On private indirect government

The aim of this study is to draw attention to the long time-scale of the developments currently taking place in Africa. This has been overshadowed by the brouhaha concerning phenomena that are mainly connected with the present moment (structural adjustment, transitions toward democracy, wars and conflicts, corruption, criminalization). This study is based on two hypotheses. The first is that of interlacing : emerging from a history whose depth is overlooked by many analysts, Africa is simultaneously advancing in several directions. This advance is not following a closed orbit. It is neither smooth nor unilinear. It is heading toward several outcomes at once. Moreover, it is moving on several timescales and takes the form of fluctuations and destabilizations, sometimes abrupt, as well as of apparently disordered accelerations and inertias. In fact, however, several different systems of change are involved : stationary, dynamic, volatile, even catastrophic. The second hypothesis is that of the exit of the state. This exit is neither total nor irreversible. It takes diverse forms. Some of them will be examined later in this study. For the moment, it facilitates the emergence of new political actors in the public sphere, the proliferation of unexpected social rationalities, and the implementation of novel technologies and apparatuses, whose purpose is to control individual conduct and to make possible new modes of constituting private property and inequality. Private indirect government : this is the formula we propose to apply to these emergent technologies of domination, whose forms, intrinsic qualities, and goals are fundamentally different from those which postcolonial African regimes had previously espoused. Private indirect government is itself the result of an abrupt renegotiation of the relationships between the privatization of public violence, on the one hand, and the constitution of new systems of private property on the other. Our attention will be focused here on this privatization of public violence, this appropriation of substances and profits, the levies they require, the shifting of boundaries to which they lead, and the new forms of violence and social stratification to which they imply.

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