The concept of political clientelism is one if the few genuinely crosscultural concepts available to political scientists for the comparative study of transitional systems. As a descriptive concept, political clientelism helps us uncover patterns of relationships which deviate markedly from those ordinarily associated with class or ethnicity. As an analytic concept political clientelism provides crucial insights into the internal dynamics of social and political change. Moreover, if, as some contend, patterns of resource allocation are more meaningful indicators of political development than their conceptual opposites, political clientelism may well supply the critical “missing link” between micro- and macro-sociological or system-centered theories of political development.
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There can be no reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi without justice, and no justice without truth. This proposition holds true for all three states of former Belgian Africa. In Rwanda and Burundi, in particular, getting at the truth will remain problematic as long as the perpetrators of genocide readily cast themselves in the role of victims, and the victims, in turn, are seen as perpetrators by their enemies. Basic disagreements between Hutu and Tutsi about who committed genocide and why are traceable in part to the uncritical use of the term genocide to describe just about any type of ethnic violence, in part to the selective sifting of the evidence with a view to exonerating one group and condemning the other. Although Hutu and Tutsi are both guilty of genocide, the tendency to substitute collective guilt for individual culpability in the planning and execution of the killings can only result in distortion of the facts. There will be no peace in the Great Lakes region unless one takes seriously the task of shedding light on the circumstances, the scale and the consequences of the genocide of Hutu by Tutsi in Burundi (1972), of Tutsi and Hutu by Hutu in Rwanda (1994), and of Hutu by Tutsi in Congo (1996–1997).
WhatGeertz refers to as the ‘pigeonhole disease’ is nowhere more evident than in the persistent tendency of political scientists to locate state and society in separate conceptual niches: one inhabited by a potentially predatory species and the other by a defenceless and fully domesticated pigeon. Only where a recognisable entity is sharing the characteristics of a state system, whose boundaries are analytically separate from those of the social system, can political science claim a disciplinary domain of its own. The ongoing debate over the relative merits or demerits of state-centred approaches has only served to add further salience to the dichotomy between state and society, but with little agreement as to where the one begins and the other leaves off.
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