The study of legitimacy is working its way into mainstream international relations scholarship. Ian Hurd's book presents an overarching theory of legitimacy in international relations, grounded in case studies of the United Nations Security Council. Working within the strand of constructivism developed by Alexander Wendt, Hurd shows how legitimacy shapes state behavior, interacts with rational strategic interests, and affects power relationships. Hurd defines legitimacy as “the belief by an actor that a rule or institution ought to be obeyed” (p. 30), and argues that a “rule will become legitimate to an individual (and therefore behaviorally significant) when the individual internalizes its content and reconfigures his or her interests according to the rule” (p. 31). He asserts (p. 34) that legitimacy can be studied as a form of social control distinct from both coercion and pursuit of self-interest. The “behavioral significance” of legitimate institutions can be gleaned from the socialization of state actors to those institutions, the changed structure of payoffs that results from the presence of the institutions, and the construction of new power resources (p. 40). For Hurd, legitimacy both shapes state behavior and helps to constitute state identity and interests.

The resources generated by legitimate international institutions are largely symbolic, and the author spends a good deal of time defending the salience of symbols as resources of power (pp. 49–60). In this, he takes something like a discursive turn without explicitly belaboring the point. This subtlety might make the book more palatable to those uneasy with discourse-oriented approaches. Treating the “blue helmets” as a symbolic resource, or arguing that a Security Council seat is a source of prestige, may be less controversial than arguing that “words shape reality.”

Rather than considering the legitimacy of norms in general, Hurd chooses to analyze the legitimacy of a specific institution—the UN Security Council. His first case study is the 1945 San Francisco conference culminating in the adoption of the UN Charter; here, he focuses on the debates revolving around the structure of the Security Council and the status of the veto. Other case studies in the book examine the dynamics of agenda setting in the Council, contestation surrounding the appropriation of the symbols of peacekeeping by Russia in its “near abroad” as well as the United States in Iraq, and the trajectory of the sanctions regime against Libya. Overall, the case studies illustrate the point that legitimacy and symbols matter in international politics, and Hurd takes care to engage alternative explanations derived from materialist and more narrowly rationalist approaches.

Although compliance figures strongly in his measure of institutional legitimacy, Hurd also takes care to explore how dissent and noncompliance factor into the politics of legitimacy. For example, his study of how Libya manipulated UN norms in order to delegitimize Security Council sanctions against it is a sophisticated analysis of the salience of symbolic politics and the strategic manipulation of legitimacy conceptions. Thus, he treats symbols of institutional legitimacy as resources not only of the powerful but also of the less powerful states in the system. This is an especially challenging argument to make about the Security Council, which is normally seen as a tool for the strong, rather than a resource for the weak.

That said, much of After Anarchy is about strong states trying to exercise their power in such a way that the weak follow voluntarily. Hurd's central point in his chapter on the San Francisco Conference is that although many of the smaller states objected to the veto, they ultimately accepted the Charter pretty much as it was drafted by the “Great Powers” in earlier closed diplomatic conferences. The Great Powers preserved the special status they had originally negotiated for and among themselves, but were able to secure broader legitimacy for the institution by following procedural norms of conference diplomacy and engaging in reassuring discourse.

Hurd never mentions the other legitimating function of the conference—that of legitimating the UN to the U.S. public and particularly the U.S. Congress. But Franklin Roosevelt had learned the lesson of Woodrow Wilson's failure to win congressional support of the League of Nations Covenant, and the San Francisco conference was explicitly designed to prevent another such domestic political failure. Because Hurd hews closely to Wendtian constructivism, he sidesteps domestic politics in his case studies and treats the state as a unitary actor. But such evasion short-circuits his key arguments about the strategic manipulation of symbols, and also sidelines possible alternative explanations for behavior that he claims demonstrates the importance of legitimacy.

For example, in his discussion of why states compete for nonpermanent Security Council membership, Hurd asserts that since there is little material strategic value to such membership, states must value it as a symbolic source of power in the international system (p. 123). This may be true, but one ought also consider the domestic political value that accrues to a specific government (not just “the state”) when it occupies such an international position. To be fair, the author does not discount the importance of domestic politics; he simply does not extend his analysis in that direction. But surely the deployment of symbols of international legitimacy plays a crucial and not always obvious role in the domestic politics of at least some states (otherwise why would the Czech government collapse during its European Union presidency?), and to “black box” the state as though such politics were irrelevant to international relations does an injustice to the power of legitimacy concerns.

Although the case studies help to illustrate his theory, they do not stand alone as coherent historical narratives. For example, if Hurd's account were one's only source on the San Francisco Conference, one would believe that the Great Powers were a unified entity, and miss entirely the intense diplomatic struggles that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union over such things as the illegitimacy of the Soviet puppet regime in Poland, the veto, and the question of how many votes the Soviet Union should get in the General Assembly.

Theory building is the main aim of the book, however. The grandest claim therein is that sovereignty is not an attribute only of states but also of international institutions like the Security Council. Therefore, international relations today should not be characterized as anarchic, but rather as a realm of multiple, overlapping authority structures. That may well be, but the rather far-fetched claim about Security Council sovereignty seems to be supported mostly by the logic of definitions: If legitimacy means authority, and if the Council has authority (as the case studies show it does, sometimes), then it must have sovereignty since sovereignty is authority. According to this logic, we should start seeing sovereignty everywhere—not just in the UN but in other institutions, such as multinational corporations, churches, and even some nongovernmental organizations.

Yet, sovereignty is not just legitimate authority: It is exclusive political authority over a specific territory, and it has evolved historically as an institution in its own right. This book does not engage historical sociological accounts of the evolution of sovereignty in order to substantiate the claims it makes about the Security Council taking on attributes of sovereignty. Nor does the book make any reference to the one supranational institution that does seem to be taking on the trappings of sovereignty—the European Union Commission.

The fact that there is some theoretical overreach in this book (who is not guilty of that?) should not detract from the fact that it makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the power of legitimacy in international politics. Legitimacy is a concept that is often tossed around without really being analyzed. In After Anarchy, Ian Hurd has done a fine job of making it central to the analysis of international politics.