Relocating African Agency: Assessing the Role of ‘Local Patrons’ and Chinese Enterprises in the Construction Sector in Ghana

Contrary to the conventional notion that African agency outside of the state is marginal if not irrelevant, this paper argues that it is ‘local patrons’ in Africa who are actually the most powerful determinants of the success of Chinese enterprises in Africa. These ‘local patrons’ exact financial resources from the Chinese in exchange for their services as brokers between state officials. Specifically, their ‘informal connections’ to local state authorities enables them to insure the Chinese firms against official state prosecution/demands as well as facilitate related bureaucratic procedures. Using the case of the Chinese construction firms operating in Ghana, we will investigate the challenges experienced by Chinese firms entering into new markets and the strategies utilised by them to address and mitigate risk in their search for profit, chief amongst them the employment of ‘local patrons’ to serve as brokers with state officials. This relocation of agency, drawing from scholarship by Mohan, Lampert and Soule-Kohndou as well as the empirical materials based on substantive fieldwork, provides new insights into terms of engagement with local actors that form a bonded relationship facilitating integration of Chinese enterprises into the African political economy.

“Substantial Mutuality”: The Road to Trust between NGOs’ stakeholders

Multi-level governance materialises in the chain of influence between donors, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), local partners and beneficiaries. This stepped relationship is often characterised by a degree of mutual mistrust and by divergent interests. It exists in a realm between formal highly bureaucratised and standardised development systems coupled with ineffective management practices, short-term agendas and lack of interpersonal relations, which undermine the creation of mutuality between the former and mostly informal stakeholders at the receiving end. This enquiry on “leadership as process” examines the role of NGOs in creating “substantial” mutuality in this chain of relationships. The data collected showed that there is a gap between upstream (donors and NGOs) objectives and the context in which they operate. The study concludes that by establishing mutuality and ownership NGOs can bridge the gap and limitations of the current system. Keyword: multi-level governance; non-governmental organisations; leadership-as-process; trust; development agendas

Re-imagining framework for Leadership Analysis

This essay presents a new six-stage framework for leadership analysis. This essay will discuss the foundations of the framework as well as each of the six stages. The hope is that this framework will prove to be both accessible and effective for scholars to use when studying instances leadership and their consequences.

Leadership and Peacebuilding: The Role of Young People in Countering Violent Extremism in North East Nigeria

The involvement of some young people as foot soldiers of extremist groups has led to the stereotype of youth in general as perpetrators of violence and a threat to peace and stability. That is why many commentaries and media reportage on Nigeria portray young people as perpetrators of violence or victims of conflict. However, this picture of young people is incomplete because it fails to acknowledge the role of young people as peacebuilders. This commentary examines the role of young people in countering violent extremism in North East Nigeria and focuses on the North East Intellectual Entrepreneurship Fellowship (NEIEF) Fellows as a case study. I argue that young people who actively joined extremist groups represent a small minority of the youth population. The majority of young people in North East Nigeria have been actively working to counter extremist narratives of violence.

Revisiting Governance: Extended Statehood in Africa and Beyond

This article sets the theme for this issue. Weberian understanding of statehood has been valid and dominant for 100 years. However, it no longer reflects the complex dynamics of the superstructure resting on the social contract. One must acknowledge the widening frame of social and political influence and take it into account to make true sense of decades of failure in attempted state-building. Africa provides the scene for this argument as original focus of an ALC research project on the State in, and of, the Global South. Resulting from empirical evidence and analysis, this article not only offers the post-Weberian model of Extended Statehood, but also suggests its applicability within the realities of multilevel governance. Formal political order, even if remaining essential, has become a co-dependent element subject to fluctuating spheres of power. This research makes such dynamics visible.

Governing Dahiya: Interrogating the State in Beirut’s Southern Suburbs

Lebanon, a multi-confessional country with an established consociational democracy, is facing the threat of slipping into state failure as it grapples with its soaring political and economic crisis. The country’s governing system has come under increased and perhaps unprecedented scrutiny since the outbreak of popular protests in 2019 as many accuse an oligarchic political and sectarian elite of subordinating the State to their private interests. Based on an empirical examination of the politics of post-war reconstruction in Beirut’s southern suburbs, this article examines regimes of rule beyond the limitations of the seemingly dichotomous categories of State and non-state. The empirical inquiry presented in this article argues for a state analysis that is less concerned with discerning and deciphering where the State begins (or ought to begin) and where its non-state other(s) end (or ought to end), but is concerned instead with unpacking the real and messy workings of government. Rather than relativising the weak-state thesis, this article seeks to extend and complicate our understanding of the State (in Lebanon and beyond) by locating regimes of rule within a broader, dynamically evolving social whole.

Revisiting Governance: Extended Statehood in Africa and Beyond

This article sets the theme for this issue. Weberian understanding of statehood has been valid and dominant for 100 years. However, it no longer reflects the complex dynamics of the superstructure resting on the social contract. One must acknowledge the widening frame of social and political influence and take it into account to make true sense of decades of failure in attempted state-building. Africa provides the scene for this argument as original focus of an ALC research project on the State in, and of, the Global South. Resulting from empirical evidence and analysis, this article not only offers the post-Weberian model of Extended Statehood, but also suggests its applicability within the realities of multilevel governance. Formal political order, even if remaining essential, has become a co-dependent element subject to fluctuating spheres of power. This research makes such dynamics visible.

The Battle for Guatemala: Multilevel Governance and the Nation-state

Although a brutal Civil War ended in 1996 and a democratisation process was initiated, Guatemalan statehood remains contested. Due to a historical process defined by elite capture and extreme repression, the State never fully consolidated. As a result, formal institutions tasked with political and economic governance are not as robust or effective as the informal institutions. There have been important developments. For instance, a myriad of social actors was able to carve out a space of public political and economic resistance which continues to this day. Notwithstanding these advances, Guatemala is now facing widespread insecurity as a result of the rise of transnational drug-trafficking, and the presence of gangs and cartels. The current crisis has worsened historic and structural injustices. In this regard, security governance is never an isolated issue. It is deeply interwoven with political and economic forms of governance. Due to the weak political governance, cartels and gangs can operate with near impunity. Then, because of weak economic governance, there are countless desperately poor youths willing to enter the drug trade. To address these security issues, it is crucial to look at the institutional, political and social factors which have shaped the national context.

Reconciling Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism: The North African Leadership Dilemma

The purpose of this research to examine the challenges Arab leaders face in simultaneously adhering to Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism and extract conditions in which the two ideologies can be reconciled to produce mutual benefits. This study poses the question: what strategies do North-African leaders deploy to balance their Pan-Arab and Pan-African commitments and what repercussions do these strategies have on the state of Arab-African relations? By drawing on two scenarios where Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism conflicted, namely the 1967-1979 Arab-Israeli Conflict and the 2011 Libyan civil war, it will highlight the role leadership can play in mediating such tensions. The study finds that it is only through the decrease of hegemonic pursuits and the increase in effective leadership processes both domestically and regionally that the two ideologies can coexist.

Developmental State and Ethnic Federalism in Ethiopia:

The ethnic federalization of the post-1991 Ethiopia and the subsequent adoption of developmental state paradigm are the two most important pillars for the country’s political and economic restructuring. An interventionist developmental state model is opted for against the dominant narrative of the non-interventionist neo-liberal approach as the right path to conquer poverty: a source of national humiliation. On the other hand, ethnically federated Ethiopia is considered as an antidote to the historical pervasive mismanagement of the ethno-linguistic and cultural diversity of the polity. The presence of these seemingly paradoxical state models in Ethiopia makes it a captivating case study for analysis. Ethiopia’s experiment of pursuing a developmental state in a decentralized form of governance not only deviates from the prevalent pattern but also is perceived to be inherently incompatible due to the competing approaches that characterize the two systems. This article argues that the way in which the developmental state is being practiced in Ethiopia is eroding the values and the very purposes of ethnic federalism. Its centralized, elitist and authoritarian nature, which are the hallmark of the Ethiopian developmental state, defeats the positive strides that ethnic federalism aspires to achieve, thereby causing discontent and disenfranchisement among a swathe of the society. The article posits that the developmental state can and should be reinvented in a manner that goes in harmony with the ideals of ethnic federalism. The notion of process-based leadership remains one way of reinventing the Ethiopian developmental state model.