The conceptual starting point is that legitimacy in global governance has never rested on sovereign command. International institutions hold authority only insofar as their justificatory claims are recognised, contested or denied by audiences around the world. Zürn’s idea of reflexive legitimation conflict describes a situation in which disputes escalate beyond questions of performance or participation to the meta-criteria of legitimacy itself: not only what counts as an effective basis for legitimation, but who decides this and how the answers get institutionalised. Pegram shows that AI governance, fragmented and weakly institutionalised, is unusually exposed to this kind of conflict, because there is no settled regime whose performance can be evaluated. What is contested instead is the evaluative script of global rule itself.

The empirical pivot is the rupture between the Biden and Trump approaches to AI. In 2023, Biden’s Executive Order 14110 on safe and trustworthy AI built explicitly on emerging multilateral precedents, including the OECD AI Principles of 2019, UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of AI adopted by 193 member states, and the European Commission’s risk-based AI Act. The order committed the United States to allied engagement in multilateral bodies, international technical standards and global AI safety monitoring, and even adopted the OECD’s definition of AI. Washington subsequently joined the 2023 Bletchley Declaration, signed the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI in 2024, and sponsored a UN General Assembly resolution calling for safe, secure and trustworthy AI systems for sustainable development.

That trajectory reversed abruptly. On his first day back in office, Trump revoked the Biden order, leaving the United States without federal regulatory guidance. Three days later he issued Executive Order 14179, declaring national policy to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in the name of human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security. At the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance warned that excessive regulation could kill a transformative industry, rejected the European model as burdensome, and framed international cooperation chiefly as a defence against authoritarian powers capturing technological infrastructure. The administration declined to sign the summit’s declaration on inclusive and sustainable AI, and in July 2025 withdrew from UNESCO, the body anchoring global AI ethics norms.

Crucially, the study finds, the Trump administration did not abandon international forums altogether. Instead it recast engagement in plurilateral and mercantile terms. America’s AI Action Plan, published in July 2025, promotes plurilateral controls on the AI technology stack while avoiding multilateral treaty bodies, coordinates with allies to extend US export controls against adversaries, and pledges to leverage the US position in standard-setting bodies such as the ITU, OECD, G7 and G20 to counter Chinese influence and ensure AI governance reflects American values. In August 2025, Washington backed a second term for Doreen Bogdan-Martin as ITU Secretary-General, explicitly linking that contest to control over the more than 150 AI standards already set. Trump framed the stakes geopolitically, warning that foreign nations must not make rules and regulations that make it impossible for American firms to do business.

China’s response forms the other half of the analysis, and it is here that the study identifies a striking role reversal. Beijing’s 2017 New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan had already pledged active participation in global AI governance, but Western observers long dismissed Chinese claims as authoritarian and censorial, describing ambitions ranging from the anodyne to the dystopian. Successive initiatives, including a 2022 position paper on ethical AI governance and the Global AI Governance Initiative launched by Xi Jinping at the Third Belt and Road Forum in October 2023, emphasised sovereignty, developing AI for good, greater voice for developing countries and a UN-centred governance body. Yet these claims struggled to gain traction, and China’s inclusion in the Bletchley Declaration was contested so vigorously that UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had to defend it publicly.

Trump’s return marked the inflection point. Confronted with tightened chip sanctions in January 2025, Beijing did not retreat into secrecy as many predicted. Instead, firms such as Alibaba and DeepSeek released advanced models as open source, with Premier Li Qiang declaring that China’s innovation is open and open source and that the country was willing to share indigenous technologies. The strategy served a dual purpose: it mitigated the effect of sanctions by globalising Chinese models, and it recast China’s legitimacy claims, transforming a state once portrayed as censorial into a putative provider of AI as a global public good. At the World AI Conference in Shanghai in July 2025, Li called global AI governance fragmented, warned against technological monopoly, and unveiled a Global AI Governance Action Plan proposing two UN-based mechanisms: an International Scientific Panel on AI and a Global Dialogue on AI Governance.

The juxtaposition of the two strategies reveals what Pegram calls rival scripts of legitimation, each mobilising distinct repertoires conditioned by material power and normative legacy. The American script invokes sovereign discretion, market dynamism and technological nationalism, delegitimising liberal norms of ethical oversight and multilateral coordination while instrumentalising international forums for competitive advantage. The Chinese script invokes sovereign equality, developmental inclusion and UN-centred ethics, aligning open-sourcing practices with discursive claims of ethical multilateralism. By August 2025, Western commentators were warning of America’s AI colonialism, while Trump officials confirmed the United States was explicitly rejecting China’s call for global governance, offering instead customised AI packages tied to American technology. Neither script has achieved uncontested recognition, but their antagonism demonstrates that legitimacy itself has become the object of the contest.

The study’s findings carry implications well beyond AI. Legitimation, it concludes, is processual and precarious, continually reconfigured through cycles of challenge and response, in which delegitimation by one actor creates openings for others to reformulate their claims. Repertoires of legitimation remain structurally conditioned: US claims drew credibility from material dominance and corporate alignment, while China’s gained traction precisely because Washington’s rejection of multilateral norms created space for alternative scripts. Crises act as catalytic junctures, and the advent of generative AI, reframed as systemic risk since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, combined with Trump’s sovereigntist turn, has consolidated competing visions of global order rather than convergence on shared norms.

AI governance, the article suggests, may serve as a bellwether of a post-hegemonic or multiplex world order. What is at stake is not simply the regulation of a transformative technology but the capacity of global governance to sustain any authority at all in a system fractured by sovereignty claims, geopolitical rivalry and competing visions of justice. As the United States and China advance incompatible legitimacy scripts, one grounded in sovereign voluntarism and competitive dynamism, the other in UN-centred cooperation and developmental equity, the study warns that the field exhibits pluralised and antagonistic legitimation that resists consolidation, offering a preview of how authority itself may be contested across the international system in the decade ahead.

Subject of Research: The crisis of legitimacy in global AI governance under competing US and Chinese legitimation strategies

Article Title: Reflexive legitimation conflict: trumpism and the crisis of legitimacy in global AI governance

Article References: Reflexive legitimation conflict: trumpism and the crisis of legitimacy in global AI governance. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00123-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00123-x

Keywords: AI governance, legitimacy, Trumpism, global governance, China, United States, multilateralism, technological nationalism, UNESCO, open-source AI, sovereignty, post-hegemonic order

The intellectual backdrop to this argument is a profound shift in how the international community treats democracy. In the immediate post-Cold War period, peace-building missions, international interventions, and security sector reform were explicitly conceived as vehicles for democratic governance, and Western security aid was frequently conditioned on liberalization, elections, and human rights commitments. That orientation collapsed rapidly after the early 2000s, the study argues, as terrorism, irregular migration, cyber-attacks, and renewed geopolitical rivalry pushed governments and international institutions toward “security first” models. Democracy conditionality was relaxed or abandoned in favor of reliable security partnerships, and authoritarian-leaning regimes received tolerance as long as they delivered cooperation. Democracy was reframed as an aspirational goal rather than an immediate imperative, creating a widening gap between rhetorical commitments and practical governance that forms the empirical basis of the research.

Protection diplomacy, as defined in the study, is a strategic exchange in which states secure regime survival and territorial protection through international guarantees, thereby reducing their dependence on domestic democratic legitimacy. Unlike conventional alliances built on reciprocity or shared values, these arrangements are characterized by asymmetry, dependence, and explicit political tradeoffs: states relinquish some measure of democratic input in exchange for military assistance, intelligence sharing, diplomatic cover, or financial aid. Crucially, the framework is not limited to autocracies. Authoritarian, hybrid, and democratic systems all engage in protection diplomacy when survival is at stake, which is precisely why the study treats it as a structural feature of modern international politics rather than a pathology of any single regime type.

The theoretical machinery behind the argument combines securitization theory from the Copenhagen School, critical political economy, and relational sovereignty. Securitization theory describes how political elites define an issue as an existential threat requiring extraordinary measures, suspending the deliberation, transparency, and accountability that normally constrain executive power. The study’s innovation is to show how foreign security commitments stabilize and prolong these threat narratives. When external patrons legitimize a regime’s definition of a security need, they lower the political cost of repression and rights restrictions. Emergency governance, once framed as temporary, becomes the normal way of doing business, and the distinction between emergency politics and ordinary politics dissolves. External actors, preferring predictable security partners over unpredictable reformers, remove the international pressure that might otherwise push regimes to de-securitize.

Relational sovereignty supplies the second analytical pillar. Against the idea that sovereignty confers untrammeled discretion, the study argues that sovereignty is socially constructed within an international hierarchy in which weaker states trade autonomy for protection, economic benefits, or recognition. Formal independence is retained while substantive autonomy narrows. External guarantors become de facto underwriters of regime stability, gaining influence over domestic political trajectories without public acknowledgment, while the norms of non-interference are formally observed. Drawing on hierarchy theory, the study notes that compliance in protection diplomacy extends beyond foreign policy alignment into domestic governance itself: border security becomes conditional on regime stability rather than democratic character, and democratic accountability comes to be seen as a liability rather than an asset within these hierarchical relationships.

From this framework the study derives four causal propositions. First, international security guarantees substitute for popular consent, reducing the cost of suppressing dissent. Second, international acceptance of a regime’s threat framing institutionalizes securitization and normalizes emergency government. Third, accountability shifts from citizens toward the foreign patron, weakening electoral and civic oversight even when elections continue. Fourth, and perhaps most counterintuitively, the short-term stabilization achieved through protection diplomacy generates long-term fragility, as institutional erosion, diminished legitimacy, and dependency cycles accumulate. The causal sequence runs from security assistance through internationally legitimized securitized governance, to executive centralization, to democratic erosion, and finally to a feedback loop in which growing instability deepens reliance on external security assistance, perpetuating the cycle.

The empirical cases illustrate how the same causal chain produces regionally distinct forms of erosion. In the Sahel, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso cooperated for years with France, the United States, and the European Union on counterterrorism while domestic institutions collapsed. In Mali, a national state of emergency transferred sweeping authority to the armed forces, civil liberties restrictions expanded, oversight mechanisms were bypassed, and security assistance flowed directly to executive and military institutions without accountability. The study documents how external recognition of military leadership empowered officers, hollowed out civilian institutions, and contributed to a wave of military coups, after which international partners adapted by continuing to cooperate with military elites rather than terminating partnerships. Western criticism of human rights abuses remained largely symbolic and irregular, while counterterrorism operations displaced civilians and deepened grievances.

Eastern Europe demonstrates that protection diplomacy can operate inside formal democratic alliances. Hungary and Poland, both NATO and European Union members, received extensive security assurances that multiplied after geopolitical tensions with Russia reignited in 2014, weakening the leverage available to enforce democratic conditionality. Hungary’s government consolidated control over courts, media, and civil society under justifications of national cohesion and security, while the V-Dem Institute recorded a fall in the country’s liberal democracy score from nearly 0.80 in 2010 to approximately 0.30 in 2023, and Freedom House downgraded Hungary from Free to Partially Free in 2019. Elections continued, and opposition victories such as the Budapest mayoral races showed that competition persisted, but the study argues that protection diplomacy devalues elections rather than eliminating them. The European Union’s sanction mechanisms proved slow and consensus-bound, allowing illiberal normalization to proceed within the liberal international order itself.

The Middle East case shows the regime-focused variant in its starkest form. Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf monarchies rely on large-scale military support and diplomatic backing legitimized by regional instability. After the Arab Spring, external actors pivoted toward protecting incumbent regimes, treating democratic reform attempts as threats to stability. Egypt illustrates the pattern: despite a brief pause in some deliveries, the United States continued providing over 1.3 billion dollars per year in military assistance after the 2013 military takeover, while emergency law has been continuously extended since 2017, enabling broad detention powers and restrictions on assembly, and opposition figures have been prosecuted under counterterrorism charges. The study highlights the irony that security arrangements designed to produce stability instead bred insecurity, as coercion replaced legitimate political channels and external actors were repeatedly drawn back into crises of their own making.

The study’s conclusions carry significant implications for international relations theory and policy. Liberal theories have long assumed that security provision creates conditions for democratic consolidation; protection diplomacy shows the opposite can occur, meaning security agreements must be understood as governance mechanisms rather than merely strategic arrangements. Because democratic backsliding is co-authored by international and domestic processes, responsibility for it crosses borders, yet existing global governance frameworks contain no mechanism for assigning that responsibility. The study recommends differentiated democratic conditionality tailored to each donor, structural rather than merely declaratory de-securitization, security assistance that builds civilian institutions alongside military capacity, multilateral accountability mechanisms with democratic indicators and transparent agreements, and ultimately a reframing of security as a democratic public good in which citizens participate rather than an executive privilege. Without such reforms, the research warns, the short-term gains of protection diplomacy will continue to undermine the long-term institutional resilience on which both security and democracy ultimately depend.

Subject of Research: The relationship between external security guarantees and democratic erosion in the contemporary multipolar international order

Article Title: The tradeoff between democratic governance and external security guarantees in a multipolar order

Article References: Edmond, C. (2026). The tradeoff between democratic governance and external security guarantees in a multipolar order. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 224. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00557-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00557-6

Keywords: protection diplomacy, democratic backsliding, securitization, sovereignty, security alliances, Sahel, Eastern Europe, Middle East, authoritarianism, international relations, global governance, counterterrorism

LaMothe’s central analytical tool is the concept of the apparatus, borrowed from the philosopher Giorgi Agamben. In Agamben’s formulation, an apparatus is a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient human behaviors, gestures, and thoughts in ways that purport to be useful. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Agamben notes that in a disciplinary society, apparatuses create docile yet free bodies that assume their identity and their freedom as subjects. LaMothe applies this lens to the theological and philosophical traditions of the Abrahamic West, arguing that their theologies, narratives, and rituals have functioned as apparatuses shaping masculine identity around sovereignty, mastery, and dominion. The result, he argues, is a masculinity that treats other species and the Earth itself as objects to be used, reified, and destroyed rather than as fellow creatures deserving of care.

The paper is careful about definitions. By Western, LaMothe means people who have internalized the narratives and practices of dominant European anthropologies, theological and philosophical, that create a seemingly unbridgeable divide between humans and other species. He explicitly notes that many people and groups within the West, including Indigenous peoples, hold anthropologies that do not produce such a chasm between the human and the other-than-human, citing the work of anthropologists such as Eduardo Kohn and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Masculinity, meanwhile, is treated as biologically rooted but socially constructed, taking varied forms across time and cultures, with a fluidity of gender expression depending on culture and era. This definitional care matters, because the argument is not that men are inherently destructive but that particular historically contingent formations of manhood have been recruited into an ecological project of domination.

One of the paper’s most striking claims concerns the very concept of nature. LaMothe places the word in quotation marks because he regards it as a construct that is itself a feature of the ontological divide between Western human beings and the rest of the living world, a point he grounds in the work of Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Bruno Latour. Many Indigenous religions and philosophies, he observes, do not have a concept like nature at all, mainly because they do not view themselves as distinct from the world around them. The implication is unsettling: the modern Western mind, in carving the world into human and natural domains, may have manufactured the very alienation that licenses ecological destruction. Once the Earth is deemed dead or inert, practices such as mountaintop removal, fracking, and oil drilling become thinkable, even legitimate, because there is no living community to injure.

LaMothe traces the genealogy of sovereign masculinity through political and psychoanalytic mythology alike. He points to the origin myths of Scripture and their counterparts in the origin myths of philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud. Freud’s imaginative recreation of the origins of society in Totem and Taboo, in which the father of the clan dominates others only to be killed and overthrown by his progeny, essentializes and leaves unquestioned male sovereignty. Hobbesian political thought, meanwhile, implies that communal life depends on civilization, and therefore that ruling epistemologies are necessary for social order, a view that renders those deemed uncivilized subject to the whims and cruelties of nature and helps justify the colonization of other human beings and everything falling under the construct of nature. Even Aristotle, who believed animals have souls, placed them within a hierarchy crowned by human beings, diminishing the significance of other-than-human animals and othered humans alike.

The paper does not pretend that concern for animals is absent from Western history. LaMothe catalogues a counter-tradition stretching back to antiquity: Plutarch argued for the rights of animals, and the third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry maintained that it was our moral duty to extend justice to other animals. Centuries later, Jeremy Bentham argued for animal welfare, and in the nineteenth century Arthur Schopenhauer raised concerns about animal rights. In recent decades, philosophers such as Peter Singer, Andrew Linzey, and Martha Nussbaum have explored the thorny ethical issues surrounding humanity’s treatment of other species. Yet LaMothe’s point is that these ethical currents have largely failed to reshape dominant masculinity, which remains tethered to apparatuses of sovereignty and mastery. Care ethics, developed by thinkers including Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Joan Tronto, Virginia Held, and Maurice Hamington, offers resources, but they must be deliberately extended beyond human relationships to the more-than-human world.

What would becoming eco-cooperative and caring men and boys actually involve? LaMothe argues that forms of eco-masculinity sustain caring relations toward other species, and that such relations depend on capacities for vulnerability, empathy, and compassion vis-à-vis the other species that share this one habitable Earth. Vulnerability here is technical rather than sentimental: it means relinquishing the fantasy of invulnerability and control that sovereign masculinity demands, and accepting exposure to the needs, sufferings, and singularities of other creatures. Empathy and compassion, in this framework, are not merely feelings but practiced capacities that orient action toward the flourishing of particular animals, plants, and places. The affirmation of the singularities of other human beings and other species accompanies what LaMothe describes as a categorical ethical command to care for and cooperate with other species and the Earth, a formulation that deliberately echoes the unconditional structure of Kantian ethics while relocating its scope beyond humanity.

The paper finds exemplars of this stance in unexpected places, including male researchers whose scientific work manifests caring and ethical concern in relating to and cooperating with other species, such as Peter Godfrey-Smith, whose study of octopus minds models a form of engagement that neither dominates nor reduces the other. LaMothe also draws on Dana Lloyd’s account of Yurok earth-based theology, in which the Land itself is a living being: the Yurok believe the Earth is alive and has a spirit, motivating care for mountains, rivers, wildlife, and ocean in which each part is entangled with every other part. Because trees are considered living beings and members of the community, their removal is an attack on the community itself, which Lloyd argues should be understood as a continuation of genocidal policy rooted in epistemologies of ruling and deficiency. Such relational stances, LaMothe suggests, expose the poverty of the sovereign model.

He is equally candid about the limits of fashionable solutions. Chandler and Reid have objected to the tendency of anthropologists and others to argue that dealing with the climate crisis requires becoming Indigenous, citing Indigenous peoples’ history of resilience and ways of relating to the land. Yet even those critics conclude their book by calling for a recovery of the hubris on which modernity was built, and from which other worlds are yet to come. LaMothe’s verdict is blunt: the hubris of Western subjects is exactly what we do not need, because hubris, especially with regard to masculinities, has been a significant factor in the current climate crisis. The paper thus refuses both romantic primitivism and technological triumphalism, insisting instead on the harder work of transforming the emotional and ethical formation of men within Western societies themselves.

The significance of the argument extends well beyond pastoral theology. If LaMothe is right, then climate communication, environmental policy, and sustainability education may all be addressing symptoms while leaving intact the gendered apparatuses that reproduce domination across generations. Raising boys to equate manhood with control, invulnerability, and mastery does not merely constrain individual lives; it recruits them into an economy and politics that treat the living Earth as inert material. An eco-masculinity of care and cooperation, by contrast, would reframe strength as the capacity to remain vulnerable, to empathize across species lines, and to act on a categorical obligation to protect the singular creatures with whom humans share a single habitable planet. Whether such a transformation can occur at the scale and speed the climate crisis demands remains an open question, but LaMothe’s paper makes a compelling case that the answer will depend, in part, on what it means to become a man in the West.

Subject of Research: The relationship between Western masculinity, anthropocentric thought, and the climate crisis, and the development of an eco-cooperative, caring eco-masculinity

Article Title: (Western) Men and the Climate Crisis: Toward an Eco-Cooperative and Caring Masculinity

Article References: (Western) Men and the Climate Crisis: Toward an Eco-Cooperative and Caring Masculinity. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01381-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01381-0

Keywords: eco-masculinity, climate crisis, care ethics, Western philosophy, anthropocentrism, pastoral theology, sovereignty, animal ethics, Indigenous worldviews, Giorgi Agamben, vulnerability, environmental ethics

The research, published in SN Social Sciences by Ayamn Abdoun Nazal of the University of Diyala, analyses a corpus of 847 texts produced between 2003 and 2021, spanning parliamentary debates, executive speeches, party communications and official state documents. Using corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, the study tracks how Iraqi political actors deployed four recognised legitimation strategies: authorization, which appeals to authority and law; rationalization, which appeals to utility and purpose; moral evaluation, which appeals to shared values; and mythopoesis, which legitimates action through narrative, storytelling and shared social myths. The findings reveal a striking transformation in how power was justified in post-conflict Iraq.

Methodologically, the study is notable for treating language as something that can be quantified over time. Nazal divided the corpus into nineteen annual sub-corpora and calculated what the study terms legitimation density, a measure of how frequently legitimation strategies appear per unit of text. The corpus was then grouped into four historical phases mirroring Iraq’s political trajectory: the reconstruction period under the Coalition Provisional Authority and early transitional governments, the consolidation years, the crisis years dominated by the fight against the Islamic State, and the post-crisis period from 2018 to 2021 marked by protest movements and institutional exhaustion.

The headline result is a dramatic reversal in the dominant legitimation strategy. In the reconstruction period of 2003 to 2006, authorization-based legitimation dominated, registering 18.4 instances on the density measure, reflecting an era in which obedience was demanded primarily by appeal to occupation decrees, transitional law and the imprimatur of international authority. By the post-crisis period of 2018 to 2021, that figure had fallen to 9.1. Mythopoetic legitimation moved in precisely the opposite direction, rising from 3.3 to 14.7 across the same interval and overtaking all other strategies in the final phase. Statistical testing across the four phases returned log-likelihood ratio statistics, or G² values, of 2247.1 for authorization and 5241.0 for mythopoesis, each on three degrees of freedom and each with p less than 0.001. Effect sizes, measured with Cramér’s V, stood at 0.16 for authorization and 0.30 for mythopoesis, indicating an especially strong association between the crisis and post-crisis periods and narrative-based legitimation.

The interpretation offered is that as Iraq’s institutions matured nominally but remained fragile in practice, their leaders found appeals to formal authority progressively less persuasive. The occupation-era habit of legitimating decisions by citing legality and command gave way to storytelling: narratives of martyrdom, national sacrifice, resistance and historical destiny. This shift tracks Iraq’s political reality closely. In the years after 2003, institutions such as the constitutional drafting process and the electoral commissions derived whatever legitimacy they had from external sponsorship and legal procedure. After the rise of ISIS in 2014 and the mobilisation of the Popular Mobilization Forces, the most powerful justification available to political actors was the narrative of a nation defending itself, in which clerical calls to arms and the martyrdom of fighters supplied a moral story that no legal instrument could match.

The study also examines speech act distribution across institutional arenas, drawing on the speech act theory framework of Searle and Vanderveken. The quantitative picture is one of functional differentiation. Directive and commissive acts, the speech acts of command and promise, concentrated heavily in executive discourse, from prime ministerial addresses to ministerial statements. Parliamentary debate, by contrast, sustained a higher proportion of assertive acts, statements of fact and claim, throughout all four phases. This division of pragmatic labour persisted even as the content of discourse transformed, suggesting that the formal architecture of Iraq’s political institutions shaped how language functioned within them, even while the strategies of legitimation flowing through those institutions changed beneath.

Perhaps the most analytically rich finding emerges from co-occurrence analysis of key legitimation terms, using Mutual Information scores to identify words that cluster together more often than chance would predict. The analysis identifies a persistent semantic tension between the vocabulary of constitutional order and the vocabulary of religious duty. Terms associated with the constitution, elections and the state repeatedly co-occur with terms associated with faith, obligation and the sacred. Crucially, Nazal argues, this pairing does not resolve the central dilemma of Iraqi state-building, namely constructing a sovereign polity under conditions of dependency and fragility. Instead, it enacts that dilemma at the lexical level: every invocation of religious duty alongside constitutional language simultaneously strengthens and undermines the claim that the state’s authority rests on secular, procedural foundations. The tension is not a rhetorical accident but a structural feature of the discourse itself.

Framing analysis adds a temporal dimension to this picture. In non-crisis periods, sovereignty discourse was organised around frames of electoral mandate and economic development, presenting the state as the product of ballots and budgets. During crises, most notably the ISIS occupation of large swathes of territory, the framing reconfigured rapidly around external threat and martyrdom narratives. The study’s framing data thus show discourse responding elastically to security conditions, with the vocabulary of sovereignty bending toward survival narratives whenever the state’s territorial integrity was challenged, and snapping back toward developmental and procedural frames when relative calm returned. This oscillation, the study suggests, reflects a sovereignty discourse that never settled into a stable register during the entire 2003 to 2021 period.

For scholars of post-conflict state-building, the study’s contribution lies in connecting macro-political narratives to measurable linguistic behaviour. The literature on fragile states has long debated whether institutional weakness stems from design flaws, external intervention or local political settlements. Nazal’s findings imply that legitimation is itself a variable in that equation, one that can be tracked empirically. The decline of authorization and the rise of mythopoesis suggest that the social contract in Iraq was renegotiated not in constitutional texts but in stories, and that the state’s ability to command obedience by citing its own laws weakened even as its institutions multiplied. The study is careful to remain within its evidence, noting that no datasets were generated or analysed beyond the textual corpus, and its claims concern discourse rather than causal political outcomes.

The implications nonetheless extend well beyond Iraq. Post-conflict states from Afghanistan to South Sudan have experienced similar sequences: externally sponsored institutions, legitimacy problems, and the eventual ascendancy of narrative and identity-based justification over procedural authority. If legitimation density can be measured and tracked, it offers analysts a leading indicator of institutional health, detectable in political language before it manifests in constitutional crisis or street protest. The Iraqi case, as documented here, suggests that when a state stops being able to legitimate itself through law and starts needing myths to hold itself together, that shift is not rhetorical decoration. It is the political story of the state itself, written one speech, one debate and one communiqué at a time, and now, for the first time, counted.

Subject of Research: Legitimation strategies and institutional development in post-2003 Iraqi political discourse

Article Title: Legitimation and institutional development in Iraqi political discourse from 2003 to 2021

Article References: Nazal, A. A. (2026). Legitimation and institutional development in Iraqi political discourse from 2003 to 2021. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 460. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01751-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01751-8

Keywords: Iraq, political discourse, legitimation strategies, Critical Discourse Analysis, state-building, fragile states, mythopoesis, speech acts, sovereignty, corpus linguistics, post-conflict, framing analysis