Negotiating Statehood

Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa

Tobias Hagmann, Didier Péclard, Tobias Hagmann, Didier Péclard

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781444338683
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781444395570
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa provides a conceptual framework for analysing dynamic processes of state-making in Africa.

• Features a conceptual framework which provides a method for analysing the everyday making, contestation, and negotiation of statehood in contemporary Africa
• Conceptualizes who negotiates statehood (the actors, resources and repertoires), where these negotiation processes take place, and what these processes are all about
• ncludes a collections of essays that provides empirical and analytical insights into these processes in eight different country studies in Africa
• Critically reflects on the negotiability of statehood in Africa

Chapter 1

Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa

Tobias Hagmann and Didier Péclard

INTRODUCTION

Since the mid-1990s, African states have occupied a prominent place in discussions about state failure, collapse and reconstruction (Bates, 2008; Herbst, 1997; Milliken, 2003; Williams, 2006). According to the prevailing rhetoric they have fallen prey to an array of destructive forces in the aftermath of the Cold War, while the purported ‘disconnection’ (Bach, 1991) of the African continent from the ‘globalized’ rest of the world further accelerated this process. These forces include savage privatization policies spearheaded by the Bretton Woods institutions (van de Walle, 2001), the growing influence of criminal groups and activities (Bayart et al., 1999; Nordstrom, 2004), the rise of rebel movements and warlords (Clapham, 1998; Reno, 1998) and a gradual institutionalization of violence (Richards, 2005). Consequently, many academic works portray post-colonial African states in virtually pathological categories. They are perceived to be threatened by ‘collapse’ (Zartman, 1995), ‘failure’ (Rotberg, 2004), ‘fragility’ (Stewart and Brown, 2009) and ‘weakness’ (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982) as they degenerate into nightmarish ‘shadow’ (Reno, 2000) or ‘quasi’ (Hopkins, 2000; Jackson, 1990) states, void of popular legitimacy and administrative capacity. Rebuilding the deficient bureaucratic apparatuses of sub-Saharan African governments then becomes a major preoccupation and challenge for international donors (Englebert and Tull, 2008).

Dominant though they still may be in much policy discourse about Africa — particularly in the realm of development, peace-building and ‘anti-terrorism’ — arguments about state failure and collapse have been subject to growing criticism. In 2002, the collection of articles edited by Milliken and Krause (2002) demonstrated the complex and non-linear nature of processes of state failure and collapse, and showed that the latter remained an exception even in the context of African civil wars of the 1990s. Critics of the state failure paradigm contend that state weakness in Africa is nothing new, but rather a long historic continuity (Engel and Mehler, 2005: 91).1 Furthermore, administrative practices such as the levying of taxes may continue in the relative absence of the state, as Trefon’s (2007) research in the city of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) demonstrates. To this day the only case of complete and prolonged state collapse is Somalia, which has remained without a central government since the downfall of Siyad Barre in 1991. But even in the war-ravaged central and southern parts of the country, Somalis have responded to state collapse by (re-)activating informal, mostly clan-based, security and governance mechanisms (Menkhaus, 2007: 74). And while African states may erode institutionally, ‘fragmented imageries of stateness’ (Nielsen, 2007: 695) may persist among ordinary people who continue to make strategic use of these imageries in pursuing their everyday lives.

Ideal-typical notions of the state as a monopolist of legitimate physical violence, as an autonomous bureaucratic apparatus, as the embodiment of popular sovereignty, and as a spatially and territorially coherent entity enjoy global prominence (Schlichte, 2005: 6). These ideal-typical notions constitute the analytical lenses through which scholars interpret state politics around the world. The global diffusion of a set of normative state ideas which derives from the European historical experience explains why African states are often ‘identified as failed not by what they are, but by what they are not, namely, successful in comparison to Western states’ (Hill, 2005: 148). Underlying this ‘pathological’ approach to state institutions in Africa are essentialist, teleological and instrumentalist conceptions of state and political authority (Hagmann and Hoehne, 2009). State failure proponents tend to reify African states as a-historical ‘things’, as given and fixed sets of institutions rather than as political processes. Despite political sociologists’ earlier call not to view states as ‘the outcome of a linear process of differentiation’ (Badie and Birnbaum, 1983: 54), most observers implicitly and falsely assume that in the long run all states will converge towards a model of Western liberal democracy. The overly instrumentalist character of much of the state failure literature is also evidenced in its emphasis on order and stability, which reflect distinctly Western geopolitical and humanitarian interests (Call, 2008).

One could also argue that the popularity of state failure concepts not only indicates a malaise with the post-colonial African state, but, more fundamentally, reflects a growing dissatisfaction with what are increasingly criticized as stereotypical Weberian state conceptions (Kapferer, 2005: 286). The heuristic limitations of mainstream Western political science have encouraged researchers to resort to either more empirically grounded or more conceptually innovative approaches to public and state authority in Africa. In this process some have forged their own vocabulary and concepts in order to grasp statehood in Africa from a less normative perspective. This is the case with the volume on Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics in Africa edited by Christian Lund, who forcefully called attention to the fact that African public authorities may ‘wax and wane’ as ‘state institutions are never definitely formed’ (2006: 697).

In recent years a growing body of literature has documented the creativity of African societies in coping with the limited statehood and political turmoil that became the hallmark of African politics in the 1990s (Raeymaekers et al., 2008: 8). In parallel with the retreat and erosion of the post-colonial state in Africa ‘new forms of power and authority’ had sprung up across the continent (Ferguson, 2006: 102). Structural adjustment, democratization and decentralization programmes effectively facilitated the return of local power centres in Africa to the detriment of the centripetal agenda of existing nation-states (von Trotha, 2001: 1617). In countries as diverse as Mali, Chad or Mozambique contemporary types of political regulation, accumulation, investment and institutionalization proceed at the local level beyond the reach of conventional states. In many cases the prolonged absence of a central government has provided room for the formation of societal political orders ‘beside the state’ (Bellagamba and Klute, 2008: 11). The most prominent example is the Republic of Somaliland, a political entity which has all the attributes of a modern nation state except for international recognition (Bradbury, 2008). It is the ideal-typical example of an African political order that is characterized by what sociologists and political anthropologists refer to as ‘para-sovereignty’, that is, a non-state political order that shoulders local state functions, but operates in parallel and independently of the national power centre (von Trotha and Klute, 2004). The realities of non-state or ‘partially state’ political and economic regulation forcefully challenge the idea that state failure equals anarchy or a breakdown of order (Roitman, 2005).

The normative shortcomings of the state failure literature and the complexities of empirical statehood call for alternative ways of conceptualizing state and political authority in Africa. Attempts to forge alternative perspectives on contemporary statehood must draw on the insights provided by the existing literature. Beyond the great diversity of theoretical schools and arguments on the state in Africa, four main arguments seem to have achieved a certain consensus. In many ways they apply to African states as much as to states all over the world.

First, states must be seen as historical processes that include and span the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. The historicity of the state in Africa has been emphasized most prominently by Bayart (2006) who argues that the state in Africa must not be seen as an imported product, but one that has long been appropriated by African societies and elites. Statehood in Africa should thus be understood as the emanation of particular historic types of African modes of governing. The importance of colonial legacies in African politics such as the reproduction of decentralized, racialized ‘despotism’ has been highlighted by Mamdani (1996). The call for historical scrutiny extends to the analysis of evolving relations between states and citizens (Lewis, 2002). Rather than assuming a priori distinctions between the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods, one has to be aware of African states’ historical trajectories through these different periods. Thus the colonial state was strongly shaped by ‘indigenous social forces’ (Berman, 1998: 332) as colonial rulers relied on and incorporated numerous local intermediaries to govern, while post-colonial states ‘exacerbated and institutionalized’ many of the deficiencies of colonial administrations (Paul, 2008: 219).

Second, the idea that states are external to society is erroneous. Rather states are deeply embedded in social forces, as Migdal’s (1998: 2001) ‘state-in-society’ approach compellingly demonstrates. Long gone are the days when a first generation of area specialists and political scientists considered state power in Africa to be autonomous, as John Lonsdale suggested some thirty years ago (1981: 148). Contemporary accounts of statehood in Africa abandon a narrow focus on formal state actors and institutions for a more sociological reading of the multiple ‘power poles’ (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 1997: 441) that exist within, at the interface, and outside of the bureaucratic apparatus. A wide range of actors, state officials and non-state actors are involved in ‘doing the state’ (Migdal and Schlichte, 2005: 14–15), both in co-operation and in competition with the state (Arnaut and Højbjerg, 2008: 20). Hence, innovative studies of the state consider the elusive boundary between state and society ‘not as a problem of conceptual precision but as a clue to the nature of the phenomenon’ (Mitchell, 1991: 78).

Third, states are not only the product and realm of bureaucrats, policies and institutions, but also of imageries, symbols and discourses. Governments exist not only as the result of routinized administrative practices, but also because ordinary people imagine and represent the state in their everyday lives (Gupta, 1995: 390–3). The almost metaphysical idea of the state has become universalized and hence hegemonic (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001). State institutions themselves incorporate numerous cultural and political representations, discourses and activities that give meaning to their practices (Nagengast, 1994: 116). While one doesn’t have to go as far as Abrams (1988 [1977]: 75–6) who sees the ‘state system’ as an ‘essentially imaginative construction’, it is essential that political analysis deals with the state in terms of both its materiality and its ‘social imaginary’ (Castoriadis, 1987).

Fourth, at the core of state formation processes we find attempts to institutionalize and legitimize physical coercion and political power. Max Weber’s (1947) key insight that successful bureaucracies transform coercion or power (Macht) into domination (Herrschaft) — a type of authority that is based on obedience and recognition rather than sheer physical force — remains highly relevant. State actors must legitimize their authority to appear acceptable to those they govern (Abrams, 1988 [1977]: 76). The same applies to non-state or non-bureaucratic power holders, although they rely on a different set of legitimization strategies. State-building thus becomes a process of accumulating Basislegitimitäten or ‘basic legitimacies’ (von Trotha, 2001: 10). A relational concept of power that looks at the ‘relations between the governing and the governed’ (Gledhill, 1994: 22, cited in Hagberg, 2006: 780) is instrumental in trying to decipher contemporary forms of power and domination. It is through an empirical analysis of variegated transformations from power to domination and from domination to power that state formation and erosion can be grasped in Africa and elsewhere (Schlichte, 2005).

NEGOTIATING STATEHOOD: A HEURISTIC FRAMEWORK

Building on these important theoretical precedents, we propose an interpretative approach to processes of state construction and deconstruction in contemporary Africa. The objective of this analytic of statehood in Africa is to better understand how local, national and transnational actors forge and remake the state through processes of negotiation, contestation and bricolage. Our proposed framework explores by whom and how state domination is fashioned (‘actors, resources, repertoires’), where these processes take place (‘negotiation arenas and tables’) and what the main outcomes and issues at stake are (‘objects of negotiation’). Our main ambition is to provide a heuristic framework for the investigation of past and ongoing dynamics of state domination. Hence, the proposed ‘negotiating statehood’ framework does not provide an explanation or causal model of state failure and formation. Nor does it apply to all states at all times and in all places. It is neither a theory nor a concept in the strict sense, but rather a way of looking at and grasping dynamic and complex dimensions of statehood.

Although we give emphasis to the dynamic and partly voluntaristic aspects of political institutions, the approach sketched in this section is best thought of in conjunction with existing studies that call attention to the more structural aspects of African states. Population densities and infrastructure (Herbst, 2000), rural political economies (Boone, 2003) and local property rights regimes (Lund, 2008) have a strong bearing on the structural conditions of state domination in post-colonial Africa. The ‘negotiating statehood’ framework is, however, geared primarily towards the more conjunctural processes of state domination in post-colonial Africa. Furthermore, it is also a call for an alternative approach to current processes of state formation and disintegration on the African continent, an approach that is interpretative rather than normative in scope, sociological rather than state-centric in philosophy, and dynamic rather than static.2 It is hoped that our framework offers an innovative approach to dynamics of empirical statehood beyond the limits of the state failure paradigm or the unhelpful emphasis on ‘figures, number...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Chapter 1: Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa
• Chapter 2: Protection for Sale? War and the Transformation of Regulation on the Congo–Ugandan Border
• Chapter 3: The Struggle Continues? The Spectre of Liberation, Memory Politics and ‘War Veterans’ in Namibia
• Chapter 4: Federal Restructuring in Ethiopia: Renegotiating Identity and Borders along the Oromo–Somali Ethnic Frontiers
• Chapter 5: Facing Up to the Centre: The Emergence of Regional Elite Associations in Angola’s Political Transition Process
• Chapter 6: The People, the Power and the Public Service: Political Identification during Guinea’s General Strikes in 2007
• Chapter 7: The Party and the State: Frelimo and Social Stratification in Post-socialist Mozambique
• Chapter 8: Maintenant, on sait qui est qui: Statehood and Political Reconfiguration in Northern Côte d’Ivoire
• Chapter 9: Negotiating Statehood in a Hybrid Political Order: The Case of Somaliland
• Chapter 10: Researching African Statehood Dynamics: Negotiability and its Limits
• Index