Securing Legitimacy? Perceptions of Security and ISAF’s Legitimacy in Northeast Afghanistan

Abstract

Using ISAF's security involvement in Afghanistan as an example, this article asks: Does the perceived provision of goods and services affect the empirical legitimacy attributed to external governance actors in areas of limited statehood? The study applies multilevel analysis to survey data for 2009-2013 from Northeast Afghanistan. The results support arguments of performance-based legitimacy. Perceptions of goods and service provision as effective have a positive impact on the legitimacy of external governance actors. However, the analysis underlines that this relationship is no automatism and that it depends on the attribution of governance effectiveness to a specific governance actor. In other words, no attribution, no legitimacy. Successfully linking more effective governance with more legitimacy is a possible impetus for a virtuous circle of governance.

Virtuous or Vicious Circle? Governance Effectiveness and Legitimacy in Areas of Limited Statehood

“…Mcloughlin (2018) for state-, Krieger (2018) for non-state-, and Ciorciari and Krasner (2018) for external actors). The wide geographical range of areas that the studies cover, including Bangladesh (Winters, Dietrich, and Mahmud 2018), Sri Lanka (Mcloughlin 2018), Timor Leste, Liberia, Kosovo and Haiti (Ciorciari and Krasner 2018), and Afghanistan (Stollenwerk 2018b), further puts the generalizability of our findings to the test.…”

“…Unlike in Western welfare states, where the state usually controls the delivery of public services, external and non-state actors play an indispensable role for governance provision in such areas. Examples that are discussed in this issue are security provision by the International Security Assistance Force's (ISAF) in Afghanistan (Remmert and Walter-Drop 2018;Stollenwerk 2018b) or the Smiling Sun Clinics, a network of U.S.-funded, local-NGO run health care facilities in Bangladesh (Winters, Dietrich, and Mahmud 2018). The relevance of these external and/or non-state actors for the interplay between governance legitimacy and effectiveness is twofold.…”

“…In other words, governance effectiveness must be a part of the audience's conception of legitimacy, in order to establish a causal connection from effectiveness to legitimacy (box 1). If, for example, a political community holds that only traditional or native authority is justified, then external actors will not be able to gain legitimacy, no matter how effective their governance is (see Ciorciari and Krasner 2018;Stollenwerk 2018b).…”

“…In areas of limited statehood, attributing credit or blame for governance success and failure can be challenging (Mcloughlin 2015, 350-351). With a multitude of governance actors, it becomes hard to identify the actors responsible for certain results and to grant them legitimacy accordingly (see Ciorciari and Krasner 2018;Stollenwerk 2018b;Winters, Dietrich, and Mahmud 2018). (4) Generalization: To make the causal pathway from effectiveness to legitimacy viable, governance audiences need to connect positive experiences to a governance institution and its representatives as a general attribute of that institution (box 4).…”

Escaping the Isomorphic Bias: Towards a Legitimacy-Centered Approach to State-Building

“…Emerging evidence from studies which utilized several rounds of household surveys in the same Provinces in Northern Afghanistan points to nuanced, but generally encouraging impacts of stabilization programmes on citizens' perception of the state (Böhnke, Köhler, and Zürcher 2017;Stollenwerk 2018). Citizens who were exposed to SPNA projects and knew of the activities of their District Development Assemblies generally perceived their situation more secure in 2012 than in previous surveys.…”