Afterword: Brokerage as social practice

This afterword argues for a narrow and analytically strong concept of brokerage, which is oriented towards the classical definition by Boissevain. His ideal type emphasises the agency of brokers who actively pursue their own interests and act at an equal distance to the groups between which they mediate. Furthermore, the text argues for thinking of brokerage as a bundle of social practices instead of as brokers in the sense of a social type. While few social actors are fully-fledged brokers, many of them engage in brokerage.

The local appropriation of democracy: an analysis of the municipal elections in Parakou, Republic of Benin, 2002–03

Ever since the ‘democratic renewal’ of 1989–90, Benin has been regarded as a model democracy in the African context. The holding of local elections in 2002–03 can be seen as the culmination of this turn to democracy. Donors attach high expectations to decentralisation and local democracy. Based on an empirical analysis of municipal elections in Parakou, the country's third-largest city, the paper tries to gauge whether these expectations have been realised. The paper argues that while multi-party democracy has been instituted under considerable pressure from the outside, the particular form it has taken derives instead from rationales of national and local politics which go back to the late…

Book Review: When Things Fell Apart. State Failure in Late-Century Africa

Review of the monograph: Robert H. Bates: When Things Fell Apart. State Failure in Late-Century Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, Paperback ISBN 9780521715256; Hardback ISBN 9780521887359; 216 pages

Introduction: Continuities, Dislocations and Transformations: 50 Years of Independence in Africa

Many sub-Saharan African countries celebrated 50 years of political independence in 2010. This presented an opportunity for scholars, politicians and journalists, both within and outside of Africa, to take stock. The situation on the African continent has changed fundamentally since 1960. Brief general analyses and reviews can scarcely do justice to the complexity of this development process. The processes of consolidation, differentiation and transformation that have caused African societies today to become significantly more complex than they were at the time of independence are simply too multifaceted. Most of the journalistic attempts to take stock of these developments in recent years …

Book Review: Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow

Review of the monograph: Pierre Englebert (2009), Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow , Boulder, Co. & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, ISBN: 978-1-58826-646-0 (Hardcover) / 978-1-58826-623-1 (Paperback), 310 pages.

How to study bureaucracies ethnographically?

We propose a short epistemological and methodological reflection on the challenges of doing ethnographical research on public services (‘bureaucracies’) from the inside. We start from the recognition of the double face of bureaucracy, as a form of domination and oppression as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this dialectic entails. We argue that, in classical Malinowskian fashion, the anthropology of bureaucracy should take bureaucrat as the ‘natives’, and acknowledge their agency. This means adopting basic anthropological postures: the natives (i.e. the bureaucrats) must have good reasons for their seemingly ‘absurd’ (or arbitrary) practices, once you underst…

Commentary: ethnography, critique and the state. Some thoughts on “fiscal anthropological insights into the heart of contemporary statehood”1

This commentary explores the assets and liabilities of anthropology for the study of core functions of statehood (such as taxation) that increasingly become a matter of transnational negotiation an...

Local Powers and a Distant State in Rural Central African Republic

‘The State Stops at PK 12’ – i.e. 12 kilometres from the capital, Bangui.The situation described by this statement, often heard in the Central African Republic, seems to conform to the objectives of the currently fashionable policies of decentralisation and structural adjustment – for example, to end ‘too much state’. However, the absence of the state in the rural areas of the CAR is so striking that the position in certain respects has almost reached the level of caricature. It also reflects the more general situation in other parts of the continent where the excesses of a centralised, over-staffed post-colonial regime can coexist perfectly with the pronounced absence in the rural areas of…

World Anthropology with an Accent: The Discipline in Germany since the 1970s