State Formation after Retrenchment

Neoliberalism has dismantled states across the globe. In Africa especially, the capacity of governments and ministries to devise and implement programmes was massively curtailed by economic crises, imposed austerity, and a discourse that delegitimised states as developmental drivers. Since the turn of the millennium, however, a number of new social policy programmes have emerged, and they are bringing the state back into action. Given its long disconnect from peripheral people and areas, the implementation of social programmes necessitates some reconstruction. Against this background, Anna Wolkenhauer explores how the state is reconstituted after retrenchment.Based on extensive research in Zambia between 2014 and 2026, Wolkenhauer presents a theory of state formation that revolves around the forging of new centre-periphery connections through social policy, which occur along four dimensions: discursive, bureaucratic, political, and epistemic, all of them mutually constitutive. Given the exclusivist nature of statehood inherited from colonialism, the unfinished project of state formation in Africa consists of expanding the state to the majority population. Social policy is a key site where this takes place.While the 1990s' roll-back phase of neoliberalism was replaced with new state engagement, many facets of neoliberalism remain. The term mature neoliberalism captures this continuity as well as new facets of the paradigm and helps to make sense of the considerable degree of ambiguity displayed in the centre-periphery connections forged in Zambian social policy. On the one hand, these connections expand the state's reach and role; on the other hand, they weave the state's limits into its new fabric, thereby manifesting them. State Formation after Retrenchment identifies critical seeds that have been sown and out of which a more progressive rehabilitation of African states could grow.