Africa's New Territorial Politics: Regionalism and the Open Economy in Côte d'Ivoire

African Studies Review, Apr 2007 by Boone, Catherine

Abstract:

This paper considers implications of the neoliberal shift for forms of national integration that were achieved during the era of state-led development. These national integration strategies (1960s-1980s) helped define and manage regional competition within the juridical boundaries of the territorial state. In today's "open economy" settings, old strategies of national integration are difficult to sustain. What has emerged is a new territorial politics, which revolves around attempts to consolidate power within subunits of the state and reorder relations among them, to enforce political control within communities, and to reorder rural property rights. Côte d'Ivoire provides a case in point.

Introduction

Most analysts of the worldwide economic and political liberalizations of the 1980s and 1990s assumed that the countries they studied possessed integrated national economies, spatially uniform systems of territorial administration, and systems of law and property rights that were projected evenly across the national space. When it came to questions of national integration, Netti's 1968 injunction to take the state itself as a variable was rarely heeded in literature on the political economy of economic reform. This is even true in African studies, where large literatures underscore the spatially uneven reach of both states and markets across much of the continent. In Africa and beyond, the full implications of national integration problems for the course of neoliberal economic reform, and vice versa, have yet to be fully explored.1

In Africa, market-oriented economic reform, which is taking place in a context of fiscal crisis and declining state capacity, has been associated with a series of unintended and unexpected territorial effects. The most dramatic manifestation at the national level is the resurgence of regional conflict, both inside and outside the electoral arena, and often with a heavily ethnic cast.2 At the micropolitical level, territorial conflict finds expression as land-related conflict, also ethnicized, which has emerged as a dangerous reality in regions and localities across a wide array of African countries.3 At the extreme, centrifugal forces threaten to tear territorial states into warring subnational entities or warlord-controlled fiefdoms. Côte d'Ivoire is, unfortunately, a case in point. Long taken as an exemplar of political stability and successful national integration in Africa, Côte d'Ivoire has been paralyzed since about 2001 by a standoff between virulently ethnicized, locally rooted, partisan-cum-regional divisions. The question here is why moves toward "open-economy" policies, which scale back interventionist state policies and increase the country's exposure to the world economy, have been associated with such dramatic spatial or territorial effects in Côte d'Ivoire and so many other sub-Saharan countries.4

Upsurges in regional conflict, ethnoregional conflict, and land-related conflict all challenge the territorial cohesion of African states and political systems. Explanations for these phenomena that have been proposed in the African studies literature are not fully satisfying. One basic argument is that with the dwindling of central state revenues and spending, governments can no longer dispense the patronage that once served as the glue for nation-building. This explanation is largely correct, but it is underdetermining: it does not account for the geopolitical contours of the disintegration processes, or the territorial nature of the struggles that have emerged. Other analysts have suggested that market forces are inherently centrifugal, or that retreat of the state has unleashed previously repressed tribalisms and localisms. These analyses are also unsatisfying, because they can suggest that today's regionalisme and localisms are developing in institutional and historical voids, or that they spring up where state authority is erased or where it never really penetrated in the first place. This is manifestly not the case, for the stakes in today's territorial conflicts often involve struggles over how state power has been and should be used. Reintroduction of electoral politics, which has accompanied market opening in most cases, is also insufficient as an explanation for new political struggles over territory and jurisdiction. Heightened electoral competition does not, in itself, explain the territorial fault lines and stakes of political conflicts that often extend far beyond the electoral arena.

This paper treats this resurgent regionalism and these localisms as interrelated aspects of a new territorial politics. The new territorial politics centers on rearranging core-periphery relations, reordering political hierarchies among and within territorially defined constituencies, redefining the locus of control over resources and market access, and enforcing political authority and subnational citizenship rights within regions and localities. The main argument is that institutional or geopolitical legacies of the earlier, developmentalist era go far in defining the actors, playing field, and stakes in current rounds in the making and unmaking of African states. With the move to the open economy and the dismantling of earlier forms of state intervention in national economies, old territorially based institutional arrangements and geopolitical governing strategies have become subversive of the forms of national integration they originally helped promote.5 Evidence of these institutional effects is found in the geography of today's conflicts: the new territorial politics follows fault lines and divisions that were carved into national bodies politic by the modern state itself.