Chiefdom in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Watchdog of Domesticated Modern State?
Keywords:
chiefdom, state, authority, power, Africa, indirect ruleAbstract
The article examines general issues of state-chiefdom interaction in sub-Saharan Africa. The starting point is the claim by Peter Skalník (2011: 6) and other anthropologists and political scientists that chiefdom is an “omnipresent organisational principle that coexists with the state” and should play a crucial role in the democratisation process. The theoretical basis of this literature is the understanding of authority and power as distinct phenomena with their own dynamics. In the first part, I deduce a general typology of political units along the dimensions of authority/power and centralisation/decentralisation as implicit in Skalník’s texts. In the second part, I examine the normative side of Skalník’s thesis, which sees the link between chiefdom and the modern state as a solution to long-standing governance problems in this part of the world.
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