Part 1 Power and Legitimacy, 1.3 Regimes’ Legitimacy Crises in International Law: Libya, Syria, and Their Competing Representatives

Regimes’ external legitimacy crises are a common phenomenon in the international arena. Such natural predicaments regularly come to disrupt state-to-state relations, especially when one regime experiences an unconstitutional change of government, a coup d’état, severe unrest, an unbridled insurgency, or wide condemnation for grave and systematic violations of human rights. In all such situations, the external legitimacy of the regime concerned is generally put to test, thereby raising the question of the representation of the state concerned in the concert of...