Conclusion: In Pursuit of Legitimacy

Summary

This study of the nature and dynamics of political legitimacy in Mali started out as a critique of existing accounts of legitimacy: of accounts that discuss political legitimacy mainly with reference to institutions and procedures of constitutionalism and democracy (e.g. Bratton et al. 2002; Wing 2008), even if they acknowledge the potential interference of conventional, shared normative standards for assessing rightful rule (e.g. Bleck 2015); of anthropological studies that either privilege cultural and performative aspects of legitimation or posit the ‘state effect’ as the result of an ensemble of rules, ‘discourses and practices of power’ (Aretxaga 2003: 398; see Mitchell 1991; Trouillot 2001: 129), without, however, examining how this form of governmentality actually operates and hence becomes effective; of investigations that centre on the ‘logic’ or ‘practical norms’ of political practice in Africa (de Herdt and Olivier de Sardan 2015); and finally, of accounts that either assume that certain legal and institutional conditions prove the existence of a legitimate political order (e.g. Weissbrod 1981) or altogether dismiss the relevance of ‘legitimacy’ to analyses of postcolonial politics.

As illustrated throughout this book, rather than discount the relevance of the concept of legitimacy to analyses of contemporary politics, in Africa and elsewhere, scholars would gain much from acknowledging that the concept allows us, indeed compels us, to address anew how understandings and the conferral or withdrawal of political legitimacy emerge in the actual encounter between those who hold formal positions of power and those who submit to their governance.

Empirically, the focus on actual engagements and situated assessments allows us to understand the history of postcolonial Mali, particularly of the post-democratization period since the 1991, not as one of simple failure or a loss in widely anchored legitimacy, nor as evidence of a continued patrimonial logic, allegedly unfettered by people's ongoing experiences with and adjustments to state actors, procedures, and institutions. Rather, what has emerged from the analysis is a history of extreme instability and volatility of procedures and institutions that, although nominally – that is, from the (normative) point of view of liberal political theory – are meant to confer legitimacy on the political system and office holders, do not live up to this promise. This is so partly because of their short-lived and unstable nature and also because they coexist uneasily with conventional rules of how power should be accessed and exercised.