Changing stateness in Africa: Ghana, Ethiopia and Mozambique compared

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This project wants to contribute to the debate on the nature and practice of the state in Africa by focusing on, firstly, the subjective experience of and expectations towards changing stateness in selected African countries and, secondly, on the circulating models of stateness that are attractive to African elites. We assume that the functions states have to perform as well as expectations of people on what states should do are changing as a result of uneven processes of unequal globalization. Firstly, we are interested in how, under these circumstances, state institutions master the adaptation and cultural coding of creativity when they translate external concepts of 'state' into local ones. Secondly, we investigate how core actors in these processes of adaptation and cultural coding (i.e. discourse entrepreneurs) imagine and practice changing stateness in Africa. Thirdly, we are analysing how the state has mastered the challenges of the 1960s (national integration) and the 1990s (re-democratisation and accelerated process of globalization) and how this is narrated today. And finally we want to understand how these processes produce new forms of national order and transnational entanglements. The project is designed as a comparative study on Cameroon (phase I and II), Ethiopia, Ghana and Mozambique (phases II and III, resp.). The project is inspired by the spatial turn and focuses from an actor centred perspective on transnational entanglements; it is historicizing and employs the methodology of transferts culturel-studies.