Política territorial e alcance do estado: irregularidades no projeto

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

Política territorial y el alcance del Estado: Irregularidad por diseño

CATHERINE BOONE

University of Texas at Austin.

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 Côte d'Ivoire, explores some of these dynamics.

Key words: State-building, Africa, Political Economy, Côte d'Ivoire, Territory.

RESUMEN

Guillermo O'Donnell prestó atención a las "zonas marrones" en la topografía política de América Latina. O'Donnell definió a estas zonas como regiones periféricas 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 través del África sub-sahariana. Este trabajo revisa tres formas de explicar dicha irregularidad en el alcance del Estado: a) una perspectiva determinista geográfica, económica y demográfica; b) una perspectiva histórico-sociológica; c) una perspectiva política centrada en la negociación estratégica 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 construcción del Estado. Se exploran estas dinámicas a partir de un análisis de la construcción del Estado en el África moderna.

Palabras clave: Construcción del Estado, África, economía política, Costa de Marfil, territorio.

"Let us imagine a map of each country in which the areas covered by blue would designate the areas where there is a high degree of state presence (in terms of a set of reasonably effective bureaucracies, and the effectiveness of properly sanctioned legality), both functionally and territorially; the green color indicates an intermediate case; and the brown color a very low or nil level on both dimensions. ...The extensive presence of such brown areas entails the introjection of authoritarianism -understood here as the denial of publicness and of the effective legality of a democratic state and hence, or citizenship-at the very center of political power of these countries".

(Guillermo O'Donnell, 1993:1359-1360)

Guillermo O'Donnell drew attention to the existence of "brown spots" in the political topography of Latin American states, which he defined as peripheral regions or districts in which the presence of the republican state is attenuated and more arbitrary forms of power -neofeudal, sultanistic, personalistic, and clientelistic- hold sway.1 Similarly uneven projections of republican state authority, citizenship rights, and access to the legal and political institutions of the modern state are visible across most sub-Saharan African countries. Analysts like Mahmood Mamdani (1996) and Issa Shivji (2006) have described the rural areas (where approximately 60-70% of the sub-Saharan population now resides) as governed under neocustomary or administrative despotism, in contrast to the more open and liberal political orders prevailing in the cities, especially for the middle classes. The character of state authority and the quality of citizenship vary both functionally and territorially (and along class lines), precisely as O'Donnell described.

O'Donnell's 1993 discussion stressed that the "unevenness of stateness" can result from territorially-uneven breakdowns or decay that are caused by prolonged economic crises, or neoliberal restructurings. Yet as his examples of Brazil's Amazonia, highland Peru, and northwest Argentina suggest, "brown spots" are not necessarily the result of any erosion of stateness. Instead, this unevenness may be the result, or effect, of state-building itself.

The implicit counterfactual in many discussions of the uneven reach of the state is what O'Donnell imagines as "blue areas". Blue areas are spatialized (idealized) representations of the fully-integrated republican state, wherein the rules and practices of political authority at the local level mirror the rules and practices that prevail at the national level. Blue areas are regions in fully integrated national economies in which systems of territorial administration are spatially uniform, and standardized law and property rights are projected evenly across the national space.

This ideal does not hold for African countries, and it may not be a reliable point of reference for most countries. As the federal systems studied by E.E. Schattschneider (1960) and Edward Gibson (2008), or in the "multilevel jurisdictions" of Indonesia described by Dik Roth (2003), African states (and most perhaps other states) are characterized by heterogeneity of scale (and scope). In Africa, most rural jurisdictions look like O'Donnell's brown areas. States are marked by a partial disarticulation of most local political arenas from national citizenship regimes, accountability mechanisms, and the rules of political representation that are inscribed in the national constitutions. Mahmood Mamdani is correct in arguing that this disarticulation has been a structural feature of virtually all African states, including the apartheid state in South Africa.2 A general effect is one that Philip Nord identified in nineteenth century Europe: the uneven and unstable integration of the countryside into the civic life of the nation.3

Several of the papers in this collection attempt to address this question of unevenness in the territorial reach of the state (Soifer, Kurtz and Schrank),