Injustice, Reparation, and Legitimacy

2019 ◽  
pp. 65-89
Author(s):  
Stephen Galoob ◽  
Stephen Winter
Keyword(s):  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Adequate Theory ◽  
The Right

Legitimate states have the right to rule over specific people and territory. This right to rule is not immutable. A state’s wrongdoing can undermine its legitimacy. Likewise, acts of reparation can bolster a state’s legitimacy. Because injustice and reparation can directly affect a state’s legitimacy, any adequate theory of political legitimacy must be able to explain these phenomena. However, many prominent theories of legitimacy cannot straightforwardly account for the significance of injustice and reparation. We demonstrate this point by analyzing A. John Simmons’s voluntarist theory of legitimacy. Although Simmons accepts many of the effects we identify, his theory ultimately fails to explain how injustice can compromise and reparation can bolster a state’s legitimacy. We then describe four strategies for explaining the significance of injustice and reparation, two of which seem particularly promising. We conclude by highlighting some broader implications of our insights for theorizing legitimacy.

The Specter of the Past: Reconstructing Conservative Historical Memory in South Korea

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-362
Author(s):  
Myungji Yang
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
New Right ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Right

Through the case of the New Right movement in South Korea in the early 2000s, this article explores how history has become a battleground on which the Right tried to regain its political legitimacy in the postauthoritarian context. Analyzing disputes over historiography in recent decades, this article argues that conservative intellectuals—academics, journalists, and writers—play a pivotal role in constructing conservative historical narratives and building an identity for right-wing movements. By contesting what they viewed as “distorted” leftist views and promoting national pride, New Right intellectuals positioned themselves as the guardians of “liberal democracy” in the Republic of Korea. Existing studies of the Far Right pay little attention to intellectual circles and their engagement in civil society. By examining how right-wing intellectuals appropriated the past and shaped triumphalist national imagery, this study aims to better understand the dynamics of ideational contestation and knowledge production in Far Right activism.

Indirect Instrumentalism about Political Legitimacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-202
Author(s):  
Matthias Brinkmann
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The Right

Abstract Political instrumentalism claims that the right to rule should be distributed such that justice is promoted best. Building on a distinction made by consequentialists in moral philosophy, I argue that instrumentalists should distinguish two levels of normative thinking about legitimacy, the critical and applied level. An indirect instrumentalism which acknowledges this distinction has significant advantages over simpler forms of instrumentalism that do not.

scholarly journals The Human Right to Political Participation

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabienne Peter
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Right ◽  
Governance Processes ◽  
Central Claim

In recent developments in political and legal philosophy, there is a tendency to endorse minimalist lists of human rights that do not include a right to political participation. Against such tendencies, I shall argue that the right to political participation, understood as distinct from a right to democracy, should have a place even on minimalist lists. In addition, I shall defend the need to extend the right to political participation to include participation not just in national, but also in international and global governance processes. The argument will be based on a cosmopolitan conception of political legitimacy and on a political conception of human rights that is normatively anchored in legitimacy. The central claim of my paper is that a right to political participation is necessary – but not sufficient – for political legitimacy in the global realm.

scholarly journals Re-Emergence of Shari'ah Penal Law in Northern Nigeria: Issues and Options

ICR Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-385
Author(s):  
Hanafi A. Hammed ◽  
Wahab O. Egbewole
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Freedom Of Religion ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
Penal Law ◽  
State Senator ◽  
The Right

It was in quest of political legitimacy as well as religious purity that former governor of Zamfara state, Senator Sani Ahmed Yerima, started a crusade in 1999 to re-establish Shariah. That initiative immediately found spacious reverberation with many Muslims. For the clerics, it was an opportunity to restore a religious and moral heritage that had been suppressed after colonial conquest. Many people saw Shariah as an instrument for achieving a just, safe, compassionate and less corrupt society. Thus, the Zamfara governments actions were soon taken up by other states, whose governors followed with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The federal government, however, declared Shariah to be incompatible with the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion. The northern governors responded by highlighting that the same constitution vested in states concurrent powers to establish their own court systems. The writers develop this narrative and look into the constitutional provisions that guarantee freedom of religion and international and national judicial decisions where the right of religion has been vindicated.

scholarly journals Nationalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umut Özkırımlı
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Equal Citizenship

Nationalism is the belief that the interests and values of a particular nation are prior to, and often superior to, those of others. Etymologically, the origins of the term can be traced back to the Latin word natio, or “something born,” which was used by Romans to refer to a community of foreigners. It is commonly believed that in its modern sense of “love for a particular nation,” the term was first used in 1798. Nationalism refers to both an ideology and a political movement. In the context of the French Revolution, nationalism has come to be associated with the more inclusive idea of popular sovereignty based on shared and equal citizenship. Later, under the impact of German Romantic thought, it has also been connected to exclusivist notions of ethnic and cultural distinctiveness. As a political movement, nationalism has often entailed the fusion of these two ideals, presupposing a world composed of “nation-states” in which, at least in theory, each nation has a right to a state of its own, later called the principle of national self-determination. Nationalism has outlived the expectations of a great many thinkers, both on the right and the left, who predicted its imminent demise, and reasserted itself as a powerful tool for mobilization in the wake of the end of the Cold War, inspiring or energizing a vast array of political projects, from independentism and isolationism to authoritarianism and populism. Despite attempts to pool sovereignty in supranational or transnational bodies, mostly to counter the corrosive and uneven impact of globalization, nationalism remains the fundamental organizing principle of interstate order and the ultimate source of political legitimacy. For many, it is also the taken-for-granted context of everyday life and a readily available cognitive and discursive frame to make sense of the world that surrounds them.

Secession

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Heath Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Right

Secession occurs when a portion of a state breaks away either to form its own sovereign country or to join with another state. Because secessionist conflicts are essentially contests over territory, theories of state-breaking presuppose various positions regarding political legitimacy. Most theorists now acknowledge that a group might have the right to secede when it has been treated sufficiently unjustly, but a growing minority (especially nationalists who trumpet the importance of political self-determination) now contend that groups sometimes have the right to political divorce even in the absence of injustice.

Legitimacy and Power in the Soviet Union Through Socialist Ritual

1984 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Right ◽  
Over Time

Every political system must secure compliance with its commands on the part of the ruled; the methods applied to achieve this vary from society to society and within societies over time. One way of gaining compliance is for political elites to establish the legitimacy of the political system, of their position within it, and of the commands that are issued. Political power can be said to be legitimate when, in the words of Sternberger, it is exercised both with a consciousness on the part of the elite that it has a right to govern and with some recognition by the ruled of that right. Both this consciousness of the right to govern and its acknowledgement by the ruled is derived from some source of authorization which may change over time. This paper will focus on the conscious attempts of Soviet political elites from the early sixties onwards to change their strategy of gaining compliance by reducing reliance on coercion and strengthening political legitimacy. It will draw attention to their efforts to develop a new source of authorization and to employ a new legitimation procedure. In developing the theoretical argument the Weberian typology of legitimate rule will be employed, and this approach to the topic will be contrasted with that adopted by T. H. Rigby in two recent publications.

scholarly journals Sovereignty over natural resources – A normative reinterpretation

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-37
Author(s):  
PETRA GÜMPLOVÁ
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Historical Injustice ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Legal Structure ◽  
The Right ◽  
Normative Account

Abstract:This article provides a normative account of sovereign rights to natural resources on the basis of moral principles which underlie its international legal structure – the right to self-determination and human rights. The first part locates the emergence of the system of sovereign rights to natural resources in the process of the decolonisation and justifies it as a correction of historical injustice of violent appropriation of natural resources. The second part identifies the key moral component and justificatory principle of the system of sovereign rights to natural resources – the right to self-determination. I outline a justice-based interpretation of the right to self-determination and show why rights to natural resources are its corollary. The last part connects rights to self-determination and rights to natural resources to human rights and shows how human rights define the permissible scope of rights to natural resources in two dimensions – the dimension of political legitimacy of the exercise of resource rights and the dimension of the distribution of resource benefits.

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