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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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State, Politics and the rule of law in contemporary Mali
| Panel |
36. Between customs and state law: The dynamics of local law in sub-Saharan Africa
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| Paper ID | 40 |
| Author(s) |
Pes, Luca
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | a) Politics and de-politicisation. In Mali, social and political practices are increasingly being conceived of as posing technical ‘problems’ which can be solved by ‘development’ or aid actors. As noticed by Ferguson, ‘development’ functions as an anti-politics machine, weakening other local mechanisms of political participation and decision-making.
Showing the social and cultural dimension of the local institutions that are transformed into technical ‘problems’ by the development ‘machine’, a classical anthropological analysis can also provide the evidence necessary to counter-argue the rhetoric of ‘lack’ underpinning so many aid interventions. Do Africans really lack democracy and the rule of law? Do they lack local control of natural resources or human rights?
How did the wave of donor-driven policies of decentralisation spread all over Africa since the ‘90s in the attempt to fill these alleged ‘gaps’, impact on West African ideas of political community and public/political sphere? How do they affect the relations between rural and urban contexts (incorporation of peasants, citizenship, state’s political control, etc.)? How do they change the idea and the nature of political participation and the actual control of resources? Do these local institutions, in turn, have an impact on these processes?
b) State and law. Forms of government, and particularly the state, are changing in the context of globalisation. In Mali, the blurred, hybrid and interpenetrating character of public and private forms of power, governmental and non-governmental actors, makes the state a problematic subject to define and analyse.
Lawyers, on the one hand, tend to assume unproblematically a unitary and ethnocentric notion of ‘state’; anthropologists, on the other, tend to avoid engaging with such an abstract and general construct. I aim to track a middle cause by contributing to a socio-legal-anthropology of the state (as a form of government, a complex of power relations, including the domain of the law).
What changes are occurring in the relations of power described in modern sociology by the concept ‘state’? What are the changes for the unitary notion of ‘sovereignty’ which lawyers assume to exist and anthropologists have for long time ignored? What does an analysis of government (the state and the law) in a ‘peripheral’ and ‘developing’ country such as Mali tell about the general nature of government, and in particular about power (or government or ‘governmentality’) in modern and ‘developed’ contexts?
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