06 Medialities in the Regulation of State Crisis in Africa Interrogating the Institution of Expert Groups for Political Reforms in Mali, Guinee and Burkina Faso

Chair: Natewinde Sawadogo

In Mali, Guinee and Burkina Faso, groups of militaries have perpetrated coups d’Etat, following which they have respectively set up experts committees, with a relatively large representation of academics, to draft regulatory instruments and propose an agenda for political transition in the respective countries. This new dynamic hardly coincides with the literature on the “African state”. For example, Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) demonstrated that what is considered as modern political institutions Africans inherited from colonisation are in fact transfigurations of European despotic, feudal, institutional designs. Fundamentally, one struggles to disambiguate the African precolonial political systems Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1964) described, with Bayard’s postcolonial state of the belly (Bayard 2006), the patrimonial state of Médard (Faure and Médard 1982; Médard 1991), the imported state of Badie (1992), Hilgers and Mazzocchetti’s semi-authoritarian state (Hilgers and Mazzocchetti 2010). What ethnographic studies of African bureaucracies add to this is simply methodological, by empirically studying what patrimonial state means (Blundo and al. 2006; 2009). Any attempt to different perspective falls in the trap of African political exceptionalism (Terray 1989; Loada 2006). While Breckenridge (2014) provides a useful lens for studying the materiality of the state in Africa that includes its “coordinating bureaucracy”, his argument still falls in line with that of his predecessors. Indeed, he believe that “The state on the African continent has done little of the cultural work that historians have demonstrated in detail elsewhere, and its grasp over the social, where it exists at all, has long been feeble” (Breckenridge 2014:6). In consequence his study departs from an idea of the state that resembles “the expert (and omnipotent) bureaucracy; what Weber saw as the revolutionary agent of rationalization” (Breckenridge 2014:11). Building on the political dynamics in the three countries or elsewhere in Africa, panellists are asked to address the following question: Are we witnessing a new state project? Towards what audiences (national/international/social/political) are these “new" choices of expertise directed ? What do they mean? Are they likely to have an impact?

Panelists:

• Ayokunle Olumuyiwa OMOBOWALE, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
• Natéwindé SAWADOGO, University of Ki-Zerbo, ACC Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
• Hervé YAO, University of Ki-Zerbo, ACC Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

abstracts of contributions

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