ECAS 2013

This paper analyses how political elite in Juba relate to the wide range of international actors intervening and investing in the development of South Sudan. The world's youngest nation has great shortage of nearly everything but also enormous resources such as land, water, oil and minerals. Both elements have attracted attention of foreign actors. The paper compares two categories of international involvement. The first, development agencies and donors seek to bring services, improved institutions, peace and stability. The second category of interventions comes from investors with economic interest in the country's underexploited resources. Currently there is much discussion about the conditions under which such investments can be made beneficial to ordinary South Sudanese. The issue of land grabbing, for example, raises much concern.

The (dis)connections between development interventions and economic investments represent an underexplored field of research, in South Sudan and elsewhere. Aiming to contribute to filling this gap, our research zooms in on South Sudan's political, administrative and military elites, strongly rooted in the SPLM/A guerrilla and who play an important role in brokering relations between external actors and the Government. The paper analyses how these elites interpret, respond to, re-appropriate and transform ideas, policies and resources introduced by interveners. The research fits in with recent theoretical debates about 'hybridity' and 'frictions' in peacebuilding and development and provides insight into the ambiguous reality of a country that needs developments on all fronts in a political context in which short-term gains seems more profitable for the emerging elite.

The sustained growth in the size and scope of the international development sector, and the attendant proliferation of non-governmental organisations, has served to intensify the debate on the 'legitimacy' of non-state actors. The location of this debate, however, has often remained within the purview of state-centric international relations and/or specific policy communities. The discourse that has emerged around NGO legitimacy oscillates between, or indeed fuses, the technical, de-politicised language of policy and the inherently normative language of developmental goals. I argue that this discourse inhibits a more profound understanding of legitimacy. This is not legitimacy in its traditional guise as a political good, but legitimation as a localised, socio-political practice via which the use of power, influence and resource by development actors is negotiated and rendered acceptable in a crowded, and often chaotic, aid environment. I draw on an extreme district case study in Tanzania, saturated by NGO activity, to examine how NGO workers negotiate, establish and entrench their presence in practice, drawing on different forms of Bordieuian 'capital'. An interpretative, sociological account of legitimation necessarily attends to the wider contexts in which aid takes place, in contrast to the 'vertical' epistemology of development agencies' movement to the village. I employ the tools of critical ethnography to challenge 'vertical' bias and to interpret both how NGOs legitimate their presence and how NGO activities themselves are interpreted and contested in their areas of operation.

The 2007 Distribution Framework was the first meaningful attempt by the Nigerian State to regulate Nollywood marketing. It aimed to create a centralized film distribution structure, but its implementation was traumatic, with the parastatal Censors Board and marketers' guilds struggling to shape the process. The paper examines the interactions between conflicts over the enforcement of regulation, contestations over institutional legitimacy and individual marketers' struggles for social self-realization and honour.

The initiative is analyzed across four scenes. In Scene 1, Impasse, the Board struggled with communication, surveillance and enforcement and faced legal suits and physical threats. The Board and guilds contested each other's legitimacy along three axes: core industry creation and development narratives, legal rights, and commentaries on extraction.

Scene 2 saw a Realignment of strategic groups, as many Edo and Hausa marketers licensed, utilizing the Board's arguments in their own strategies. In Scene 3, Coercion/Shaming, the Board's refusal to certify new films began to squeeze the marketers, accelerating uptake. The Board then publicly shamed the recalcitrant marketers by publishing a list of licensees, which included anti-Framework campaigners. This stimulated the collapse of opposition to licensing with the accession of the Igbo guild.

In Scene 4, Transformation, the remaining marketers licensed. However, the Board was unable to remould them into the desired structure. Emboldened, marketers found opportunities to appropriate the Board's conflict and contestation strategies through their own uses of the licenses. A typology of these relationships between institutional strategies and marketer applications is offered, including: coincidence, correspondence, redeployment, and recycling.

My research (2008-2012) in the Ateker region, where closely related tribal communities of South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia border each other, revealed a scenario of inter-related conflict configurations on different levels. Colonial administrative structures; unclear boundaries (most prominently the Elemi Triangle); former rebel armies transforming into party state systems; developing modern ethnic elites and 'strong man' politicians; networks of reciprocity and patronage; NGOs and churches running aid-, development and service sector 'businesses'; large scale investors taking over enormous tracts of land and drilling oil; and a pastoralist majority, organised into tribes, sections and age-sets, led by local assemblies of men and charismatic trans-local prophets, still maintaining the only assuredly sustainable production system while continuously fighting over livestock and land - all these elements compose a landscape of selective cooperation and inter-related factional contest that could serve as a textbook example for multipolar power structures that mirror local, national and international conditions in complex but traceable traits of aspiration, struggle and integration. My aim is to depict how those traits are related to particular forms of social organisation that divide the social landscape into collectives specialising in particular forms of accumulation of economic, social and symbolic capital, and how this division shapes the situation in the region.

This paper utilizes empirical data gathered as part of a doctoral thesis focusing on land reform and rural livelihoods to highlight the reconfiguration of rural authority during the implementation of Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP). In the aftermath of land reform, conflicts over control of local spaces and landscapes have emerged, these conflicts have reshaped the local state and amplified discourses of local ownership of natural resources . The paper explores how discourses of autochthony, indigenization, national liberation and state bureaucracy are deployed by various actors as a way of claiming authority over land and what lies beneath it. The paper is largely based on qualitative data gathered in the Mhondoro Ngezi District in Mashonaland Province of Zimbabwe.

Drawing upon ethnographic research on Mai Mai groups in the territories of Fizi and Uvira (South Kivu, eastern DR Congo), in particular on their self-perceptions and modes of embedding in their social environment, this paper explores the ambiguous and ambivalent relations between Mai Mai groups and processes of state-making. It takes its point of departure in constructivist approaches to "the state" that focus on how "the state" is imagined, "called into being" and constructed through certain rationalities and everyday practices. It describes how on the one hand, Mai Mai groups undermine "the state's" regulatory authority and sources of income, by exercising fiscal, policing, military, justice and other governance functions. While these are often defined by governmentalities similar to those of Congolese stateness, audiences might view these practices of governance as more legitimate than those of state agents. On the other hand, Mai Mai militias reinforce the authority and sometimes the resources base of power-holders that are connected to the state apparatus, like politicians and army officers. Furthermore, by copying the symbols and nomenclature of "the state" and inscribing their actions in its rationalities, these militias contribute to reproducing discourses on stateness. At the same time, through their worldview of autochthony, they diffuse discourses on sovereignty, which are also central to processes of state-making. This leads to the puzzling conclusion that Mai Mai groups simultaneously make and unmake "the state" and therefore contribute to its constant redefinition and contextuality.

The paper explores the contrast between the claim to reconstitute political authority through post-conflict statebuilding with the practice of sharing sovereignty and the existence of plural authority in post-conflict statebuilding contexts. Looking at the example of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the ways in which the political authority is asserted contradicts the image of the centralised rational sovereign state that is embedded in post-conflict statebuilding policy documents. The paper argues that this is partly the representation of the challenges post-conflict statebuilding finds on the ground, but also a natural consequence from the actual policies. These are in themselves a reflection of the ways state authority is mediated in contemporary times. Although this has been hailed as a particular feature in African politics, the paper argues that this practice has a much longer and wider standing.