~I would like to express my sincere thanks to Robbie Shilliam and Meera Sabaratnam, who have been incredibly supportive editors on top of being inspiring scholars and colleagues. Their comments and those of the different reviewers have helped improve the manuscript. I’m most grateful for the...

~The present book contends that the state in African contexts—whether precolonial, colonial or postcolonial—was always a transient phenomenon that pushed against internal ‘others’. From this perspective, postcolonial state failure is the result of the...

~In the domain of state-building, the originality of West and Central African political trajectories points, historically, to the openness of the political landscape. This particularity is signified by an ethics of hospitality that requires further analysis. This ethics and its likenesses...

~Dominant political discourses in the Voltaic region have made the binary of state/stateless, political/non-political and the distinction between the underlying imperatives of the ‘sphere of politics’ and a ‘sphere of rituals’ more generally a founding construct for...

~Kopytoff posits an idea of the frontier as the production of similarly structured polities out of a complex ‘political core’ (1989, 3). The frontier thesis debunks evolutionary theories that conceptualize states as stemming from hypothetical archaic bands evolving into...

~There existed within the Mossi state structures functional attributes that represented patterns of coexistence and interaction between power and belief. Unless one understands how rituals are used in the attempt at conciliation of two seemingly discrete spheres of social authority, the...

~A point made in this book is that the principle of government as articulated in postcolonial Africa lacks axiological consistency. On the one hand, it is the case that pre-existing forms have been disintegrated; their relics, their representations and their reinterpretations, however,...

~The transcription of Mooré terms follows the dispositions of the 69/012 /PRES decree of the government of Upper Volta (17 January 1969) as set out by the National Commission on Voltaic Languages. The generic term used is Mossi/Moose (pl.), Mooga or Moaga (sing.). Mooré is the...

227Index

This is the first series to mark out a dedicated space for advanced critical inquiry into colonial questions across International Relations. The ethos of this book series is reflected by the bricolage constituency of Kilombos – settlements of African slaves, rebels and indigenous peoples in South America who became self-determining political communities that retrieved and renovated the...