Description
African states, under the market liberalization of the last two decades, have witnessed resurgent non-state intervention. Non-state actors (NSAs), typically foreign or foreign-financed entities, increasingly take up service provision and/or public roles that conventionally fell to the state. NSAs, whether companies or non-governmental organizations, must legitimate essentially private forms of authority in the name of the public. That is not only the case for oft-studied Western corporations and NGOs but also the proliferation of Chinese actors in Africa today. Legitimation, we argue, is thus a core problem of socio-political life but remains only partially represented in political science, hamstrung by Eurocentric, state-based rationalities. This paper sets out a post-Weberian framework for understanding how NGOs and companies legitimate their authority to act within particular African contexts. We bring analyses of nominally non-profit organizations versus for-profit companies into dialogue, before introducing our three conceptual axes: organizational type; provenance; and domain. Through this, we attend to legitimation’s multiplicity, heightened by Africa’s South-South mobilities, whereby the constant inward and outward flows of ideas, people and things engender new symbolic and material assemblages through which the legitimation of public authority is negotiated. To illustrate the urgency and purchase of such an approach, we explore one of the most immediate, conspicuous ‘fronts’ in Africa’s IR: the rise of China in Africa, especially through the increasing efforts of Chinese companies and NGOs to ‘go global’. We move away from notions of a coherent, state-directed Chinese ‘model’ towards a pluralist understanding, wherein new - or returning - ideas are layered, adapted and/or contested within particular domains in a constant process of making. Through such legitimation, companies and NGOs craft degrees of autonomy from Chinese and host governments and, in turn, the political space in which to exercise their own forms of governance.
