Unsettled authority and humanitarian practice: reflections on local Iegitimacy from Sierra Leone’s borderlands

Calls to localise humanitarian practice and to engage communities in emergency responses have gained prominence in recent years. Using the case study of the response to the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, this article probes into the assumptions underlying efforts to mobilise ‘community stakeholders’ to legitimise emergency measures, revealing how they envision authority within communities as static and independent of experiences of humanitarian intervention. Drawing inspiration from Raufu Mustapha’s intellectual legacy, it shows the limitations of these assumptions by paying attention to structural factors, historical legacies, and the empirical workings of power. Through an ethnographic account of how the Ebola response was experienced and remembered in a remote border town, the article proposes instead the concept of unsettled authority. Stories from these borderlands show how the legitimacy of local authority was dynamically negotiated, made and unmade, through encounters with humanitarian interventions as these became intertwined with longer-term contestations of power with unpredictable consequences.