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The contemporary legitimacy of state-building is unprecedented: remaking weak and failing states into secular, constitutional democracies promises to stabilise countries and regions, secure human rights, further social and economic development, hinder the spread of terrorism and contribute to world order: Liberia, Southern Sudan, Somalia, DRC, Afghanistan, Iraq.
In its own terms unproblematic, yet simple implementation of the nation-state template often fails and ‘more-of-the-same’ technical solutions (capacity building, elections etc.) seem unable to address persistent internal fragmentation and weakness.
With its high representation of states diagnosed as fragile and failed, sub-Saharan Africa provides an environment in which these issues can be observed closely, allowing us to pose a series of challenging questions, amongst which is the following: how do we to account for the continuing strength of non-state forms of social order in the very space which the state claims as its own? The question is acute - non-state social order is usually represented as an anachronism, as pathology and/or as a threat to the state, thus endorsing an antagonistic relationship to it.
To investigate these issues, this course places the notion of “social order” at the centre of its analysis: how is social order consolidated, what is its relationship to its surroundings, how is it contested and destabilized? The course builds a theoretically informed and critical perspective on what is at stake when agents ‘state-build’, drawing on Schmitt, Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe and others.
Finally, the course does not provide easy solutions. No appeal is made to a new revolutionary subject. Instead, entanglements, contradictions and difficult choices are highlighted when different codes of governance, different subjectivities and heterogeneous ways of being are brought together in an attempt to subsume them under a unified state logic.
Themes to be covered include:
• The post WWII development paradigm and the failed state
• What characterises the post-colony?
• Political community: primary and secondary
• What is (non-state) social order
• Sovereignty, one space and multiple orders
• State responses to non-state order
The course is informed by on-going post-doctoral research on non-state social order in Kenya. Students are encouraged to choose an empirical case that will put the theoretical perspectives to work.
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