Source of legitimacy: violence?

This article was written in 2011 by my friend, Farah Mahmoud El Batrawi. She is a great person and friend, a fencing national champ and a rising talent in writing as well as many other things. I wish her all the luck in the world.

Legitimacy is an essentially contested concept; one where around it, there are many disputes on how to interpret it and give it a certain definition. Gallie – a Scottish political theorist; believed that every concept had a common core, and different competing conceptions are to be given around the same core. However, here, I’ll be dealing with it as the popular acceptance of the governing regime or law as an authority.

Egypt as a police state, had a strong central police, state security, and the emergency law. Those were some of the aspects of the violence practiced in Egypt. For me, violence isn’t just physical; it’s more than an assault on our bodies. It’s any act that is not forbidden legally, but is carried out contrary to one’s will. Thus, when you are suppressed and not allowed to say your opinion, violence is practiced against you under the name of a law!

Violence isn’t legitimate. Hannah Arendt - one of the pioneers who wrote on this issue - saw that no matter what end violence pursues, it can never be legitimate. It can be justified for a short end. It’s only an instrument used when there is a threat to the loss of authority and legitimacy. So, it’s clear that our country did use violence, but if violence is not legitimate, how did it survive? The answer is that the state, which was manipulated by the ruling elite, did not only rely on violence to preserve the status quo; it had to find other ways. People had to tolerate the violence because life continued and the state was stable. To an extent it did work. However what was in question was the legitimacy of the state.

So here, Egypt was confronted by a legitimacy crisis. A widespread feeling among the people was that it wasn’t rightful, thus, this regime had to be overthrown by a revolution. So here, once some realized that they are the only source of legitimacy and they will hit the streets, others reacted and for the first time, this awoke millions and millions as if by an electric shock. And that’s when we came to realize how intolerable the social and economic existent state was, a state which had been endured for decades.

But if I am saying that violence is always illegitimate, then how is it legitimate for those oppressed? Can they use it to take their freedom back under “the end justifies the means”? Well, certainly not, and that is what the revolution’s brilliant principle came to teach us: “peaceful revolution”. The violence was fought by peace, thus a legitimate path to overcome the violence of the regime.

Legitimacy does not fall from heaven and surely doesn’t come from violence. Governments must cultivate the respect and the willing obedience of the people. “I derive my legitimacy from the people” - an excellent start for the new Prime Minister who now knows more than ever that the only true source for people to obey is when they give you the right to rule.