Recent studies on African Statehood and Statebuilding have illustrated inadequacies in
conceptualizing politics around a unified, institutionalized state and have developed understandings of politics as a multidirectional process rooted in social communities and lifeworlds as much as political and bureaucratic institutions associated with the state. This is especially urgent in postcolonial
states, which face institutions weakly associated with societies, but not necessarily weak
societies or social engagement, as well as authoritarian states, which in regulating institutionalized politics push political processes outside of official channels. These findings raise important questions
for research on African politics: How do people pursue political interests, when institutions conventionally understood to accumulate such interests fail to do so both intentionally and due to inadequacies? And are they building alternative social institutions? Political institutions are regarded beyond the nation state; international institutions and actors provide similar points of access to Africans pursuing political goals and can be used strategically, while also exerting repressive power on multiple levels. With international organizations, NGOs, foreign states and regional organizations present, political, military and economic power is multiscalar, requiring multiscalar strategies in dealing with them. This panel thus invites contributions which focus on empirically showing how Africans pursue political goals within challenging institutional frameworks. Especially encouraged are Sociological or Anthropological case studies which shift attention away from institutional logics of state building toward citizen’s
strategies in dealing with existing institutions to work with, circumvent or subvert them. It
encourages theoretical papers discussing whether informal politics and social institutions have the capacity to offer alternatives to conventional states, explaining enduring challenges to expansive institutions while providing a possible vision of a non-statist state.
