Judging Where States Will Not: Towards a Theory of Relational Legitimacy for People’s Tribunals

While international relations scholarship is increasingly examining the legitimation strategies of non-state actors, one category—People’s Tribunals (PTs)—has remained overlooked. How PTs construct their legitimacy is instructive because they operate outside state-sanctioned frameworks, raising questions about legitimate authority in their sharpest form. PTs are civil society mechanisms that adjudicate mass atrocities when formal international courts cannot or will not act. Drawing on analysis of ten tribunals, this article develops a theory of relational legitimation to explain how PTs construct their legitimacy not in isolation, but in relation to the formal courts and tribunals against which they are most frequently measured. It introduces an instrumentalist-transformative typology: instrumentalist tribunals construct legitimacy through alignment with, and mirroring of, formal courts; while transformative tribunals construct legitimacy through principled differentiation. These positioning strategies are traced across input, process, and output legitimacy, showing how choices about normative foundations, evidentiary standards, and the form of findings reflect different diagnoses of why accountability gaps exist. Variations in legitimation strategies embody implicit assumptions of international order, namely, whether the state-centric architecture is sound but temporarily blocked, or structurally problematic. The article contributes to broader debates about non-state actor legitimation while offering insights into an understudied element of global justice.