Who Gets to Be Legitimate?

Armed Movements, Regional Power, and the Politics of Recognition

I begin this review with a brief disclaimer. I approach this volume, edited by Stephan Hensell and Klaus Schlichte, as an Egypt-focused researcher writing in a newsletter primarily concerned with Egyptian politics, state power, and regional influence. While Armed Groups and the Politics of International Legitimation is a global comparative study, it repeatedly intersects with Egypt’s role as a regional actor of political authority. My reading, therefore, foregrounds those chapters and analytical insights that illuminate how Cairo shapes the international standing of armed movements beyond its borders. This focus explains the sustained attention to the Palestine and Libya cases, where Egypt emerges not as a peripheral player but as a central node in the contemporary politics of recognition.

Edited volumes on armed groups often catalogue conflicts or rehearse familiar debates about insurgency, violence, and state fragility. This book takes a different approach. Rather than treating recognition as a legal event or legitimacy as a moral judgment, it conceptualizes legitimation as a political process shaped by strategic interaction, historical context, and power relations. Armed actors are not passive recipients of approval or condemnation; they actively attempt to transform themselves from criminalized forces into accepted political authorities within the international system.

At the core of the volume is a framework that distinguishes between practices of claim-making and claim validation. Armed groups construct narratives that justify their violence using the prevailing language of liberation, democracy, order, or security. These claims acquire political force when validated by states, regional powers, international organizations, or influential elites. Legitimacy, in this account, is neither automatic nor universal. It is produced through recognition rituals, diplomatic engagement, symbolic gestures, and material support. The editors situate these processes across four overlapping historical periods: decolonization, the Cold War, the era of humanitarian intervention, and the current phase of sovereignist politics marked by authoritarian resurgence and regional power projection.

For scholars of the Middle East and North Africa, and particularly those concerned with Egypt’s regional role, the volume is especially revealing. Although Egypt is not treated as a standalone case, it appears repeatedly as an actor in the politics of legitimation. Across chapters on Hamas and Libya, Egypt functions as a gatekeeper and validator, demonstrating how regional powers increasingly shape international recognition in the contemporary order.

Leila Seurat’s chapter on Hamas offers a detailed account of how the movement recalibrated its legitimacy strategy during the Arab uprisings. Following the fall of Hosni Mubarak, Hamas sought to reposition itself as a politically acceptable actor by endorsing the 1967 borders, adopting the language of “peaceful resistance,” and deepening diplomatic engagement with Egypt and other regional states. These moves did not signal ideological transformation so much as strategic adaptation aimed at securing regional validation, with Cairo serving as the principal conduit toward broader international acceptance.

That window closed decisively after the 2013 military coup. Egypt’s post-coup turn stripped Hamas of the regional validation that had underpinned its bid for political normalization. The movement was pushed away from diplomatic legitimation and back toward a strategy centered on armed resistance, domestic authority, and survival under isolation. This episode encapsulates one of the book’s central arguments: legitimacy is not conferred by abstract norms but by political actors capable of endorsing or withdrawing recognition. Egypt’s shift from mediator to delegitimizer fundamentally restructured Hamas’s political horizon.

The same dynamic appears even more starkly in Wolfram Lacher’s chapter on Khalifa Haftar in Libya. Despite leading one of the most violent and repressive armed coalitions in post-2011 Libya, Haftar rapidly acquired a degree of international legitimacy far exceeding that of rival factions. Early and sustained backing from Egypt and the UAE transformed him from militia commander into an internationally courted political figure. Egyptian weapons shipments, political endorsement, and the framing of Haftar’s campaign as a war against Islamism aligned seamlessly with Cairo’s post-2013 counterrevolutionary agenda and paved the way for broader Western engagement.

Crucially, legitimacy here was not earned through governance performance or popular consent but through symbolic and material acts of recognition: formal titles, staged diplomatic encounters, military assistance, and carefully managed optics. Egypt’s role in constructing Haftar’s credibility illustrates how contemporary legitimacy is increasingly manufactured through regional power coalitions rather than global consensus.

One of the volume’s most important theoretical contributions lies in its challenge to great-power-centric models of recognition. Rather than locating legitimacy primarily in Western capitals or global institutions, the book demonstrates how regional political constellations often precede and shape international acceptance. In the current era of multipolarity and authoritarian assertiveness, regional powers such as Egypt, the UAE, Turkey, and Iran frequently function as primary arbiters of political acceptability.

One important dimension the volume does not fully confront, however, is that Egypt itself is a regional hegemon in decline. While the book convincingly demonstrates Cairo’s role as a validator of armed actors, it implicitly treats Egyptian power as stable and readily deployable. In reality, Egypt’s capacity to project influence beyond its borders has steadily eroded over the past decade, shaped by economic exhaustion, soaring external debt, diplomatic marginalization, and an increasingly inward-looking security state. Cairo continues to perform the rituals of regional authority—mediation, sponsorship, military signaling—but these gestures increasingly substitute for, rather than express, effective power projection.

This decline complicates the book’s otherwise persuasive account of regional legitimation. Egypt’s endorsement of actors such as Hamas at certain moments, or Haftar more consistently, did not stem from hegemonic confidence but from defensive strategies aimed at preserving relevance amid waning influence. As Egypt’s leverage has diminished in Gaza, Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and the Red Sea, its legitimation practices have become more coercive, more selective, and more closely aligned with counterrevolutionary order-making rather than durable political settlement. Legitimacy conferred by a declining hegemon is inherently unstable. It may accelerate an armed actor’s rise, but it also embeds that actor within a brittle regional order vulnerable to sudden reversals when Cairo’s own standing shifts.

Beyond its regional relevance, the volume excels in restoring political agency to armed groups themselves. Contributors show how these movements engage in diplomacy, narrative construction, institutional mimicry, and symbolic politics. Across cases spanning Western Sahara, Angola, Uganda, and Afghanistan, armed actors lobby foreign governments, establish quasi-diplomatic missions, participate in international forums, and strategically adopt the language of dominant global norms. The historical framing clarifies why similar movements are treated so differently across time: what once counted as revolutionary virtue may later be recast as extremism, while today’s dominant currency is the promise of authoritarian order.

While theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, the volume also opens several avenues for future research. Egypt itself warrants systematic treatment as a legitimacy-producing power rather than an episodic case. The relationship between domestic authoritarian consolidation and external legitimation politics remains underexplored, as does the role of media, optics, and narrative warfare in producing recognition. Political economy also deserves greater attention. Arms deals, reconstruction contracts, and security markets quietly underpin many recognition decisions.

Overall, Armed Groups and the Politics of International Legitimation makes a substantial contribution to the study of civil wars and international politics. It reframes armed conflict not merely as a struggle for territorial control but as a struggle for political acceptance within international society. In an era where militias become presidents, warlords become diplomats, and violence is repeatedly translated into authority, this book provides a compelling account of the political mechanics behind that transformation. It will remain a foundational reference for years to come.