The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Thomas M. Callaghy has written a truly admirable study of formation in Africa that is at once bold and provocative. Focusing specifically on Zaire, the study boldly and convincingly situates the formation process in contemporary Africa within a comparative and historical framework that is astutely informed by the current theoretical debates on the and by a judicious blend of analytic categories derived from Weberian sociology, Marxist analysis, organization theory, modernization and development approaches, and world-system and dependency-underdevelopment perspectives. This ambitious framework is operationalized with the help of an impressive array of extant theoretical and empirical studies, enriched by primary data collected in Zaire. It is also a provocative study, for Callaghy proceeds from what, at first blush, seems to be a preposterous assumption that the formation process in contemporary Africa is similar to and comparable with the formation process in Latin America and especially seventeenth-century France. The central thesis of the study is that the formation process in contemporary Africa is no different than in Europe and postcolonial Latin America, or, for that matter, anywhere else. Methodologically, therefore, the state formation experience of other areas and periods is indeed germane to the study of formation process in Africa and ... the use of comparative perspective helps to highlight key aspects of African politics today that have been neglected or inadequately conceptualized (pp. xixii). Everywhere, the process of formation entails a struggle between a group of centralizing elites and a diverse set of powerful and autonomous internal and external groups over the location and distribution of political power and economic resources. Essentially, this is a struggle for sovereignty, for domination over internal societal groups and autonomy vis-a-vis external actors and forces. Everywhere the struggle proceeds slowly, unevenly and incrementally, involving a varying mix of conflicting and complementary interests, confrontational and cooperative strategies, and coercive and cooptive techniques. Nowhere is the eventual outcome of this struggle predetermined or unambiguous. This central thesis is methodically elaborated in two crisply written and tightly argued parts of the book, comprised of eight chapters which are liberally footnoted, often with long explanatory notes. Part I elucidates the comparative and analytic perspectives which inform the study. Part II focuses directly on the statesociety struggle in Zaire. Chapter I employs the current theoretical debates on the to categorize Mobutu's Zaire as the contemporary African variant of an early modern absolutist authoritarian with a strong organic-statist orientation and associated but weak corporatist structures linking and society. Comparison with Latin America serves to emphasize the quintessentially uninstitutionalized character of this in which structures, societal configurations (especially class and ethnicity), and state-society relations are all in flux and in the process of formation. Zaire in this respect conforms not to the bureaucratic-authoritarian model of contemporary Latin America or Bonapartist France, in which