Joshua M Chibuyi

When does participation at AFSF 2026 exercise influence? Because the Kigali Forum has not yet taken place, the question is prospective: what evidence would justify such a claim? I defend limited institutional answerability as the normative standard for a forum that frames issues, brokers investment access and tracks commitments but is not a legislature. Participation progresses through presence, voice, consideration, uptake and outcome influence; influence therefore requires a traceable route from a claim to institutional response, decision and subsequent change. Drawing on Young, Christiano and Rancière, I identify three points where this progression can be weakened: unequal agenda-setting power, investor discretion over conditions of feasibility, and institutional rules determining credible disagreement. Analysis of AFSF reporting, programming, and Deal Room criteria shows that participation indicators do not establish whose proposals shaped decisions or investment. I propose three records as the evidentiary infrastructure needed to make later claims of influence institutionally answerable.

Political legitimacy is often assessed by appeal to freedom, yet freedom itself is rarely treated as a contested concept within legitimacy theory. This paper argues that freedom does not ground legitimacy in a straightforward way. Instead, competing conceptions of freedom reshape how arbitrary power is identified and evaluated, reorganizing the standards by which political authority is judged legitimate. Adopting a diagnostic approach, the paper treats freedom as an interpretive lens rather than a foundational criterion. It examines three influential conceptions of freedom, non-interference, self-mastery, and non-domination, as developed by Isaiah Berlin, T. H. Green, and Philip Pettit. Each conception foregrounds certain forms of power while obscuring others, thereby altering what appears to require justification. The paper concludes that persistent disagreements about legitimacy reflect conceptual disagreements about arbitrariness rather than disputes over institutional design. This reframing helps explain why legitimacy disputes persist across political theory despite shared institutional concerns.