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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Critique of the 'Quasi-State' Thesis;Power,Subjectivity and The Re-Imagining of Community in East Africa
| Panel |
10. Theorizing African State Trajectories
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| Paper ID | 35 |
| Author(s) |
Opondo, Sam Okoth
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The modern state and states system has been familiar both structurally and symbolically in the daily acts of imagination through which space, time and subjectivity are construed. The persistence of this international imaginary has helped to support the political privilege of sovereignty affiliations and territorialities over other conceptualisations of ‘the political’. However, certain historical events continually mess up the neat conceptual ‘frameworks’ and the more or less elegant theoretical speculations with which we endeavor to understand the past and forecast the future of the world we live in. The decolonization process and the delegitimization of territorial aggrandizement marks one such profound change for international relations. With the ascension to independence, former colonies acquired ‘statehood’ that made them internationally recognized as full juridical equals to other members of the states system, yet they are said to have manifestly lacked all but the most rudimentary empirical sovereignty capabilities.
As such, various hypotheses have been proposed to explain why the process of state formation in the Third World did not yield states similar to those in Europe and inferences made on how this impacts on political life in these regions. One perspective comes from Robert H. Jackson’s ‘quasi-state’ thesis that defines a ‘quasi-state’ as one to which “the international community currently accords sovereignty, but which has ‘a comparative lack of power and agency...a state whose writ often does not extend throughout the country; and where it does, it is observed irregularly”.
The thrust of the quasi-state thesis is that most national governments in Africa exercise only tenuous control over the people, organizations and activities within their jurisdictions. The extension of this conclusion is that African states are a product of and are sustained by an international normative framework grounded on negative sovereignty and not through any evidence of their capacity to rule.
In this essay, I locate the ‘quasi-state’ thesis as a discursive microcosm of a much larger cultural and philosophical enterprise that in the past has transformed a particular meaning of reality into ‘Reality’ per se. I suggest that this singular, homogenous and narrowly focused image of human society establishes the boundaries of legitimacy and the ‘art of the possible’ in the international. This study will address the issue by illustrating how, via an unproblematic appropriation of a particular way of understanding modern politics, the ‘quasi-state’ thesis resonates with the problems, tensions, paradoxes and potentials intrinsic to a dominant modernist agenda.
My main claim is that by viewing social reality through a series of binary opposites, the ‘quasi-state’ thesis presents a distinction between experiences considered universal and normal and those seen as residual and pathological. This critique will of necessity involve an analysis of the foundational status accorded to sovereignty and attempts to universalize a particular idea of the state. In the following sections, I employ critical and reflexive tools to illustrate how the ‘state’ is more complex and paradoxical than conventional IR theory, or the ‘quasi-state’ thesis, present it to be.
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