Dunn
and Englebert Chapter 3
People,
Identity, and Politics
(review
provided by Pelin Sazak and Saban Emre Karakaya)
Here, we aim to produce an overview of
how and why people mobilize and act collectively in Africa in order to
understand African politics. People, identity, and politics are highly
overlapping and certain dimensions of social realms need to be taken into
consideration. Every dimension will be explained briefly and these are the
following: ethnicity, religion, social class and class politics, gender
inequality and women’s participation, and lastly civil society.
Ethnicity
Africa
is more ethnically heterogeneous than the rest of the world. However, the
question of how to define a category of an ethnic group is significant. Considering
with nuances and fluidity of cultural features, where does an ethnic group
start and where does it end? In a given country, ethnically heterogeneity
depends on how we define an ethnic group and what is our theoretical
understanding of ethnicity. There are three main theoretical approaches to
ethnic identity in Africa that would be considered: Primordialism,
Constructivism, and Instrumentalism.
Firstly,
Primordialism is a view of ethnicity as a deep-rooted, ancestral, and irreducible
part of one’s identity. Besides the national identities, individuals have
preexisting or even permanent ahistorical ethnic identities. According to Primordialism, Ethnic diversity
of Africa is understood as a cause of conflict and an explanation for the poor
functioning of its states. Individuals have allegiance to their ethnic group or
their tribe and this led to a two-faced public sphere. One of the faces is the
civic public which is the extension of the colonial state, and the other one is
the primordial public which encompasses traditional village life. The tension
and confrontation between these two spheres caused that state became an
alienated institution and elites are expected to tap the resources of the state
in order to benefit their ethnic community. The states do not simply deal with
cultural heterogeneity but face with competing loyalties of the same general
order as the nation-state. This approach offers a theoretical explanation for
phenomena such as civil wars, separatism, and irredentism.
Secondly,
Constructivism asserts that ethnic identities are malleable and the outcome of
some other factors. By contrast with the deeply rooted and ahistorical
understanding of ethnicity, ethnic identities can be invented, constructed, or
rendered more or less salient. Colonization was one of the circumstances that
triggered the political salience of ethnic identity. Colonizers imposed or
crystallized tribal categories upon Africans. These identities may have existed
before or been simply invented. With urbanization and migration to the new
cities, different groups encountered each other and became aware of their
different identities, especially as they occasionally faced different
treatments from the colonizers. Urban became a locus of ethnic differentiation
and polarization. When they migrated back to rural areas, they carried their
new identities with themselves. After the colonial era, the need for rulers to
bridge the urban-rural gap to extend their hegemony led them to a
retribalization of the state, as they sought alliances with local, tribally
defined leadership. Hence, the ethnic groups have unequally benefited from the
postcolonial state and this has induced polarization among them. Constructivism
explains how different political identities such as both ethnic polarization
and nationalist fervor are displayed simultaneously. The same individuals may
find themselves part of different groups at different points in time or
concurrently. These identity transformations are responses to the dynamics of
the accumulation process as competition intensified for access to state power
and resources.
Thirdly,
Instrumentalism focuses on the uses of ethnicity by political entrepreneurs and
sees the ethnic groups as political coalitions. The ethnicity is not some
primitive level of identity that disappears in the process of modernization,
but a phenomenon seen as a rational response to modernization. Interest
coalitions are established in order to gain control over the administrative
mechanisms of the modernization process, which allocate public resources. Thus,
Modernization and ethnic conflict, or competition end up being two sides of the
same coin. The likelihood of ethnic self-identification (as opposed to class or
occupational self-identification) increases as nears a presidential election
and instrumentalists infer that ethnic identity is an instrument in the
competition for political power. This results from the fear that others from
different ethnic groups will vote along ethnic lines. They suggested that
ethnicity persists for strategic reasons rather than reflecting ancestral
bonds.
On the other hand,
governments respond to ethnic challenges in different ways. Repression is one
of the ways and the Nation-building policy of governments is based on the
strategy of undermining ethnic ties. The other way is the accommodation and that is the formal legal incorporation of
ethnicity into political systems. The ethnicity is not only recognized but also
legally integrated at the root of the nation-building strategy. It becomes, in
theory, a building block of the state rather than a competitor to it.
Despite the ethnic
conflicts and competitions in the continent, identification with the nation,
surprisingly, supersedes the identification with the ethnic group. National
identities have been shaped by African elites, who stand to gain legitimacy
from the rise of nationalist sentiment against the traditional leaders. The
ideological justification for them to take control of the colonial state and using
nationalism as a credible alternative to ethnicity. The development of national
identity is partly the outcome of survival strategies based on the
instrumentalization of the state. Individuals may have other identities,
including ethnicity, but the only identity that gives them access to the state
and its opportunities is the national one. This view is also compatible with
simultaneous ethnic sentiments. While national identity is necessary to support
claims for access to the state, ethnicity provides a principle for the
distribution of these benefits. National and subnational sentiments are thus
jointly produced.
Religion
Religion
is another key component of identity mobilization in Africa ever since the
economic liberalization efforts in the 1990s. With the increased presence of
religion within the public sphere, diverse religions spread across the
continent. Religious distribution in Africa is characterized by diversity both
within countries and denominations within the religion. Ethnic conflicts have
been influenced by religious differences from time to time; becoming markers of
political identity. Domestic politics and changing religious patterns in the
world influence the distributions as well. Christianity expanded with the
colonial conquest of Europe, and it is still projected to be the largest
religious group in sub-Saharan Africa. Denominational variations are
remarkable. In addition to economic crises and widespread poverty, systematic
missionary work plays an important role in the spread of Pentecostalism and
Evangelism. Christian churches have gained importance by offering solidarity
networks, provision of services such as health and education. They also get
involved in politics because religions, in general, provide an accessible
instrument of mobilization. Islam, on the other hand, has existed in Africa
before colonization and currently is growing faster than Christianity. Sufism
takes a large part, but after the 1990s, it has been challenged by activist
fundamentalist movements. Defending “Islamic reforms” and keeping close ties
with the Arab world were the main motives behind these movements, but it has
not gained so much momentum across the continent. The radicalization of Islam
has caused polarization and fear for the plural religious structure in many
African societies. Besides Christianity and Islam, indigenous spiritual beliefs
continue to exist without the likelihood of disappearing with modernization.
Witchcraft has evolved in time and contributes to the system of political
accountability.
Social Classes and Class
Politics
Class
analysis has always been a significant element in understanding social systems
and politics. Africa displays the formation of class and class analysis in
different aspects, as opposed to the Western sense. There is a lack of
industrialization and proper capitalist production, in turn, leads to the absence
of capital owning class and ultimately to the highly restricted speed of
industrial capitalism. So the players of the game alter in Africa, states
represent the modernized nationalist bourgeois. As scholars analyze the
relationship between the African states and social classes, two prominent class
approach has evolved: Marxist theory and dependency theory. Without further
details, it has been concluded in the book that the African class approach must
avoid dogmatism and show flexibility in the use of class concepts, thereby should
use unorthodox methods. In contrast with Western sense, classes in Africa
coalesce around the state and the class struggles are not the dominant mode of
class action. In an adverse way, it is the exercise of power by those who
control social organization that led to the formation of the dominant class,
meaning that class relations are determined by relations of power, not
production. Once the dominant class is formed and since they reconstruct the
existing organization of authority; in the end, nationalization and
expropriations become the ways in which economic consolidation occurs. In short,
these tendencies explain both the anticapitalistic and authoritarian
characteristics of African regimes. The authors pointed out that gaining access
to the state is gaining access to resources and thus political corruption
becomes the primary means of the accumulation of wealth, in turn, justifies
patronage and exploitation via structural inequality.
Gender
inequality and women’s participation
Women in Africa face physical hardship, higher rates of
maternal mortality, unequal opportunities in education and employment, violence
at home and in public space, discrimination, limited access to land, or other
types of property. They have less time for leis and lack control over their own
sexuality and reproductive functions while being largely unrepresented in
politics. Almost every society was patriarchal during pre-colonial times. The Colonial
system further strengthens male dominance and furthered gendered division of
labor and marginalization of women in the political sphere. Although the era of
independence promised liberation and inclusion for women, officials call for
women to a bonded their recently acquired leadership roles and return to
subordinate roles of domesticity for the sake of post-independence nation-building.
Women’s limited access to political parties and influence on policymaking is
prevalent, although at different scales, in African states, even though the 1990s
face relative political opening, yet with more or less the same foggy situation
for women. Thanks to quota systems, women’s legislative representation has
tripled between 1990-2015, however, not much of a change in women's status has
been observed. For instance in South Africa, despite the four percent of women
in government, they failed to develop policies around gender-based violence due
to lack of political will among female members of the parliament. Women’s
movement thus illustrates relatively better consequential practices yet evade
to a similar outcome. These movements happen to be led by relatives of the country’s
leaders and thus serve to support the ruling class, without further empowering
their status. It is a bitter paradoxical situation for women. In spite of experiences
of women vary across the continent, the overarching hardships and challenges
faced are ever-present.
Civil
society
Civil society is “the realism of autonomous, intermediate
associations, the purpose of which is to organize citizens and prevent the
state from appropriating too much power”. It is bridging the state and the
citizens. The most prominent forms of associations in Africa are trade unions,
churches, student organizations, media outlets, business associations, public
intellectuals, NGOs- mostly orchestrated by the states themselves to keep them
in check.
With the rapid increase in democratization after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, new spaces emerged for those social
organizations; yet Africans were squeezed between overbearing postcolonial
states and the local weight of tradition. NGOs became the widespread mode of
social organization and seemed like a substitute for the state in terms of
service provision. This substitutive role of NGOs partly exonerates the state
from being accountable for its failings and may reinforce it in the process.
In western norms and values, various democratic features
are attributed within civil society which most of the time do not intersect
with Africa. Because of that, some scholars examined alternative approached
civil society in the face of African realities, in order to better understand
the fundamental dynamic of the continent. Taking African realities into
account, authors like Monga and Kasfir stressed the necessity to redress
western bias go existing civil society and consider informal civil society
features such as music, linguistic novelty, tailoring of appearance
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