Legitimation as Political Practice
Crafting Everyday Authority in Tanzania

A radical, interdisciplinary reworking of legitimation, using ethnographic insights to explore everyday non-state authority in Tanzania.

Kathy Dodworth (Author)

9781316516515, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 May 2022

256 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.55 kg

'Legitimacy is profoundly a challenging matter in Africa. What informs legitimacy is a question that we often ask. Kathy Dodworth examines how legitimacy is produced in everyday practices. The analysis goes beyond state level by examining NGOs practices. This book is invaluable in seeking to bridge the 'legitimation practices' gap.' Aikande C. Kwayu, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Legitimacy has long been perceived through a Westernized lens as a fixed, binary state. In this book, Kathy Dodworth offers an exploration of everyday legitimation practices in coastal Tanzania, which challenges this understanding within postcolonial contexts. She reveals how non-government organizations craft their authority to act, working with, against and through the state, and what these practices tell us about contemporary legitimation. Synthesizing detailed, ethnographic fieldwork with theoretical innovations from across the social sciences, legitimacy is reworked not as a fixed state, but as a collection of constantly renegotiated practices. Critically adopting insights from political theory, sociology and anthropology, this book develops a detailed picture of contemporary governance in Tanzania and beyond in the wake of waning Western dominance.

Foreword
Preface and acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Practicing legitimation
1. Legitimacy and legitimation: Broadening the landscape
2. Practicing the 'how' of legitimation
3. 'We go deeper': Extensity and territoriality as practice
4. 'In and out': Working the state in Tanzania
5. 'I was chosen, it's the work that's voluntary': Negotiating voluntarism in Tanzania
6. 'These people, they just sit!': Representing coastal 'others'
7. 'Reporting has all sorts of issues!': The global ecosystem of information
Conclusion: Legitimation as practice: Everyday authority in Tanzania
Appendix A: Interviews
Glossary
References.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], African history [HBJH]