Suchergebnisse

This article analyses a longstanding ethno-political conflict between Kusasis and Mamprusis in Bawku in north-east Ghana. A double argument is pursued. First, while communal conflict and violence challenge the state and expose its incapacity, the conflicts (played out over chieftaincy, party politics, land, markets, names of places etc.) at the same time invoke a powerful idea of the state as the most significant institution to qualify claims as rights or discard them as illegitimate. Second, the broad variety of social conflicts has effectively been cut to fit an ethnic distinction. Thus, the various conflictual issues have 'confirmed' and structured each other. The antagonisms have been crystallised and a pattern entrenching conflict between the two groups has been perpetuated. The article draws historical lines from the 1930s to the present, linking national policy to local politics and political culture with a particular focus on the political manifestations vis-à-vis the state and the use of 'history' to justify claims.

Literature on the African state often finds it hard to specify what is state and what is not. The closer one gets to a particular political landscape, the more apparent it becomes that many institutions have something of a twilight character. This article argues that studies of local politics in Africa should focus on how the public authority of institutions waxes and wanes and how political competition among individuals and organizations expresses the notion of state and public authority. This is explored in the context of contemporary political struggles in Niger, played out in three different arenas in the region of Zinder around 1999, as home–town associations, chieftaincies and vigilante groups all take on the mantle of public authority in their dealings with what they consider to be their antithesis, the 'State'.

Niger experienced two major political reforms since 1986: a land tenure reform, a Rural Code, aimed at increasing security for the rural population through a codification and formalisation of indigenous land rights, followed by constitutional democracy in the early 1990s. Both reforms aimed at securing some basic rights and were expected to confer legitimacy on the state. The conjuncture of the two, however, unleashed an intensive political struggle, competition over jurisdiction between politico‐legal institutions and the decline of legitimacy of state institutions.