1
Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship

Christian Lund

INTRODUCTION

Weak, fragile and failed. Mainstream work on states in post-colonial societies has often used these adjectives to describe dysfunctional public administrations. Kaplan's seminal article, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, which sketched out imminent lawlessn ess and state disintegration, was the forerunner of huge scholarly interest in state formation in poor countries (Kaplan, 1994). The first generation of the fragile states literature, with its somewhat skewed focus on how real government structures fall short of an ideal Weberian index of a rational state was essentialist, ahistorical and teleological. In a recent literature review on failed states, Hoffmann and Kirk (2013) map out how subsequent research has emerged. While this newer body of scholarship is varied, a few features seem generally shared. These include an interest in how public authority actually works, a focus on competition, contestation and conflict as enduring parts of public authority, and, not least, the acknowledgement that public authority is always in the making. Some particularly interesting contributions have analysed how a broad range of institutions compete over territorial governance, over different forms of rent from resources, and over the grand narrative of history.1 These perspectives are shared in this Introductory essay, as well as the special issue which follows. However, the present ambition is to elaborate an approach that does not only take the competing institutions as given entities exercising governance with greater, or lesser, effect, ceremony and gusto: by reorienting the enquiry a little, I want to also capture how governance of vital resources creates statehood, or state quality, in these institutions.

In what follows, I therefore present a series of propositions about the inter-connectedness of authority and rights. I suggest that property and citizenship, on the one hand, and authority, on the other, are mutually constitutive and represent social contracts of recognition. I then discuss various dynamics of recognition, such as how state quality emerges out of contracts of recognition, and how this ought to be the centre of analysis of the formation of political authority. Finally, I provide two concise examples from Ghana and Indonesia.

THE ARGUMENT

Dynamics of State Formation and Institutional Pluralism

Treating the ‘state’ as a finished product gets in the way of understanding it. The state is always in the making. Political authority is (re-)produced through its successful exercise over an important issue in relation to the social actors concerned.2 To move beyond the mere incantation of this claim, this Introduction investigates and specifies contracts of recognition as the key dynamic of the constitution of authority, and the chapters which follow describe and demonstrate it.

The argument I pursue is that the ability to entitle and disenfranchise people with regard to property, to establish the conditions under which they hold that property — together with the ability to define who belongs and who does not, and to establish and uphold rank, privilege and social servitude in its many forms — is constitutive of state power. Claims to rights prompt the exercise of authority. Struggles over property and citizenship are therefore as much about the scope and constitution of political authority as they are about access to resources and membership of polities. Hence, investigating the social production of property and citizenship enables concrete understanding of the dynamics of authority or state formation.

Granted, there are many problematics of government (Rose and Miller, 1992), and not all questions of state formation can be reduced to property and citizenship. Government — or authority — forms around the control over central resources, and in some historical periods, and in some places, key resources may be trading points and routes; they may be ‘knowledge’ or ‘security’, or even more abstract sources of wealth. It seems prudent to remain open to different kinds of combinations at all times. Yet, property (especially in land) and citizenship are increasingly such central resources in most societies, and engaging with these two fundamental and substantive questions in terms of their production allows us to traverse a broad series of dynamic questions of how property and citizenship are made.3 This takes us through questions of how notions of ownership are conceptualized, how political identities are constructed, how taxes are recovered, how conflicts are adjudicated, how violence and other sanctions are exercised and legitimated, and so on. There are therefore good reasons to investigate the rights–authority relations from a process perspective.

The mutual constitution of rights and authority takes place in many institutional settings. Thus, no single institution defines and enforces rights and exercises public authority as such. Governance is not reserved for statutory institutions alone. The ability to govern can reside in institutions other than formal government. Statutory institutions (legislative, judiciary and executive) may effectively govern, but it is more appropriate to treat this as an empirical question than a pre-established fact, and more productive to identify the actual authorities in semi-autonomous social fields of property and citizenship (S.F. Moore, 1978). In other words, government institutions are not the only source of state effects. Claims to rights are therefore ways to invoke public authority and governing capacity in different institutions, be they statutory or not. And, conversely, a claim to authority through the categorization of property and citizenship is a way to acquire and exercise state quality. In a nutshell, it is a claim to ‘state’.

To grasp the dialectics of rights and authority, we need to dispense with simple assumptions that political authority exists prior to rights of property and citizenship. Rights and political authority are contemporaneous, and the control exercised by institutions over resources and political subjectivities does not represent a pre-existing authority. It produces authority. Conversely, effective rights do not represent pre-existing natural rights. They are political constructions and achievements. Yet, the idea of the ‘state’ as something established is very powerful and can easily divert our attention from its constant reproductive and relational character. Hence, if we investigate societies with relative stability, there is a risk that we will see ‘rights’ (changing and new) as flowing from a set of governing institutions. To avoid that, the present collection investigates processes of state formation through the production of property and citizenship from the particular angle of ‘rupture’.

Rupture and the Example of Colonialism

Ruptures are ‘open moments’ when opportunities and risks multiply, when the scope of outcomes widens, and when new structural scaffolding is erected. These are particularly propitious moments for observing and analysing how authority is as much at stake and as much under construction as the very rights produced through its exercise. This perspective draws inspiration from different quarters. A ‘revelatory crisis’ as developed by Sahlins (1972) and further elaborated by Solway (1994) makes central contradictions visible. Structures, interests and powers are mobilized and activated for the observer to see. ‘Trouble cases’, ‘situational analyses’, or ‘diagnostic events’ emanating from the Manchester School also take their point of departure in particular events in order to say something more general about structural features in society (Holleman, 1973; Lund, 2014; J.C. Mitchell, 1983; S.F. Moore, 1987; van Velsen, 1967). By looking at ruptures, however, we do more than simply account for the structural pre-conditions; we can inspect the very construction of new contracts of recognition. When we focus on moments of rupture in this issue, it is therefore not because they are inherently more important forms of change than any incremental transformations. Both forms of change can give rise to profound reconfigurations of polities, institutions, norms and the prevailing social contract. Above all, the choice of rupture is epistemological.4

‘Colonization’ describes the most dramatic and violent rupture and reordering of property and political subjectivity in human history. Colonial agents — governments and private companies in various combinations — dispossessed colonial subjects and established new property regimes. By the same token, they established new subject categories and various degrees of (dis-)enfranchisement of people in their new dominions. New identities and new categories of property were produced through the colonial administration's everyday power to categorize, regulate and exclude. The capacity to form and reproduce categorical distinctions as principles for recognizing or dismissing claims — for granting or denying rights to property and political participation for entire groups — was key in the colonial enterprise, as it is in state formation more generally.5 To take an old...