Browsing by Subject "Legitimacy"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Codified compassion: politics and principles in humanitarian governance
    (2012-08) Kennedy, Denis V.F.
    This dissertation analyzes recent attempts to devise rules and regulations to govern humanitarian action. Specifically, it asks: What drives humanitarian organizations to collectively regulate their principles, practices, and policies? Self-regulation, or self-organized attempts at collective action within direct state intervention, is a recent global phenomenon, affecting both the for- and non-profit worlds. In humanitarianism alone, there are now dozens of codes of conduct and other mechanisms that implicate all manner of humanitarian practice, from principles to aid provision. This research focuses on four key self-regulatory projects: the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief; the Sphere Project; HAP International; and the Code of Conduct on Images and Messages.Contrary to the widespread view that firms regulate for branding and competitive reasons, this study finds that principled reasons better account for the origins of these initiatives. Specifically, it shows that self-regulation has emerged out of a crisis of legitimacy in the humanitarian sector, whereby aid veterans concluded that good intentions were no longer enough as a basis for action. As Rwanda demonstrated, good intentions can lead to terrible outcomes. Through self-regulation, aid workers have sought to shift humanitarianism's ideational foundations from charity and good deeds to professionalism, technical standards, and human rights. Contestations over self-regulation, in turn, derive from different understandings of humanitarianism - of its meanings and know-how.
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    The foundations of community capacity: an exploration of the role of fairness, trust and legitimacy in sustainable watershed management
    (2014-11) Sames, Amanda
    Water resource managers and policymakers are increasingly turning to a watershed approach using hydrologic rather than political boundaries to address water resource problems. However, transboundary, interjurisdictional water resource management can be especially challenging for local government officials and citizens. This thesis examines community capacity for sustainable watershed management within two southeastern Minnesota mixed land use and multi-jurisdictional watersheds. Specific objectives were to describe and compare conditions and capacities that promote or constrain sustainable watershed management from the perspective of water resource professionals, government officials and active community members. Data were gathered though 49 key informant interviews conducted with resource professionals, community decision makers and active residents in 2011and 2012 and analyzed using grounded theory and comparative analysis. Findings indicate the importance of fairness, trust and legitimacy in relation to community capacity for sustainable watershed management. The emergence of fairness, trust and legitimacy in this study indicate a new aspect of community capacity: foundational conditions. As foundational conditions, they allow previously identified actionable capacities to be leveraged in response to community needs, in this case, sustainable watershed management. Implications for resource managers are discussed.
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    Freelance Warfare and Illegitimacy: the Historians’ Portrayal of Bandits, Pirates, Mercenaries and Politicians
    (2015-04) Beek, Aaron
    This dissertation examines freelance warfare in the ancient world. The "freelancer" needs to be understood as a unified category, not compartmentalized as three (or more) groups: pirates, bandits, and mercenaries. Throughout, I contend that ancient authors' perception and portrayal of the actions of freelancers dramatically affected the perceived legitimacy of those actions. Most other studies (e.g. Shaw 1984, de Souza 1999, Grünewald 1999, Pohl 1993, Trundle 2004, Knapp 2011) focus on 'real' bandits and on a single one of these groups. I examine these three groups together, but also ask what semantic baggage words like latro or leistes had to carry that they were commonly used in invectives. Thus rhetorical piracy is also important for my study. The work unfolds in three parts. The first is a brief chronological survey of "freelance men of violence" of all stripes down to the second century BC. Freelancers engage in, at best, semi-legitimate acts of force. Excluded are standing paid forces and theft by means other than force, vis. In a form of ancient realpolitik, the freelancer was generally more acceptable to states than our aristocratic historians would prefer that we believe. Moreover, states were more concerned with control of these "freelancers" than in their elimination. The second section explains events of the second and first century in greater detail. The observations made in the first section hold true in the second, despite being depicted differently by ancient historians. The third section focuses on the historians, historical accounts and rhetoric employed. The historians make motivations less pragmatic and more idealistic. Additionally, the perception of piracy was affected by triumphal politics, consular authority, and employment of mercenaries Overall, the chief semantic burden of pirate-terms is to convey legitimacy: individuals that possess power that they should not. Condemnation of these figures is not rooted in their actions of plundering (rarely dissimilar from official acts of war) but instead their holding any such power in the first place. In short, this study reveals that the "at-large" soldier was far more complex and far more influential than is normally shown by either ancient or modern historians.
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    Legitimacy and Belonging: Community Engagement in Higher Education
    (2019-04) Grewell, Rachel
    This dissertation is concerned with a move toward community engagement within academia generally, and more specifically the concepts of legitimacy and belonging in engagement practices. My work contributes to a relatively recent shift toward community engagement classifications and designations for institutions of higher education (Saltmarsh and Driscoll 2015). These designations are important for understanding the growing significance of engagement within academia, as an opportunity for expanding interpretations of how knowledge is understood and produced. I find in this dissertation that the growing field of community engagement is an opportunity to challenge ideas of dominance and power in knowledge systems, as well as offer a space for growing collaborations and building relationships beyond traditional academic research practices. My work contributes to the idea that participatory and collaborative work is a place where practitioners of these methods grapple with questions of legitimacy and a sense of belonging, both in the work and with one another.
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    Remembering The Faces Of Law: Collective Memories And Legal Consciousness In Transitional China
    (2015-06) Liao, Wenjie
    Abstract Using a social survey of 556 individuals, my dissertation examines how Chinese urban residents remember the past and how they think of and act toward current laws. By linking Chinese people's different understandings of law with larger cultural themes, this project provides socio-legal scholars with the theoretical tool to articulate the complex cultural environments in which people experience, think about, and act toward law. In addition, the findings also suggest that it is fruitful to deconstruct the concept of law based on the social relations it seeks to regulate. Finally, my dissertation further expands collective memory research by revising theories on cohort formation and connecting memories of the past to attitudes toward present laws. In my first empirical chapter, I treat collective memories of the past as a core component of culture, situating the study of law in specific historical and cultural context. My survey results show that memories most influential in shaping people's understanding of law and the state are those that resonate with nationalist sentiments. This applies especially to memories of resistance against foreign invaders. Memories of these events contribute to people's support for laws that strengthen centralized state power. The next two chapters examine how people's perception of law's legitimacy is associated with their tendency to obey the law and mobilize it for dispute resolution. My research reveals that Chinese people's ideas of and potential behaviors toward law vary across different social relations. Specifically, family laws are considered to be much more legitimate than laws that regulate state-citizen relations or economic transactions. This difference in the perceptions of law translates into varying tendencies to report compliance or mobilization of the different types of laws. While the perception of law's legitimacy is positively associated with tendencies to obey and use the law, this is true to a much greater degree for family laws than for other types of law. Interestingly, people report that they are least likely to litigate for conflict within the family, despite the high level of legitimacy they attribute to laws in this social sphere. These chapters also report on how legal ideas and potential behaviors vary across respondents. These findings have implications for policy makers and activists who seek to change the legal system in China. On the one hand, reformers could repurpose these existing cultural themes to promote the legitimacy of their causes. On the other hand, the authoritarian state of China very shrewdly co-opted these discursive resources as well. The Chinese government has invested considerable resources in establishing its image as a rising super power and thus taps into the increasing national pride among Chinese citizens. To counter such nationalistic narratives could thus be the mission of activists and social reformers. Methodologically, my dissertation borrows from the culturalist tradition in collective memories study. Bearing in mind the pitfalls of oversimplification, I designed my survey to cover a wide range of cultural discourses. This has provided new insights into the larger context of contemporary China, context that has been either unduly neglected or misunderstood in previous research.
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    The right to be multilingual: How two trilingual students construct their linguistic legitimacy in a German classroom
    (2014-06) Ennser-Kananen, Johanna Ennse
    In order to maintain multiple languages within the US school system, multilingual students need to feel legitimate as speakers of their languages. While prior research has investigated the "right to speak" of individual second language (L2) learners (Norton, 2000) as well as the overt and covert policies around "legitimate languages" at schools (Heller, 2006), no research exists that examines the negotiation of linguistic legitimacy of multilingual students. The purpose of this case study is to fill this gap. It describes the legitimacy discourses in one German foreign language (FL) classroom in a US high school and how two trilingual students, "Jana" and "Karina", construct their legitimacy as speakers of Latvian (L1), English (L2), and German (L3) in this environment. Overall, this study thus aims to promote multilingualism in education.Qualitative methods were employed to gain insights into the legitimacy discourses and negotiations in one German classroom. More precisely, the data were gathered through participant observation of classes and breaks (about 145 hours), semi-structured interviews with two focal students, 30 peers, and the German teacher, and video recordings of 38 lessons. These data were transcribed and analyzed according to principles of thematic analysis. Findings illustrate the focal students' struggle to see themselves as legitimate L1 users because of the societal racialization of monolingualism, which associates their whiteness with speaking only English. In addition, while their peers performed German in the classroom for entertainment in order to balance different investments, this option was not available for Jana and Karina, who derived most of their legitimacy as German speakers from orienting towards the German teacher's discourses, that is by focusing on task fulfillment and correctness. Rare occasion of resistance against these discourses are described and analyzed. Further, Jana's and Karina's legitimacy as English speakers appeared to be unstable despite having been exited from the ESL (English as second language) program. Insights from this study expand Van Leeuwen's (2008) model of legitimation by conceptualizing legitimation as interactive and dynamic process. They further inform practitioners and teacher educators by describing how classroom discourses of correctness and an overemphasis on production and entertainment can inhibit multilingual legitimacy.