How Do We Build Resilient Societies?
Competing for Legitimacy explores why people form bonds with each other and systems of authority, offering a comprehensive framework for building resilient societies. It introduces the Comprehensive Social Contract Framework, Legitimacy Gap Map, and Grievance-Driven Pathway to explain how perceived illegitimacy and grievances can lead communities to align with insurgent groups or alternative authorities. Ultimately, the book argues that resilient societies emerge from adaptive, trust-based state-society contracts shaped by the constructive tension between governments and their people.
Comprehensive Social Contract Framework
Comprehensive Social Contract Framework
Comprehensive Social Contract Framework
Why do people bond with each other and with systems of authority? Competing for Legitimacy draws on the invaluable body of social contract theory, state-building, peacebuilding, and insurgency research to develop an overarching conceptual framework depicting a political social contract.
Legitimacy Gap Map
Comprehensive Social Contract Framework
Comprehensive Social Contract Framework
The Legitimacy Gap Map delineates how a social contract can be perceived as illegitimate across the sources of legitimacy and identifies the related grievances, which inform societies' motivations to bond with alternative political authorities.
Grievance Driven Pathway
Grievance Driven Pathway
Grievance Driven Pathway
How do people bond with each other to form alternative societal groups and with insurgent organizations in lieu of, in competition with, or parallel to governments to form reformist insurgency-society contracts? And how do state-society contracts and governments affect this process? The Grievance-Driven Pathway is offered as one way through which this can occur.
Societal Resilience
Grievance Driven Pathway
Grievance Driven Pathway
In its ideal form, friction between society and government sparks healthy competition that strengthens responsiveness, trust, and cohesion. Resilient state-society contracts rely on both political and non-political agreements—within and beyond borders—that support adaptive governance. Reformist insurgency and counterinsurgency reflect this competitive process of shaping the social contract.