13
politically- and economically-advantaged Agni southeast.
11
Once a
supreme leader was in control of the central state, “politics as usual”
could revolve around a state-managed competition for advantage in
inter-regional competitions for resources distributed by central
rulers. Control over this process enhanced the longevity of leaders
and regimes.
B. Consolidation of Local States
A second institutional legacy of developmentalism was the
consolidation of local states, and sub-national citizenship rights,
identities, and legal entitlements. As Mamdani’s work suggests, this
meant that the “national” state was actually constructed as a mosaic of
local states or local political orders centered on unelected “local
despots.” Two extensions or local implications of Mamdani’s argument
are relevant to understanding the new territorial politics.
First, state-building in Africa was a processes that produced or
reinforced regional variation in the character of “the local state.”
12
Local states vary in their coherence, capacity to govern, degree of
autonomy of vis-a-vis the center, and legitimacy. These can be
artifacts of geographical variations in social, political, economic,
and ecological endowments that pre-dated colonialism’s imposition of
modern state boundaries.
Variations also reflect colonial and postcolonial rulers’
economy- and institution-building strategies, which sought to cope with
and capitalize on these differences.
13
There were differences in the
11
This allows the south-center and the North to procede to gang up against the
land-rich southwest.
12
This is the argument we have presented in Political Topographies of the
African State (CUP, 2004).
13
One source of variation in the robustness of core-periphery linkage is uneven
economic development, and in fact this is at least as important as proximity in
Convention