The sum of its parts? Sources of local legitimacy

The article analyses the sources of local actors’ legitimacy perceptions towards international peacebuilding operations. Local legitimacy perceptions are increasingly recognised as shaping local behaviour towards international peacebuilding, which influences the effective functioning of the operation. Legitimacy debates in peacebuilding are either absent or imported from the literature on domestic legitimacy, without respect to the specific temporal and spatial situation of international operations. The article first explores which legitimacy sources influence local legitimacy perceptions of international peacebuilding operations. It finds that two sources are relevant: output and procedure. Second, it investigates how exactly legitimacy arises from them. In doing so, it demonstrates that output and procedure are umbrella terms comprising several sub-elements which influence legitimacy in different, sometimes contradictory, ways. Finally, the article empirically explores which of the sources are important to local actors’ legitimacy perceptions using field data from the EU peacebuilding operations EULEX in Kosovo and EUPM Bosnia-Herzegovina

From capitalism to neo-medievalism: the perverse effects of privatization

The drift towards new forms of delegation of control over crucial resources from public entities to private firms is a phenomenon can be directly linked to the wide spread of privatization policies in Western economies. In the literature, deciding whether privatizing or not state-owned enterprises is typically presented as a technical point that must be subject to an economic evaluation: the emphasis is put on the "the ante fact". In our study we want to discuss “the ex-post” in terms of effects produced on the relationship between consumers and providers. To interpret this dimension we introduce the concept of neo-medievalism. The context is offered by Italian market where, recently, many industries, and in particular many public utilities were privatized, in the name of a higher level of efficiency