Notes on 'Africa Works: Disorder as a Political Instrument' by Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz
1999; James Currey, Indiana University Press: Oxford, Indiana

- Aim of book - to further the understanding of African politics - not thorough analysis/generalization, but theoretical reflection
- "to provide the analytical framework, the instruments, which...can help explain the condition of contemporary Africa" (p.xv)
Much current writing on Africa is weak - "analytically feeble" (p.xv)
- "the acuteness of Africa's crisis is such as to defy the usual parameters of current political analysis" (p.xv)

the goal, therefore, is "to make sense of what appears senseless and arbitrary" 

They note that their approach "inevitably involves a degree of generalization" (p.xvi) – their work is not a detailed reference work on Africa, nor a discussion of the prospects of democracy

They argue for 5-dimentional approach: (adapted from p.xvii)
1)	Empirically grounded – what appear to be anomalies must not be ignored
2)	use of "universal analytical tools, rather than Africa-specific conceptual instruments" – i.e. an assumption that "political action in Africa can be explained in terms of rational behaviour"
3)	a multi-disciplinary approach is required, to adopt a single approach would be ethno-centric in that it assumes African politics is restricted to the "relatively well-defined and self-contained" realm that it does in Western society
4)	their "method is comparative, in that it seeks to provide an analysis of politics which integrates…Africa with the rest of the world" a good test of the effectiveness of this is how understandable it is to non-experts
5)	historical approach, in terms of context and identities

An understanding of historical continuities has two meaning here:
1)	"the present day…disorder in Africa is a crisis of modernity and 2) this crisis of modernity is rooted in the deep history of societies in which it is taking place" (xvii)

they argue that their approach is "purely analytical…not prescriptive or normative" (xvii)

the paradigm of their analysis is called The Political Instrumentalization of Disorder
- definition – "the process by which political actors in Africa seek to maximise their returns on the state of confusion, uncertainty and sometimes even chaos, which characterises most African politics" (p.xviii)

"all African states share a generalized system of patrimonialism and an acute degree of apparent disorder": governmental inefficiency, lack of institutionalisation, and disregard for formal rules

disorder does not mean irrational, but "informal, uncodified and unpoliced" (xix), also, uncertainty is important "both a cost and an opportunity" (xix)

like Herbst, Chabal and Daloz restrict their analysis to 'Black Africa' excluding South Africa, and Northern Africa

"analysis of contemporary African politics requires sustained attention to the intricacies in which the present crisis of modernity appears to be worked through the political instrumentalization of disorder" (xx)

attack existing "intellectual sloth" (xx) regarding Africa

book is in 4 parts:
1)	politics, states, society, political elites, in particular "the patrimonial and infra-institutional ways in which power is legitimated" (xx)
2)	how politics is interpreted and affected by culture, identity, violence, religion etc
3)	the 'productivity of economic failure' – analysis of how people use dependence as a resource, "how it is possible for Africans to enrich themselves whilst the continent is failing to develop" (xxi)

Chapter 10 – The political instrumentalization of Disorder

analysis of Africa “can appear elusive, [because it] has been at the centre of the Western imagination of ‘the other’” (p.141) since the 19th Century at least; that is, we expect Africa to be exotic, so our analysis searches for enigmas
we assume Africa is “congruent with out view of Western development…[either] the initial stage of development or the dark opposite of what Western civilization is taken to represent” (p.141)
- clearly these “perceptions have had a profound influence on the approaches employed to analyse present-day Africa” (p.141)

both anthropology and political science sought “to understand the reasons for radical differences in development” (p.141) or “they have all sought to explain why it is that Africa has hitherto failed to develop either along the Western or the Eastern (Socialist) models – that is, effectively to modernize” (p.142)

there are two important consequences of this paradigmatical assumption:
“historically unrealistic expectations…in terms of the development potential of modern independent Africa”
“conceptualization has been tied to a notion of development that implies a purposeful (economic, social and political) historical movement in a given direction. In effect, virtually all models of African politics are constructed on the assumption that development and modernization are coterminous” (p.142)
these assumptions “has been detrimental to our understanding of the continent”

Chabal and Daloz’s model, however, is “driven by the realities of what we observe in Africa today, but grounded in the [classical] social and political theory which underpins the analysis of all modern societies” (p.143)

The political instrumentalization of disorder is about “how the political, social and economic ‘logics’ of contemporary Africa come together in a process of modernization which does not fit with the Western experience of development” (p.143)

Africa is modernising, but in a different way

We can only under want ‘this particular dynamic’ by using “universal conceptual apparatus” post-Weberian social and political theory” (p.144)
- it examines “the logic of African politics from the local viewpoint”

Their approach is, they argue “scientifically grounded” and yet capable of “analytical empathy” (p.144)

They argue that Africa is both “modern and underdeveloped”
- “African’s are not slow in adopting the latest technology…but at the same time they seem locked into apparently ‘backward’ social or psychological conventions, such as polygamy or witchcraft” (p.145)

modernization must be considered “from the viewpoint of the logic of those concerned” (p.145)
their “concern is thus not to dispute existing notions of modernity, but merely to assess the texture of Africa’s own path to modernization” (p.145)

modernity “a dynamic process rather than a state of equilibrium. As such it is pointless to deem one part of the world categorically modern and another irredeemably traditional” (p.145)

African modernity “has not engendered…forward movement, in terms of economic progress [but instead] a form of modernity which provides for the ability both to utilize the implements of Westernization and to remain obdurately ‘traditional’ in cultural terms” (p.145-6)
The modern and the traditional are bound together in two ways
1)“the re-Africanization of Western concepts” that is “a reshaping of both political institutions and political actions by more informal and personalized (infra-institutional) African codes of practice” (p.146)
Africans operate simultaneously on…different and largely discrete registers… Africa’s political modernity is characterized by a fusion of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ rationalities” (p.146)

unlike Africa, Europe/the Far East restrict the traditional to “individual preferences, desires and beliefs” (p.146)
in Africa “being both traditional and modern is at once justifiable and instrumentally profitable” (p.147)

they argue that culture is significant, but “do not in anyway maintain that politics is Africa to be explained solely in cultural terms” (p.147)
instead the important this is how “traditions are used politically” (p.147)

aim: therefore “a coherent framework for what might otherwise appear as chaos or anarchy” (p.147)

They also argue that for African political analysis to be effective, 4 other things must be considered

1) Boundaries : decisions must be taken on what is and isn’t relevant to political analysis; classical approaches should be used to decide this, rather than pre-conceived ideas (this is not to say that everything is relevant politically)
emphasis that “all political actors from the political elite to the ordinary man and woman share a common notion of the undifferentiated nature of political which they all seek to employ profitably” (p.149)

key question – will the “political realm become more functionally differentiated” (p.149)

2) Register and modernization: not only are the boundaries of the political blurred, “there is a multiplicity of registers” (p.149) that individuals participate on politically

asserts that individual/community identity defies “the conceptualization most readily offered in the social sciences”– “the formal notion of the citizen does not correspond to” (p.149)  the African reality

in African society it is acceptable, even profitably, to switch between registers, partly because of their ambiguous differentiation - e.g. ‘the occult’ and Western norms in use simultaneously

3) The rationality of political action – Western modernity is traditionally linked to a growth in rationality

asserts that a classical Weberian analysis is more useful than most contemporary perspectives
-	“Weber defined rationality in terms of what individuals and political actors believe for themselves to be rational and not in terms of what outside observers might consider to be the case” (p.151)
although Weber described Western rationality, his approach remains open to other forms

this view seems to have been ignored as Western rationality is assumed to be “not just inherently desirable but inevitable” (p.152)
-	a result of this assumption is the view that Africa is irrational in some way
↓
for example, the coverage of the violence in Rwanda and Liberia in the Western media often emphasised the ‘age-old tribal hatreds’, implying that these things happen “because Africa has failed to develop Western rationality” (p.152)

Chabal and Daloz instead look for how Africa has “rationalities that are both modern and distinct from what is found in the West (p.153) – incoherence is not the same as irrationality

4) Rationality must be linked to a discussion of political causality
“Political analysis is by definition the search for the most plausible explanation of the causes of given political events and processes” (p.153)
Africa causes problems for political analysis, it doesn’t appear to fit the model – “Cause and effect are often not what they seem to be” (p.153) – things that are (il)legitimate from a Western perspective often have the opposite meaning from the point of view of an African, or the view might be more ambivalent
-	Chabal and Daloz seek to explore these differences

Conclusion – The Instrumentalization of Disorder

A radical analysis?

Not so much disorder, but a different form of order

“The view that societies could modernize without becoming Westernized is one which most political analysis does not readily entertain” (p.155) – yet this is the reality in Africa according to C&D

“apparent disorder can in fact have its own logic – even if at first that logic seems hardly to contribute to the future prosperity of the continent” (Castells?)

Five important elements to the political instrumentalization of disorder:
1)	the notion of the individual
2)	the salience of reciprocity
3)	the importance of vertical links
4)	the concept of success
5)	the importance of the short-term view and the micro-perspective

1 = the notion of the individual
“individual rationality is essentially based on communal logic” (p.156) that is to say that a respect for the values of the community, and the belief that the political is communal are widespread, influential notions
-	this differs from the West, where the emphasis is on the discrete individual, thus a different political rationality

in Africa, “we need to conceive of individuals as the nodal points of larger communal networks rather than as single, free and intentional agents” (p.156)
-	the conclusion of this is that “multi-party elections are unlikely to bring about significant change in the nature of individual differentiation” (p.157)

2 = the salience of reciprocity
this does not refer to day-to-day transactional reciprocity (though it is obviously important) but “a more profound notion of what is expected of the relations between individuals and the communities which are most relevant to their lives” (p.157)

any action, political or otherwise, must be considered in terms of the communal, reciprocal context
-	that implies that people vote, for example, because they think that someone will be best positioned to deliver patronage, rather long-term development

3 = the importance of vertical links
Patrimonial relations are not just important, but the driving force in politics
-	the overall aim of politics is to affect the nature of such relations” (p.158)
-	an economy of affection, leaders need to secure the support of people

‘corruption’ on a large scale can serve patrimonial (and therefore, legitimate) purposes (p.159) – it stresses the notion of accountability

they assert that the desire for equilibrium in African societies is string, hence the emphasis on the ‘re-traditionalization’ of society to tame disorder

“development requires the productive use of disequilibrium…the channelling of the resources generated by inequality into productive investment” (p.159) – there appears to be a lack of political will for this

4 = the concept of success
the opposite of the protestant ethic (differed reward) appears to be present in Africa – ostentation seems to be more important , the measure of success

“far from becoming less prevalent, the present norm of success seems in practice to be pushing politicians into and ever more frantic search for the means of patrimonial ostentation” (p.160)

5= the importance of the short-term view and the micro-perspective
“legitimacy rests with its immediate achievements…similarly, the logic of neo-patriomonialism is focussed on the proximate: the local and the communal” (p.161)

even genuinely long term leaders like Nyerere, Museveni and Mandela have limited ability to “move the political system beyond it present rationality” (p.162)

conclusion – pessimistic

the political instrumentalization of disorder constitutes “an inbuilt bias in favour of greater disorder and against the formation of the Western-style legal, administrative and institutional frameworks”