Legitimation as Political Practice : Crafting Everyday Authority in Tanzania

Bringing together extensive multidisciplinary insights into legitimacy and legitimation, this book explores the everyday making of authority in Tanzania. Analysing how non-governmental organizations work alongside government actors, it offers a globally resonant picture of local governance today.

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.