Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
As the years have progressed, I have assigned Chabal’s publications in many of my courses at Harvard and the University of British Columbia, where I have held faculty positions in urban planning and policy. These courses have included several related to international development, comparative politics, and urban governance in the Global South, topics that wouldn’t feel too unusual to Chabal’s regular readership. Increasingly, though, I have assigned Chabal’s works in the courses I teach about planning, policy and politics in other settings, and I now find him particularly relevant in a context that may seem outlandish at first, namely contemporary America.
Before introducing some of Chabal’s ideas and their relevance to American political life, I should say that, aside from the provocative insights they offer, I also like to assign Chabal’s publications because they rage with an intensity, both in terms of ideas and written style, that is increasingly uncommon. Admist the pablum of much academic writing, Chabal’s writing stands out for its sheer energy and for its eagerness to accost you with ideas you have never heard or considered before. As was noted in a memorial essay, following his death in 2014: “Chabal did not become a scholar in order to make friends.” There is a sharpness to his writing that is, frankly, invigorating and which is increasingly necessary at a time when the scholarship coming out of our universities can feel remarkably disconnected from the realities of political and public life.
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The idea of disorder as political instrument, developed by Chabal and Daloz, has the counter-intuitive – on first glance – tenor of much of Chabal’s writing. In essence, the book argues that, while African institutions may often appear to be in a state of disorder, such disorder and corruption in fact is instrumentally useful and profitable. Ironically, Chabal and Daloz argued that this pattern of instrumental disorder characterizes a developmental path that is relatively unique to Africa. That last claim seems less plausible with every passing day, as the relevance of their ideas expands to cover territories that they themselves might have considered unlikely.
My mind was drawn back to Chabal and Daloz’s writing in recent months because so much commentary on the contemporary West, and America in particular, is reminiscent of standard takes on why things “don’t work” in African cities. To paraphrase, they ask, why don’t people realize that things aren’t working, and why can’t they see that if they just approached things rationally then all this disorder and confusion would tidy up nicely and we’d all be “getting to Denmark,” as old-school developmentalist thinking would have it. Indeed, the fact that the trope of Denmark as a symbol for all that is stable and ordered is now regularly deployed in America is indicative of just how similar the Global South and North have become. Nowadays, we all want to get to that mystical “Denmark,” perhaps even people in Denmark itself, making Chabal and Daloz’s work all the more relevant.
Many aspects of contemporary American political life bear particular overlap with the arguments advanced in Africa Works. This is particularly true of its understanding of apparent disorder. Chabal and Daloz note that in conditions where there is a disregard for the rules of formal political or economic sectors (as many would argue is increasingly the case in America) “there is a premium on the vertical and personalized infra-institutional relations through which the ‘business’ of politics can be conducted.”
Chabal and Daloz argue that “the notion of disorder should not be construed, as it normally is in classical political analysis, merely as a state of dereliction. It should also be seen as a condition which offers opportunities for those who know how to play that system.” This simple, but important, insight is increasingly relevant in a world where the liberal international order, and the relative stability that accompanied it, are under growing strain.
The verticalization and personalization of political relations identified by Chabal and Daloz, both in political and economic spheres, were once a stereotype of leadership in many African cities and states but are increasingly visible in America, and elsewhere. Can there be a better example of verticalized and personalized governance than the recent statements by US President Donald Trump, regarding the bombing of Iran, that “I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” Chabal and Daloz’s analysis is powerful because it helps us understand that the seemingly inadvertent “chaos” this model of leadership brings is actually the product of a highly rational system of governance.
Chabal and Daloz’s book also disabuses us of the notion that the existence of a seemingly modern state brings an end to patrimonialism, wherein a leader’s power is based on personal loyalty and patron-client relations. The belief that the modern state and patrimonialism could or should not coexist was based on the Weberian idea that those who hold political power should not have a personal claim on the public assets they oversee. It perhaps goes without saying that episodes like Qatar’s donation of a new jet for President Trump’s use and reports that he has likely benefited from other payments from foreign governments shatter these Weberian ideals.
Chabal and Daloz argue that disorder provides rewards for those actors who can exploit it. They emphasize that “To speak of disorder is not to speak of irrationality. It is merely to make explicit that political action operates rationally, but largely in the realm of the informal, uncodified and unpoliced – that is, in a world that is not ordered in the sense in which we usually take our own polities in the West to be.” It is indicative of how much has changed since their book was published in 1999, that the authors could so clearly differentiate the West in this regard. The argument that the West and Africa are separated cleanly by the degree to which politics are exercised through formal or informal channels seems increasingly hard to sustain. It is for this reason that so much analysis of American politics, relying on traditional Western understandings of order and disorder and their relative utility, struggle to make sense of the country’s current political situation.
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Ultimately, the relevance of Chabal’s scholarship to contemporary American life shows how important it is to look comparatively at political affairs. It can be hard, if not impossible, to make sense of our surroundings without getting some distance on them. Indeed, one common critique of Chabal and Daloz’s work, of Disorder as Political Instrument specifically, was that it looked too broadly, failing to focus on the narrow specificities of particular countries on the continent. But, in a disordered world, a broadly comparative lens, like that offered by Chabal’s scholarship, is all the more important as we struggle to make sense of an increasingly complex and rapidly changing political landscape. The perhaps surprising relevance of Chabal’s work to contemporary America highlights the continuing need for this kind of creative, provocative and comparative scholarship and for the fearlessness its production requires.
Michael Hooper is an Associate Professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia.
