The analysis of political power and statehood in Africa has proceeded through many stages: from early anthropological analyses of the internal dynamics of local communities to the early post-independence political scientists’ attention to nation- building and its required institutional and personal qualities, such as political leadership (Lonsdale 1981; Stark 1986: 336-9); Marxist approaches, where the state was seen as an instrument of national or metropolitan elites or a result of local class struggles and articulation of modes of production (Lonsdale 1981; Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985; Bernstein and Campbell eds 1985); the neopatrimonial view where the failure of liberal institutions in African politics reflected a different kind of structuration, in which personalized rule and relations of patronage coexisted with and dominated bureaucratic institutions (e.g. Médard 1982; Bratton and van de Walle 1994; Stark 1986; Erdmann and Engel 2006; Pitcher, Moran and Johnston 2009) that ‘worked’ in its own way (Chabal and Daloz 1999) through a ‘politics of the belly’ (Bayart 1993); and the possibilities offered by the state’s playing a developmental role through regulating property relations, economic policy, accumulation and investment, and generally steering economic and social policies (Meyns and Musamba 2010; Mkandawire 2001).
All of these analyses approach ‘the state’ as a relatively stable political structure with certain characteristics. But should it be taken as such? Contrary to its apparent self-evidence, Radcliffe-Brown argued in his long preface to the classic
African Political Systems that the state does not exist as an entity ‘over and above’
society but is, rather, ‘a fiction of the philosophers’. Instead, he wrote, there is ‘an organization, i.e. a collection of individual human beings connected by a complex
system of relations’ and these individuals have different roles and hold different positions of power or authority. (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: xxiii.)15
Since then, many others have elaborated this idea. Philip Abrams’s (1988 [1977]) post-Marxist account separated the material and the ideological and treated ‘the state’ as an abstraction that serves to hide the realities of political subjection. For him, the concept of the state is a reification (ibid.: 63) that conflates two actually existing phenomena, namely the state-system, ‘the palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure centred in government’, and the state-idea, lending an aura of materiality to the ideological smokescreen that comprises the state (ibid.: 76, 82).
Timothy Mitchell criticizes Abrams for separating ‘the material forms of the state from the ideological, or the real from the illusory’ (Mitchell 1999: 77). In his view, there is no need to bifurcate the state-system and the state-idea. Both arise from ‘techniques that enable mundane practices to take on the appearance of an abstract, nonmaterial form’ (ibid.). The separation of ‘the state’ and ‘the economy’ from ‘society’ is not given but rather an effect produced ‘within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained’ (ibid.: 83; see also Trouillot 2001).
This view of the state as an effect is heavily influenced by Michel Foucault’s ideas of power. For Foucault – as for Abrams – ‘the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction’ (Foucault 1991: 103). He suggested ‘not taking as a primary, original, and already given object, notions such as the sovereign, sovereignty, the people, subjects, the state, and civil society’ but rather, ‘starting from [governmental] practice…[to] show how certain things—state and society, sovereign and subjects, etcetera—were actually able to be formed’ (Foucault 2008: 2-3). Instead of emanating from a state conceptualised as an autonomous agent, power is heterogeneous and dispersed and can be better understood through the study of various mundane practices, norms and forms of
15 Colonial structures of administration did not form a comprehensive centralized political structure
nearly to the same extent as their metropolitan counterparts and this may have encouraged the authors of African Political Systems to arrive at the conclusion that there is no state. However, even when Radcliffe-Brown wrote his preface, the regulation of physical force had become significantly restructured and displaced increasingly away from local leaders to individuals and agencies that represented colonial powers across the continent. Since then, these powers have been delegated to the central governments of postcolonial states and, while their capacity to administer admittedly varies considerably, the principle – and contestation – of centralized administration is firmly entrenched. It is convenient to refer to this phenomenon as statehood, in distinction from other possible forms of political organization.
knowledge in multiple institutional sites and involving many different actors and agencies (Jessop 2006: 36-37). However, although Foucault was critical of general theorizations of the state and argued that the study of power should start with the micro-physics of government, he also suggested analysing how these practices are bundled into more general mechanisms and strategies and gradually constitute the state (ibid.: 35-37) as ‘the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities’ (Foucault 2008: 77).
James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) join this Foucauldian current of criticizing the view of the state as a self-contained administrative structure that stands apart from society. ‘Instead of opposing the state to something called "society," we need to view states as themselves composed of bundles of social practices’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 991-992), they argue, calling attention to the material and imaginary practices, for example in bureaucracy, through which ‘the state’ is produced as supposedly sitting above and encompassing society (ibid.: 982).
The above arguments were a reaction to various approaches based on more structural or static conceptions of politics and the state. These included European political philosophy, the systems theoretical view of the 1950s and 1960s, structural varieties of Marxism and the ‘Bringing the state back in’ movement of the early 1980s. The latter was influential in refocusing analytical attention on the state, and bureaucratic institutions in particular, as a crucial part of political and economic organization, while also treating it as historically constructed (Skocpol 1985). In this perspective, the autonomous agency of the state could be significant for economic development and the formation of social relations and political processes. As is evident from Mitchell, and Ferguson and Gupta above, some of the main criticisms of this approach are that it treats state and society as discrete entities, does not sufficiently unpack which actors, agencies or operations belong to the state and which do not, and does not pay sufficient attention to the divisions and contradictions among the agencies of the state (Mitchell 1999: 80-83; Jessop 2001: 155; Lund 2006a: 674-675; Vu 2010: 168).16
16
If Skocpol et al. (1985) can be criticized for separating state and society and privileging the state in terms of agency, a mirror image of this approach can be found in a number of anthropological studies that likewise contrast ‘the state’ as a uniform machine above to ‘societies’ or ‘communities’ below, celebrating the latter for their heterogeneity and authenticity (e.g. Scott 1998; cf. Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 300).
Is there, ultimately, anything specific about ‘the state’ that would justify it as a concept and an object of analysis, or would it be better simply to deconstruct it and focus on politics in its different forms, without the conceptual baggage of statehood? For Abrams, ‘the state comes into being as a structuration within political practice; it starts its life as an implicit construct; it is then reified – as the respublica, the public reification, no less – and acquires an overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice as an illusory account of practice’ (Abrams 1988 [1977]: 82). So, here we have statehood as a ‘structuration’ on one hand, but also as a ‘symbolic identity’ and ‘an illusory account’ on the other. Likewise, in Mitchell’s view, ‘we must analyze the state as…a structural effect…not as an actual structure, but as the powerful, apparently metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist’ (Mitchell 1999: 88-89). This, too, is not entirely clear. What does it mean to have a ‘structural effect’ instead of ‘an actual structure’? Furthermore, while Ferguson and Gupta scrutinize the concrete bureaucratic practices that produce the effects of verticality and encompassment, they also repeatedly speak of how verticality, encompassment and the state are ‘imagined’ symbolic constructs or ‘images’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 982-983).
I suggest that the key to such puzzles lies in adopting a diachronic, instead of a synchronic, approach to the formation of statehood. The practices of government, referred to by Foucault, Mitchell and Ferguson and Gupta are not haphazard and discontinuous. While they may be context-specific and subject to change over time, they also tend to become interlinked, rooted in people’s expectations and assume repeated forms that outlive any particular government. In other words, they become institutionalized and achieve a degree of continuity. The result of such processes of institutionalization and reproduction may be called an effect but it also would not be too far-fetched to refer to it as a structure.
So, when Ferguson and Gupta (2002: 988) argue that ‘a state may be able to create, through mundane and unmarked practices, a powerful impression of vertical encompassment of the “local”’, the problem is that in order for ‘a state’ to be able to create such an impression, there must already exist some kind of complex of power relations that compels the ‘local’ to play its part in this game of encompassment. As Foucault noted, states do emerge as historically formed institutional constellations and it is this particular form of institutionalized power that Skocpol and and other state-centred theorists bring into focus. Likewise, for Bourdieu, ‘the state is the
culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital’, namely
physical force, economic capital, informational capital and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1994: 4, emphasis in the original). The state emerges as a kind of ‘meta- capital’ through which other different forms of capital are increasingly concentrated and their rates of conversion established and regulated (ibid.; see also Aretxaga 2003: 394). In other words, politico-economic and symbolic processes of concentration, such as administrative and political centralization, concentration of organized violence, regulation of economic activity and standardization and classification of information, people and things have historically been associated with state formation. These are concrete rather than imagined processes that work towards producing the impression of verticality and encompassment (see Bourdieu 1994: 12-14).
This is not to deny that such hierarchy also consists of localized practices and that it always needs to be actively reproduced. I also agree that it is important to distinguish this phenomenon of political centralization from totalizing images of the state as above or encompassing society. Clearly, ‘state’ and ‘society’ are concepts of a different order. To put it bluntly, humans always live in societies in which politics in the sense of struggles over, and arrangements of, power relations occur, and states are a particular form of organizing political relations. The duality where the state is seen as a counterpart of (civil) society is itself a historically specific result of European processes of state formation (Gupta 1995: 376, 378; Mbembe 2001: 36- 39) but has been transformed from a contextual description into a general analytical premise. Still, the overall image of the state sitting above society is in some ways rooted in concrete hierarchization, which itself consists of historically institutionalized practices.
The main lesson to be drawn from the above discussion, then, is not to question the political and analytical significance of the state in toto. Rather, the point is that ‘the state’ is a historically emergent, particular assemblage of political institutions, an aggregate concept with which many different qualities are commonly associated, including centralization of political power, administrative hierarchy and territorial demarcation of political authority (Weber 1978 [1922]; Tilly 1985: 170). Statehood may also refer to an ensemble of bureaucratic practices, a conglomeration of governmental techniques that forms subjectivities and patterns of behaviour, the imagined unity of the people occupying a particular territory and so on. However,
there is no clear threshold of what comprises a sufficient degree of concentration of these qualities in order to qualify a polity as a ‘state’. Instead, the term has been applied to many different kinds of polities, both contemporarily and historically. To illustrate the point with two African examples: the Democratic Republic of the Congo is an internationally recognized state although it does not have a functioning administrative hierarchy that is able to extend its power from the political centre over large parts of its territory and population. In contrast, Somaliland largely fulfils these conventional characteristics of statehood but lacks international recognition. Stateness, then, is not a starting point for analyzing political organization, but a problem that involves unpacking the unified notion of ‘the state’ and examining the processes through which power and authority are institutionalized or de- institutionalized. This is what it means to study the state as ‘an effect’.
In this way, writings by Abrams and other historical sociologists and historians, like Weber (1978 [1922]), Thompson (1975), Corrigan and Sayer (1985) and Tilly (1985), combined with Foucauldian approaches, served to break the state open for scrutiny as a historically formed and heterogeneous condensation of political relations.17 As Abrams put it: ‘The only plausible alternative I can see to taking the state for granted is to understand it as historically constructed’ (Abrams 1988 [1977]: 80). This state formationist or processual approach has become increasingly accepted since then with two main premises being widely shared among scholars of this persuasion. First, states are treated as historically amalgamated institutional constellations. Accounts of state formation are necessarily diachronic, and it can be argued that all accounts that approach statehood diachronically can be said to be concerned with state formation, whether they use this term or not.18 The formation of states can be traced back for decades, centuries or millennia and, importantly, has not stopped but is an ongoing process of gradual change.19 The second main point is that state formation is not restricted to the level
17 In African studies, Lonsdale (1981) provides an early example of arguments in favour of
processual, multicausal explanations of state formation based on rich empirical detail.
18
In contrast, a number of synchronic or ahistorical approaches have tried to understand African statehood through comparisons with other empirical situations (most commonly, modern European or North American states) or certain conceptual definitions of statehood (liberalism, neopatrimonialism, weak/strong states, hard/soft states, developmental states), seeking to classify and analyze African states according to the extent they fit into such empirical and conceptual models.
19
Different theories have been proposed for the emergence of early states. Without going into details, the overall lesson of these studies seems to be that such processes, broad and long-term, are
of high, official politics but involves a variety of social, economic and technological changes beyond conventional politics as well as interactions between multiple social groups. As Vu notes, research on state formation does not focus on any particular institution but ‘shifts from mercenary armies to state granaries, from revenue- collecting bodies to representative institutions’ (Vu 2010: 149).
A logical step that follows from the idea that states (or forms of political authority in general) are historically formed is that the present moment is a continuation of such processes. Institutions of public authority and the image of ‘the state’ are constantly produced, performed, negotiated and contested in repeated encounters between regulatory agencies and citizens. In this perspective, the state appears as a field of relations or an arena of action instead of a unitary structure or agent (Vu 2010: 150, 164; Hagmann and Péclard 2010: 550-552). In Bourdieu’s words, ‘the construction of the state proceeds apace with the construction of a field
of power, defined as the space of play within which the holders of capital (of
different species) struggle…for power over the state’ (Bourdieu 1994: 4-5; emphasis in the original). Multiple actors are involved, including official agencies and functionaries, various other authorities and different groups of non-officials.
There is, however, a point to be made at this stage concerning the official / non-official, or state / non-state divisions. Although it might make sense to speak of ‘the state’ as opposed to ‘other social organizations’ (Migdal 2001) in particular contexts, these are situational variables and it is not a given which institutions and authorities count as ‘state’ and which do not. While it may seem clear that the army, the police, or the legislative bodies are part of the state, what is the case of, say, government schools or hospitals? Or private schools and hospitals from which the central government buys services? Or NGOs that take over duties previously performed by government agencies? Or customary authorities that often manifest some forms of continuity from pre-colonial political systems yet have been transformed into a part of the central government apparatus? ‘The state’ is not a
necessarily multicausal. States have developed in the course of complex interaction of multiple factors – not always in the same combination – that include population growth, technological and managemental improvements, and suitable environmental conditions to allow the generation of surplus, particularly in agriculture. Legitimation by religious or other ideology and warfare also play a part, while social stratification is both a condition and further contributor in this process (Claessen 2010: 18, 23-24, 29; Bouchard 2011: 196; Vengroff 1976: 70). In other words, despite the theoretical obscurity of the concept of the state, an empirical history of political centralization is clearly discernible.
constant set of political institutions that always serve the same functions. Instead, stateness refers to the degree to which political institutions manage to stabilize their command over territories and populations by the use of force, negotiation and generation of legitimacy. Lund (2006a and 2006b) refers to the multiple authorities moving between the state / non-state and public / private spheres as twilight institutions, noting that ‘no institution is state as such; “state” is, rather, the quality of an institution being able to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on members of society’ (Lund 2006a: 676).
Focusing on institutionalization and the exercise of authority instead of a predetermined administrative structure is, in my view, a fruitful move. However, it also raises new questions. For example, there may be multiple institutions in a political space that are capable of enforcing ‘collectively binding decisions’ on members of society, or on different groups of them. Are they all to be called ‘state’? For example, are the gangs of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas or Kingston’s ghettos ‘state’ because they exercise such power? Do the Brazilian and Jamaican states cease to exist in these areas if their security personnel have trouble accessing them? Such questions point towards the need to pay close attention to the coordination, conflicts and hierarchies between different institutions and examine statehood in terms of competing and partially overlapping forms of sovereignty and authority, producing different forms of real governance with varying institutional combinations, instead of a clear-cut monopoly of force and authority. In principle, then, statehood refers to the highest degree of political centralization in a given territory, irrespective of how such authority is organized and who holds it. Fundamentally, there is no qualitative difference between state forms and other forms of political authority and whether an institution is recognized as being part of the state or not can vary contextually. So in addition to institutions operating ‘in the twilight between state and society, between public and private’ (Lund 2006a: 678, 2006b: 686), it can be argued that prevailing ideas of ‘state’, ‘society’, ‘public’ and ‘private’ evolve through the very process in which the institutions of authority gain or lose their hold on power. In practice,