Stability in Africa: Indeterminacy and Credence

Thesis advisor: David RasmussenThis dissertation explores the instability of the African postcolonial state and demonstrates that such a fundamental crisis can be solved only through discourses and practices that are designed beyond the Westphalian model of the modern state and the neo-patrimonialistic system of African governance. The challenge of instability will not be overcome by rebuilding the African nation-state undermined by social contradictions and complex emergencies; rather stability will be achieved by opening a public space of agonistic democracy that is supported mainly by an overlapping consensus on justice. I argue that by reading critically the African philosophy of solidarity that is contradicted by structural violence and inequality. The political instrumentalization of kinship provokes the exclusion of minorities, the marginalization of masses and the instability of the entire society. Governance is reduced to mere conflict management. The solution of legitimate violence becomes another version of the problem of institutional incapacity. My contention is that people are the ultimate and permanent agents of stability. State institutions and state sovereignty are not set in stone; they are contingent arrangements of human relations that evolve throughout history. The ground of stability must not be a strong state but the politics of reciprocity and union among people that implies a sense of justice in the power sharing and in the decision making process. The dissertation is divided in three parts. In the first two-chapter part, I present the paradox of the continent: on one side, there is an ethics of abundant life (vitalism). On the other side, there is a politics of permanent death (necropolitics). The hermeneutics of the two sides reveals that metaphysics (with its monism) and historicity (with its pluralism) intertwine in the dialectical rapport between the agent and the structure. The state is still the bull of international stability in a continent ravaged by violence and poverty. But paradoxically it does not contribute to the stability of the national society. The structure persists at the detriment of the agent. Instability endures. I analyze the various solutions offered to solve the crisis of the unstable state. Some are practical and others are theoretical but they are all state-centric: state institutions must be fixed to deliver social order. But such an order is a status quo perpetrated by a criminalized state in which agents and groups cannot cooperate fairly but only compete violently for power and security. Stability is undetermined. The second two-chapter is a search of stability for the right reasons. The main cause of instability is the absence of justice and not the failure or the collapse of the postcolonial state. Restoring stability implies promoting consensus in the decision making process and fostering an ethic of reciprocity in the power sharing. In the ubuntu ethics of reciprocity, alliance is preferred to social contract and is promoted through dialogue, fairness, and togetherness. In the ubuntu ethics of power, decisions are all made by consensus. Consensual democracy is preferred to the majoritarian democracy. It promotes participation in power and not appropriation of power. Although it is not an enduring strategy for stability, the Rawlsian model of the overlapping consensus plays a conciliatory role within different social groups with their various traditions and comprehensive doctrines. That consensus is an essentialized contingency that must be completed by the dissensus that the African palaver manage to control through a web of mediations which promote reconciliation, fairness, dialogue in the public sphere within which the protagonists are transformed. It promotes an agonistic pluralism in which adversaries are equal citizens who lives their individuality at the triple level of singularity, reciprocity, and community. Their violence and confrontation do not come first. Their mutual recognition is the originating reason of the political order and the ground for stability. Stability is determined and maintained. In the third one-chapter, I move from domestic politics to international affairs. I assert that security and stabilization of African societies come with the union of African states. Such a continental union requires from them democratic regimes and international cooperation that will promotes democratic peace, collective security, and regional integration. Instead of having fifty-four countries that are indebted and chronically underperforming, Africa can be organized into super-states that carry the panafricanist patriotism of micro-patriotisms. In its agenda for 2063, the African Union envisions a United State of Africa with one currency, one army, one government, and supranational institutions. The main challenge to such an ambitious project is the heterogeneity of the continent that an epistemology of credence can overcome: history and politics become a critical use of one's subjectivity. It implies an epistemological diversity that allows interactive intelligibility of human experiences. It does not present many alternatives but allows an alternative thinking of alternatives that make feasible the panafrican project of a united and stable Africa. The credence in African stability dwells in that realistic utopia. In the end, stability is not achieved in the re-building of the postcolonial state but in the rehabilitation of the human agent in domestic politics and in international affairs. Individual human beings, not states, are the agents who participate in defining society, state, power, and principles of justice or of sovereignty. They are the ultimate units of the national and international societies of all humankind.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Philosophy