Politics, state institutions, de facto sovereignty and public authority in (violently) contested environments are my main themes of interest. These concepts have normative connotations, but what is interesting about conflict-affected contexts is that received wisdom about legitimacy, legality or morality often gets turned on its head. The self-evident nature of the state often gets called into question, purportedly illegal political formations manage to craft some legitimacy, and the presence of violence does not equal plain anarchy or disorder. And this in turn raises interesting questions about what we tend to consider ‘normal’ contexts, where normative schemata about what is natural or just are more clearly scripted and rehearsed, but not necessarily more accurate. These questions may seem purely academic, but they actually raise some pertinent issues with regard to policy-practice as well. The echelons of policy-making, the sites where policy gets ‘translated’ to practice, and the ways in which such practice connects to ‘local beneficiaries’ or ‘interlocutors’ are social arenas, just like any other. Policy is as much a discursive form political performance aimed at crafting legitimacy, as it is an instrumental rationality connecting interests, objectives and means.