The State We're In: Recent Contributions to the Debate on State—Society Relations in Africa

Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in 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, numbers and formal structures found in much political science literature’ (Eriksen, 2001: 304) 3 . Four core theoretical propositions underpin our research agenda.…”

Co-Producing Ineffective States: Social Knowledge, Social Policy and Social Citizenship in Africa and in Development

“…The constitution of community as in effect an institution of government in the organisation of African postcolonial states (Boone 2007: 564;Lund 2006: 694) is a consequence of the political and institutional legacies associated with colonial governance regimes, post colonial developmental states and ongoing development policy interventions. These prioritize education and health over an expansion of social support and, concurrently, promote community development and decentralization (Eriksen 2001;Adesina 2007;Tendler 2002;Doornbos 2010) The constitution of community as a basis for social organisation and the allocation of entitlements plays an important role in the `politics of needs interpretation' (Fraser 1989), legitimating the absence of a distinct sphere of state action dealing with the `social' directed at the welfare and security of citizens. 5…”

“…As Olivier de Sardan makes clear, such approaches in privileging an interpretation of state failure as pathologically related to cultural idioms render the `delivering state' , that is states which function in various ways to deliver goods and services to populations, invisible (2009: 6). State forms and functioning in Africa cannot be adequately explained in terms of either colonial legacies or indigenous cultures (Eriksen 2001;Pitcher et al 2009). State forms based on widely accepted organisational templates have broad based legitimacy in African countries, even where state performance is poor (Eriksen 2010).…”

Civil Society Under Different Political and Aid Regimes in Nicaragua

“…This understanding builds to a large extent on the liberal view of civil society, with fairly rosy ideas of the sector as the promoter of democratic values, without acknowledging the potential contradictions between the many meanings attached to the concept, and, as Grugel and Bishop (2014: 138) point out, with only a limited understanding of the workings of power. Based on such criticism, Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) and Eriksen (2001) suggest that the notion no longer has any use as an analytical concept. However, since the concept has considerable importance within the development apparatus, it still merits academic attention, but as an idea within the sphere of data rather than as a tool for analysis.…”