Séverine BELLINA is director of the IRG. A doctor of law, she has focused her research on the institutionalisation of power, normative pluralism and development cooperation. She has worked as an international consultant, program manager at the UNPD and at the French Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs. She has taught at Sciences Po Paris and lectures in other universities.

Understanding, identifying, seeing, bringing out what actually underpins power adhesion have been the IRG’s constant pursuit over the past six years through its “legitimacy and Entrenchment of power” program. It has placed us in a position to scrutinize the sources of power legitimacy, whether exercised at the level of the village or of a supra-national organisation, via those exercised at state level, and this in diverse socio-cultural and historical contexts. Concluding, at the term of our analyses and meetings, to the divorce between the populations, the institutions and the elites, we wrote in the latest issue of this periodical that this growing gap raised in increasingly violent terms the ongoing question of a crisis of politics and democracy. Indignations, revolutions, and demonstrations: all over the world, action has, in recent months, spoken loudly; indeed demanding dignity and social justice… From Tunis to Washington via Madrid, the call for a democratic governance “from, by and for” all its actors compellingly urges the reconnection of societies with their state.