Bringing together ethnographic case studies of vigilantism from various parts of sub-Saharan Africa, this volume starts from the observation that, in many African countries, the question of who is entitled to formulate legal principles, to enact justice, to police morality and to sanction wrongdoings has increasingly become the subject of violent contestation and conflict. Generally speaking, these conflicts arise out of tensions between the principles of sovereignty, empirical statehood and citizens' self-determination. More particularly, they concern the conditions, modes and means of the legitimate exercise of power. Consequently, in this volume these conflicts are seen as diagnostic of how social actors in sub- Saharan Africa debate, practice and reconfigure sociopolitical and sociolegal orders.

In order to understand the range and variability of these diagnostics, the contributions to the present volume take a broad approach to the phenomenon of vigilantism, conceptualising it as an ever-evolving and contested social practice that can be enacted by different types of social agencies and that takes diverse organisational forms. Accordingly, the volume incorporates the examination of vigilante action on the part of groups as varied as, for instance, bodies of night guards (David Pratten), community policing forums (Thomas Kirsch), hunters' associations (Sten Hagberg and Syna Ouattara), and ethnically and religiously based militias (Johannes Harnischfeger).