Everyday State and Democracy in Africa

“Major fresh perspectives on the state in everyday life that will be seminal reading for historians and social scientists as well as for Africanists.” — Frank Trentmann, author of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers

“Anthropologists, for some time, have successfully deconstructed essentialist notions of ‘the’ state in Africa by focusing on what states do when they are working. The contributors to this book push this approach further: they enquire about how ordinary citizens experience the state and its agents in multiple sites, focusing on the possibilities and constraints of everyday life and the resulting popular grammars of state and democracy. The book should be on the core reading list of every course on state and democracy, in Africa and beyond.” — Thomas Bierschenk, coeditor of States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies

“Mobilizing the decentering perspectives of ethnography to capture living practices, Everyday State and Democracy in Africa develops an original view from below on the huge changes throughout the continent since the end of the Cold War. The volume convincingly demonstrates that a focus on how the people involved see state and democracy might be more helpful than intricate theoretical discussions. Two themes seem to come back throughout the volume. The first is (unsurprisingly) the role of violence in people’s everyday encounters with the state. The second (maybe more surprising) is that the state is all the more present in people’s perceptions where it seems to be absent.” — Peter Geschiere, author of The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe

This edited volume by Wale Adebanwi is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning corpus of works on the anthropology of everyday state and democracy in Africa. — Canadian Journal of African Studies