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The
Problematic of the State in Africa |
For the 2004
session of the Annual Social Science Campus, the theme that has been selected
is: The Problematic of the State in Africa. For over two decades now, the
African state has been at the heart of intellectual and policy debates touching
on virtually all aspects of the experiences and prospects of the continent. The
reasons for this preoccupation are diverse, some associated with well-founded
concerns about the origins, structure and record of the state, others motivated
by a narrow and tendentious anti-statism that sometimes tallies with and/or
reinforces a condescending attitude towards everything African. Easily, the
African state will qualify for the record of having perhaps the highest number
of epithets ever deployed to describe an institution. It has variously been
characterised as “overdeveloped”, “prebendal”, “patrimonial”/“neo-patrimonial”,
“rentier”, “crony”, “unsteady”, “kleptocratic”, “sultanist”, “convivial”, a
“lame leviathan”, an “international Bantustan”, “shadow”, “criminal”,
“omnipotent but hardly omnipresent”, etc. Although the bulk of these epithets
have been associated with the public choice approaches and the so-called new
political economy school that dominated the discussions on Africa in the 1980s
and 1990s, it is equally true that their deployment transcends disciplinary
boundaries and their use has been shared by other schools of thought, including
those associated with notions of the post-colony. Indeed, arguably, the
problematic of the African state is one area of scholarly interest where the
lines among the different theoretical approaches for the study of politics,
economy and society have been blurred the most. Not a few scholars have noted
that this state of affairs reflects the depth of the conceptual and theoretical
confusion which exists and which is in urgent need of being redressed. It might
also be a measure of the extent to which instrumentalist, market-based policy
concerns driven by the World Bank and the IMF have come to dominate the terrain
of thinking about the state. The 2004 Session of the Annual Social Science
Campus is designed to encourage theoretically-grounded reflections on these
questions, with the accent placed on new thinking that can help to advance the
debate on the place and role of the state in Africa.
Among the issues
which it is hoped that the Campus will cover are:
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A critique of the
dominant approaches in the literature to understanding the contemporary
African state;
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A (re-)reading of
the historical processes and forces that shape the modern African state;
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A critique of the
logic that drives the African state, makes sense of its workings, and accounts
for its performance;
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The processes by
which the state mobilises consent and legitimacy and the contexts in which
both consent and legitimacy are eroded and lost;
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A re-thinking of
the state in Africa beyond the parameters set by the dominant discourses; and
- A reflection,
in a comparative frame, on the African state and states in other regions of
the world.
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