How do democratic governments respond to crises of legitimacy induced by episodes of collective violence? This dissertation comprises an historical and comparative account of the rise, and dispersion of a common organizational form for responding to crises of state legitimacy, and of the narratives of legitimation offered in the wake of such crises. Based upon a comparison of a century of the reports of public commissions of inquiry arrayed over five national contexts, I show that the substantive foci and legitimating narratives of such inquiries have been patterned in strikingly transnational manners. Substantively, twentieth century commissions cross-nationally converged on violent incidents which were defined by an ostensible racial or ethnic basis. Even more strikingly, the logical bases of commission explanations of the causes and consequences of ethnic violence repeatedly shifted, within distinct historical periods, along common dimensions - thus recurrently framing global political discourses of "legitimate" violence and the state's role in preventing violence along similar lines. I distinguish four dominant logics that typified the shifting terrain of 20^th century violence commission discourses, and explain the shifts between them through an argument concerning the intersection of knowledge regimes and state power - focusing in particular on the intersection of dominant social theories and professional knowledge discourses, historically contingent modes of social control, and the impact of globally-resonant political events upon the cultural politics of legitimation.