Legitimacy and Authority

In an attempt to explain why the gender gap in leadership positions persists, we propose a model centered on legitimacy. When women hold powerful positions, they have a harder time than men eliciting respect and admiration (i.e., status) from subordinates. As a result, female power-holders are seen as less legitimate than male power-holders. Unless they are able to legitimize their role, relative illegitimacy will prompt a variety of consequences such as more negative subordinate behavior and reduced cooperation when the leader is a woman. Subordinate rejection will likely put female leaders in a precarious mindset, and trigger negative responses toward subordinates; such behavior can confirm negative expectations of female leaders and further undermine female authority in a self-reinforcing cycle of illegitimacy. Leader or organizational features that enhance status attributions and/or lower subordinates' perceptions of power differentials may increase legitimacy for women in leadership roles.

The most recent transformation of world order is often depicted as a shift from a Westphalian to a post-Westphalian era in which international organizations are becoming increasingly independent sites of authority. This internationalization of authority is often considered as an indication of the constitutionalization of the global legal order. However, this article highlights that international organizations can also exercise authority in an authoritarian fashion that violates the same constitutionalist principles of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law that international organizations are usually expected to promote. It is thus an open question which post-Westphalia we are in fact heading to: a constitutionalized order, an authoritarian order, or a combination of both? Based on a conceptualization of post-Westphalian orders as a two-dimensional continuum linking the ideal-typical end points of constitutionalism and authoritarianism, we analyze the United Nations security s...

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Functionalist theories of political authority are commonly challenged on the grounds that such theories cannot explain the boundaries of state of authority. If all that matters for political authority is whether a state is sufficiently just, then one will have some difficulty explaining why persons have political obligations to the particular state they reside in, why unilateral annexation by reasonably just states does not create political obligations on the part of the annexed, and why a reasonably just state may lack political authority because of past wrongdoing. In this paper, I develop a hybrid theory of political authority which combines fair play and functionalist criteria. I go on to show that fair play functionalism can resolve all three of the particularity problem, the problem of unilateral annexation, and the problem of historical injustice while maintaining a commitment to basic functionalist intuitions.

Emerging with increased intensity since the 1990s, peace-building and reconstruction of post-conflict and war-torn societies have become central to today's international relations and assistance agendas. When we are talking about reconstruction of collapsed states, we have to keep in mind two models: an external model which rests on building institutions which promote stability through checking the exercise of power, and an internal model where domestic actors produce change and which hinges on re-establishing power.

Resumo Este artigo visa apresentar a socialização legal como um campo de investigação que busca compreender a maneira pela qual as crianças e os adolescentes desenvolvem suas noções sobre autoridades, regras e leis. Trata-se de uma revisão da literatura dividida em dois segmentos centrais: um balanço teórico das chamadas abordagens tradicionais e uma síntese dos estudos recentes sobre a temática da socialização legal. Além disso, o artigo sinaliza alguns desafios de pesquisa que podem contribuir para o entendimento desse processo no contexto brasileiro. Abstract The article aims to present the legal socialization as an inquiry field that seeks to understand how children and adolescents develop their views on authorities, rules and laws. This article presents a literature review divided into two main segments: a theoretical review about the traditional approaches and a brief review about the recent studies on the legal socialization. In addition, the article indicates some research c...

“Who is in charge of Sinaloa?” This is a question about  power relationships, exclusively addressing the young people of Los Mochis, Culiacán, and Mazatlán. Of the 350 participants, aged 15 to 25, 75% replied that they believe the drug traffickers are the ones in charge of Sinaloa, while just 18% referred to politicians, leaving business people, journalists, and the police very far down on the scale of power. Of those same young people, 98% were convinced that the most influential politicians of Sinaloa have made agreements with the drug traffickers, while 86% firmly believed that, in order for a drug trafficker to be successful, they must reach agreements with politicians. What is being referred to here is a brutal symbiosis, with degrees of mutual protection at high levels.

The Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities under International Humanitarian Law issued by the ICRC in 2008 recommended two interpretive standards on the use of force against individuals in armed conflicts. While one standard defines ‘direct participation in hostilities’ by reference to ‘functional membership’ such that anyone with a continuous combat functions in an organised armed group will lose her/his civilian immunity and be subject to attack on a continuous basis, the other standard requires that the kind and degree of force used in the attack be graduated according to military necessity. This paper surveys the court decisions, military manuals and legal or policy documents in different domestic jurisdictions since the publication of the Interpretive Guidance to illustrate the different levels of the adoption of these standards in domestic legal orders. The paper then borrows Franck’s theory of legitimacy to identify the possible legitimating factors that gave these standards the capacity to induce their adoption by domestic actors. Lastly, the paper employs Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy in order to examine whether and how the governance by these transnational standards of the people subjected to them may be justified by their democratic legitimacy.

This symposium addresses the role of wars and crises as mechanisms of international change. Over the past two decades, the international system has undergone a number of remarkable transformations, from the end of the Cold War to the emergence of an ongoing “War on Terror,” and from the collapse of statist development models to the emergence of a contested—if evolving—neoliberal “Washington Consensus.” This volatility exceeds any underlying shifts in economic structures or the distribution of capabilities, and raises important questions regarding the roles of agency, uncertainty, and ideas in advancing change. In this introduction we examine the role of wars and economic crises as socially constructed openings for change. We attempt three things: to critique materialist approaches in the security and political economy issue areas, to outline the distinctive contribution that an agent-centered constructivist understanding of such events offers, and to offer a framework for the study of such events, one which highlights an expanded range of elite-mass interactions.

In a fascinating paper on the nature of police legitimacy in Southern China, Sun et al. (2018) present evidence that what have previously been treated as possible sources of legitimacy—public perceptions of police procedural justice, distributive justice, effectiveness and lawfulness—are in fact constituent components of legitimacy. We argue in this paper, that the empirical strategy used to reach this conclusion is not fit for purpose because both conceptual stances—possible sources of legitimacy or constituent components of legitimacy—are consistent with the same fitted statistical model. Ironically, therefore, Sun and colleagues end up assuming rather than discovering the normative bases on which people judge police legitimacy. To be sensitive to cultural context means using a methodology that does not a priori impose the preconditions of legitimacy. We illustrate this general point by analysing nationally representative data from 30 countries across Europe and beyond.

How can we explain the dynamics of nonconventional struggles such as the Gaza flotilla case of May 2010? Most international relations scholars analyze international disputes using a “chess logic,” according to which the actors seek to outmaneuver their opponents on the battleground. However, an increasing number of clashes are guided by a “performance logic”: although the players interact with one another, their real targets are audiences. The present study aims to bridge this gap, proposing a phenomenological framework for analyzing this particular kind of performative contest over legitimation and delegitimation in contemporary conflicts. It expands upon the idea that current anarchical global politics increasingly lead contending actors to engage in “pure” legitimation struggles—“battles for legitimacy”—seeking to persuade international audiences that they deserve political support. After providing guidelines for the identification of these phenomena, this article presents a model for the methodical examination of their interactive dynamics based on three legitimation functions (appropriateness, consensus, empathy). This model is applied to the flotilla case by mapping the protagonists’ framing contests across “legitimation (battle)fields.” The findings of this study, which emphasize the strong interplay between normative, political, and emotional mechanisms for empowering (de)legitimation strategies, can contribute to expanding the research program concerning international legitimacy.

This paper examines how Irish elite schools negotiate change and maintain their legitimacy in times of economic turmoil and rising social inequality. It argues that they have not bowed before the demands of democratisation or economic globalisation. Instead they continue to maintain a high level of social closure and control diversity rather than adapt to it. Moral character acts as a principle of distinction and legitimation as these schools pose as the moral vanguards of the nation, in a national context where the economic crisis is commonly blamed on ‘greed’ and moral corruption. Their discourse is based on the defence of a certain social and moral order, somehow at odds with the dominant neoliberal ideology, but consistent with a static view of society and an aristocratic conception of leadership, which their students internalise.

This paper historicizes the ambivalent discourse on data and communication transparency that is epidemic in digital cultures by confronting it with a reading of Kleist’s novella, The Duel (1811). In the medium of literature, conditions of possibility for the production of relevant and reliable knowledge on the basis of data are subject to analysis and critique. Basic operations of data processing have proven to be fallible and corrupted by media, which, instead of reducing complexity, deepen it. In contradistinction to the trust that reduces this complexity, The Duel performs an epistemology of mistrust, which insists on the polyvalence, dubiousness, agility, and ephemerality of the data from which truth is supposed to appear.

As internet users become subjected to stricter and more developed means of surveillance and censorship, the developments towards a decentralised version of the network move forwards by providing functional and scalable alternatives. These blockchain inventions are definitely marvelous from the perspective of engineering and cryptography, but they raise important questions about legitimacy and governance. By employing qualitative data analysis and comparisons, this paper aims to present the current state of the internet, explain the origins and nature of the blockchain as the underlying source of immutable decentralisation, and ultimately ask the question " What are the possible solutions to create a truly decentralised internet which makes use of all the new technological advancements but is simultaneously accountable to national, transnational, and international polities? ". According to the findings, a framework of trust, collaboration and consensus must be established between those who govern and those who are governed, as new cryptographic innovations are led by autonomous " law is code " systems.

Confronted with the need for scholarly criteria in properly defining the ad hoc papal institution existent under Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), this paper seeks to clarify the title, office, and jurisdiction of the eleventh-century reforming legate. Discussing the Roman origins of this office through to the twelfth century – taking into account the political, ecclesiastical and legal constraints of the period – questions are raised concerning the extent and nature of legatine authority (especially as the reformers understood it). Contemporary criteria are unclear, but modern scholars can infer some regularities from Gregory VII's Register and other contemporary sources as to how this office operated in the last quarter of the eleventh century, and ultimately, to understand more clearly how reform was being implemented in the provinces.

The ethics of voting is a new field of academic research, uniting debates in ethics and public policy, democratic theory and more empirical studies of politics. A central question in this emerging field is whether or not voters should be legally required to vote. This chapter examines different arguments on behalf of compulsory voting, arguing that these do not generally succeed, although compulsory voting might be justified in certain special cases. However, adequately specifying the forms of voluntary voting that are consistent with democratic norms is likely to be philosophically complex and politically controversial.

Pojęcie interregnum w symboliczny sposób oddaje istotę zagadnień podjętych w ramach niniejszej monografii. Jej przedmiot stanowi analiza XX-wiecznych transformacji ustrojowych, które dokonały się w kręgu euroatlantyckiej kultury prawnej. Celem badań było uchwycenie najistotniejszych elementów zmiany ustrojowej ujmowanej możliwie szeroko, a zatem obejmującej przekształcanie się reżimów monarchicznych w ustroje o charakterze republikańskim, procesy liberalizacji lub demokratyzacji reżimów autorytarnych czy wreszcie formowanie się całkowicie nowych bytów państwowych. Opisywane metamorfozy ustrojowe zostały uchwycone in statu nascendi, w perspektywie dynamicznej, w okresie kształtowania się nowych form ustrojowych, a zatem ścierania się starego porządku z nowym.

Monografia ma walor nie tylko informacyjny, przejawiający się w opisie biegu zdarzeń składających się na poszczególne procesy zmiany ustrojowej. Podejmuje także uniwersalne problemy związane z napięciem między legalnością a legitymizacją ustroju w warunkach doniosłej zmiany politycznej lub społecznej.

Iako je definicija javnog ovlašćenja predmet debate u okviru savremenog diskursa društvenih nauka, suština pojma javnog ovlašćenja je nesporna ― javno ovlašćenje zavisi od voljnog podređivanja naredbama koje nadređeni izdaju podređenima, pa se zbog toga efektivno javno ovlašćenje možda najkraće može definisati kao legitimno vršenje faktičke vlasti. Element legitimiteta je ključan za pojam javnog ovlašćenja i na osnovu njega se javno ovlašćenje razlikuje od opšteg koncepta moći. Legitimitet javnog ovlašćenja postoji onda kada ga i nadređeni i podređeni priznaju i smatraju opravdanim.

Kriminal belog okovratnika odnosi se na brojna krivična dela od kojih većina može biti izvršena samo ukoliko izrvršilac poseduje faktičku institucionalnu vlast, bilo da je u pitanju javni ili privatni sektor. Zloupotreba ovlašćenja koja je inherentna ovoj vrsti kriminala, ne generiše posledice samo u jednoj sferi društvenih odnosa, već znatno šire ― u okvirima u kojima funkcioniše poverenje građana u institucije i u njihov integritet. Podrivanjem legitimiteta javnog ovlašćenja u smislu formalne vlasti, putem kriminalizacije te vlasti, kriminal belog okovratnika proizvodi devijaciju u načinu na koji institucije nastupaju spram javnosti i društva u celini. Zbog toga su političke posledice kriminala belog okovratnika slične onim posledicama koje izaziva pojava korupcije u opštem smislu, a to je stvaranje deficita legimiteta javnog ovlašćenja i, posledično tome, ozbiljno narušavanje poverenja javnosti u institucije. U opisanoj situaciji, u ekonomskoj sferi, posledice se ispoljavaju kao usporavanje dinamike legitimnih i produktivnih društvenih, institucionalnih i ekonomskih transakcija. A pošto se istovremeno smanjuje građanska participacija u političkim procesima i stavovi građana o demokratičnosti društva slede negativan trend, narušava se ukupna demokratičnost takvog društva.

Esta obra analiza el proceso de consolidación de la autoridad de las Organizaciones Internacionales Intergubernamentales (OII) y, en especial,  el proceso de creación de una de sus fuentes de poder, la legitimidad. En ella se defiende que estas instituciones, en la mayoría de los casos, carecen de métodos de aplicación coercitiva para imponer su autoridad y dependen de la percepción externa sobre su labor. Asimismo, las OII se conciben como una comunidad política global cuya legitimidad se pude consolidar en el proceso de rendición de cuentas que pasa ante los Estados miembros y ante la sociedad civil global. En este trabajo se elabora y se propone la noción de legitimidad social para examinar y valorar dicho proceso. Así, la legitimidad social es una característica no material con capacidad de impulsar el cumplimiento, fundada en las percepciones subjetivas de los otros actores de la comunidad política sobre los tres criterios objetivos que describen el comportamiento de la OII: los valores morales, el principio de legalidad y la efectividad. Los estudios sobre la legitimidad social de la ONU, la OMC y la OIT ofrecidos en esta obra demuestran las debilidades y fortalezas de la legitimidad social de cada una de ellas, tanto desde una perspectiva objetiva como atendiendo a la percepción de los diferentes actores que la analizan.

I propose a set of distinctions that demarcate the structure
that I consider appropriate for the examination of the thesis
of conceptual incompatibility between authority and autonomy.
I begin with an analysis of the standard conception of authority,
i.e., the practical difference thesis (correlativism). I distinguish two versions: the epistemic and the voluntarist. Then I offer an analysis of two conceptions of moral autonomy: self-legislation and self-judgment. I conclude by remarking that we should distinguish two different versions of the conceptual incompatibility thesis: a) The conflict is unsolvable because autonomy requires that we always be the authors of the rules we have to obey while the authority claims that her will is the source of such standards. b) The conflict is unsolvable
because autonomy requires that we always act based on our
own moral judgment on what categorical reasons should guide our actions while the authority pretends that we have to give up acting as that judgment requires.

In this book I offer a critical, comparative and empirically-informed defense of Islamic schools in the West. To do so I elaborate an idealized philosophy of Islamic education, against which I evaluate the very different empirical situation in the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States. I examine in detail notions of cultural identity and cultural coherence, the scope of parental authority v. a child's interests, as well as the state's hypothetical role in regulating religious schools.

"When I Wear My Alligator Boots examines how the lives of dispossessed men and women are affected by the rise of narcotrafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the “war on drugs”: despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in Mexico’s north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige.

In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural villages, from the vibrant folklore popularized in the narco-corridos of Norteña music to the icon of Jesús Malverde, the “patron saint” of narcos, tucked beneath the shirts of local people. In When I Wear My Alligator Boots, the author explores the everyday reality of the drug trade by living alongside its low-level workers, who live at the edges of the violence generated by the militarization of the war on drugs. Rather than telling the story of the powerful cartel leaders, the book focuses on the women who occasionally make their sandwiches, the low-level businessmen who launder their money, the addicts who consume their products, the mules who carry their money and drugs across borders, and the men and women who serve out prison sentences when their bosses' operations go awry."

In recent years, scholars of criminal justice and criminology have brought legitimacy to the forefront of academic and policy discussion. The focus has been primarily – though not exclusively – on legitimacy within policing, with the most common approach framing legitimacy as a self-regulatory scheme that can enhance widespread voluntary compliance with the law and cooperation with legal authorities. In the most influential definition, institutional trust is assumed to be an integral element of legitimacy (Tyler, 2006a, 2006b). For an individual to find the police to be legitimate, for instance, she must feel that it is her positive duty to obey the instructions of police officers (she grants the police the rightful authority to dictate appropriate behavior), but she must also believe that police officers exercise their power appropriately. In this chapter we argue that the nature, measurement and motivating force of trust and legitimacy is in need of further explication. Considering these two concepts in a context of a type of authority that is both coercive and consent-based in nature, we make the case that legitimacy is (a) the belief that an institution exhibits properties that justify its power and (b) a duty to obey that emerges out of this sense of appropriateness; that trust is about positive expectations about valued behavior from institutional officials; and that legitimacy and institutional trust overlap if one assumes that people judge the appropriateness of the police as an institution on the basis of the appropriateness of officers' use of power. Our discussion will, we hope, be of broad theoretical and policy interest.

É possível obter um conceito de Autoridade que esclareça como autoridade e poder interagem no Direito? O problema se justifica na necessidade de categorias para avaliar fenômenos jurídicos e políticos. Utilizamos da obra de Hannah Arendt como marco teórico, por sua abordagem diferenciada da questão. Partimos da revisão bibliográfica da obra arendtiana e das suas fontes, encontrando conceitos-chave e perspectivas renovadas sobre autoridade como parte de um sistema jurídico-político. A hipótese confirmada é que a autoridade coloca manutenção e modificação da ordem em harmonia, vinculando passado e futuro pela tradição, enquanto aumento da comunidade política vinculado ao momento constituinte fundador.

In this paper I examine how Hobbes’ philosophy can be read from an Arendtian perspective. I argue that Arendt provided two different interpretations of Hobbes: one set down in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where Hobbes is depicted as the spokesman of the emerging bourgeoisie; and another that she developed later, scattered among various texts such as The Human Condition and Between Past and Future. I focus on this second interpretation and on her analysis of concepts such as common sense, authority and sovereignty. Firstly, I examine how she changes the meaning of common sense, and how this shift is linked to what Arendt understands by the expression “estrangement from the world.” Secondly, I explain how Hobbes redefined the concept of authority and how his notion of sovereignty deliberately conflated the dual concepts of authority and power.

Link: https://brill.com/abstract/journals/hobs/32/1/article-p71_71.xml

Further research on this topic can be read here:
https://www.academia.edu/30502447/Ph._D._Hannah_Arendt_on_the_question_of_authority_Concluding_Remarks_

Or here: https://www.academia.edu/31488906/Hannah_Arendt._Una_lectura_desde_la_autoridad_Tesis_doctoral_

How do ‘new’ and ’old’ Islamic actors in contemporary Albania define religious legitimacy, the nation and religious otherness? This chapter uses Olivier Roy’s analytical distinction between accommodationism and neo-fundamentalism as a compass to navigate through Albania’s complex religious landscape by exploring different sets of beliefs promulgated by a selection of Islamic groups (2010).  These are the Muslim Community of Albania, which represents ‘official Islam’ , and ‘mainstream’ Sunni Muslims, who are typically accommodationist. I also analyse a Sufi subgroup thereof, which is equally accommodationist, but in a slightly different manner. As a neo-fundamentalist counterpoint, I explore the ideas of a competing organisation composed of Salafi imams.

Accommodationism means that the bond between religion and a specific territory and culture of origin is tight. In this context, ‘culture’ refers to Albanian historical tradition and the language-based, secular nation-building project engineered by modernising state elites since the early 20th century. Neo-fundamentalism, conversely, is a globalised form of religion that emphasises the gap between faith and culture. As such, it represents a reformatted, exportable form of religiosity, which stands in contrast to cultural ethno-national ways of being Muslim. Neo-fundamentalist religious identity is faith-based, and seeks to ground itself solely upon explicit religious norms, at least in principle. Accordingly, these believers make their religiosity visible through a global uniform of religious markers detached from the surrounding culture.

In the Albanian Islamic context, the theoretically informed labels, neo-fundamentalist and accommodationist, roughly correspond to the ‘Albanianist’ versus the ‘Salafi’ forms of Islam. To some extent, this resonates with mainstream distinctions adopted in Albania and in the Balkans. A popular Albanian term for Muslims associated with neo-fundamentalist forms of Islam is ‘fanatic’ (fanatik). Accommodationism is commonly related to ‘old’ forms of Islam, which many be deemed as local, rooted, and European as well as tolerant and moderate. Neo-fundamentalism, conversely, refers to certain ‘new’ forms of Islam, i.e. those perceived to be imported, transnational, alien, ‘fanatic’ and a threat to local religious customs. This cultural distinction between what are deemed acceptable and unacceptable forms of Islam is often politicised and securitised. As I will show, the association between neo-fundamentalism and violence is not necessarily correct, and the Salafi community under scrutiny here can be defined as pacifist and purist (Wiktorowicz 2006). These two formats, moreover, clash and merge together as different local actors seek to recast and legitimize their respective positions.

The question of the authority of international law over domestic authorities and the duties of state officials to international law are fundamental concerns in international law theory and practice. The Authority of International Law: Obedience, Respect, and Rebuttal addresses these concerns by reviewing the present accounts of authority in international law constructing the authority of international law as imposing three different layers of duties on domestic officials: the duty to obey, the duty to respect and the duty to rebut, carefully setting out the duties owed by domestic political and legal authorities towards international law.

This book provides an original account of the authority of international law, one that is not tied to prior state consent or domestic constitutional frameworks. It offers a nuance account, arguing that whether or not international law is obeyed within any given situation depends on the type of duty it imposes on the state, and that duties normative force. There is no black and white framework in which international law always trumps domestic law or vice versa. Instead, Cali presents a realistic account of when international law has absolute authority, and when it can afford a margin of appreciation to states.

The Authority of International Law: Obedience, Respect, and Rebuttal contributes to existing debates on the authority of international law through considering the gap between consent-based jurisprudential theories of authority and self-interest and identity-based theories of compliance; looking at the importation of often highly demanding concepts of authority and legitimacy from standard domestic political and legal theory, to identify the shortcomings of the authority of international law; and by considering monism, dualism, and normative pluralism as theories for addressing authority competition between domestic legal orders and international law.

The doctrine of imamate, a fundamental doctrine of the Shiʿi Nizārī Ismaili community led by its 49th Imam, Aga Khan IV, has gone through several phases of development in history. Various periods of Ismaili history have episodes and specific cases of how the doctrine has been revisited and adjusted to accommodate the emerging issues facing the community.
The most recent shift in the doctrine has come about in the modern period of the Ismaili community through the vast institutionalisation of the office of imamate and the expansion of institutions whose primary role has been to improve the quality of the life of the community and the people amongst whom they live. The encounter of the Ismailis with modernity at the turn of the 20th century is a key event. The effective decoupling of the imamate and authority from nation-state divisions dislodges the familiar interconnection of authority and territory in the Weberian sense. The most recent integration of a bifocal leadership in which both worldly and spiritual matters receive due attention with a constellation of terminologies now predominantly part of the language of the Ismaili imamate herald the emergence of this new shift.