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Legitimacy can be understood as a quality we ascribe to an actor or action when it is perceived by other social actors as rightful: ‘desirable, proper, appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions’. Christian Reus-Smit, Chair of International Relations at the University of Queensland, discusses in his speech the connection between confernce diplomacy and the politics - or, shall we say the crisis - of diplomacy advancing three arguments: 1. seing conference diplomacy as product of two political imperatives that together generate their own problems of legitimacy; 2. seing conference diplomacy as a product of an international system, transformed by struggles over legitimacy; 3. seing conference diplomacy as a mixed effective political instrument generating its own problems of legitimacy.