Aziz, M. H.
(2012)
How a crisis in the moral economy of development policy challenges state legitimacy.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This PhD thesis accounts for the legitimacy challenges faced by the state that are
specifically created by organized industrial workers through their anti-state unrest. It also relates
such legitimacy challenges to recurring regime breakdown in unconsolidated democracies. I thus
answer the question: how can we more fully account for labour-led legitimacy challenges to the
state that at key times contribute to regime breakdown in unconsolidated democracies? I build
on the dominant elite-driven explanations that are already emphasized in the existing theoretical
literature by highlighting bottom-up labour mobilization that has not been given sufficient
consideration.
Moreover, I have uniquely framed such bottom-up mobilization in terms of “shared norms”
in a very particular “moral economy” centred around development policy. These norms were in
part created by the state as part of its informal “legitimation project” with labour. Key to the
state-labour relationship within this moral economy is workers’ expectation of certain
subsistence provision from the ruling regime in return for its role in state-led industrial
production and national development. Such expectation of specific subsistence provision was
partly built up by the state itself through its own rhetoric and policies; but this also set up the
state to frequently lose legitimacy when such provision could not be delivered or maintained.
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