@Hyolobrika is it, in practice? Israel has overwhelming might relative to the Palestinians in Israel/Palestine, yet they can’t engender internal legitimacy. one can compel conformity always at the point of a gun, but no army can constantly point guns at the whole of a population. or persuade those who see the army only as illegitimate (in the fuzzier sense) oppressors to resort to them to resolve disputes. i think it is less kraterocratic than you think. 1/

@Hyolobrika in the United States, much, perhaps most, of the public claims to detest the government. i claim the Supreme Court is currently entirely illegitimate, in a subjective sense. but i still conform to the law in the US, much more than physical coercion can enforce, and would rely upon US courts rather than other means to resolve disputes. 2/

@Hyolobrika normative notions of legitimacy have very little predictive power i think. but that doesn’t mean legitimacy collapses into “might” alone. however the Supreme Court or the American state as a whole might be illegitimate from a variety of normative or subjective perspectives, that illegitimacy is of an entirely different character, evident in human behavior, than Israel’s illegitimacy as government to Palestinians. 3/

@Hyolobrika an interesting case is the Jim Crow South in the US. unlike the Palestinian case, i think the American state in 1950 had internal legitimacy, despite overt oppression of a self-conscious minority. so despite being profoundly immoral, i’d call that government “legitimate” in the senses i describe. 4/

@Hyolobrika why/how was it so? i don’t know. it’s an interesting question. what i do claim is it comes down to more than “might makes right”. blacks in the Jim Crow south faced a regime of pervasive brutality and coercion, but i think it hard to argue they faced that more than Palestinians have in I/P. 5/

@Hyolobrika yet they mostly conformed to law and resorted to the US state to address disputes. in that sense conferred internal legitimacy upon the state that oppressed them (and that arguably still does to a lesser degree). i don’t think a claim that US Blacks were inherently or culturally more pacifistic can be a sufficient explanation. 6/

@Hyolobrika legitimacy resides in and emerges from the relationship between states and publics. the factors that engender it are “soft” — situational, difficult to objectively characterize — rather than “hard” — things we might objectively observe and run regressions on. that’s why i suggest we judge it from the result, rather than from conditions about which we might have normative views or misleading hypotheses. /fin

@Hyolobrika (in any case, thanks a ton for reading and giving these issues some thought!)