Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa

Abstract

This article, which forms the introduction to a collection of studies, focuses on processes of state construction and deconstruction in contemporary Africa. Its objective is to better understand how local, national and transnational actors forge and remake the state through processes of negotiation, contestation and bricolage. Following a critique of the predominant state failure literature and its normative and analytical shortcomings, the authors identify four key arguments of the scholarly literature on the state in Africa, which concern the historicity of the state in Africa, the embeddedness of bureaucratic organizations in society, the symbolic and material dimensions of statehood and the importance of legitimacy. A heuristic framework entitled 'negotiating statehood' is proposed, referring to the dynamic and partly undetermined processes of state formation and failure by a multitude of social actors who compete over the institutionalization of power relations. The article then operationalizes this framework in three sections that partly conceptualize, partly illustrate who negotiates statehood in contemporary Africa (actors, resources and repertoires); where these negotiation processes occur (negotiation arenas and tables); and what these processes are all about (objects of negotiation). Empirical examples drawn from a variety of political contexts across the African continent illustrate these propositions.

Thinking About the Politics of Inclusive Development: Towards a Relational Approach

“…Hagmann and Peclard, 2010;Lund, 2006). For Hagmann and Peclard (2010: 552), "the state is the product of complex processes of negotiation that occur at the interface between the public and the private, the informal and the formal, the illegal and the legal".…”

The Afghan Local Police – Closing the Security Gap?

“…Neo-Weberian understandings of statehood derive from the Weberian ideal-typical bureaucratic-rational state seen, at root, as a monopoliser of the legitimate means of coercion. Although Weber intended his ideal types as 'pure' logical categories for analytical purposes that had 'no connection with value judgments ' (Weber 2011' (Weber [1904: 98; emphasis in the original), his formulation has in recent decades become a normativeteleological benchmark dominating both the scholarly and policy discourses (Migdal and Schlichte 2005;Hagmann and Péclard 2010;Weigand 2015). The view that deviation from this condition is a dangerous pathology threatening the wider community of states has underpinned the tendency to categorise states with a low degree of monopolisation of force as 'fragile' or even 'failed ' (Fukuyama 2004;Rotberg 2004).…”

“…Intervenors in Afghanistan, for example, were accused of assuming that strengthening the centre would have a ' cascading' effect in which 'the rest of the country would become successively subject to the Afghan state' (Schetter 2013: 8). Such interventions were thought to lack traction because they either largely ignored the periphery, assumed a tabula rasa on which they could build afresh (Ucko 2013: 529) or, influenced by the 'pathologizing' failed states and ungoverned spaces discourses (Bell 2012;Hughes and Pupavac 2005), treated areas beyond state control as sites of breakdown or Hobbesian anarchy (Call 2010;Hagmann and Hoehne 2009;Hagmann and Péclard 2010). A sense emerged that an external vision of government could not simply be imposed upon a given country and that such efforts could and would be locally resisted or co-opted (Englebert and Tull 2008).…”

“…Migdal and Schlichte (2005), for example, presented a dynamic understanding of political order and statehood that redirects the analytical focus from the degree of monopolisation of force to interactions between the involved actors or authorities. Hagmann and Péclard (2010) use this definition to develop their heuristic framework of 'negotiating statehood', describing 'processes of state (de-)construction' (ibid. : 544) as a non-linear and at least partly undetermined product of ongoing, dynamic interactions between differently situated actors (ibid: 545; Doornbos 2010: 752).…”

“…The ALP, for example, can be interpreted as a policy that has taken to heart exhortations for ' alternative nonstate-centric approaches to governance, the control of violence, peace-building, and development' and to be based on an appreciation of 'the strengths of the societies in question, acknowledging their resilience, encouraging indigenous creative responses to the problems, and strengthening their own capacities for endurance' (Boege et al 2009a: 14). Meanwhile, this policy-level shift has been paralleled by, but needs to be distinguished from, an increasingly prominent and diverse scholarship that seeks to overcome the perceived intellectual failures of the failed states discourse by redefining statehood and suggesting 'more empirically grounded or more conceptually innovative' (Hagmann and Péclard 2010) research into the emergence and practice of local governance and authority in situations of violent conflict. While scholarship in this vein is opening the way to a much more sophisticated analysis of social phenomena and processes currently affecting the lives of billions of people across the world, the policy turn to the local contains highly problematic implications that have yet to be fully unpacked or sufficiently considered by either the policy or the academic communities.…”