Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Postcolonial states can organize dispossession through institutions that remain procedurally regular, legally authoritative, and indispensable to citizens’ claims. This article theorizes the legitimation trap as a contingent configuration in which procedural propriety certifies a substantively unjust order and narrows the terms in which that order can be contested. The trap mediates property, extraction, and racialised accumulation; it does not replace them as causes of material injustice. Citizens may internalize deprivation as personal inadequacy, a pathway of self-colonisation, while alternatives include strategic or cynical compliance, withdrawal, and collective resistance. We develop substantive justice as a conflict-aware decolonial praxis grounded in redistribution, recognitive dignity, and ontological plurality, with procedure retained as a safeguard against arbitrariness. Illustrations from Nigeria, South Africa, and Bolivia expose the framework’s conditions and tensions. The argument reconnects legitimacy to the contested question of whether people can flourish.
Source: Globalizations
Authors: Aybike Mergen, Mustafa F. Özbilgin
Institutions: Özyeğin University, Brunel University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7204270225