The legitimation trap: substantive justice as decolonial praxis

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.