TERRITORIAL POLITICS AND THE REACH Of THE STATE: UNEVENNESS BY DESIGN

Guillermo O'Donnell drew attention to the existence of "brown spots" in the political topography of Latin American states, which he defined as peripheral regions or districts in which the presence of the republican state is attenuated and more arbitrary forms of power -- neofeudal, sultanistic, personalistic, and clientelistic -- hold sway. Similarly uneven projections of republican state authority, citizenship rights, and access to the legal and political institutions of the modern state are visible across most sub-Saharan African countries. Analysts like Mahmood Mamdani (1996) and Issa Shivji (2006) have described the rural areas (where approximately 60-70% of the sub-Saharan population now resides) as governed under neocustomary or administrative despotism, in contrast to the more open and liberal political orders prevailing in the cities, especially for the middle classes. The character of state authority and the quality of citizenship vary both functionally and territorially (and along class lines), precisely as O'Donnell described.This paper takes up the question of explaining uneveness in the territorial reach of the state. Part I reviews three different (perhaps converging) ways of explaining unevenness in the reach of the state: (a.) a geographic, economic, and demographic determinism perspective, (b.) a historical-sociological perspective, and (b.) a political perspective centered on strategic bargaining between social actors and state actors. Drawing on these perspectives, we propose that heterogeneity (unevenness) of scale and scope is often an artifact of state-building, rather than a sign of the failure thereof. We can call this "unevenness by design." Part II illustrates some of these dynamics in a consideration of territorially-uneven state-building strategies in modern Africa, where the rise of state infrastructural capacity in the 1950-1980 period was followed by a general decline in state capacity in most states starting in the mid-1980s, in an era of economic liberalization and state retrenchment. Cote d'Ivoire serves as a case in point, drawing on Boone (2007).