Everyday State and Democracy in Africa

Wale Adebanwi is Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His monographs include Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria, Yorùbá Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ and Corporate Agency, and The Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning.

• ContentsForeword (JEAN AND JOHN L. COMAROFF)PrefaceIntroduction. The Everyday State and Democracy in Africa (WALE ADEBANWI)PART I: EXPERIENCING THE BUREAUCRATIC MACHINE1. ID Cards and Social Class: The Intensification of the Bifurcated State in South Sudan (FERENC DÁVID MARKÓ)2. Paper Games: Consularity and Ersatz Lives in Urban Lagos (WALE ADEBANWI AND EBENEZER OBADARE)3. Somali Kinship and Bureaucratic Governance at a Refugee Camp in Kenya (FRED NYONGESA IKANDA)4. Inside the Anti-Politics Machine: Civil Society Mediation of Everyday Encounters with the State (E. FOUKSMAN)PART II: (UN)MAKING LIVES: THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF INFRASTRUCTURE AND SHORTAGES5. Lateral Futurity: The Nigerian State as Infrastructural Enigma (ERIC TROVALLA AND ULRIKA TROVALLA)6. Gazomania!: Shortage and the State in Chad (LORI LEONARD)PART III: DISCIPLINARITY, SUBJECTIVITY, AND VIOLENCE7. Politics of Patience: Acceptance, Agency, and Compliance in Rwanda (ROSE LØVGREN)8. The State as Golem: Police Violence in Democratic South Africa (NICHOLAS RUSH SMITH)9. Encountering the State in Times of Terror: The Case of the Civilian Joint Task Force (DANIEL E. AGBIBOA)PART IV: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF DEMOCRACY10. Fishing Nets, Kabila’s Eyes, and Voter’s Cards: Citizen-State Mediations in the DRC (KATRIEN PYPE)11. Encountering Cameroon’s Garrison State: Checkpoints, Expectations of Democracy, and the Anglophone Revolt (ROGERS OROCK)12. Disputing Democracy and Challenging the State in Mozambique (JUSTIN PEARCE)PART V: EVERYDAY POLITICS OF RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITY: EDUCATION, WELFARE, AND HEALTH13. The Intimate State: Ethiopian Civics Teachers as the Fault Line between Repression and Revolution (JENNIFER RIGGAN)14. The State and “Its Responsibilities”: School, Welfare State, and Community Building in Lubumbashi (Haut-Katanga, Democratic Republic of Congo) (EDOARDO QUARETTA)15. Fragile Relationships: Elusive Encounters with Public Services in Rural Burkina Faso (HELLE SAMUELSEN)Afterword. Postcolonial Powerscapes (VICTORIA BERNAL)ContributorsIndex

"Major fresh perspectives on the state in everyday life that will be seminal reading for historians and social scientists as well as for Africanists." "Anthropologists, for some time, have successfully deconstructed essentialist notions of 'the' state in Africa by focusing on what states do when they are working. The contributors to this book push this approach further: they enquire about how ordinary citizens experience the state and its agents in multiple sites, focusing on the possibilities and constraints of everyday life and the resulting popular grammars of state and democracy. The book should be on the core reading list of every course on state and democracy, in Africa and beyond." "Mobilizing the decentering perspectives of ethnography to capture living practices, Everyday State and Democracy in Africa develops an original view from below on the huge changes throughout the continent since the end of the Cold War. The volume convincingly demonstrates that a focus on how the people involved see state and democracy might be more helpful than intricate theoretical discussions. Two themes seem to come back throughout the volume. The first is (unsurprisingly) the role of violence in people's everyday encounters with the state. The second (maybe more surprising) is that the state is all the more present in people's perceptions where it seems to be absent."