A ‘Negotiating Statehood’ Perspective: Implications for Policy?

Abstract

As indicated in Chapter 2, a dominant opinion in international political and academic circles has been increasingly critical if not pessimistic about the nature and future of African statehood. Efforts to identify and comprehend features and paradoxes of state trajectories in Africa have spawned an impressive stream of literature and debate (Dorman et al. 2007, Herbst 2000, Mbembe 2001, Reno 1998, Rotberg 2003, Young 2004). Without attempting to list recurrent themes and problem areas raised, it is evident that statehood in Africa carries an enigmatic quality to many of its observers: seemingly omnipresent yet often glaringly absent where one might have expected it, African statehood has frequently invited the flippant generalization of being problematic. Still, with numerous problem-areas associated with it, it has eluded many an attempt at diagnosis and being ‘boxed in’ for definitional clarity. Instead, limited understandings have led to, and been expressed in, an overwhelming use of adjectives like ‘fragile’, ‘failing’ or ‘failed’ in recent discussions about African states. Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, social science researchers have often cast their analyses in similar and related terms. As Mbembe (2001) pointed out in his On the Postcolony, Africa has often been used as an image not only of what is supposedly primitive, but also of what is absent or does not exist. But what should be at stake is not to determine what African states are not, but to better understand the formative processes they are engaged in.