Intra
State Challenges to the Nation-State Project*
After independence, the construction of the
modern nation-state was the main objective of post-colonial governments in most
African countries. It was an objective pursued in order to move the citizens of
these nations beyond multiple senses of belonging and allegiances to unite them
in a single national framework in which the legitimacy and the exercise of
central power would be assured.
In the early post-independence years, there was
rapid socio-economic development and a widening of the areas of influence of the
state in most African countries. This nation-building project, after a brief
democratic spell, was accompanied by a gradual shrinking of the political space
and a monopolisation of the same space by the state and its single party regimes.
The state increasingly overthrew the existing actors and institutions inherited
from the independence struggle, entrenching itself at the core of local
political and social spaces and thus establishing itself as the agent of change
and social and political development. This dominance was influenced by the
religious, ethnic or social heterogeneity of the local population.
However, the post-colonial state did not
completely succeed in imposing its hegemony on all the processes and structure
of society. Indeed, there were groups that were able to resist the attempt at
the monopolisation of the political space by the elite that inherited power
after independence. In time, this resistance both overt and covert took the form
of direct, wide-ranging challenges to the nation-state project.
The most important challenges to the state were
to emanate from a population supposedly submissive to its modernising project.
Confronted by the increasingly repressive control of the post-colonial state,
the urban and rural populations developed a verity of resistance
strategies, some peaceful, some violent; These strategies, of protests against
the state seem aimed at constructing alternative political, social and
economic mechanisms that could replace or tame those imposed by the state. The
mobilisation of communal, regional, generational, gender, religious, ethnic and
other identities to challenge the nation-state also foud resonance within the
structures of the state. Across Africa, there is a resurgence of ethnic, youth,
gender, religious and regional mobilisation in support of political
projects for the re-structuring of the foundations of the post-colonial
nation-state project. Within this framework, various 'traditional' resources and
networks are being re-discovered and valorised, including the role of
'traditional' elites. Also, in the context of the prolonged economic crisis on
the continent and the retrenchment of the social reach of the state, the
identity discourses that are taking place have also tended to overlap with livelihood strategies of various sections of the populace.
The 2002 session of the institute will attempt to
explore the various dimensions of the challenges which are confronting the
post-colonial nation-state, the sources of the challenges, and the various
experiments which are going on at managing them whether these be state-based or
not.
