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Beyond the State: Civil Society and Associational Life in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Michael Bratton
Michael Bratton
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Abstract

The current scholarly preoccupation with the state may obscure more than it reveals for students of politics in sub-Saharan Africa. The weakly formed state in Africa—beset by decline in economic production and political authority—is now retreating from overambitious attempts at social transformation. The time is therefore ripe for societal actors to play an enhanced role in political change. This article reviews the current literature on state-society relations in Africa with particular emphasis on the nature of African associational life and the extent to which it is taking on a politically organized form as an identifiable civil society. The author proposes a theoretical framework and research agenda that takes account of the capacity of either state or societal actors to exercise a range of options to engage or disengage.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , April 1989 , pp. 407 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1989

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References

1 I am not the first to explore this avenue of inquiry. Joel Migdal has questioned the assumption that state elites can always impose their political will in Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Samuel Huntington's classic, Political Order in Changing Societies New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, remains relevant twenty years after its publication because it explores the degree to which governments actually govern.

3 Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Bacl{In New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Whether a state is “strong” or “weak” depends upon the existence of legitimate political institutions which are capable of winning compliance for official policies without resort to violence against domestic populations; see Robert Jackman, Power Without Force: The Political Capacity of Nation-States (forthcoming). For a discussion of dominant and reflexive patterns of state formation see Bratton, Michael, “Patterns of Development and Underdevelopment: Towards a Comparison,” International Studies Quarterly 26 (September 1982), 333–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 This point of view is shared by theorists of diverse persuasions. Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Faletto have stressed that dependency experiences vary according to the timing of insertion into the world economy and the trajectory of local class conflicts; Dependency and Development in Latin America Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 1Google Scholar. Huntington has recently called for a reconsideration of the role of culture in explaining the different development paths taken for example in the Islamic, Sinic, Latin, and African regions; see “The Goals of Development,” in Weiner, Myron and Huntington, Samuel P., eds., Understanding Political Development Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 21–28Google Scholar.

5 Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Evans et al. (fn. 2), 20: see also Stepan, Alfred, State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; 1Kohli, Atul, ed., The State and Development in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Victor Azarya, “Reordering State-Society Relations: Incorporation and Disengagement,” in Rothchild and Chazan, 3–21, at 10; emphasis in original. I would add that the state is a set of organizations—legal, coercive, administrative—whose functionaries do not always act cohesively.

7 A definition of civil society is offered below (fn. 26).

8 Callaghy, Thomas, “The State as Lame Leviathan: The Patrimonial Administrative State in Africa,” in Ergas, Zaki, ed., The African State in Transition Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1987), 87–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Naomi Chazan, “State and Society in Africa: Images and Challenges,” in Rothchild and Chazan, 325–41, at 327.

10 Mazrui, Ali A., “Political Engineering in Africa,” International Social Science Journal 25, No. 2 (1983), 293Google Scholar.

11 Jackson, Robert H. and Rosberg, Carl G., “Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood,” World Politics 35 (October 1982), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Political scientists who studied African nationalism wrote copiously about voluntary associations, especially syncretic churches, welfare societies, and trade unions. See, for instance, Hodgkin, Thomas, Nationalism in Colonial Africa London: Frederick Muller, 1956)Google Scholar and Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Voluntary Associations,” in Coleman, James and Rosberg, Carl G., eds., Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), chap. 8Google Scholar.

13 Political scientists concomitantly turned their attention away from interest groups and political parties in favor of the executive instruments of the state.

14 For an earlier statement of Hyden's thesis see Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopmentandan Uncaptured Peasantry Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

15 Zolberg, Aristide, “The Structure of Political Conflict in the New States of Tropical Africa,” American Political Science Review 62, No. 1 (1968), 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17 Hirschman, Albert O., Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar. Hirschman argues that, as a political or economic system becomes monopolistic, so the prospect for exit declines and relevance of voice increases (p. 34). For Africans wishing to avoid a monopolistic state, the exit option is often costly and unpalatable: emigration, secession, retreat into subsistence, or illegal behavior. Because people are generally unwilling to make such heavy commitments, one would expect voice to play a larger role; certainly, the various manifestations of voice—from spontaneous protest to organized lobbying—require more attention in the literature on African politics. By the same token, however, voice is also costly, either in terms of transactions required to build collective organization or the personal risk involved in confronting entrenched power. As such, “the alternative is now not so much between voice and exit as between voice from within and voice from without” (p. 104). In the African context, we need to examine the relevance of the concept of boycott, “the weapon of customers who do not have an alternative source of supply [of] goods and services .. . but who can do temporarily without them” (p. 86). Boycott, a hybrid of exit and voice, is a conditional form of exit which promises reengagement with the state once its performance is improved.

18 Chabal reprints Sklar's essay as the first chapter in his book from African Studies Review 26 (September-December 1983), 11–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This essay was originally presented as a Presidential Address to the African Studies Association in November 1982.

19 Dunn, “The Politics of Representation and Good Government in Post-Colonial Africa,” in Chabal, 158–74.

20 Lonsdale, “Political Accountability in African History,” in Chabal, 126–57. al O'Brien, “Wails and Whispers: The People's Voice in West African Muslim Politics,' in Chabal, 71–83.

21 Or as Jean-Francois Bayart says in the centerpiece of the Chabal volume: “It seems most profitable to explain the continued quest for democracy as a commentary upon the relationship between state and civil society”; “Civil Society in Africa,” in Chabal, 109–25, at 111.

23 The concept of civil society was introduced by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right to distiguish the family—an extended group based on clan or kinship ties—from “a community of producers .. . together with the public services needed to maintain order within it”; Plamenatz, John, “The Social and Political Philosophy of Hegel,” Man and Society, Vol. II London: Longmans, 1963), 233Google Scholar. In civil society, rights and obligations are executed by written contract and by services for payment. Ultimately, civil society cannot maintain social harmony by methods used in the family, and a new structure of moral authority must be invented: the state. In Hegel's view, state and civil society overlap, for example by sharing administrative, coercive, and judicial institutions, “to the extent that their function is to reconcile personal and private interests, they are organs of civil society; to the extent that they serve to hold together a community whose members value it for what it is, they are organs of the State,” ibid., 250.

24 For Gramsci in The Prison Notebooks, the critical distinction is not between the realms of the public and the private, but rather whether political regimes and production systems are maintained by force or consent. He distinguishes “political society,” which is comprised of the coercive elements of the superstructure (army, police, courts), from “civil society,” which consists of ideological instruments (churches, schools, trade unions). Taken together, political society and civil society comprise Gramsci's broad definition of the state. The state has at its disposal instruments of both domination and hegemony; “individual societies can be analyzed in terms of the balance between, and specific manifestations of, these two types of social control”; Femia, Joseph V., Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 29Google Scholar

25 In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville saw voluntary associations as contributing to both political and civil life. An association consists of “the public and formal support of specific doctrines by a certain number of individuals who have undertaken to cooperate in a stated way in order to make these doctrines prevail”; de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, edited by Mayer, J. P. and Lerner, MaxNew York: Harper and Row, 1966), 175Google Scholar. Associations contribute to the development of political society by policy advocacy (”formulating laws which should take the place of present ones,” ibid.) and to the development of civil society by inculcating democratic values within small-scale organizations (”a civil government … [with] a place for individual independence,” ibid., 180). On the checking and balancing power of civic associations, de Tocqueville saw “no other dike to hold back tyranny,” ibid., 177.

26 Stepan, , Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3–4Google Scholar. He distinguishes the institutions of civil society (for example, “neighborhood associations, women's groups, religious groupings”) from the institutions of “political society” (political parties, elections, legislatures), in which the polity arranges itself for contestation over state power. Importantly, in authoritarian regimes, “political society is frequently absorbed by dominant groups into the state, but civil society characteristically has at least some spheres of autonomy,” ibid., 4.

27 See also Bayart (fn. 22), 117. In fairness, Bayart is nuanced on this point. In one breath he defines civil society as “society in its relation to the state . . . insofar as it is in confrontation with the state” (p. 111, following Fossaert, R., La societe, lesetats, Vol. 5 [Paris: Seuil, 1981], 146–47Google Scholar emphasis added). In the next breath he adds the rider that “the notion of civil society is thus an ambivalent (and not just conflictive), complex and dynamic relation between state and society” (ibid., 111; emphasis added).

28 As Bayart says, civil society “encompasses not only popular modes of political action . . . but also the claims of those socially dominant groups (merchants, businessmen, the clergy) which are no less excluded from direct participation in political power,” ibid., 112.

29 This edited volume is the product of a dozen African scholars who met in 1985 under the auspices of the Regional Perspectives Programme of the United Nations University.

30 Amin, “Preface: The State and the Question of Development,” in Nyong'o, 1–13, at 3.

31 Mamdani, “Contradictory Class Perspectives on the Question of Democracy: The Case of Uganda,” in Nyong'o, 78–95.

32 Nyong'o, “Introduction,” 14–25, at 23–24 Amin (fn. 30), 10; Harry Goulbourne, “The State, Development, and the Need for Participatory Democracy in Africa,” in Nyong'o, 26–47, at 46.

33 Campbell, “Challenging the Apartheid Regime from Below,” in Nyong'o, 142–69.

34 In an appendix, Campbell provides a comprehensive list of the grass-roots organizations which registered for the UDF National Conference in August 1983.

35 Nyong'o, “Popular Alliances and the State in Liberia, 1980–85,” in Nyong'o, 209–47 E”1- manuel Hansen, “The State and Popular Struggles in Ghana, 1982–86,” in Nyong'o, 170–208.

36 The Africa volume is one of a series of four publications emanating from the Project on Democracy in Developing Countries sponsored by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

37 Cf. the cross-national analysis of 80 countries in Vol. I of the study.

38 In extolling the virtues of enduring political competition in Botswana, Gambia, and Mauritius, for example, Diamond equates “liberal democracy” with “multiparty regime” and “free and fair elections”; “Introduction: Roots of Failure, Seeds of Hope,” in Diamond et al., 1–32, at 1, 5; see also 18–20. Are these institutions a “condition” for democracy or a “measure” of it?

39 As Diamond later pithily puts it: “Democracy requires moderation and constraint. It demands not only that people care about political competition, but also that they not care too much. . . . Throughout much of Africa . . . everything of value is at stake in an election, and hence candidates, communities, and parties feel compelled to win at any cost”; “Nigeria: Pluralism, Statism and the Struggle for Democracy,” in Diamond et al., 33–91, at 69.

40 Ibid., 56, 59.

41 Christian Coulon, “Senegal: The Development and Fragility of Semidemocracy,” in Diamond et al., 141–78, at 159; see also 164–65 on the regional separatist movement and 173–74 on Islam's new role of mobilization and protest.

42 Masipula Sithole, “Zimbabwe: In Search of a Stable Democracy,” in Diamond et al., 217–57, at 244.

43 The papers were originally presented in July 1985 at an international workshop on “The Reordering of the State in Africa,” held at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

44 Azarya (fn. 6), 5, 18.

45 Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan, “Preface,” in Rothchild and Chazan, ix–x, at ix.

46 Chazan, “Patterns of State-Society Incorporation and Disengagement in Africa,” in Rothchild and Chazan, 121–48, at 123. See also Rene Lemarchand, “The State, the Parallel Economy, and the Changing Structure of Patronage Systems,” in Rothchild and Chazan, 149–70.

47 Magendo is a Swahili word for black marketeering.

48 Donald Rothchild and Michael W. Foley, “African States and the Politics of Inclusive Coalitions,” in Rothchild and Chazan, 233–64. An earlier Chazan article is more explicit: “The New Politics of Participation in Tropical Africa,” Comparative Politics 14 (January 1982), 169–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Chazan (fn. 9), 337. She adds: “Viewed from above, institutional mechanisms have been undergoing a process of contraction and disaggregation. But from below, social and economic niches have been carved out and are beginning to interact and adhere in new ways,” ibid

50 For a first step in this direction see Bratton, Michael, “The Politics of Government-NGO Relations in Africa,” World Development 17 (April 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Other writers have made the positive-sum case that the interests of state elites can sometimes be enhanced by political mobilization in civil society: for example, see Esman, Milton J. and Uphoff, Norman, Local Organizations: Intermediaries in Rural Development Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 40Google Scholar; and Alfred Stepan, “State Power in the Southern Cone of Latin America,” in Evans et al. (fn. 2), 418.

52 Joel Barkan and Frank Holmquist conceive of peasant-style “bargaining,” which nicely captures the reciprocity and indeterminacy of two-way state-society relations. They see selfhelp activities in civil society as “contested terrain that has experienced a changing balance of forces and has produced different outcomes over time”; World Politics XLI (April 1989), 359–380, at 362Google Scholar.