Afr. j . polit. sci. (2001) Vol. 6, No. 2,29^-57 
Towards Understanding New Forms of 
State Rule in [Southern] Africa in the 
Era of Globalization 
Michael Neocosmos * 
Abstract 
In the recent process of transition in Africa since the 1980s, the form of state rule has 
been changing in many important ways as have the relations between the state and 
(civil) society. One of the changes in this process concerns the demise of development 
as a national state project through which state rule was reproduced and legitimized 
(culturally and politically) up to the 1980s. While the collapse of this form of rule of 
the developmental state is now apparent, a clear alternative has yet to become 
evident in Africa. Often formal multi-partyism and elections have been introduced, 
while at the same time a single-party predominant system has been prevalent to the 
extent that the earlier ruling parties often continue to control state institutions. In 
this context, relations between state and civil society may not always exhibit the 
same kindofobviously repressive characteristics as before, andvarious alternative 
forms of legitimation are being experimented with (e.g., rights discourse, national 
"visions", reconciliation, neo-liberal multi-partyism, new forms of corporatism, 
etc.). This paper addresses several theoretical problems surrounding the analysis 
of new forms of state rule in Southern Africa in particular. These seem congruent 
with the current phase of globalization. It seeks to elucidate the workings of 
developing alternative modes of rule, one basedon the plunder of national mineral 
assets by members of the ruling elite, another legitimized through a state constructed 
consensus. It debates the various components of the consensual state in South 
Africa in particular and assesses the extent to which these have been achieved. 
Introduction 
We know that the struggle for power is the struggle for a lie. What is needed 
in these times of globalization is to build a new relationship between 
government and citizens. (Sub-Comandante Marcos, Le Monde Diplomatique, 
March 2001.) 
1027-0353 © 2001 African Association of Political Science
30 Michael Neocosmos 
From the perspective of democratization and the establishment of popular sovereignty 
and genuine emancipation in Africa, one of the main issues of concern is to develop 
a theoretical perspective capable of enabling an understanding of politics in its own 
terms. This is the only alternative to conceiving politics in a way which reduces it to 
the economy, history, ethnicity, culture or even to the state. It is these various forms 
of reductionism which inexorably lead to essentialist conceptions in theory and to 
undemocratic politics in practice. Understanding forms or modes of politics in 
Africa means rethinking relations between state and society on the continent. 
Central to liberal discourse, has been a conception revolving around the idea that 
politics is reducible to the state or that the state is the sole legitimate domain of 
politics. For liberalism, "political society" simply is the state. This idea has 
permeated so much into African opposition thinking, for example, that it has 
become difficult to conceive of an oppositional practice that is not reduced to 
capturing state posts or the state itself. One of my main intentions here, is to 
establish the highly limited and limiting nature of this perspective, especially in so 
far as the process of democratization is concerned. It is indeed important to stress 
that if the concern is to conceptualize a genuinely popular form of democracy in 
which popular institutions are sovereign, in which politics is truly emancipatory 
(Balibar, 1997), then politics need to be conceived in a different manner. In particular, 
this means visualizing a popular domain of politics beyond the immediate 
purview of the state, over which the state needs to exercise some form of hegemony, 
but which conversely may also be in a position to influence state politics and hold 
the latter to account. My other main concern to briefly outline some of the features 
of state rule (of state-society relations) as they have developed in Africa in the 
context of the globalization of neo-liberal ideology and practice. 
State and Society in Mutual Relation 
Even sophisticated and subtle accounts of state and society often fall short of 
accurately accounting for political change simply because of a failure to 
systematically encapsulate the relationship between state and society within their 
narratives, and because of their tendency one-sidedly to stress the ability of the state 
to "invent" and enforce social relations. Moreover, while the state cannot substitute 
itself for social activities, it should not be assumed either that any social institution 
can be substituted for the state itself. For example, although it seems to have been 
understood that state authoritarianism in Africahas been systematically suppressing 
and substituting itself for the popular self-activity of social groups and individuals, 
this cannot just be corrected through simply demonizing the state and proposing that 
its functions be replaced by equally unaccountable "non-governmental organizations" 
(NGOs) which are taken, by neo-liberal discourse, to be the main components of 
civil society in Africa today (Beckman, 1992). 
It is in the context of the relations between state and society that the concept of 
"civil society" becomes useful. "Civil society" as understood here refers to society 
in so far as its political character is concerned. It is its organizational and
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 31 
institutional forms which give that society a "civil" (political) character. The use of 
the term here does not imply any agreement with the way it is sometimes used in 
neo-liberal Africanist political science, as an "arena of choice, voluntary action and 
freedom", and as necessarily liberatory in relation to a supposedly monolithically 
authoritarian and corrupt state. Neither does its use imply that the relations between 
state and civil society are always confrontational. What itdoes suggest rather, is that 
there is a dimension of society which is "civil" and thus implicated with the state in 
the reproduction of political power. As such, any process of democratization, a 
process that would have to transform the nature of power in society as well as in the 
state, along with the relations between them, must start from a perspective which 
sees state and society as fundamentally interconnected. It is the concept of civil 
society as Gramsci in particular understood, which expresses this interconnectedness. 
Marx had already argued that the existence of civil society is itself intrinsic to a 
process of capitalist development, one whereby the realms of politics and society/ 
economy become separated and distinct so that rather than being combined as under 
feudalism, politics now becomes relegated to the state while society and the 
economy (i.e., civil society) are largely de-politicized (Meiksins-Wood, 1995: ch. 
1; Gibbon, 1986). In such cases the state itself tends to be, according to Marx, 
bureaucratic and authoritarian. The apparent "externality" of the state from society 
thus masks its underlying links with society and the potentially political nature of 
the latter. As a result the state may also appear as a "neutral" body "above" society 
while at the same time, the unequal and oppressive character of society is 
reproduced by the state. Therefore, authoritarianism and the absence of politics in 
civil society can coexist more or less happily with a "developed" civil society and a 
seemingly universalistic or "neutral" state existing above the conflicts between the 
particularisms of society. Democratization cannot therefore be equated with or 
reduced to any "deepening" or "vibrancy" process in civil society as contemporary 
liberal Africanist social science maintains. 
Moreover, politics can only become democratized if as a necessary prerequisite, 
civil society becomes politicized. The basis for a democratic politics must be the 
recovery of politics within civil society, in other words, to begin with the centrality 
of a realm of politics outside or beyond the state domain. Democratic politics 
beyond the state also implies the creation of a fully politicized citizenry, a process 
which presupposes pluralism but is not reducible to it. But such politicization 
cannot be a sufficient condition for a democratic politics. After all, the state can 
itself politicize civil society "from above". The politicization of civil society should 
be supplemented by the democratization of the state in order for a democratic 
transformation of politics to be successful. Therefore, in order to be able to conceive 
of a democratic society, a fully active citizenship needs to be combined with a 
democratization of the state: the two are inseparable conceptually and politically, 
one does not make any sense without the other. 
In liberal conceptions, the state domain is the sole source of politics, or in other 
words, "political society" is itself the state, there is no politics beyond the state
32 Michael Neocosmos 
regulated and controlled political arena. Liberalism is therefore unable to recognize 
the existence of politics outside this state-controlled domain. Africanist neoliberalism 
therefore has a problem as it tries to find alternatives to what it has seen 
as a corrupt, incompetent and irredeemable state. Its anti-statism is only skin deep 
as the "civil society" it prefers is one which operates clearly within the state domain 
of politics. Thus, in so far as the neo-liberal notion of civil society in particular is 
concerned, it is worth noting that this amounts to a formal conception from the point 
of view of the state. What I mean is that here, civil society is only said to exist when 
it is granted formal recognition by the state. For liberalism, a civil society of secret 
societies and illegal organizations cannot be conceived while it is stressed that civil 
societies are incompatible with authoritarian states. Here, civil society is formally 
circumscribed by the state which also legitimizes its existence, hence the fact that 
the former is often equated with "interest groups" (today referred to more innocuously 
as "stakeholders". 
Thus, civil society can be said to be part of the state domain of politics because 
its existence is premised on its legitimacy in the eyes of the state. Conversely, the 
same position also implies recognition by civil society organizations of the 
legitimacy of the state. This view cannot include explicitly "revolutionary" 
organizations within civil society. It is to emphasize this point, and also to stress 
civil society's class-ideological character, that Gramsci referred to it as bourgeois 
civil society—in other words, a civil society well ensconced within a (bourgeois) 
state domain of politics and political consciousness. The neo-liberal conception of 
civil society is one defined by the state itself.1 
Ho we ver, the state should not be allowed to dictate whether popular organizations 
are legitimate or not, and neither can intellectual inquiry allow itself to narrow the 
concept to adhere to state prescriptions; only sock iy itself can bestow such 
legitimacy. In this sense South Africa, for examr'e, Jan be said to have had an 
extremely powerful and "vibrant", as well as politicized, civil society in the 1980s 
despite the quasi-legal nature of most organizations which comprised it. In fact, it 
was the political distance of these organizations from the state, the fact that they had 
exited the state domain of politics, which accounts for the "vibrancy" of civil 
society in South African townships during the 1980s (Neocosmos, 1998). Also in 
neo-liberalism, "rights" are seen as formal and universal, and thus not subject to 
debate or contestation because of the fact that they are deemed to be scientifically, 
technically or naturally derived, and it goes without saying, they are supposed to be 
state sanctioned if they are to achieve the status of universal truth. 
Under such conditions, it is clear that civil society is already part of a state 
domain of politics, and usually appears to be "apolitical" if the state is evidently 
"uni versalistic" in form. Interest groups lobby for favours and for "their share of the 
cake", which they claim is not large enough; they do not demand rights and social 
entitlements. In other words, the authoritarian nature of the state is not questioned 
by them, they simply wish to access its resources and favours. Here, frankly 
political questions regarding the entitlements of various social groups are hidden
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 33 
under issues of state-legitimized technical expertise, claims for greater access to 
state resources, and the deployment of state largesse. In most cases in Africa, the 
problem of authoritarianism, irrespective of the number of political parties or 
interest groups in existence, revolves around the absence of such entitlements and 
rights and is linked to the absence of an active citizenship which corresponds to this 
state of affairs. The liberal view must, therefore, be jettisoned in favour of a more 
inclusive conception, which goes beyond the notion of a civil society exclusively 
composed of politically neutral "interest groups" within a unique state-monopolized 
political domain. 
Today in Africa, it is the development of political identities not necessarily 
reducible to economic concerns, which have become more apparent in the opposition 
and resistance to state authoritarianism. It is such identities which define political 
arenas. They are formed in relation to the state but from within civil society. If we 
see political arenas or domains as structured largely by political identities, we can 
also start to see that politics can also exist outside a state-controlled domain and may 
exist within society itself. 
Moreover, the state itself possesses features (authoritarian, bureaucratic, 
managerial, etc.) which are not reducible to socio-economic class characteristics. In 
fact, it is arguably the authoritarian nature of such state practices which has 
exercised a determining effect on the political character of the ruling class or elite, 
rather than the other way aroundas^iasTisually been assumed. This is because such 
a class or elite constitutes itself as a political unity through its melding with the state 
power. On the other hand, the economic and social attributes of such a politically 
dominant class can be determined from within civil society, although in Africa, as 
is well known, the tendency has been for the state to have a dominant role to play in 
elite accumulation. However, it must be emphasized that it is state authoritarianism 
and unaccountability which has historically enabled predatory accumulation and 
socio-economic class formation among members of the state personnel; in other 
words it is state practices, rather than class ones in the strict sense, which have been 
determinant in the process of ruling class formation. When it comes to the political 
as well as socio-economic characteristics of the popular or subaltern classes and 
groups, these have invariably been constituted from within civil society and, as 
such, their political practices have tended to be much more contradictory. 
Rather than simply reducing political forms, consciousness, identity and 
practice to the economic characteristics of various classes and groups in civil 
society, it may therefore be more useful to distinguish between different forms and 
domains of politics characteristic of the state and of the elite/ruling group who are 
associated with it on the one hand (elite politics, state politics, dominant/hegemonic 
politics, etc.), and those domains and forms of politics practised by those excluded 
from and oppressed/coerced by it on the other (popular politics, subaltern politics, 
etc.). This distinction must be undertaken on the basis of the social relations, 
cultural practices and discourses within which each exists (Chatterjee, 1993). While 
the "domains" of politics refer to the different arenas in which politics takes place,
34 Michael Neocosmos 
"forms" or "modes" of politics refer to different political practices. The central 
points are that the state is not the exclusive domain of politics, and that state forms 
of politics are not necessarily the only ones in existence. 
In general, the fundamental reason for the difference between the politics of the 
hegemonic groups and those of the subaltern groups in society is related to the role 
which the state itself plays in each. In particular, the ruling classes and groups 
establish their hegemony through the state and hence through one form or other of 
authoritarian, bureaucratic or administrative political practice. These various forms 
of politics are by their very nature state-founded politics, if not wholly etatiste in 
nature. Such politics always restricts democracy in one way or another and to some 
degree or other. These kinds of politics may differ along a continuum between say 
liberal democracy and militarism, but they always exhibit elements of a bureaucratic 
or authoritarian practice, simply by virtue of the fact that they are founded on the 
modern regime of power. Militaristic politics (currently dominant in several 
African states such as Congo, Rwanda, Eritrea, Angola, etc.) constitute an extreme 
form of statism or elite politics in which minimal concessions are made to 
democratic practices, while liberal democracy is more clearly able to make such 
concessions. It can be argued that the latter usually results from pressures from 
subaltern groups and subaltern politics and is usually a means to coopt or deflect 
these simply in order to produce consent (Rueschemeyer, Stevens and Stevens, 
1992). In Good's words "liberal or representative democracy is a phenomenon of 
this century which expresses not the fulfilment of democratic aspirations but their 
deflection, containment, and limitation" (Good, 1997: 253). It often suggests a 
ruling class or elite which is secure and confident in its ability and in its (purportedly 
natural) "right" to rule. 
Therefore, the hegemonic project of the ruling classes or groups is founded on a 
politics which is structurally and fundamentally undemocratic (irrespective of the 
complex contradictions between various interests or positions within the state 
apparatuses), as it has to manage state rule bureaucratically. Its undemocratic nature 
may be more or less tempered and restricted by popular, pressures and especially 
democratic prescriptions emanating from within civil society. These subaltern 
forms of politics emanating from within civil society are clearly contradictory, 
including as they do both authoritarian as well as democratic forms of politics and 
may be expressed in completely different representational forms from those 
associated with the modern state (e.g., religious, "traditional", literary, theatrical, 
etc.), but they may possibly form a distinct domain of a counter-hegemonic project 
(Chatterjee, 1993). If it is to be more than a state-centred project, this has to be 
founded on a popular-democratic politics and thus on a project for the democratization 
of the state itself. 
Popular-democratic or consistently democratic politics are the only kind of 
politics which are truly emancipatory and of greatest interest to the majority of the 
people of Africa—the poor and the oppressed. Democratic politics therefore are to 
be found primarily within civil society as, despite the contradictions within it, the
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 35 
domain of state politics is founded on administrative, managerial and bureaucratic 
concerns, the nature of which is anything but democratic. How state politics ended 
up being so dominant in Africa (etatisme) is fundamentally connected to the nature 
of the state and to the historically developed relations between state and civil society 
there. 
The State and Civil Society in Africa 
Three historical periods of the relations between state and society in Africa are 
important: the colonial period, the post-colonial period (1960s-1980s) of the 
developmentalist state, and the post-developmentalist period of the 1980s to the 
present. Each period can be distinguished by different modes of state rule, in other 
words by different forms of state-society relations. 
The Colonial Period 
The colonial period is of central importance in understanding the contemporary 
state and its relations with society because it was during this period that certain 
fundamental features of the post-colonial state were constructed. Colonialism was 
not (Said, 1994: 9) primarily about territorial acquisition nor was it fundamentally 
about the (arbitrary) drawing of boundaries. As Mamdani (1996, 1998a) shows 
extremely well, it was not a question of geography but primarily a question of 
politics. It was about the imposition of an alien form of state rule over a subject 
population. The state did not simply exercise social control in order to regulate 
individuals but it was primarily founded on the coercion of (majority) groups of 
people and nationalities in particular. 
It is widely recognized that the colonial state was profoundly founded on 
coercion. As Crawford Young puts it: "nothing was more alien to the telos of the 
colonial state than a civil society. Sovereignty required forcible subjugation; there 
were few illusions that it could rest on any principles but overwhelming military 
power" (Young, 1994: 223). Coercion (of the extra-economic variety) affected 
peasants primarily and workers in so far as the latter existed and were not simply 
wage-labouring poor peasants. Forced labour, forced contributions, forced 
cultivation, forced removals and forced development all contributed inter alia to the 
reproduction of the modern regime of power as well as to the exploitation of the 
majority of the population. The power structures of existing societies were 
transformed and made to fulfil the roles of lower level state apparatuses so that 
tradition/culture and authoritarian state became closely intertwined in the process 
of indirect rule. The kind of capitalism which developed in Africa during the 
colonial period can therefore be described as state-coercive capitalism. 
Central to the colonial form of state rule in Africa was not only the coercion of 
peasants and workers, but also the oppression of women and "youth" as the 
anthropological conception of African society, a knowledge upon which the state 
depended for its control, saw this society as structured around family and kinship 
relations usually of an authoritarian, patriarchal and gerontocratic kind. The
36 Michael Neocosmos 
"tribalization" of African society for the purposes of indirect rule during the late 
colonial period, centred on the making of a particularly oppressive tradition which 
was based, not only on colonial interests, but which also sought support primarily 
among chiefs, elders, men, the wealthy and dominant ethnicities in colonized 
society (Vail, 1989). This colonial intervention had the importanteffectof restricting 
to a minimum differentiation between society, economy and culture (i.e., civil 
society) on the one hand, and state power on the other. As a result, authoritarianism 
was entrenched and democracy systematically restricted in rural areas in particular. 
Moreover, it was generally the case, initially at least, that resistance, particularly 
among the rural-based colonized population, tended to operate from within these 
specifically authoritarian constraints and to be profoundly marked by them (Mamdani. 
1996; Neocosmos, 1995). 
The British had already developed a clear philosophy of separateness on the 
issue of government and administration in their older colonies which Chatterjee 
(1993:16) refers to as the "rule of colonial difference" whereby cultural difference 
between colonizers (civilized) and colonized (uncivilized) was seen as justifying 
the authoritarianism of the state. In addition, it also justified the teaching by 
colonizers of their "child-like" colonial charges to advance and progress towards a 
cultural state where they could then benefit from and responsibly utilize modern 
forms of government and administration. Until then, cultural backwardness was the 
main impediment to a universalistic state. From this essentialized hierarchical 
notion of difference it was easy to move to a position which stressed separateness in 
political systems through indirect rule as a way of resolving this contradiction, as 
the "native question"—the thorny problem of how to rule the subject population— 
was revisited in the late 1920s. Mamdani (1996) has shown how this system of 
indirect rule controlled rural Africa differently from the manner in which urban 
areas were ruled so that the state took a "bifurcated" form. Mamdani clearly shows 
how this policy of ethnic segregation, eventually developed in South Africa under 
the name of apartheid, became the general form of state rule during the late colonial 
period in Africa. Colonialism therefore naturally restricted politics to the state, but 
it tended to do so in a way which demarcated two forms of rule, one of which was not 
alien but based within a culture and practice (in, however, state-distorted forms) 
emanating from within society and popular practise itself. 
As—in conformity with authoritarian exigencies—society and economy on the 
one hand, and the political realm on the other, were not clearly demarcated during 
the colonial period, the formation of resistance (civil society) organizations 
combined socio-economic demands with frankly political ones within an overall 
nationalist anti-colonial movement. Thus, as they took up such nationalist positions 
(of various kinds), these organizations were politicized, born as much of a socioeconomic 
as of a political struggle, a distinction rarely made by them. The fact that 
this resistance initially occurred outside the state domain of politics, was one of the 
reasons why their political character independent of the state, could no longer be 
tolerated once independence had been achieved, as they contested the legitimacy of
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 37 
a state-controlled domain of politics. Adversarial politics between the state and 
these civil society organizations had to be undercut for the imposition of statehegemonic 
national unity in the post-colonial period. This was done through the 
state project of "national development" which was an attempt to give each sector in 
society something, and to ensure the dominance of a domain of state politics over a 
fast-receding popular domain of politics. 
Related methods of incorporating such organizations into the state domain of 
politics also included "expert" advice from civil society organizations from the 
erstwhile colonial power (or other countries, or even United Nations organizations 
such as the ILO) such as the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) advisers to 
African trade unions, for example. Such organizations were of course already part 
and parcel of state politics in their own countries (or in the case of the ILO, part of 
a supra-national state structure). The central lesson they invariably taught was the 
necessity for trade unions (in this case) to abandon their more obvious political 
positions and concerns and to restrict themselves to representing the interests of 
their members by acting as efficiently organized interest groups. In other words, 
African trade unions were being taught about the advantages of being incorporated 
into the state domain of politics. This process was always presented as a simple 
technical one, of course, or as one of the "maturation" of trade unions in the third 
world, but never as the state-political process which it evidently was. 
The Developmental State 
The post-colonial period saw state rule being structured around a project of a 
national character whilst maintaining some of the fundamental features of its 
colonial predecessor. The most obvious politico-economic continuities, as noted on 
many occasions, were the forms of state appropriation based on extra-economic 
coercion of peasant producers in particular and continued forms of coercive state 
regulation. On the other hand, the racially ordered division of labour was transformed 
and restructured through a more clear class differentiation among the African 
population in both its upper and lower strata. Among the upper strata, a section of 
the middle-class professionals demarcated itself from the rest of the petty-bourgeoisie 
and accumulated through access to state resources and links to foreign capital. 
Among the lower strata, a minority of peasants and artisans became transformed 
into capitalist farmers and small capitalists through access to state amenities and the 
removal of racial barriers to capital accumulation. Employment opportunities were 
created in the civil service in particular as state posts were Africanized and thus deracialized. 
This changed political economy informed and constrained the possibility of 
new forms of rule. The post-colonial state could not rely solely or even primarily on 
force and coercion as the colonial state had done, as it had to secure its hegemonic 
rule through greater use of legitimizing processes. The combination of authoritarianism 
and paternalistic social democracy which developed and characterized 
this state was centred around the state project of development. It was development
38 Michael Neocosmos 
which would unify the nation, and only the state which had the capacity to undertake 
such a wide-reaching project as a national bourgeoisie was weak. In its radical 
version made famous by Nkrumah and theorized in dependency theory, the idea was 
to achieve economic independence after political independence had been won. In 
whatever version and irrespective of the political colour of the regime, economics 
was to take precedence over politics, and democratic institutions were seen as 
superfluous, as obstacles to the process of nation-building as they encouraged 
ethnic threats to national unity. Politics and debate were seen as luxuries that poor 
countries could not afford as they were ethnically divisive. Rather what was 
required was economic development (Shivji, 1988; Chachage, 1999, Mamdani, 
Mkandawire and Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1993). 
Central to this state ideology of developmentalism was a close combination of 
political and economic processes. In fact, the process of development or accumulation 
itself was one which was not simply state-dominated and coercive, but at the very 
centre of the state's existence. The most obvious aspects of this process have been 
debated at length in the literature. For example, the role of parastatals as vehicles for 
the economic exploitation of the peasantry through iniquitous pricing policies as 
well as their role in bureaucratic accumulation is well known. Also much debated 
are the opportunities afforded for private appropriation of resources by state 
channelled aid along with the corresponding centrality of patron-client relations as 
a form of class rule. Moreover, the fact that these appropriated resources were rarely 
productively invested but rather put into speculative ventures, real estate, transport 
or commercial ventures, meant that very little accumulation in the strict sense took 
place. The fact that the post-colonial state had to secure support from aspiring 
accumulators among the middle class explains to some extent its use of "neopatrimonial" 
practices. This feature of the state cannot, however, be used as a 
universal key to explain the state itself without collapsing into crude essentialisms 
which often dominate in current Africanist political science (Mamdani, 1990, 
Beckman, 1992). 
At the same time it must be recalled that while the development undertaken 
during this period was state-directed and thus top-down and ultimately coercive, it 
was supported politically and financially by Western donors and international 
institutions (including the "Bretton Woods Twins"). Concurrently, the state genuinely 
secured support from large sections of the population through the mobilization of 
national sentiment and the provision of social infrastructure and subsidies. It also 
provided, in most cases, basic state functions and provisions through a sometimes 
increasing reliance on overseas development assistance. These included some basic 
infrastructure, social services, low-level co-operative financing, subsidization of 
inputs, extension services and so on. In combination these often provided a kind of 
"cushion" which, while it failed to promote accumulation on a broad scale among 
the people, was sometimes successful in contributing towards restricting the 
process of impoverishment, especially among rural producers. 
This form of state must be qualified as a "developmental state" not with
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 39 
reference to its possessing (or lacking) a technical capacity to ensure that development 
takes place as the term is sometimes understood today (Mkandawire, 1998), but 
rather because it secured its rule through its ubiquitous and fundamentally 
authoritarian (statist) conception of development in which the reproduction of its 
rule was contingent on the success of its economic ventures. The emphasis in 
characterizing the state should be placed on its political character and not on its 
supposedly politically neutral technical or administrative capacities. Clearly, the 
ideology it employed was highly political. It served as a justification for state 
authoritarianism, typified most obviously by one-party states. What was delegitimized 
was not politics as such, of course, but democratic politics. The masses of the people 
who had been mobilized in anti-colonial struggles were systematically demobilized. 
Popular organizations, trade unions, political parties—the bases of an organized 
civil society—were either banned or incorporated into state structures, while their 
leaders were either imprisoned, banned, killed or bribed. Liberal multi-partyism 
was rejected as a threat to state-controlled national unity (nation-building) and to 
the very existence of the state itself largely because it was seen as giving voice to a 
politicized ethnicity which was itself founded within social structure. The state 
attempted to establish its uni versalism through coercion and fundamentally continued 
as an "excrescence" (to use Marx's term) on the body of society, detached from the 
day to day cultural activity of the people. State forms and state politics were evident 
within society as a struggle raged between elite forms and more popular forms of 
politics within villages, ethnic groups and whatever socially founded communities 
were in existence. Thus, even under conditions of state collapse, popular politics 
(authoritarian or democratic in form) were often able to continue existing at the 
level of civil society itself. 
In sum, the colonial state as well as the post-colonial state in its authoritarian 
developmental form, both reproduced ethnic particularistic allegiances, while (and 
because) they were simultaneously suppressing them from above.2 Ultimately, the 
development process based on a strategy of state-led import-substitution 
industrialization, foundered on the twin rocks of statism and globalization and with 
it the legitimacy of the state itself was questioned. The crisis which befell this mode 
of state rule at the end of the 1970s and early 80s was predictably both economic and 
political. Economically, the failure of development to provide basic needs for 
African populations was exacerbated by the precariousness of African economies 
in the world economic system as a result of the collapse of raw material markets in 
the mid-70s. The crisis of legitimacy which ensued was exacerbated by Structural 
Adjustment Programmes (SAP) which advocated economic "liberalization" or 
state "withdrawal" from the market which undercut whole classes' possibilities of 
reproduction and systematically altered (and informalized) people's survival 
strategies. The nation-state entered a crisis as ethnic, religious and regional entities 
contested its existence. Pressures for political liberalization sometimes taking the 
form of political conditionalities by western donors restricted themselves to calls 
for multi-partyism, elections and respect for human rights, while popular demands
40 Michael Neocosmos 
for democratization "from below" often went beyond this to demand popular forms 
of government and accountability of leaders to the led (Olukoshi and Laakso, 1996; 
Olukoshi, 1998b). The South African popular movement of the 1980s went the 
furthest in demanding the democratization of social relations and of the state 
(Neocosmos, 1998). 
The Post-Developmental Period 
Clearly, development as a state-led consciously planned project can today no longer 
suffice as a legitimizing principle in Africa, while in certain instances (Congo, 
Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan,Sierra Leone, forexample)theexistence of the state itself 
is being contested. Currently new processes of rule under different conditions are 
being worked out throughout the continent. These include at one extreme the Kenya 
(or Cameroon) "model" where Moi has been able to continue securing his 
personalized rule while introducing multi-party elections which his party controls. 
At the other extreme it includes the South African case which is said by most 
accounts to be a paragon of liberal democracy and to have been produced by a 
miracle of negotiations between departing racists and incoming black nationalists. 
Furthermore, the issue of state corruption is now also becoming an unavoidably 
public issue. However, with the dominance of liberal conceptions of politics in the 
current general discourse on the state in Africa, there is a reticence to address the 
fundamental cause of corruption which is undeniably to be found in a popularly 
unaccountable power. The most that liberal conceptions can propose on this issue is 
to make one state department or commission the policeman or overseer of others. 
The state is therefore expected to police itself. Nevertheless, the struggle against 
corruption in Africa is unavoidably linked to the struggle for genuinely popular 
democracy. However much liberal discourse tries to skirt around this issue, it is 
difficult to avoid this fundamental implication. This is especially true given the 
weakness of professional associations in Africa, which is itself largely derived from 
the fact that they lack a monopolistic power over professionals and knowledge, and 
the consequent weakness of their policing functions (as compared to Europe where 
they developed from the powerful medieval guilds).3 
Such kinds of functions can rarely be democratically fulfilled by what are 
currently referred to as NGOs, as these are overwhelmingly dependent on the state 
itself, on foreign donors or on powerful politicians (see, for example, Kiondo, 
1994). In this context, the dominant perspective on state-society relations in Africa 
by liberal scholarship is one which has been dismissive of the African state as 
fundamentally corrupt and largely irredeemable in practice. The same perspective 
has searched for an alternative to this apparently demonic state, and appears to have 
found it in an idealized conception of civil society understood as a realm of "choice, 
voluntary action and freedom" and reduced to NGOs (Beckman, 1992). It should be 
pointed out that the net effect of this conception and practice, has been not just for 
donors to bypass governments, as they seek apparently more palatable clients, 
without in any way contributing to a democratization of the state itself. This process
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 41 
has also had the fundamental effect of turning citizens and potential active 
participants with entitlements and "voice" into clients and passive consumers of 
donor largesse. It can therefore be fundamentally "disempowering" rather than 
"enabling" in its orientation, and has very little to offer regarding popular 
democratization in Africa, as a genuine emancipative democracy must rest on the 
mutual recognition of rights and not on the granting of freedom from above 
(Balibar, 1997: 22). This process has as its fundamental objective effect, the 
expansion of the state domain of politics to include NGOs and hence to legitimize 
state rule both at home and abroad. At the same time, it makes possible a new form 
of accumulation among the petty bourgeoisie through what has been aptly called 
"social entrepreneurship" (Fowler). 
Two new forms of state rule seem to have come into prominence in the new 
epoch of globalization. One may be called the "warlord state" (e.g., DRC, Angola, 
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia),anotherform can be referred to as the "consensual 
state" (e.g., RSA, Botswana, Namibia). In either case they seem to correspond to 
new globalized neo-liberal conditions; in either case politics is restricted to a 
specific state or elite domain, but in radically different ways. 
Collapsed States? 
The idea of "warlord state" is based on the notion that it is in the economic and 
political interest of ruling elites to systematically pursue warfare and insecurity to 
the detriment of their country's social fabric and to the overwhelming majority of 
the population. It hasJxen suggested that huge amounts of profit can be made by 
plundering the natural resources of countries under conditions of insecurity. This 
plunder is undertaken by local and regional elites, as well as transnational corporations 
as they all seek truly staggering profits. The case of the DRC is perhaps the best 
example in which political elites from neighbouring countries as well as local rulers 
and their transnational partners carve up the country's resources. According to the 
South African periodical the Financial Mail (15/01/1999): 
If the risks are high in Angola or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 
where President Laurent Kabila's troops are battling rebel forces, the 
business rewards can be dazzling. These and other warring African countries, 
like Sierra Leone and the Republic of the Congo (Congo Brazzaville) are 
rich in mineral' deposits with scant, if any, regulatory restrictions—a 
glittering lure for foreign companies (cit. Taylor, 2001: 5). 
Clearly then, the central state is here unable to provide the basic conditions of 
socio-economic life for its citizens including basic security, markets, communications, 
etc. Rather the state constitutes an extreme version of a vehicle designed for 
the self-enrichment of members of the elite and engages in constant warfare with 
other elites based in other parts of the national territory who are also engaged in 
plundering natural resources and the population. Militarism rules, as does extreme
42 Michael Neocosmos 
factionalism, the constant search for the highest bidder, etc. Wamba-dia-Wamba). 
In Taylor's words: 
a number of state elites in the Great Lakes and Southern African regions have 
ceased to use the mantle of sovereignty to promote the collective good, but 
instead have used it to help bolster their own patronage networks and 
weaken those of potential challengers (ibid.: 11). 
Of course, under such circumstances such elites have very little incentive to 
resolve conflicts and find peaceful answers to their differences. Whether such elites 
ever used sovereignty to promote the collective good is a moot point, however, such 
warlordism has been made possible precisely by the neo-liberalism which insists on 
the withdrawal of the state from the market and the short-termist and unregulated 
conceptions of economic activity so prevalent in today's hegemonic economic 
discourse. It is perhaps also worthwhile commenting that to refer to these states as 
"collapsed states" as is sometimes done is singularly unhelpful for a number of 
reasons. 
situation with the result that the genocidal state of Rwanda under Habyarimana was 
also said to have "collapsed" despite all the evidence to the contrary (see, e.g., 
Longman, 1998). Second, the absence of the state which this term seems to suggest, 
leaching the population of its resources and conditions of life, suggests that such 
collapse may not necessarily have been such a bad thing! Surely the point must be 
that large numbers of the people of Africa have lived under such oppressive 
conditions, that the issue is not one of collapse or not, but rather one of accountability 
or the lack thereof. It is after all quite clear that state functions can be carried out in 
conditions of central government "ungovernability" in urban or rural communities, 
as well as within whole ethnic groups. Moreover, this can be done probably with 
greater legitimacy than any central state has been able to achieve given its 
First, the idea of "collapsed state" tends to be used with reference to any crisis 
would logically also imply the absence of politics or at least of a political culture. 
While this may be true among the elites who have had no qualms in engaging in 
systematic slaughter rather than in political discussion when the former has been in 
their interest, it is certainly not the case among the people. "Collapse" would seem 
therefore to reduce the state to the existence of central state institutions which have 
in most instances ceased to function, at least for the majority of the citizenry. 
However, the fact that such institutions had in the past the primary function of 
overwhelmingly authoritarian history. 
How can states be collapsed or non-existent and countries still exist? Surely this 
suggests that countries are held together by other social forces and that, if this 
holding together requires politics as a public arena for debate in order to occur, then 
this politics must exist within society itself, relatively independent of central state 
authority. After all this is what writers like Foucault and movements such as 
feminism have been saying for years: viz., that politics is prevalent within social 
relations and cultural relations everywhere. Politics cannot be reduced implicitly or
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 43 
explicitly to the state, politics can always be found, to various degrees, outside the 
state. What matters is the character of this politics, not whether it exists or not. 
The Consensual State 
Another new form of rule in the new post-developmental period is an attempt to 
establish state legitimacy by following the western model of liberal democracy 
through the establishing of a "consensual state"—a state founded on a elite-driven 
political consensus. This is the case in South Africa and in some other countries such 
as Botswana and Namibia. In Africa this form of state has been based on singleparty 
predominance, as one based on the alternation of elite parties in power, which 
would have to attempt to emulate the universalistic attributes of the western state 
while combining these with a state form actually founded on colonially initiated 
particularisms, is largely impossible. However, characterizing the state in terms of 
the characteristics of parties (single-party, multi-party, no party, predominance) 
remains squarely within the narrow limits of liberal assumptions for which political 
participation is predicated on the existence of parties. It fails to address the more 
serious questions regarding the characteristics of the forms of rule by the state over 
society (Neocosmos, 2001a). After all, politics can exist outside political parties, 
the notion of "political movement" suggests as much. 
In order to elucidate new forms of rule it has to be recognized that in a number 
of African countries, state discourse and practise are geared primarily towards 
achieving consensus with notable consequences forpolitics such as the delegitimizing 
of political activity in society, i.e., that beyond the predominant party/state 
consensus, as "extremist", "foreign inspired", or whatever. In the Western liberal 
model, consensus is established through multi-partyism and the alternation of 
different parties representing different sections of a ruling class or elite. The system 
works precisely because each party is given access to the benefits of state power in 
turn, and predictably so (e.g., alternation of two similar political parties in Britain 
and the United States, "cohabitation" in France) even though the increasingly low 
turnout at general elections creates a problem of legitimacy for the political system. 
The consensus is further underwritten by the power of the mass media (along with 
other ideological apparatuses) and by regular state-cultural discourses on the 
national interest and so on. 
In Africa, given the notorious inability to unify the ruling elite into a coherent 
class, as access to state resources implies jobs, careers, contacts and resources for 
accumulation for certain sections of the ruling elite at the expense of others who are 
excluded from all the perks, other ways have to be found to achieve consensus if at 
all. It was this economically-founded sectarianism which had formed the basis for 
the one-party systems on the continent during the heyday of the developmentalist 
state. If anything, the economic position of the middle classes has become more 
precarious since the 1980s in several African countries as a result of SAP (e.g., 
Mustapha, 1992). This economic precariousness is thus arguably even more 
conducive to sectarianism than it was previously. With the insistence on multi-
44 Michael Neocosmos 
party ism by western political conditionalities, crude one-partyism has been displaced, 
but its conditions of existence have remained leading to institutionalized 
"predominance".4 
The case of South Africa is a useful illustration of this process of building 
consensus. Constituted in a conjuncture of the resuscitation of political and 
economic liberalism in the post-cold war period, and given the extreme power of an 
already established capital with a (political as well as economic) role (or pretensions 
to a role) on the world scene, it is clear that the South African post-apartheid state 
had to achieve legitimacy and hegemony through different means than simple oneparty 
authoritarianism or developmentalism. The main characteristics of the way in 
which a consensual state was achieved in South Africa differed from the Western 
model because of its African historical context. 
The consensual state in Africa has to be a national state, it has to establish a 
national consensus, around a national legitimizing process of some kind. It has to 
confront foreign domination and in the case of South Africa, white power and 
privilege. As the South African state sees itself as a "world player" in the neo-liberal 
global arena, the anti-imperialist aspects of this dimension are minimal. This is 
related to the dominant ideology of South African exceptionalism, according to 
which South Africa is visualized as having more in common with Southern Europe 
or even Latin America than with the rest of Africa, because of its relatively 
industrialized economy. Unlike in the case of the African developmentalist state of 
the 1970s, which attempted to build national unity around a national project— 
namely development—there is no national state project in South Africa. Of course, 
given the centrality of the state in the processes of development planning, investment 
and so on during the post-war social democratic or Keynesian consensus, after the 
collapse of this political paradigm in the 1980s, such unifying state projects became 
no longer quite so easy to construct. 
Rather, the national unification process in South Africa while still referred to in 
official discourse as "nation-building", is not centrally founded on an ideology of 
development. In fact, this was attempted and jettisoned mid-way through the first 
ANC administration as the neo-liberal right acquired ascendancy over the statist left 
within the government. The South African state's national legitimacy is not based 
on any one single overriding project, but on a number of state initiatives which 
attempt to produce a national consensus (so far reasonably successfully). Thus we 
can speak of the development of the post-apartheid state as the development of a 
"consensual state". This legitimation process has a strong authoritarian dimension 
as we shall see. The main ways in which this consensual state is being constructed 
are as follows: 
1. Nationalism. As in other African countries in the post-independence period, 
the post-apartheid state attempted to secure legitimacy primarily by incorporating 
the nationalist political organization (ANC) which emerged as the representative of 
the people-nation within it and to meld with it. The nationalist political organization 
had achieved victory precisely by embodying the nation to form a political
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 45 
movement founded on a diverse social movement in civil society. As a "movement" 
it saw itself as representing different strands of civil society (workers, youth, 
women, businessmen, chiefs, etc.) and it still attempts to create national unity by 
convincing itself and constantly asserting that it does indeed still represent the 
nation, long after it has transformed itself into a political party with all the sectarian 
attributes this implies. Thus the ANC is in formal alliance with organizationally 
independent sectors such as unions and has largely incorporated previously 
independent women's and youth organizations within it. At the same time, state 
posts are being Africanized and jobs are provided for the new petty-bourgeois elite 
within the state apparatuses (so-called affirmative action). This feature of the ruling 
party of nationalism is similar to that of other such parties (and one-party systems) 
in post-colonial Africa. However, as noted above, there is no single national project 
around which the state-party can mobilize the nation (Neocosmos, 1998 and 3. 
below). 
2. Multipartyism/Constitutionalism. As in the western liberal model, a multiparty 
system has been set up in a way that political parties dominate over elected 
representatives. Party bosses have immense power of patronage over party 
membership. Parties either become fused with the state or operate like mini-states. 
Political parties for the most still express racial divisions. However, it is political 
parties which are elected and not individual members of such parties. The party 
bosses have inordinate powers in deciding who is on a party list and impose their 
candidates on local branches and regions. Indeed the internal operations of the ANC 
are becoming more and more obviously authoritarian (see 3. below). A liberal 
constitution is in place and a court is charged with defending the constitution against 
the state itself and the state party the ANC. Members of this court are as yet not 
clearly making judgments against the state which has appointed them. African 
countries in general have been renowned for having extremely liberal constitutions 
which their states have proceeded to systematically ignore, bypass or transform 
(Shivji, 1991). The latter is not yet the case in South Africa where constitutionalism 
has so far prevailed. 
3. Predominance. The potentially contradictory aspects of 1. and 2. are 
reconciled through a system of predominance whereby one party (the ANC) 
regularly acquires the overwhelming majority of votes. Multi-partyism exists for 
ensuring the legitimacy of the main party's dominance and hence of the state itself. 
Single-party predominance means that many (if not most) of the benefits of a oneparty 
system (for the elite) can be retained, while at the same time securing 
legitimacy in the eyes of the west and in those of the economically dominant white 
capital. Predominance also means that one party becomes heir to "the nation', it 
becomes identified with the nation and criticisms of it amount to attacks on the 
nation and on its supposed national intentions such as social justice for the majority 
of the population of black South Africans. It must be stressed that one-party 
predominance cannot suffice to denote a type of state; to assume that it does is to 
place undue emphasis on the electoral system alone (multi-party, no-party, single-
46 Michael Neocosmos 
party, one-party predominance). Zimbabwe which has a clear predominant party 
system, has evidently less in common with South Africa than with a one:party 
system (Laakso, 1999). This is simply because the state there has shown itself 
incapable of securing its legitimacy in civil society beyond the first few years of 
independence. It is universally considered as illegitimate throughout civil society, 
and multi-partyism has quite simply failed to secure its legitimacy because singleparty 
dominance has been achieved through evident electoral fraud and systematic 
state coercion, inter alia, features which are common to one-party systems. 
Consensus or its absence as a way of securing the reproduction of the state power 
(consensus as a principle of legitimation) appears to be much more fundamental in 
characterizing the state than the kind of electoral or party system in operation. 
4. Statism and State Consciousness. The equating of political consciousness 
and state consciousness dominates the popular perspective, in other words it is 
•maintained that "politics is the state and the state is politics" (Wamba-dia-Wamba: 
1994:250). The state is seen as the provider. It will "deliver" development or will 
pass whatever legislation is necessary to ensure that development is "delivered" 
either by itself or by private capital. Political problems and issues such as ethnic, 
racial and gender oppression, inequality and poverty, are all addressed through 
legislation and policy, administratively and technically, rather than politically 
(though planning is no longer in vogue). This amounts to transformation or 
development "from above". It is no longer a question of the people or communities 
"making history", of being in control of the state as was attempted, at least at a local 
level, in the 1980s, but of political passivity and apathy (see 3. above). Erstwhile 
popular organizations are now transformed into "interest groups" or "watchdogs" 
and a civil society is formed which corresponds, in all major respects, to the liberal 
model. This civil society is unquestionably part and parcel of the state domain of 
politics. Its leaders all sit (or aspire to sit) on the appropriate state-funded commissions 
and state bodies for which they get handsomely paid. The established consensus is 
thus a state or elite consensus. The state is internalized in consciousness by those 
wishing to democratize it, so that the only way towards transformation is to achieve 
state positions. All politics is reduced to state politics and to "capturing" state posts; 
state politics thereby soon appears to be "natural" and therefore inevitable. Society 
is expected to be transformed "from above" and new bureaucracies are created for 
this purpose with the result that millions in aid money for the poor is said to be still 
unallocated as a result of "administrative bottlenecks" while, of course, the creation 
of jobs for the favoured is made possible in the bureaucracy.3 
5. Corporatism. Corporatism is evidence of the incorporation of erstwhile 
popular organizations into the state domain of politics. It is one way in which a 
national consensus is achieved, but this way is reserved for those organizations of 
civil society which cannot be directly incorporated into the party of nationalism 
proper. In South Africa this has primarily meant trade unions and refers less to 
civics, as these have largely collapsed, and even less to official women's organizations 
which have lost their independence. Such corporatism operates through institutions
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 47 
such as the National Economic and Development Labour Council (NEDLAC) 
whose decisions are in fact more and more ignored by the government. Another way 
in which incorporation into state structures is undertaken is through formal 
alliances with the state party in which civil society organizations are given a direct 
stake in the state and potentially damaging threats to the state-structured national 
consensus are avoided (e.g., the alliance of the ANC with the Congress of South 
African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party). At the same time 
regular attempts are made to bring in as many individuals with nationalist credentials 
as possible into state posts at high levels, thus tying as many members of the new 
elite as possible to the state through career paths and access to perks on government 
commissions and so on (Neocosmos and Selinyane, 1999). 
In Botswana, the incorporation of NGOs (the main source of criticism of the 
state) within the state domain of politics has taken all kinds of inventive forms 
beyond (crucially important) state funding to include "breakfasts with the president", 
permanent state councils, and the regular inclusion of (usually unelected) NGO 
officials through the provision of travel expensesand per diems to conferences in 
the west and elsewhere. This is of course referred to as "consultation with all 
stakeholders" thus providing it with a veneer of democratic legitimacy. The 
problem, however, is that in most cases these NGO officials represent no one but 
themselves. Ultimately, therefore, this simply creates a consensus exclusively 
among the middle classes as it is these who are provided with access to the trough of 
perks and jobs to the exclusion of the majority of the population of whom around 48 
percent are said to live in poverty. 
6. Reconciliation. In South Africa, a reconciliation programme ostensibly 
between races but (as I argue elsewhere, Neocosmos, 2001b) actually between the 
new and old state managers has been undertaken, while justice for the majority vwd-
vis past state depredations and systematic atrocities has been precluded (Mamdani, 
1998b). The legal basis of the old state has not been contested or seen as illegitimate, 
neither has the basis of its colonial statism been critiqued. Rather, its legitimacy has 
been confirmed and thus the threats from the agents of the old state on the new have 
been undermined at the expense of the people. The process of reconciliation has also 
been one of the formation of a post-apartheid national ruling class cutting across the 
races. 
7. Ideological Vision. An ideological "vision" propounded by the state has to 
be available. This also has to possess a "national" character in order for such a 
consensus to acquire hegemonic dominance. Although, as noted, "development" 
does not constitute such a vision, social justice, especially economic justice, is 
regularly mooted by the state as in desperate need of achievement. Yet the 
overcoming of poverty has not been even remotely initiated as unemployment has 
been increasing (so-called jobless growth). The idea of "development" or whatever 
impoverished component of it is left (such as infrastructural provision) is seen 
simply as particularistic and not as national and universalistic, because it only 
affects a sector of the population—the "most disadvantaged'. This general dis-
48 Michael Neocosmos 
cursive orientation is a direct result of the neo-liberal economic perspectives and 
policies which hold a central place within the state ideological consensus. These are 
not designed to incorporate social welfare programmes and subsidies, land reform 
programmes, poverty alleviation and other social democratic statist prescriptions as 
central state tenets but only as peripheral ones. While the state asserts that it is 
indeed engaged in such social welfare policies to some extent, the contradictions of 
these assertions with the neo-liberal paradigm are becoming more apparent.6 
Another "vision" is the ideology of an "African renaissance" propagated by 
intellectuals in close proximity to the new President, Thabo Mbeki. According to 
this view, a "new dawn" is emerging for Africa under South African leadership. 
What this "new dawn" consists of is not altogether clear apart from the fact that it is 
said to be congruent with neo-classical economic ideology (see Lodge, 1999: 96- 
109).7 It appears to be mainly a way for the black South African business elite and 
intelligentsia to assert a new found confidence, as accumulation takes place among 
a new group of rich state-connected South Africans sometimes referred to in official 
discourse as a "patriotic bourgeoisie".8 This slogan is also mooted as a way of 
providing a government of national unity between the ANC and some obviously 
"African" political parties such as the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), but not it should 
be noted with those nationalist parties created as a result of disaffection from the 
ANC such as the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the United Democratic 
Movement (UDM). 
As a result of this state-defined consensual discourse, criticisms of the ANC can 
be labelled as "foreign" (outside the national consensus), as either the utterances of 
racists or ex-racists if such criticisms are made by whites, as disloyal remarks if 
made by blacks, or simply as foreign inspired. The labelling of someone as standing 
outside the (state defined) national consensus is very difficult to answer as one South 
African commentator has recently stressed: 
Whenever freedom is to be curtailed, restrictive actions are justified by 
patriotism, ioere/zoaf, anti-Soviet activities, communist activities orracism. 
The censure is powerful for it identifies the critic as someone standing for 
perversion of the consensus and, accordingly, defence is almost impossible 
(Mail and Guardian, Vol. 16, No. 9, 3-9 March 2000). 
However, what is not emphasized so much in this remark, is the fact that this 
discourse of exclusion is a state discourse whoever may be uttering it. This state 
perspective is complemented by an outright chauvinism in relation to non-South 
African Africans most evidently apparent in the actions and statements of state 
bureaucrats, university employees and informal sector participants in particular, 
who see their jobs, careers and/or access to state perks as threatened by Africans 
from abroad. The changed attitudes towards migrants from the sub-region who still 
seek employment in South Africa is also an important indication of this crude statedirected 
or elite-inspired chauvinism (Neocosmos, 1999; McDonald, 2000). In this 
discourse, an arrogant South African exceptionalism in which South Africa is
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 49 
distinguished from the rest of Africa in terms of its supposed superiority and 
similarity with the west (and/or Latin America) is combined with pretensions to be 
a leader in Africanness (in some ways similar to certain African-American 
conceptions), a position which leads to obvious contradictions as those noted 
above. 
Broadly speaking, as a result of this discourse, democratic prescriptions on the 
state are delegitimized and said to be impossible, such as, for example, the equal 
treatment of all inhabitants of the country, including, in particular, migrants from 
other African countries. The basis for this discrimination is given legal support 
simply because the South African constitution distinguishes between rights of 
persons and rights of citizens, with the former being restricted in several important 
respects most notably with regard to their right to engage in business (ibid.). In sum, 
the false appearance of unanimity created by the consensual state suppresses 
political differences, and tends to remove democratic prescriptions from view. The 
net effect of the creation and imposition of an elite consensus by the state is to 
delegitimize any forms of politics outside its narrowly defined and imposed 
domain. No politics is allowed unless it accepts the parameters and practices of this 
state domain of politics. The restriction on democratic political practice should 
therefore be obvious as it excludes the possibility of dialogue and debate with (let 
alone influence by) a subaltern domain of politics independent of the state. 
As the consensual state attempts to secure its legitimacy, the most important 
contradiction it faces is between the success of this endeavour on the one hand, and 
what are perceived to be the exigencies of accumulation as ascribed by neo-liberal 
economics on the other. Clearly, neo-liberal economic conceptions do not usually 
assert a serious social welfare dimension, and as the growth achieved so far in South 
Africa has not been associated with job creation but the opposite, job loss, criticisms 
of neo-liberal policies ring true. Even growth is slowing to zero as reliance on 
private investment means that the power of the trade union movement and the 
government's inability to control crime are disincentives for foreign investors 
compared with countries such as Malaysia and Turkey among others. If the 
economy and state continue to show themselves to be unable to "deliver" resources 
to the overwhelming majority of the population, or to confront the massive poverty 
at present existing in the country (as stressed by the most senior politicians), more 
and more strain will be put on the ability of a consensus to deliver popular 
legitimacy to the state.9 
Consensus as a way to secure the state's legitimacy does not operate quite so 
evidently in the countryside which is still very much under the control of chiefs. 
However, the countryside can be and has been safely ignored by the state as it is not 
usually (unlike say in Kenya) the site for alternative power bases to the state 
consensus (with the possible exception of right-wing die-hard Afrikaner nationalists 
wanting to restore the old order). This ignoring of the countryside by the state is 
evident in the complete lack of progress in any serious implementation of a land 
reform programme which was one of the main planks of the ANC's nationalist
50 Michael Neocosmos 
appeals during the liberation struggle. Apart from the case of Kwazulu Natal where 
rural power bases and votes are crucial in determining who holds power in the 
province, in other provinces, the countryside simply follows the town, so far 
anyway. The industrial and urban character of South Africa does indeed tilt the 
balance heavily in favour of the urban areas as the main centres of power, but this 
need not remain so forever. 
Other sources of contradiction include: the selection of state personnel from 
certain particular social groups (e,g., "affirmative action") as opposed to others, 
emphasizing particularism vis-d-vis the state's universalistic principles,10 the contradiction 
between an Africanist ideology and the oppression of foreign Africans 
and petty chauvinism, the contradiction between the urban and the rural areas where 
the majority of poor are located and where development has yet to be seen, the 
contradiction between the growing middle class of both blacks and whites and the 
majority of the poor, the contradiction between the state and elite claims regarding 
the democratic nature of the country and massive poverty, and the contradiction 
between a formal adherence to gender equality and the systematic oppression of 
women illustrated by an estimated one million rapes a year, a fact which is 
depoliticized in state discourse by its relegation to a realm of individual violence." 
A further potential long-term threat to this liberal mode of state politics is the decline 
in the turnout at elections which is usually an indicator of popular disaffection with 
the system, but this has not yet manifested itself in legislative elections and may take 
some time to do so in South Africa (Friedman, 1999). On the other hand, the turnout 
at the recent local elections was by all accounts low, a fact which gave rise to 
comments on political apathy among the ANC s constituency {Mail and Guardian). 
However, in the rest of Africa outside South Africa and a few other countries, 
multi-partyism has not been able to secure for the state the legitimacy it has been 
seeking, as the old pre-multi-party ruling elite has largely been able to secure its 
position and access to state resources through the adoption of multi-partyism 
(Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, Gabon, etc.). At the same time S APs have not produced 
the levels of development predicted. As a result, calls for more popular forms of 
development and democracy—in other words the general detaching of democratization 
from multi-partyism as a prescription on the state—are becoming less 
isolated (Olukoshi, 1998a, 1998b). There is an intellectual trend developing in 
Africa which argues for forms of democracy which go beyond liberal democratic 
prescriptions on the state because, if grafted on a colonial foundation, these cannot 
give rise to genuine democracy (Mamdani, 1987; Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1993,1994; 
Olukoshi and Laakso, 1996; Chole and Ibrahim, 1995; Olukoshi, 1998b, 1998c). It 
has also been argued that donors' current interest in notions of "good governance" 
is not unrelated to attempts to neutralize these more popular democratic prescriptions 
on the state (Olukoshi, 1998a). 
It is becoming clear that in Africa at least, the state cannot democratize itself. 
Political parties, rather than being links between civil society and the state as 
maintained by liberal democratic theory, are state agencies for placing members of
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 51 
dominant social groups into powerful state posts, with the consequent reproduction 
of an extremely powerful and corrupt elite which is seen quite apparently to be 
accumulating at the people's expense through access to state resources. Parties are 
instruments for reproducing sectarianism at the expense of the national interest. In 
actual fact, it should be recalled that the liberal conception of politics is premised on 
the view that the state ("political society") is the exclusively legitimate domain of 
politics. If civil society were itself to be politicized so that a popular domain of 
politics were in existence legitimately, political parties as presently constituted 
could become redundant, or at the very least contested as the exclusive form of 
political organization. 
The crude economic reductionism of neo-liberalism, whereby a free market is 
said to be the best guarantee of democracy, has undermined our ability to think 
about democratic politics because debate and discussion are precluded by reference 
to external exigencies on politics. Thus, at present, we are told continuously that the 
"economic reality of the market" demands a particular type of politics, which must 
be of necessity neo-liberal. If we are indeed serious about developing genuinely 
democratic prescriptions on the state (Lazarus, 1996), we need to transcend such 
theoretically reductionist and politically authoritarian conceptions. 
The resurgence of ethnic movements in Africa has seemed to question the very 
nature of the nation state. The predictions of the modernization paradigm according 
to which ethnic identities would soon be replaced by national ones as the process of 
state consolidation unfolded, has proven to be a chimera. While this process has not 
been restricted to Africa, it is on that continent that this process has been the most 
widespread. The context for this has been provided both by the process of 
globalization itself as well as by the bankruptcy of the developmentalist state model. 
The collapse of Fordist regimes of accumulation worldwide and their reliance 
on cheap labour in the third world generally, has meant that both capital on one side 
and labour and the peasantry on the other have both been trying to make up their 
declining capacities (for sustained profit on the one and for reproduction on the 
other) at the expense of each other. The squeezing of the working people of Africa 
and the struggle for access to the state, the traditional source of accumulation for the 
elite, has had as one of its effects, the recrudescence of ethnic mobilization. The 
often genuine grievances regarding the post-colonial state's partiality in its largesse 
with regard to "development goodies" and its systematic mistreatment of minorities 
(or majorities), has been a major source of discontent as well as an easy method of 
raising followers, thus easily leading to sectarian politics. 
However, ethnic mobilization has had a contradictory character in Africa. 
While some ethnic movements have been putting forward authoritarian demands 
which concern the retention of privilege and have led in extreme cases to "warlord 
states", others have been concerned with the extension of democratic rights, not just 
to individuals but to oppressed groups. In fact, the resistance to SAPs and their neoliberal 
agendas has not only been undertaken by the poor, women (who are at the 
sharp end of household reproduction) and youth (who have slipped through all the
52 Michael Neocosmos 
strained security systems), but also by ethnic communities who find their 
environmental and cultural legacy systematically destroyed (as in the Delta region 
of Nigeria, for example). The increased state authoritarianism as a result of the 
forcing of SAP down the people's throats has also had an ethnic bias as the scramble 
for protection against the state and the saving of "one's own" has often taken 
precedence over the struggle for democracy. The recent popular upsurge in 
Zimbabwe is only the most recent manifestation of resistance against the extremely 
predatory combination of the post-Fordist regime of accumulation and state 
authoritarianism in Africa. The demands of resistance organizations and by the 
struggle for democracy on the continent have, however, not cohered as yet into a 
broad movement with a transnational dimension. 
Conclusion: Towards a New Mode of Politics 
Clearly both warlord states and consensual states attempt to restrict politics to a 
specific elite domain, well beyond the cultural practices of popular politics 
embedded in the day to day lives of the majority of the population of their countries. 
They do so, however, in fundamentally different ways. While the former has little 
need of a principle of legitimation and tends to rule primarily through violence and 
terror, the latter depends on such legitimation provided primarily, but not exclusively, 
by a process of universal suffrage. Nevertheless, state violence is never completely 
out of sight. The kind of political culture which each form of rule leads to also 
differs. The former tends to lead to a culture of militarism and opportunism among 
the elite, fear among the oppressed, but also to inventiveness resistance and 
popularly based alternatives as the people need to organize at community level 
simply for survival purposes. Clearly such popular forms of politics should not be 
idealized as they can include racist or ethnic militaristic politics as well as 
democratic ones, but they seem to enable the posing of alternative popular state 
structures, as central ones are so clearly oppressive and illegitimate. In other words, 
the possibility exists for the development of a subaltern domain of politics which 
would challenge the monopoly of politics in the state domain. 
The latter form of state tends to lead to a culture of apathy and self-censorship 
among the people (Wamba-dia-Wamba) as popular movements are demobilized 
and as the state is seen as a god on earth which is expected to "deliver" benefits of 
various kinds from employment to development to housing. Rights discourse tends 
to be concentrated within the state domain of politics. Popular politics in so far as it 
exists seems to be less concerned with rights, individual rights in particular.12 
Popular politics within a subaltern domain has a tendency to shrink as popular 
involvement in politics is restricted to voting every five years or so, and as the latter 
shows itself as more and more irrelevant to people's lives as its benefits are 
restricted to a small minority of corrupt politicians. The resultant civic apathy and 
ignorance leaves people open to the scapegoatism, racism, ethnic chauvinism, 
violent sexual oppression and to the simplistic rhetoric of opportunistic politicians 
who target the weaker members of society to benefit their own careers. This is
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 53 
particularly the case in those countries where there is little in terms of a popular 
history of resistance to oppression (such as in Botswana). In South Africa, given the 
history of popular struggle, although political apathy is widespread (witness the low 
turnout at the recent local elections), instances of democratic popular struggles 
among individual communities and organized groups still exist, although these are 
quite isolated and easily ignored by the state. 
Clearly new forms of state rule in historically new contexts tend eventually to 
give rise to new modes of politics of resistance. The central conception of these new 
modes of politics must be a popularly based politics which eschews the attainment 
of state power as a prerequisite for democratization (at best) as the lesson of history 
must surely be that there can be no democratic transformation "from above". 
Rather, following Marcos's statement heading this paper, such new modes of 
politics should have as their goal the development of a new popularly based 
democratic relationship between state and society. 
Different forms of state rule tend to give rise to different forms of resistance. It 
seems, for example, that the only effective antidote to the militarism of warlord 
states is a mass movement for peace, one where communities reassert their right to 
life and simple existence, peace and security, guaranteed by a popularly accountable 
state. Clearly, there are many possibilities for international cooperation on such 
issues but it should be noted that this means the assertion and recognition of a realm 
of politics outside the state domain, within communities themselves. 
This is also the case in the consensual state form, but in this case a popular realm 
of politics mustemerge in different sites with other demands to stress the unacceptable 
and authoritarian nature of the state consensus. In either case, recognition of a 
popular or "subaltern" domain of politics means of necessity a new conception of 
citizenship with an accent on the reaffirmation of recovery of politics as a popular 
right and the removal of the monopoly of politics by professional politicians. At the 
level of theory, this means beginning to develop a different understanding of 
politics, one which legitimizes the contradictory but potentially liberating character 
of popular practices and culture. 
Notes 
•Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Botswana. 
'This is theoretically and politically similar to reducing the economy to its 
"formal" (i.e., state recognized) constituents alone, while excluding the so-called 
"informal" sector from economic activity (the latter is said to exist "outside" the 
economy, etc.). Economics here simply follows state conceptions. 
2At the same time there were other state forms which were not strictly 
developmentalist such as the Congo-Zaire state at one extreme generally characterized 
as a predatory state and the Botswana at the other, a liberal state. Incidentally, both 
were rentier states. 
3Even Transparency International, the German-based NGO, stresses the role of 
civil society organizations (in conjunction with state ones it adds) in the control of
54 Michael Neocosmos 
corruption in Africa. See the interview with its director on SABC News Hour, 10/ 
10/1999. 
4Arguably it is this precariousness and uncertainty and the intensified competition 
which they have engendered, which have provided the conditions for extreme cases 
such as "warlord states". 
5Such as the so-called NDA (National Development Agency) whose task it is to 
allocate state funds to NGOs and which a year after its creation had only allocated 
a tenth of its R340 million (Mail and Guardian, 12-19 April 2001). 
6 See, for example, the South African Labour Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 2, April 
1998. 
7 The point here is to criticize the notion of "African renaissance" as employed 
by the South African state and not the idea itself. In fact, it is important to struggle 
to provide a popular democratic content to this idea which would give it an 
emancipatory character. See, for example, Wamba-dia-Wamba (1998). 
8 Lodge (op. cit.: 108) notes that it is striking how this discourse has become 
dominant alongside the accelerating black share of market capitalization on the 
Johannesburg Stock Exchange "from 11 black-owned companies worth R4.6 
billion in September 1995 to 28 companies representing a capitalization of R66.7 
billion—10 percent of the total share holdings listed—in February 1998 ... 
Between 1994 and 1997, the number of black South Africans earning more than 
R5000 a month jumped by 52 percent, from 310 000 to 472 000". 
9 Recent figures on income distribution suggest that the income of the (largely 
white) richest 20% of South African households is 45 times greater than the average 
income of the (largely black) poorest 20% of households (Maharaj, 1999:2). At the 
same time, as I have already noted, the black middle class has been rapidly 
increasing as a result of government "affirmative action" policies, some would say 
at the expense of the majority of the poor; see, for example, The Economist, 2 Oct. 
1999. The Mail and Guardian (Vol. 16, No. 4, 28 Jan.-3 Feb. 2000) cites recent 
research which notes that between 1991 and 1996 in South Africa: "the richest 10% 
of blacks received an average 17% increase in income, while the poorest 40% of 
households actually suffered a fall in household income of around 21 %". 
10 The fact that "affirmative action" is seen as of greater benefit to "Africans" 
than to "coloureds', is a real political issue in the Western Cape province even if we 
leave aside the state-nationalist consensual consideration of "whites" as a unified 
homogeneous group of racists or potential racists and their exclusion from state 
posts if not ANC card-carrying members. 
1' Maharaj (op. cit.: 2) for example, notes that, in South Africa, one in every three 
women is in an abusive relationship, a woman is killed by her partner every six days 
and there is a rape every 35 seconds. 
12Mamdani's (1996) dichotomy between rights discourse—urban and tradition 
discourse—rural is problematic. In Botswana, for example, adiscourse on women's 
rights does have some resonance among rural communities as does particularly a 
discourse on citizenship and group rights. On the other hand, corporal punishment 
is meted out regularly under the legitimacy of customary law and the latter tends to 
be the dominant form of rule over the popular classes, whether rural or urban based.
Towards Understanding New Forms of State Rule 55 
A liberal discourse on individual rights tends to be a middle-class phenomenon in 
that country, the discourse on tradition or group rights more of a popular discourse. 
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