In March 2012, Mali plunged into chaos, thereby reversing its earlier role of a Western donor darling hailed as an exemplar of successful democratic transition in many political science and popular press publications. Following the toppling of President Amadou Toumani Touré by a group of disgruntled officers on 22 March, several separatist and Muslim militant groups operating in the Saharan border regions swiftly seized upon the opportunities afforded by political instability and occupied the country's northern regions. Even after the military occupation of major parts of the north by French and African forces in January 2013, instability and insecurity persisted there. Meanwhile, after a period of political turmoil shaped by shifting power wrangles within the political elite in the capital Bamako, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was elected the new president in Mali, under the watchful eyes of armed Western forces. Since then, in spite of international military presence and of the signing of a Peace Treaty by many armed oppositional groups in July 2015, groups of militants continue to challenge the central state in the name of an Islamic theocratic order and to launch attacks on state institutions and actors in north-eastern Kidal, central Macina, and the southern border region to Ivory Coast. In addition to these signs of insecurity and political turmoil in the territorial margins of the nation-state, Mali's government and state institutions are increasingly tested by numerous organizations and leaders, all of whom invoke Islam as a blueprint for a better political and moral order. How could it be that these various initiatives, particularly those employing the ‘symbolic language of Islam’ (Eickelman 2000), have emerged as a serious challenge to the political order and current government in Mali, and garner support among the country's various urban and rural populations?

This book argues that the concept of ‘legitimacy’, as well as explorations of its concrete empirical manifestations, are key to understanding the political disarray and insecurity to which Malians have been exposed in recent years. With this argument, I make a two-fold intervention. First, contrary to the critique – or wholesale dismissal – of the concept of ‘legitimacy’ in some of the social science literature, I maintain that ‘legitimacy’ is a valid, useful, and necessary concept to make sense of the fate of contemporary polities, in Africa and elsewhere, regardless of whether these polities have been inter-preted as ‘failed’, ‘strong’, ‘weak’, or ‘patrimonial’.