Social Cues: How the Liberal Community Legitimizes Humanitarian War

This Element advances a theory of social cues to explain how international institutions legitimize foreign policy. It reframes legitimization as a type of identity politics. Institutions confer legitimacy by sending social cues that exert pressures to conform and alleviate social–relational concerns regarding norm abidance, group participation, and status and image. Applied to the domain of humanitarian wars, the argument implies that liberal democracies vis-à-vis NATO can influence citizen...