Overview

African governments need to accommodate contradicting expectations of international donors and domestic power groups. What concrete practices or practical norms exist and emerge in this area of conflict will be looked at by comparing the countries Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.

Duration:
01 October 2018 - 14 September 2022

Research Team:
Jude Kagoro (Head of project)
Julian Friesinger
Prof. Dr. Klaus Schlichte

Details

African governments need to accommodate contradicting expectations. While they pursue their own political agenda, international donors press towards a rationalization of state agencies and insist on political and economic liberalization. Domestic power groups try to reconfigure policies advanced by the development partners to enhance their prospects of preserving and maximizing their interests within the realm of the state. Furthermore, agents of African governments seem to pursue a classical “image of the state”. Ideas like sovereignty, territory and population are supreme in this very concept of the state.

Starting with this understanding of contradictory expectations and using historical political sociology as theoretical framework, this project aims at identifying the political figurations that result from these constellations. We assume that the quality of relationships will shape the guiding implicit and explicit patterns of action. Our research question is thus: What are the practical norms that guide African government officials’ and donor staff in figurations of internationalized rule?
By practical norms we mean a set of actions that is context-specific and pragmatic. This allows us to see that not all behavior of agents of African states can be explained by the simple dichotomy of social norms (private) and official norms (public).

Three cases - Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya - will be investigated based on a semi-structured, reiterative logic of comparison. While Rwanda and Uganda are understood as post-war settings, the analysis of Kenya will bring to light, if practical norms are substantially different in a country that has not experienced a war in recent times. Different research methods will be used: Beyond document analysis and expert interviews, it attempts to use multi-sited participant observation as an innovation for the study of internationalized politics in Africa.
The project will contribute to an understanding of African politics that is less burdened with normative expectations (democracy, development, security) and would allow both, scholars and practitioners, to better grasp what the figuration, the web of relations, of internationalized rule consists of.

Funded by the DFG

Duration:
01 October 2018 - 14 September 2022

Research Team:
Jude Kagoro (Head of project)
Julian Friesinger
Prof. Dr. Klaus Schlichte

Project Type:
Third party project

Project Partner
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi (London School of Economics); Duncan Omanga (Moi University Kenya)

Publications