by PATIENCE KABAMBA
In the midst of an abundant anti-ethnic bias in much of the critical literature in African studies, there may be a renewed necessity to theorize the salience and continuing production of “ethnic” difference in a manner that could problematize and challenge the notion that ethnicity was merely a devious and divisive invention of colonialism, pure and simple, and must be overcome. The current study is questionning non-state formations based on ethnic networks in Africa to see if and how these networks mobilize social capital or social liability for economic and political development within the different contexts of their respective “weak” states. This study revives in a distinctly new way an older tradition in anthropology to use the study of “stateless societies” to pose critical questions about the constitution of modern society and the institutions on which political economy presumably rests.
In political science theory, the state is a basic and largely unquestioned category. Other categories such as authority, rights, and sovereignty retain a certain amount of fluidity and are deemed worthy topics of discussion and debate, but the state, as a category, is simply assumed. Max Weber defined the state as a “ruling organization [which] will be called ‘political’ insofar as its existence and order is continuously safeguarded within a given territorial area by the threat and application of physical force on the part of the administrative staff” (1978:54). Weber defines a state as a rationalized administrative form of political organization and identifies legibility as the process par excellence for its creation and retention. Compounded by capitalism and globalization, this Eurocentric conception of statehood has become a fixed and rigid fact and the gauge by which all other “normative” states are judged.
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