Building domestic and international legitimacy after war: governance in Afghanistan and Syria

This article examines how post-conflict governing actors strategically prioritise and sequence legitimacy-seeking across domestic and international arenas. Developing a two-level framework that distinguishes domestic and international sources of legitimacy, and differentiating between performance and performative legitimacy, it analyses post-conflict governance in Afghanistan and Syria. Drawing on original elite interviews and political speeches, we examine the Taliban government in Afghanistan as the core case and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) as a secondary case that has emerged as the de facto authority in Syria’s post-Assad transitional order. Despite facing similar structural constraints including legacies of violent conflict, foreign intervention and fragmented sovereignty, their legitimacy-seeking strategies diverge sharply. The Taliban conceives legitimacy primarily as a domestic phenomenon grounded in religious authority and coercive consolidation. HTS, by contrast, treats domestic authority as contingent on international legitimacy and has therefore prioritised engagement with external actors. We argue that these divergent trajectories reflect differences in ideological flexibility and rigidity, which structure how post-conflict actors prioritise and sequence legitimacy-seeking across arenas in response to perceived threats and opportunities.