1 - Legitimacy and Legitimation

Summary

This chapter lays down the theoretical groundwork for reconceptualizing legitimation as practice over legitimacy as a stable state, integrating three theoretical developments. The first of these, specifically on the topic of legitimacy, is a movement away from normative towards empirical enquiry. The chapter builds on recent, millennial attempts to do so but adds a long overdue interrogation of legitimacy’s leftover Western centrisms. The second development is a movement away from the state as the primary locus regarding legitimation. There has been a concordance across disciplines that public authority is not limited to, nor contained by, the state. New, hybrid forms of authority, straddling public and private, local and global, state and society, encapsulate what the book terms non/state governance, within which state and non-state actors are enmeshed. The third development is the burgeoning field of practice-based enquiry, whereby methodological space has opened up in all relevant disciplines to spotlight the practices through which power is exercised and its conditions (re)produced. There has been a productive concordance around practice as ‘fertile’ ground for a range of disciplines in the West but also for eminent scholars in Africa who foreground the multiplicity of the normally minimised African subject, who negotiates structures of coloniality within everyday life.