Afrika Seminar: Regeringsproblemer efter statskollaps i Somalia

TIME: Thursday, 14 February, 15.15 – 17.00

VENUE: Auditorium 12, CAS, Købmagergade 46, 4. floor, 1150 Copenhagen K.

TIME: Thursday, 14 February, 15.15 – 17.00

VENUE: Auditorium 12, CAS, Købmagergade 46, 4. floor, 1150 Copenhagen K.

What happens to the state when it collapses? This seminar offers an alternative interpretation of state collapse and its aftermath in sub-Saharan Africa. It focuses on Somalia, the most prominent example of prolonged state breakdown, to draw attention to the survival of stately artefacts, practices and meanings as populations reproduce the state in its absence. Spectres of the defunct Somali Democratic Republic state have haunted the Somali territories since 1991. They materialise in the continued circulation of legal tender, the recycling of state imaginaries, and the reprensentation of juridical fictions in international diplomacy.

As sovereign afterlives, they are concomitantly ‘state’ and ‘non-state’, challenging our understanding of both state- and society-centric explanations of state faliure. Following a critical discussion of the state failure debate and an empirical exploration of stately practices in the post-1991 Somalia, an analytics is suggested that captures! both state and non-state figurations of state failure in terms of plural problematics of government.

Tobias Hagmann is Associate Professor in International Development at Roskilde University, and a research associate/fellow with the Political Geography group at the University of Zurich, and the Rift Valley Institute in Nairobi/London. He is interested in the political sociology of the state, armed conflict and its consequences, and natural resource management in the global South. He has conducted fieldwork on conflict and political developments in Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and, most recently, the Somali diaspora in the US.

He is co-editor with Didier Péclard of Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa (Development and Change, Vol 41, No 4, 2010). His most recent book, co-edited with Jon Abbink, is Reconfiguring Ethiopia: The Politics of Authoritarian Reform (Routledge, 2013). See also http://tobiashagmann.freeflux.net/

Discussant: Dr Lars Buur, Danish Institute for International Development