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This chapter introduces an ethnographic approach to security that attends to the lived experience of being constituted as a target on the domestic front of the United States' “War on Terrorism.” It examines a set of core social and psychological processes through which “national security” functions and is maintained. Such discussion illustrates not only the effect of “national security” within a particular community but also the emotions, memories, and experiences that are necessary for its constitution. It shows how the state's manufacturing of fear in response to the events of 9/11 has brought back to life a host of insecurities and anxieties that many had experienced in their countries of origin and thought they had escaped by coming to the United States. By paying close attention to these experiences, and the ways that pasts and presents can come to resemble one another, this chapter develops a framework for thinking about the state's response to 9/11 as not merely an extraordinary or excessive response to a singular event. Rather, it takes this lived sense of resemblance and familiarity as a significant commentary on emerging and enduring patterns of political legitimation and state authority.

This chapter presents an account of the international rule of law that reflects the particular dynamics of international politics, drawing on legal realism and practice theory in international relations (IR). On this reading, the international rule of law is a social practice that states and others engage in when they provide legal reasons and justifications for their actions. The goal may be either political legitimation for oneself or delegitimation of adversaries. This sort of use of international law both relies on and reinforces the idea that states should act lawfully rather than unlawfully. The priority of lawfulness is taken for granted. The chapter then outlines an approach which helps to make sense of international law's contribution to contemporary disputes and crises.

This chapter concentrates on European ideas in the period from 1381 to 1789, noting that many early revolts appealed to religion for justification. Some called for communal ownership, but typically on a small scale. Contrary to a widespread misinterpretation, the English Levellers of the 1640s defended private property. They saw the legitimacy of government as grounded on the will of the people. Previously, the Reformation in Europe had led to rival claims of possible religious legitimation of authority. There were Catholics and multiple Protestant groups, each with its own religious legitimation of political power. Facing and rebutting these rival claims, radicals were impelled to call for religious toleration and a secular state. This secular trajectory, combined with the growth of science, formed the background for the Enlightenment, which argued for the supremacy of reason over superstition.

This chapter investigates the role of the 1990s for the political legitimation of Russia’s current political leadership. It builds on the constructivist approach to analyze the role of collective trauma in Russia and demonstrates that the cultural and political constructions in Russia over the past two decades have gone hand in hand in their modes of representing the collective experience of the 1990s. This decade has been represented entirely in black colors, highlighting and exaggerating the negative side of these experiences. The chapter demonstrates that this frame of the 1990s is propagated by the pro-Kremlin media personalities and is frequently invoked by Vladimir Putin in his speeches and press conferences.

This chapter explains how the original terms Left and Right emerged in the French Revolution in 1789-1792. The Left and Right were divided primarily on the question of the legitimate source of authority for government, and secondarily on the question of universal and equal human rights. The Right defended religion and aristocratic birth as sources of authority. The Left rejected these, and sought somehow to root authority in the will of the people. The Left leaders of the French Revolution advocated an individualistic, property-owning, market economy, just as the English Levellers had done in the 1640s and the American revolutionaries in the 1770s. This chapter also contests the Marxist notion that 1789 was a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It was not primarily a victory of capitalists over feudal aristocrats.

This chapter discusses the complex concepts and practices of transparency. Transparency has become a tool and resource for political legitimation. Transparency also became a material structure of many governmental workplaces. This chapter tackles how democracy was made transparent at the German Hygiene Museum. It also presents a discourse toward an ethnography of transparency.

This chapter examines the democratic case for open borders, with particular emphasis on Arash Abizadeh's argument. More specifically, it considers Abizadeh's support for the positive claim that “anyone who accepts a genuinely democratic theory of political legitimation domestically is thereby committed to rejecting the unilateral domestic right to control and close the state's boundaries.” It first analyzes the plausibility of the notion that political coercion cannot be legitimate unless it is under the democratic control of all those coerced. It then discusses the right of the citizens of legitimate states to freedom of association and whether a state's claim to limit immigration is distinct from a property owner's claim to her land. If democratic governance is perfectly compatible with open borders, then it undermines the contention that commitment to democracy requires closing borders.

Chapter 2 examines how the Tang–Five Dynasties transition impacted Buddhist monastics, their traditions, and regional religious cultures. With the onset of the Five Dynasties, just as some southern rulers recruited former Tang officials and local leaders to their administrations, they also appointed Chang’an’s displaced court clerics and prominent native monks to the abbacies of major monasteries in their territories. Traditions of learning and practice popular in the northern capitals during the late Tang were disseminated to and reconstituted in the capitals of southern kingdoms, most notably Shu and Wuyue. The continuity of elite Tang Buddhist traditions is then contrasted with the elevation of local clerics, many of whom belonged to Chan lineages, in less developed regions like Jiangxi and Fujian. The political empowerment and economic development of southeastern regions situated resident Chan monks at the centers of newly sovereign states.