Suchergebnisse

'The Agony of Algeria' by Martin Stone is reviewed.

Examines tribal loyalties, state autonomy, and development of modern institutions in sub-Saharan Africa through analysis of patterns of land reform; case studies. Examples include Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and other countries.

Theimperative to regulate and redistribute land has become almost universal to governments in the developing world. In Africa, this kind of policy has been couched in impressive language that justifies increasing regulatory control as the only viable way to revolutionise the productive use of land for national development. Land reforms often signify one element of a larger trend involving the expansion of the state at the expense of other forms of societal authority. As such, they represent the frontier of a widening struggle over legitimacy and control between 'state' and 'society'. Scholars from a wide variety of intellectual traditions have recently shown increasing interest in exploring the nature and impact of the state. However, the overall utility of such an approach in helping us to understand political developments in Africa has often been hindered by the absence of empirical data.

The first years following independence in Africa were an exciting time for scholars who rushed off to observe the emerging politics of new states across the continent. The analytical frameworks these scholars brought with them for the purpose of interpreting what they saw were largely borrowed from mainstream models derived from the study of American politics that were widely popular at the time. However, soon after the early independence era (1956–1966), it became obvious that a sole focus on the formal structures and functions of state and society revealed little about the actual practice of politics. Across the continent, governments were suffering from constitutional failures, an inability to offer a consistent application of regulatory mechanisms or enforceable law; and few states could even extract sufficient revenue to support either pre-existing colonial-era governmental structures or the many new ambitious projects undertaken by politicians soon after independence.