Spatial Inequalities in African Political Economy

非洲国家次国家区域的不平等如何形成冲突、竞争和政治动员的模式？种族认同是非洲社会政治竞争和分裂的唯一驱动因素吗，正如许多新闻工作，甚至许多政治学工作所表明的那样？到目前为止，这些问题很难回答，因为学者们缺乏一种次国家、微观层面和地方机构的数据，而这些数据是检验区域和地方社会经济不平等之间的联系以及地方、区域和国家政治竞争模式之间联系的假设所需要的。该项目的主要目标是发展解决这一分析和政策问题所需的理论和数据。基于我们早期的研究和我们伦敦经济学院资助的试点研究的结果，我们的目标是表明，在对非洲政治竞争和冲突的政策和社会科学理解中，区域化竞争的经济、社会经济和制度驱动因素被系统地忽视了。我们的研究结果应该将学者和政策制定者的注意力从过分强调政治认同（种族）作为政治驱动因素的简单化分析转移到政策和行政改革可修正的因素——制度和地区不平等——作为竞争和冲突的驱动因素。尽管许多学者认识到非洲国家的特点是次国家区域之间的极端差异，但关于撒哈拉以南非洲国家区域不平等的政治影响的数据和理论仍然缺乏（Brown and Langer 2009）。这种差距对学者、政策制定者和公民来说都是代价高昂的：社会科学家知道，高度的空间或“水平”不平等与严重打击非洲国家的社会政治弊病有关。这些包括公共产品供应不足，深刻的社会分裂，围绕不平等和排斥的政治不满的突出，以及国内冲突（Stewart 2000）。PI和跨学科研究团队具有独特的优势，可以将新的数据和分析技术与非洲国家区域和领土动态的政治经济学方面的深厚实质性专业知识相结合。我们在非洲政治研究中开辟了新天地，利用空间数据揭示了区域主义、经济发展不平衡和领土不平等的动态，这些因素推动了政治联盟的建立、群体动员以及党派和派系在基本政策选择上的竞争。在我们所代表的社会科学领域：政治学、地理学、经济史和发展研究中，这种工作没有类似的或先例。我们相信，我们的研究将为所有这些领域的非洲空间不平等研究制定新的研究议程。我们的研究成果——大约6-8篇在高影响力场所发表的开放获取期刊长度的文章，我们所有已发表作品的公开复制数据集，开放获取政策报告和伦敦政治经济学院工作文件，博客文章和播客，由伦敦政治经济学院非洲中心和内罗毕英国东非研究所主办的三年级会议，来自学术和政策界的演讲者和讨论者，和布恩的一本大学出版社出版的书（项目结束2年后）——将为理解非洲国家政治联盟和政治竞争背后的领土动态开辟新的学术前沿。

How do inequalities across subnational regions within African countries shape patterns of conflict, competition, and political mobilization? Is ethnic identity the only driver of political competition and division in African societies, as much journalistic work, and even much work in political science, would suggests? So far, these questions have been difficult to answer because scholars have lacked the kind of subnational, micro-level, and local institutional data that is needed to test hypotheses about the connection between regional and local socio-economic inequalities, on the one hand, and local, regional, and national patterns of political competition, on the other hand. The main objective of this project is to develop the theory and data needed to solve this analytic and policy problem. Based on our earlier research and the results of our LSE-funded pilot study, our objective is to show that there are economic, socio-economic and institutional drivers of regionalized competition that have been systematically overlooked in policy and social-scientific understandings of political competition and conflict in Africa. Our results should shift scholars' and policy-makers' attention away from simplistic analyses that overemphasize political identity (ethnicity) as a driver of politics, and toward factors amendable to policy and administrative reforms -- institutions and regional inequalities -- as drivers of competition and conflict. Lack of data and theory about the political effects of regional inequalities in sub-Saharan African countries persists in spite of the fact that many scholars recognize that African countries are characterized by extreme disparities across subnational regions (Brown and Langer 2009). This gap is costly for scholars, policy makers, and citizens alike: social scientists know that very high levels of spatial or "horizontal" inequality are correlated with socio-political ills that hit African countries hard. These include the underprovision of public goods, deep social cleavages, the prominence of political grievances around inequality and exclusion, and civil conflict (Stewart 2000). The PI and interdisciplinary research team are uniquely positioned to combine new data and analytic techniques with deep substantive expertise in the political economy of regional and territorial dynamics in African countries. We break new ground in the study of African politics by using spatial data to reveal the dynamics regionalism, uneven economic development, and territorial inequalities that drive political coalition-building, group mobilization, and partisan and factional rivalries over fundamental policy choices. There is no equivalent or precedent for this kind of work in the fields of social science that we represent: political science, geography, economic history, and development studies. We believe that our research will chart-out new research agendas for the study of African spatial inequalities across all these fields. Our research outputs -- approximately 6-8 open-access journal length articles in high-impact venues, publicly-available replication data sets for all our published work, open-access policy reports and LSE working papers, blog posts and podcasts, Year 3 conferences hosted by the LSE Africa Centre in London and the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi with presenters and discussants from the academic and policy communities, and a university press book by Boone (2 years after the end of the project) -- will open new scholarly frontiers in understanding of territorial dynamics underlying political coalitions and political competition in African countries.