new insights into the fabric of international relations.

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