The growth of artistic nationalism in Senegal

ABSTRACT. In the 1960s, Senegal's first national leaders narrowly defined how artists should practise nationalism through their work, particularly in the weaving craft, and enforced this definition through selective state patronage. This ideological and stylistic control echoed state control over economic markets. As subsequent administrations have restructured the economy, leading to a powerful informal business sector, so have independent contemporary weavers redefined artistic nationalism. Using ethnographic and archival interviews, this article examines nationalism in Senegalese weaving, placing the perspectives of contemporary weavers alongside those of two arts administrators who helped to develop state‐sponsored programmes in the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that contemporary weavers find inspiration from Senegalese nationalism of the mid‐twentieth century, yet have modified it to encompass individual expression. Because definitions of artistic nationalism in Senegal have shifted, it remains a significant ideology within the national arts scene.     

Senegalese street‐sellers,racism and the discourse on ‘irregular trade’ in Rimini

The coast of Emilia‐Romagna is a favourite destination for the seasonal movement of Senegalese street‐sellers. It is no coincidence that Rimini hosted one of the first racist demonstrations of shopkeepers in 1989. The situation has worsened over time. In fact, the local public discourse on immigration never developed autonomously but has always been connected to the discourse expressing the main concern of the town: irregular trade. Yet discourses do not work alone and are linked also to social relations and to economic trends such as the restructuring of the local retailing economy and the tourist sector. This article therefore shows how racism in Rimini is the fluid product of, first, the overlapping of discourses about differing social phenomena which shape the dominant discourse on immigration; and, secondly, the identification with this dominant discourse that has emerged from everyday social relations and institutional practices. The latter part of the article presents elements of the counter‐discourse, based on observations and conversations carried out with Senegalese immigrants in a summer camp outside Rimini. Finally, a proposal by the mayor of Rimini to exclude non‐resident immigrants coming from outside the province is analysed as an example of the criminalization of immigrants through the application of a ‘sedentarist metaphysic’.     

The Strength of Weak States? Non‐State Security Forces and Hybrid Governance in Africa

In this article, I explore the recent revalorization of non‐state forms of order and authority in the context of hybrid approaches to governance and state building in Africa. I argue for a more empirical and comparative approach to hybrid governance that is capable of distinguishing between constructive and corrosive forms of non‐state order, and sharpens rather than blurs the relationship between formal and informal regulation. A critique of the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding hybrid governance perspectives sets the scene for a comparative analysis of two contrasting situations of hybrid security systems: the RCD‐ML of eastern DR Congo, and the Bakassi Boys vigilante group of eastern Nigeria. In each case, four issues are examined: the basis of claims that regulatory authority has shifted to informal security systems; the local legitimacy of the security forces involved; the wider political context; and finally, whether a genuine transformation of regulatory authority has resulted, offering local populations a preferable alternative to the prior situation of neglectful or predatory rule. I argue that hybrid governance perspectives often essentialize informal regulatory systems, disguising coercion and political capture as popular legitimacy, and I echo calls for a more historically and empirically informed analysis of hybrid governance contexts.     

Ethno‐political subordination and patient dissatisfaction: The Kurdish case in Hakkâri during the AKP period in Turkey, 2003–2013

This article revolves around a puzzle: the persistence of patient dissatisfaction with the health services as a mass phenomenon in a Kurdish province, Hakkâri, through the 2000s, despite the striking and tangible improvements enacted by the Turkish state. This is, I argue, related to the deeply entrenched conviction on the part of Hakkârians that their lives count for little in the eyes of the Turkish state. Rooted in the history of state‐Kurds relations, this conviction manifests itself in Hakkârians' deep distrust of the very basis of health services received, like the skills and intentions of health staff, causing many Hakkârians to underestimate service improvement. Thus, it is concluded, patient satisfaction among an ethnically subordinated group with health services provided by a dominant ethnic group may be unavoidably informed and perhaps overwhelmingly determined by an awareness of the wider ethno‐power context and its history, irrespective, that is, of material improvements.     

Cooperation networks and actors in semi‐colonial China, 1860–1911

This paper focuses on “cooperation networks” for the provision of public goods and services as a specific form of governance in late imperial China. While concentrating on differing forms of local self‐regulation at the end of the Qing dynasty, the article pinpoints several actors involved in the cooperation networks and (re)classifies them along the continuum of “public” and “private.” In addition to state and non‐state actors, the players included semi‐state or hybrid actors with profound network advantages who played a crucial role in the provision of governance services, as well as colonial and transnational actors who occasionally took part in this cooperation. To contextualize these actors and illustrate their modes of interaction, this paper will describe cooperation networks established for the provision of disaster relief and education in local society in late Qing China. In so doing, this paper also will question participants' motives and describe their personal gains, as well as the accumulation of symbolic capital as major incentives.     

En route to New York: diasporic networks and the reconfiguration of female entrepreneurship in Senegal

This article examines the influence of migration and transnational social networks on female entrepreneurship. It interrogates shifting patterns of market development, juxtaposed to the lure of new economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs located at the periphery, Senegal. I critically analyse how a distinct and classed category of Senegalese women entrepreneurs navigates international spaces and legal restrictions in attempts to launch profitable economic ventures in metropolitan centres such as New York City and negotiate new forms of representation and agency in contentious socio-economic spaces. By interrogating the complex interplay between women entrepreneurs and diasporic communities, I weave an often-missing gender perspective into the analysis of the emergence of female transnational entrepreneurship and diasporic social networks. This article demonstrates that diasporic social networks, transnational markets and spatial interconnections, while contributing to market revitalisation and expansion, are nonetheless fraught with tension. Diasporic social networks embody paradoxical positions. They represent an enabling economic transactional space, while embodying an informal social space that nonetheless remains sites of power struggles deeply embedded in gendered, sociocultural and economic dynamics that transfer from local to transnational contexts.     

Rude Accountability: Informal Pressures on Frontline Bureaucrats in Bangladesh

This article is about ‘rude’ forms of accountability — the informal pressures used by citizens to claim public services and to sanction service failures. Rude accountability is characterized by a lack of official rules or formal basis and a reliance on the power of social norms and rules to influence and sanction official performance. The article draws on evidence from Bangladesh, a state which has not reformed its social sector governance, to explore when and why poor citizens resort to ‘rude’ accountability, whether they have a comparative advantage in the use of informal mechanisms, and whether these work, in terms of gaining better service. It asks what informal accountability mechanisms imply for governance reform in social services, and discusses lessons for other ‘unreformed’ states like Bangladesh.     

Negotiating Statehood in a Hybrid Political Order: The Case of Somaliland

This article investigates the negotiation of statehood in Somaliland, a non‐recognized de facto state which emerged from Somalia's conflict and state collapse. The negotiation process centres on the continuing transformation of a hybrid political order, involving ‘formal’ as well as ‘informal’ spheres, both in existing institutions (as ‘rules of the game’) and in the bodies or agents enforcing these rules. The negotiation processes considered take place at the national and local level respectively, as well as between the two. These negotiations are heterogeneous, non‐linear and ongoing. The article demonstrates how the polity's tolerance for heterogeneous negotiations and different forms of statehood allowed local political actors to establish peace in their own local settings first. Although it did not produce uniform statehood, it provided the basis for communities to explore the scope for common statehood. On the national level, hybrid elements initially allowed for a healthy adaptation of statehood to local needs, and for legitimate, productive instruments of negotiation. This responsiveness was not maintained, and current hybrid elements threaten to undermine the polity's stability.     

Building Peace with Conflict Diamonds? Merging Security and Development in Sierra Leone

This article examines the merging of security and development agendas in primary commodity sectors, focusing on the case of peace‐building reforms in Sierra Leone's diamond sector. Reformers frequently assume that reforming the diamond sector through industrializing alluvial diamond mining will reduce threats to security and development, thereby contributing to peace building. Our findings, however, suggest that the industrialization of alluvial diamond mining that has taken place in Sierra Leone has not reduced threats to security and development, as it has entailed human rights abuses and impoverishment of local communities without consolidating state fiscal revenues and trust in local authorities. This suggests alternative strategies for resource‐related peace‐building initiatives, which we consider at the end of the article: the decriminalization of informal economic activities; the prioritization of local livelihoods and development needs over central government fiscal priorities and foreign direct investment; and better integration between local economies and industrial resource exploitation.     

Decentralization,Local Taxation and Citizenship in Senegal

This article deals with the politics of revenue collection in a framework of decentralization, democratization and multiparty politics as experienced in the small village of Barkedji in the pastoral region of Senegal. In Senegal, revenue collection has recently been transferred from state administrators to locally elected councillors. Contrary to the assumption of the ‘good governance’ doctrine, this transfer of responsibility has not resulted in a strengthening of democratic structures where taxpayers demand (and gain) public services and more political representation in exchange for increasing taxes. In Barkedji, as elsewhere in Senegal, tax‐compliance hit rock‐bottom after tax collection became the responsibility of local councillors. Meanwhile other types of local institutions, with less clear state relations, are able to mobilize large amounts of revenue outside the normal tax channels for the provision of goods and service. These non‐state institutions seem to have taken over as providers of political representation as well as suppliers of public goods and of access or rights to crucial local resources. The article explores the motivation among first‐comers and newcomer populations to adopt or reject tax requirements to different types of organizations, and discusses the implications of this parallel tax collection for the exercise of public authority and the crafting of state and citizenry.     

‘Milking The Elephant’: Financial Markets as Real Markets in Kenya

Financial liberalization policies in the 1990s were intended to raise formal sector interest rates, enhance competition and expand access for users. This article investigates patterns of provision and use in a local financial market in Karatina, Kenya, at the end of the 1990s after a period of financial and economic liberalization. It takes a holistic approach, examining both formal and informal financial arrangements and microfinance interventions. This is because the role of the informal financial sector is particularly important for poor people and has received relatively little attention in the discussion of the consequences of reform. The author does this using a ‘real’ markets approach that sees markets as socially regulated and structured. Significant provision by the mutual sector (formal and informal), and poor lending performance by the banking sector is explained through an examination of the characteristics of the services on offer and their embeddedness in social relations, culture and politics.     

The Failure of Popular Justice in Uganda: Local Councils and Women’s Property Rights

Advocates of alternative dispute resolution argue that informal, community‐based institutions are better placed to provide inexpensive, expedient and culturally appropriate forms of justice. In 1988, the Ugandan government extended judicial capacity to local councils (LCs) on similar grounds. Drawing on attempts by women in southwestern Uganda to use the LCs to adjudicate property disputes, this article investigates why popular justice has failed to protect the customary property rights of women. The gap between theory and practice arises out of misconceptions of community. The tendency to ascribe a morality and autonomy to local spaces obscures the ability of elites to use informal institutions for purposes of social control. In the light of women’s attempts to escape the ‘rule of persons’ and to seek out arbiters whom they associate with the ‘rule of law’, it can be argued that the utility of the state to ordinary Ugandans should be reconsidered.     

Languages of Stateness in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings: The PLO's Popular Committees as Twilight Institutions

Public authority beyond the state has often been seen as isolated from the state and/or constituting a threat to the state. Recent scholarship, however, has started to conceptualize ‘state’ and ‘non‐state’ forms of public authority as closely connected and interdependent. This article contributes to this theoretical shift by means of a qualitative case study of public authority in Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon. Lebanon's Palestinian camps are routinely characterized as ‘states‐within‐the‐state’, undermining the sovereignty of the Lebanese state. Yet, as this article demonstrates, both a generic state idea and the specific Lebanese state system constitute crucial benchmarks for the Popular Committees that govern informal Palestinian settlements. The article therefore conceptualizes the Popular Committees as ‘twilight institutions’ and explores the ‘languages of stateness’ that they adopt both communicatively, vis‐à‐vis Palestinian competitors, and coordinatively, vis‐à‐vis Lebanese counterparts. This reveals that the Popular Committees emulate the Lebanese state institutions they come into contact with, to bolster their own authority. They do this partly to be viable interlocutors for Lebanese state institutions; this suggests that the Popular Committees’ non‐state authority might validate rather than challenge state authority in Lebanon, and that state and non‐state authority can be mutually constitutive.     

Like Moses Who Led His People to the Promised Land: Nation‐ and State‐Building in Bougainville

This article focuses on indigenous religious beliefs and practices in relation to nationalism and state‐building in conflict and post‐conflict Bougainville. Since the early seventies, people of the island of Bougainville have sought to secede from Papua New Guinea and constitute a separate sovereign state. The almost ten year long secessionist struggle between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) and the PNG Defence Force (PNGDF) that eventuated in 1988, destroyed nearly all infrastructure, socio‐economic services, and the functions of the PNG state on the island. At the same time, the crisis also brought about the establishment of new local governments, such as ‘The Bougainville Interim Government’, as well as a new Nation: the Independent Republic, later called the Kingdom of Me'ekamui, ruled by BRA leader Francis Ona. This article explores the creation of the Me'ekamui Nation and analyses the religious underpinnings of nation‐ and state‐building in Bougainville, focusing on the performances and normative frameworks used in the endeavor to become a sovereign state.     

Frontiers of Urban Control: Lawlessness on the City Edge and Forms of Clientalist Statecraft in Zimbabwe

This article develops the concept of “urban frontier” to explore conflicts over state regularisation of city edge informal settlements in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. It conceptualises the presence of “lawless” urban frontiers and “illegal” territorial authorities in capital cities as expressions of a permissive form of central statecraft. In so doing, the article takes forward debates over the politics shaping the margins of Africa’s rapidly expanding cities, redressing scholars’ tendency to neglect central party‐state strategic calculations and party politics in their analyses of unregulated settlements. Dominant interpretations generally hinge on state absence or weakness and emphasise localised influences. The case of Harare’s highly politicised city‐edge informal settlements reveals the inadequacy of apolitical approaches particularly clearly, as all were controlled by the ruling ZANUPF party. The conflicts provoked by regularisation provide a lens on disputes within the ruling party, which we interpret as disputes over different forms of clientalist statecraft. Analyses of urban frontiers can thus help move away from generic one‐size‐fits‐all explanations of informality and patronage politics in Africa’s expanding cities.     

Manufacturing Disorder: Liberalization,Informal Enterprise and Economic ‘Ungovernance’ in African Small Firm Clusters

Small enterprise clusters are viewed as an important means of promoting competitive small‐firm development even in contexts of unstable markets and weak states. Yet the emergence of successful enterprise clusters in developing regions of Southern Europe, Asia and Latin America contrasts with their conspicuous absence in Africa. This article challenges ahistorical and culturalist explanations regarding the lack of successful enterprise clusters in Africa through a comparative analysis of three dynamic and increasingly globalized informal manufacturing clusters in two different regions of Nigeria. Focusing on a Muslim Yoruba weaving cluster in the town of Ilorin in south‐western Nigeria, and two Christian Igbo shoe and garment clusters in the town of Aba in south‐eastern Nigeria, this article explores the role of culture, religion and the state in shaping informal economic governance in an African context. An account of the varied and complex history of these Nigerian enterprise networks reveals both their capacity for institutional innovation and economic linkages across ethnic, religious and gender boundaries, as well as their vulnerability to fragmentation and involution in the context of liberalization, state neglect and political opportunism. Far from demonstrating the inadequacies of African cultural institutions, the slide of African entrepreneurial networks into social disorder and economic ‘ungovernance’¹ is traced to the destructive impact of neoliberal reforms in a context of poverty and formal institutional exclusion.     

Community‐Based Resource Management in Turkey: ‘Je Participe,Tu Participes,Il Participe… Ils Profitent’1

The current discourse and practice of natural resource management rest on the assumption that participatory decision‐making mechanisms offer efficient and equitable policy solutions. There is increasing recognition, however, that such mechanisms might fail in ensuring effective participation of all stakeholders and, consequently, be prone to (re)producing inequalities and remaining ineffective in environmental protection. Taking this observation as a backdrop, this study addresses the under‐investigated implications of state–society relationships on the operation of participatory processes. By employing a unique combination of data provided by focus groups, in‐depth interviews, and a survey administered to 377 individuals, it analyses the ‘failure’ of participatory decision making within the context of an internationally‐funded environmental conservation project in Sultan Sazl???, Turkey. The article argues that the specific manifestations of state–society relationships and the political economy dynamics at the local level account for this failure. It shows that local materializations of state behaviour, interacting with local inequalities and perceptions of the decision‐making process, impinge on effective participation. In emphasizing that the capability of different groups to participate is shaped by the state in important ways, this article calls for more research on the political economy of state–society relationships and community‐based resource management.     

Waste Political Settlements in Colombia and Chile: Power,Inequality and Informality in Recycling

There are stark differences between the waste recycling literature from the global North and that from the global South. The literature from the global North tends to focus on empirical analyses of existing municipal recycling services and rarely considers institutional factors. When it does, the theoretical approaches adopted are limited, especially regarding the role of informal institutions. In contrast, recycling literature from the global South does focus on informal institutions, but it does so by concentrating on the struggles of waste pickers rather than on the performance of waste management services provided by local authorities. This divergence in the literature suggests the need for an analytical framework that integrates institutions and recycling performance. This article analyses waste disposal regimes in two Latin American metropolitan areas, Medellín (Colombia) and Santiago (Chile), and explores the link between income inequality and recycling. It focuses on the political settlements that lie at the heart of the waste regimes. As such, waste regimes in these two cities are understood to be a product of the interplay of balances of power, institutions and distribution of benefits. The study also highlights the need to understand informal institutions as relational phenomena that affect both the rich and the poor, and not just as a subsistence strategy by the latter.     

Mining Formalization at the Margins of the State: Small‐scale Miners and State Governance in the Peruvian Amazon

This article analyses the Peruvian government's quest to formalize small‐scale mining in the Amazon as a political process which shows how state governance problems are reproduced in the margins of the state. It asks why the central state is unable to govern mining activities in the Madre de Dios region, and examines how small‐scale miners have reacted to state attempts to formalize their activities. The author argues that, through political agency and the reproduction of ‘hybrid’ formal and informal institutions, small‐scale miners have learned to contest, reinterpret and build alternatives to central state governance. The article contributes to the literature on development policies by showing how difficulties in implementing regulatory policies may be analysed as governance problems, particularly in regions like the Amazon, where the state apparatus is not well established.     

Gendered Structures of Local Politics in Turkey

Indicators offered by available international statistical data and observations of many researchers point out that women's formal political involvement at the local level is stronger than that at the national level for the majority of states. However, gendered political patterns in Turkey have been following a rather different path. One and the most significant contradictory aspect is that women's representation at local elected organs is weaker than the national parliament. This article, first, investigates the reasons for this relatively weak existence in formal local politics. The references of this relativity are both national formal politics of Turkey, and the dominant worldwide model. Secondly, the article tries to establish country‐specific links between formal and informal local politics concerning women's participation. The experience in Turkey has proven that women's local engagement does not necessarily propel decision‐making power and women's empowerment. Women's local mobilization in Turkey has been mostly limited to socio‐cultural and charity activities instead of central decisions on the settlement, and of efforts for establishing women's local political agendas. Moreover, as a very prominent factor concerning the maintenance of asymmetric gendered structures of local politics, women's movement at the national level has been lacking in systematic political interest in the issue until very recently. In this article, these pretensions and future prospects are discussed in terms of the actual global‐national circumstances affecting local politics as well as women's local conditions. To these ends, existing quantitative‐qualitative research, data and analysis, and relevant findings of the author's recent (2000–2003) original research, as well as her observations through participation in recent feminist activism targeting local politics are being evaluated.