Event

The Faculty of Social Sciences hosts a public seminar by Dickson Eyoh PhD, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and African Studies Program, University of Toronto, on Wednesday 4^th May, 2011, from 10 am-noon, at the Faculty of Social Sciences Lounge. Professor Eyoh will present on the topic “Politics of Belonging and Challenges of Governance in Africa.”

Abstract

Deficiencies in “governance” are assumed to be the root of Africa’s myriad economic and political problems. However defined, it is commonly supposed that institutional architectures that prop liberal political and economic orders, including a robust sense of national belonging based on shared citizenship, are imperative for the development of more effective governance. A pronounced characteristic of politics in Africa in the post-1980s era of liberalization is the invigoration of the “politics of belonging”: the resort to ethnic citizenship to assert prior rights to resources and political representation in local society by self-designated “sons of the soil” and the contestation of such claims by their national compatriots dubbed “migrants” because of their later settlement in localities.  

The main drivers of the “political of belonging” are the tensions of two inherently contradictory conceptions of citizenship on which Africa’s postcolonial states are founded. The first, inclusive, is the universalized liberal notion whereby citizens are individuals with reciprocal rights and obligations to the nation-state, unfettered by sub-national affiliations. The second, exclusionary, is ethnic citizenship which rests on membership in kin-based groups claiming an ancestral homeland.  

This seminar will consider the challenges to better governance of the politics of belonging.  It will do so in part by tracing how rival conceptions of citizenship was pivotal to colonial state formation and how their tensions were reinforced by the nation-state building and development projects of the postcolonial era.