Catherine Boone

INTRODUCTION: LAND POLITICS IN AFRICA – CONSTITUTING AUTHORITY OVER TERRITORY, PROPERTY AND PERSONS

Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, implicating social and political relationships in the widest sense. Struggles over property may therefore be as much about the scope and structure of authority as about access to resources, with land claims being tightly wrapped in questions of authority, citizenship, and the politics of jurisdiction. This dynamic relationship between property and citizenship rights, on the one hand, and the authority to define and adjudicate these questions are –we believe – central to state formation (Boone 2003a, 2007; Lund 2008).1 In a recent issue of this journal, land markets in Africa receive special attention. The editors, Colin and Woodhouse (2010), give special emphasis to the multiple processes of commoditization of land and how they are embedded in different social relations. That particular issue focuses on how a great variety of transactions and market dynamics generate commodity characteristics in land. It adds much-needed African historical and contextual nuance to Polanyi’s Great Transformation (1944) as Colin and Woodhouse defy any assumption of markets as singular or uniform or even that they somehow exist ex ante. They demonstrate how markets come about, are structured and are reproduced. In some ways, the present collection complements this focus on market dynamics. We want to investigate the relationships between property and citizenship and political institutions, and how each of these plays a role in constituting the others. This seems especially relevant in the light of the many efforts at land tenure reform that tend to assume the separate and settled existence of property, of citizenship, and of the state. Such compartmentalized understandings of land politics will, no doubt, miss the point. We consider none of these socio-political features as separate or pre-established

Politically Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence The Case of Kenya in the 1990s

Large literatures in political theory and political economy argue that private property regimes help support liberal electoral regimes by constraining majoritarian politics, lowering the stakes of elections, and protecting “fundamental” or minority rights. This article probes implications of this argument for elections in sub-Saharan Africa, a mostly rural continent where only about 2% to 10% of all rural property (by country) is held under private title. Do Africa’s rural property regimes shape electoral dynamics and, if so, which ones, and how? This article examines the case of Kenya, focusing on 1991-1992 electoral dynamics in rural zones in which the state itself has exercised direct prerogative over land allocation. We show that in these zones, politicians manipulated land rights to mobilize supporters and punish opponents. They did so in ways that contributed directly to widespread land-related violence at election time. References to other African cases help generalize and set scope conditions on the argument.

The making of a rentier class: wealth accumulation and political control in Senegal

Political and economic dynamics set in motion by efforts to consolidate post‐colonial regimes have contributed to the continuing weakness of indigenous bourgeoisies throughout much of post‐colonial Africa. This article suggests that state power has been used to foster private rent‐seeking, rather than productive local private investment, in order to promote and sustain the political cohesion of ruling classes. The political consolidation of dominant rentier classes (forged through state patronage and clientelist mechanisms of control) creates obstacles to the emergence of local class strata interested in, or capable of, using state power to promote the expanded accumulation of capital (be it local or foreign). A study of Senegal illustrates this point.

Land Conflict and Distributive Politics in Kenya

Abstract: This paper argues that even with the incorporation of land policy provisions into Kenyas new constitution, there is every reason to believe that in the near future, highly politicized land conflict will continue. This is because land politics in Kenya is a redistributive game that creates winners and losers. Given the intensely redistributive potential of the impending changes in Kenyas land regime—and the implications of the downward shift in the locus of control over land allocation through decentralization of authority to county governments—there is no guarantee that legislators or citizens will be able to agree on concrete laws to realize the constitutions calls for equity and justice in land matters. This article traces the main ways in which state power has been used to distribute and redistribute land (and land rights) in the Rift Valley, focusing on post-1960 smallholder settlement schemes, land-buying companies, and settlement in the forest reserves, and it highlights the long-standing pattern of political contestation over the allocation of this resource. It then traces the National Land Policy debate from 2002 to 2010, focusing on the distributive overtones and undertones of the policy and of the debate over the new constitution that incorporated some of its main tenets.

Economic Liberalization in Senegal: Shifting Politics of Indigenous Business Interests

Analysts of African business in the 1960s and 1970s stressed the weakness of the local private sector and its subordination to foreign capital and the government. Have economic liberalization and the shrinking of the state changed matters? This paper takes up this question in an analysis of Senegal. Here, relations between the state, foreign capital, and indigenous business interests have changed considerably since 1980, signaling what may be some of the most significant shifts in Senegals political economy since Abdou Dioufs coming to power in 1981. There has been a shift of commercial control away from the state and foreign interests and toward the Senegalese “informal sector,” and clear moves away from the old pattern of clientelist-style relations between Senegalese business and the regime. In this paper, we argue that in spite of changes, the political clout and economic ambitions of Senegalese business interests are still limited by their weak hold on productive sectors of the economy. This is clear in the economic policy fights of the 1990s. Much of the contest is a struggle for commercial-sector advantage that pits old-style politician-businessmen against the “informal sector” commercial interests that have been gathering force in Senegal since the 1970s. These changes seem to have less to do with the emergence of “indigenous capitalism” than with diminution of the regimes ability to constrain and canalize the development of indigenous commercial interests. This paper traces these developments, grounding the analysis of the 1990s in a detailed empirical study of UNACOIS, a sometimes-militant business association that emerged in Dakar in 1990 to represent the Senegalese “informal sector.”

TERRITORIAL POLITICS AND THE REACH Of THE STATE: UNEVENNESS BY DESIGN

aBStraCt Guillermo O’donnell drew attention to “brown spots” in Latin america’s political topography, which he defined as peripheral regions where the presence of the republican state is attenuated and more arbitrary forms of power hold sway. similarly uneven projections of state authority are visible across sub-saharan africa. this paper reviews three ways of explaining such unevenness in the state’s reach: (a.) a geographic, economic, and demographic determinism perspective, (b.) a historical-sociological perspective, and (c.) a political perspective centered on strategic bargaining between social actors and state actors. We propose that unevenness in state quality is often an artifact of state-building, rather than evidence of state failure. an analysis of state-building in modern africa, focusing on cote d’ivoire, explores some of these dynamics. Key words: state-building, africa, political economy, cote d’ivoire, territory. RESUMEN Guillermo O’donnell presto atencion a las “zonas marrones” en la topografia politica de america Latina. O’donnell definio a estas zonas como regiones perifericas donde la presencia del estado de derecho es atenuada y donde imperan formas de poder arbitrarias. de igual modo, las proyecciones irregulares de la autoridad estatal son visibles a traves del Africa sub-sahariana. este trabajo revisa tres formas de explicar dicha irregularidad en el alcance del estado: a) una perspectiva determinista geografica, economica y demografica; b) una perspectiva historico-sociologica; c) una perspectiva politica centrada en la negociacion estrategica entre actores sociales y actores estatales. proponemos que la irregularidad en la calidad del estado, en lugar de ser evidencia de un estado fallido es a menudo un artefacto de construccion del estado. se exploran estas dinamicas a partir de un analisis de la construccion del estado en el Africa moderna.

Neoliberalism in the Middle East and Africa: Divergent Banking Reform Trajectories, 1980s to 2000

This study aims at a better understanding of the politics of economic reform in countries that have remained on the margins of the globalising economy. The article identifies cross-national differences in patterns of financial sector reform in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the 1980s and 1990s. We argue that these differences are traceable, in part, to variations in the strength and autonomy of private capital in each country. These social-structural differences are registered, albeit imperfectly, in measures of concentration and ownership structure in the commercial banking sector. Using these measures, we propose a typology of variation in banking structure in the MENA and SSA, and argue that each type tends to be associated with a characteristic pattern of financial sector reform (or non-reform). We find that the biggest struggles over banking reform occurred in countries with a history of antagonistic relations between a relatively strong domestic private sector and the state.

2013 Conference Theme Statement: Power and Persuasion

As the world becomes more interdependent and its governance more complex, both within and between nation-states, the two biggest resources for human cooperation — persuasion and legitimate coercive power — become harder to generate across cultural and linguistic lines and sovereign boundaries. Yet the future will require more of these resources. To help societies meet the needs for political interactions of increasing complexity and scale, political scientists need to understand better the uses and abuses of both persuasion and power in varying contexts and scales. This years program theme encourages scholars to consider the politics of persuasion and power, along with their many intersections.