Ghana news briefing
Governed differently: The political economy of state absence in Africa
It displaced one governance arrangement with another one that, for some communities, offered more predictable taxation and dispute resolution than the predatory formal state.
From the Sahel to the Horn, from the Lake Chad Basin to eastern Congo, policymakers and security analysts deploy it to describe territories where the formal state appears to have evaporated.
Jeffrey Herbst's work on state capacity and political geography similarly showed that large African states with dispersed populations and resource-poor hinterlands face structural disincentives to extend bureaucratic control.
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