Wolfgang Minatti has joined us as Visiting Doctoral Researcher from EUI. He was so kind to provide a short introduction to his research project: “In my research, I explore how governance relations become constructed as legitimate, all the way from international politics to civil war. My dissertation asks how governing armed actors within civil war become legitimised on a local level. I argue that current theories of legitimacy in International Relations exhibit several blind spots when analysing processes of legitimation in contexts of complex governance systems such as civil wars. Consequently, I develop, first, a relational theory of legitimation that accounts for the micro-dynamics of legitimacy in complex governance systems. Second, I empirically illustrate this theory by investigating the legitimation of the FARC rebel group within the Colombian conflict, using a qualitative methodology based on extensive fieldwork.”