States and social contracts in Africa

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 63, 2010, Pages 35-68

  Nugent, Paul ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77955947378     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. The literatures are too vast to capture here, but indicative are David Keen, Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone, Oxford 2005;
2. Lansana Gberie, A Dirty War in West Africa: The ruf and the Destruction of Sierra Leone, London 2005;
3. Stephen Ellis, Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, London 1999;
4. William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States, Boulder, co 1999;
5. and, for the oil states, Ricardo Soares de Oliviera, Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea, London 2007.
6. There is a whole research industry on 'failed states', in which Africa features most prominently. See, for example, I. William Zartman, Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, Boulder, co 1995;
7. Robert I. Rotberg, ed., When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, Washington, DC 2003
8. and State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Washington, DC 2003;
9. and Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World, New York 2008.
10. For example, Peter D. Little, Somalia: Economy Without State, Oxford 2003.
11. Two parallel accounts are Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa, Oxford 1999;
12. and Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as a Political Instrument, Oxford 1999.
13. Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, London 1993.
14. Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works, pp. 15-6.
15. Chabal and Daloz, Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning, London 2005, pp. 261-8.
16. Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, 'Powers in the Village: Rural Benin between Democratization and Decentralization', Africa, vol. 73, no. 2, 2003, pp. 145-73;
17. and Giorgio Blundo and Pierre-Yves Le Meur, eds, The Governance of Daily Life in Africa: Ethnographic Explorations of Public and Collective Services, Leiden and Boston 2009;
18. for an account of bureaucratic activity, see Brenda Chalfin, 'Cars, the Customs Service and Sumptuary Rule in Neoliberal Ghana', Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 50, no. 2, 2008, pp. 424-53.
19. On corruption, see Giorgio Blundo and Olivier de Sardan, Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa, London 2006.
20. Bayart, 'Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion', African Affairs, vol. 99, no. 395, pp. 217-67.
21. Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, London 1993;
22. Chabal, Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling, London 2008, pp. 92-3.
23. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton 1996.
24. Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, New Haven 1994, pp. 124-40.
25. Joshua Forrest, Lineages of State Fragility: Rural Civil Society in Guinea-Bissau, Oxford 2003.
26. See, for example, Davidson, Liberation of Guiné: Aspects of an African Revolution, London 1969;
27. and Eye of the Storm: Angola's People, London 1973.
28. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, Princeton 2000.
29. For a comparison of the record of the largest states, see Christopher Clapham, Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills, Big African States: Angola, DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Cambridge 2006.
30. Catherine Boone, Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice, Cambridge 2003, pp. 240-82.
31. Pierre Englebert, State Legitimacy and Development in Africa, London 2000.
32. Chabal and Daloz, Culture Troubles, p. 264.
33. There has been some debate about how far a kingdom such as that of Asante rested on an impersonal bureaucracy. Compare Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order, 2nd ed., Cambridge 1989
34. and the critiques by T. C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante, Cambridge 1995;
35. and Larry Yarak, Asante and the Dutch, 1744-1873, Oxford 1990.
36. Bayart, Ellis and Hibou, Criminalization of the State, p. 16.
37. See Tony Hodges, Angola: From Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism, Oxford 2001.
38. Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present, Cambridge 2002.
39. On politics from below, the work that set the agenda is Bayart, Achille Mbembe et al., Le politique par le bas en Afrique noire, Paris 1992. One possible reason why this agenda did not take root in the manner of Subaltern Studies among scholars of South Asia is that the protagonists did not follow through with detailed studies, while Anglophone researchers paid relatively little attention to the approach that was being advocated.
40. One of the best studies of how patron-client ties operate, in this case across ethnic lines, is Jennifer A. Widner, Rise of a Party State in Kenya: From 'Harambee' to 'Nyayo!', Berkeley 1992.
41. A useful recent collection on ethnicity and politics is Bruce Berman, Peter Eyoh and Will Kymlicka, Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, Oxford 2004.
42. On taxes, see Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, Berkeley 1988.
43. For an ambitious comparative analysis, see Lane F. Fargher and Richard E. Blanton, 'Revenue, Voice and Public Goods in Three Pre-modern States', Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 49, no. 4, 2007.
44. Anne Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa, London 1989. Where the colonial project was crudely extractive, as it was in Leopold's Congo or in Mozambique during the era of the concessionary companies, violence was systemic.
45. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa, Cambridge 1996;
46. and Cooper, Africa Since 1940, pp. 66-132.
47. J. E. Casely-Hayford, Gold Coast Native Institutions With Thoughts on a Healthy Imperial Policy for the Gold Coast and Ashanti [1903], London 1970, p. 129.
48. On opposition to the Lands Bill, see David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850-1928, Oxford 1963, pp. 330-58.
49. On northern lands, which reverted to communal tenure in 1979, see Christian Lund, Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa, Cambridge 2008, pp. 51-4.
50. The best collection of basic data remain that of G. B. Kay, ed., The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana: A Collection of Documents and Statistics 1900-1960, Cambridge 1972.
51. A standard work, which has stood the time less well, but still has useful things to say about state interventions, is Rhoda Howard, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Ghana, London 1978, especially chapter 5.
52. For a study of how power has operated in post-independence Togo, see Comi Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadema, Paris 1986.
53. For a closer analysis of chief-state relations, see E. Adriaan B. Van Rouverory van Nieuwaal, L'état en Afrique face à la chefferie: le cas du Togo, Paris 2000.
54. There have been numerous instances of deportation since independence. See Xerxes Malki, 'The Alienated Stranger: A Political and Economic History of the Lebanese in Ghana, c. 1925-1992', DPhil thesis, University of Oxford 2008.
55. Jean M. Allman, Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana, Madison, wi 1993.
56. Kenneth Swindell and Alieu Jeng, Migrants, Credit and Climate: The Gambian Groundnut Trade, 1834-1934, Leiden 2006.
57. See the account in Jeggan Senghor, The Politics of Senegambian Integration, 1958-1994, Oxford 2008.
58. James F. Searing, 'God Alone is King': Islam and Emancipation in Senegal: The Wolof Kingdoms of Kajoor and Bawol, 1859-1914, Cape Town 2002.
59. Christopher Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860-1960, Cambridge 1988.
60. Donal Cruise O'Brien, The Mourides of Senegal: The Political and Economic Organization of an Islamic Brotherhood, Oxford 1971; Jean Copans, Les marabouts de l'arachide: la confrérie et les paysans du Sénégal, Paris 1980.
61. In recent times there has been resistance to the creation of state schools in the town. On Touba, see Eric Ross, Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba, Rochester 2006;
62. Guèye C. and, Paris and Cheikh Guèye, Touba: la capitale des Mourides, Paris 2002.
63. Leonardo Villalón, Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal: Disciples and Citizens in Fatick, Cambridge 2006.
64. On land and citizenship in Côte d'Ivoire, see Ruth Marshall-Fratani, 'The War of "Who Is Who": Autochthony and Citizenship in the Ivorian Crisis', in Sara Dorman, Daniel Hammett and Paul Nugent, eds, Making Nations, Creating Strangers: State and Citizenship in Africa, Leiden 2007, pp. 38-44.
65. This was true of Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau as well, although the fact that these remained European colonies until 1968 and 1974 respectively perpetuated an entirely different dynamic.
66. Janet MacGaffey, The Real Economy of Zaire: The Contribution of Smuggling and Other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth, London 1991.
67. For a statement on the causes of the crisis that crystallized a way of viewing Africa and which informed Structural Adjustment regimes, see the 'Berg Report': World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action, Washington, dc 1981.
68. For a more recent and nuanced account, see Robert Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa, Cambridge 2008.
69. See my Africa Since Independence: A Comparative History, Houndmills 2004, chapter 8.
70. See my Big Men, Small Boys and Politics in Ghana, New York 1995.
71. Among a number of books on the subject, see Jonathan Glennie, The Trouble With Aid: Why Less Could Mean More for Africa, London 2008.
72. Lindsay Whitfield, 'Trustees of Development from Conditionality to Governance: Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers in Ghana', Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 43, no. 4, 2005, pp. 641-64.
73. T. C. McCaskie, '"Water wars" in Kumase, Ghana', in Francesca Locatelli and Paul Nugent, eds, African Cities: Competing Claims on Urban Spaces, Leiden 2009.
74. Nicolas van de Walle, 'Introduction: The State and African Development', in van de Walle, Nicole Ball and Vijaya Ramachandran, eds, Beyond Structural Adjustment in Africa: The Institutional Context of African Development, New York 2003, p. 19.
75. Mick Moore, 'Between Coercion and Contract: Competing Narratives on Taxation and Governance', in Deborah Bräutigam, Odd-Helge Fjeldstad and Mick Moore, Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries: Capacity and Consent, Cambridge 2008.
76. Nic Cheeseman and Robert Griffiths, Increasing Tax Revenue in the Developing World: The Case of Kenya OCGG Project Paper 05-05, Oxford 2005.
77. Fjeldstad and Moore, 'Revenue authorities and public authority in sub-Saharan Africa', Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, 2009.
78. Lindsay Whitfield, 'The Politics of Urban Water Reform in Ghana', Review of African Political Economy, vol. 33, no. 109, 2006;
79. E. Osei Kwadwo Prempeh, Against Global Capitalism: African Social Movements Confront Neoliberal Globalization, Aldershot 2006.
80. Kate Bayliss, 'Private Sector Participation in African Infrastructure: Is It Worth the Risk?', IPC-IG Working Paper 55, 2009.
81. In April 2010, the World Bank made an unprecedented loan of $3.5bn to eskom, the state electricity provider in South Africa, to construct a new coal-fired power station, following the failure of private capital to plug the energy gap. The loan has been immensely controversial on environmental grounds; less commented upon is the tacit admission that public utilities may in fact be the only option.
82. For evidence from Tanzania, see Stefano Ponte, Farmers and Markets in Tanzania: How Policy Reforms Affect Rural Livelihoods in Africa, Oxford 2002.
83. Daniel Kojo Arhinful, The Solidarity of Self-Interest: Social and Cultural Feasibility of Rural Health Insurance in Ghana, Leiden 2003, pp. 60-4.
84. By contrast, the take-up in Tanzania has been slower, in part because the financial outlays are higher than for user fees and there is less choice between health service providers. Deograsias Mushi, Financing Public Health Care: Insurance, User Fees or Taxes? Welfare Comparisons in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam 2007.
85. 'Government to address policy issues of nhis', Ghana Web, 23 June 2009.