Elísio Macamo - Böcker

This book uses extractive industry projects in Africa to explore how political authority and the nation-state are reconfigured at the intersection of national political contestations and global, transnational capital. Instead of focusing on technological zones and the new social assemblages at the actual sites of construction or mineral extraction, the authors use extractive industry projects as a topical lens to investigate contemporary processes of state-making at the state–corporation nexus. Throughout the book, the authors seek to understand how public political actors and private actors of liberal capitalism negotiate and redefine notions and practices of sovereignty by setting legal, regulatory and fiscal standards. Rather than looking at resource governance from a normative perspective, the authors look at how these negotiations are shaped by and reshape the self-conception of various national and transnational actors, and how these jointly redefine the role of the state in managing these processes for the ‘greater good’. Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa will be useful for researchers, upper-level students and policy-makers who are interested in new articulations of state-making and politics in Africa.

This book uses extractive industry projects in Africa to explore how political authority and the nation-state are reconfigured at the intersection of national political contestations and global, transnational capital. Instead of focusing on technological zones and the new social assemblages at the actual sites of construction or mineral extraction, the authors use extractive industry projects as a topical lens to investigate contemporary processes of state-making at the state–corporation nexus. Throughout the book, the authors seek to understand how public political actors and private actors of liberal capitalism negotiate and redefine notions and practices of sovereignty by setting legal, regulatory and fiscal standards. Rather than looking at resource governance from a normative perspective, the authors look at how these negotiations are shaped by and reshape the self-conception of various national and transnational actors, and how these jointly redefine the role of the state in managing these processes for the ‘greater good’. Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa will be useful for researchers, upper-level students and policy-makers who are interested in new articulations of state-making and politics in Africa.

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licenceDrawing on postcolonial and decolonial approaches, this volume investigates both the theoretical foundations and the practical challenges of 'reversing the gaze' as a strategy for re-orienting global knowledge production.It brings together reflections on the theoretical and methodological implications of applying social-scientific concepts, typically developed to explain social and institutional phenomena in non-European settings, to the study of analogous empirical dynamics within Europe. In doing so, the contributions confront the potential pitfalls of this approach and grapple with the persistent epistemic, conceptual and normative frictions that inevitably shape such undertakings.Ultimately, the volume advances new conceptual and methodological pathways that offer practical visions for global knowledge production, attentive to the epistemic, moral and political issues at stake in contemporary debates.