Blended Legitimacy: Informal Practices of Collusion and State Building by the EU in Post-Conflict States

EU peace missions have in the past mainly focused on promoting formal or institutional settings in their peace-building efforts in fragile contexts. However, peace missions are involved by practice on a day-to-day basis in informal domestic politics and deal to a certain extent with clientele networks. They have to achieve support by local actors, to follow requirements of ‘local ownership’ or to gain security guarantees. In the literature, it is highly contested if and to what extent this strengthens or inhibits the long-term success of state building and democracy promotion as a peace-building exercise. Thus, the paper explores the following research question: How do EU peace missions collaborate with informal power networks and how do these practices influence the legitimacy of state building efforts? We start from the assumption that the level of convergence between normative legitimacy (the formal right to rule) and empirical legitimacy (the shared belief of the population in the right to rule) is highly contested in post-conflict settings. More often than not, these societies are vulnerable to state capture, i.e. the persistence of informal power networks who ‘capture’ emerging state institutions for rent-seeking and / or control of decision-making. External actors are thus adapting their practices of democracy promotion and more often than not establish informal collusion “under the radar”. As a result of these practices, increasing levels of normative legitimacy of state institutions is often contrasted by decreasing levels of empirical legitimacy of state institutions. In our paper we introduce a new dynamic model of “blended” legitimacy by which we can better explain the impact of these practices of informal collusion in state building in captured post-conflict states. We will illustrate our conceptual framework by comparing the two cases of Kosovo and Mali, notably the EU missions EULEX in Kosovo and EUCAP in Mali. Both missions had a strong focus on state building through capacity building of law enforcement agencies but have been facing strong power networks undermining these efforts. Our comparative case study is based on original data from field research in 2019 and 2021, notably expert interviews and focus group discussions.