The State in the Everyday: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

The chapter situates the problematic of this book along ongoing discussions in African studies around methodological nationalism, the tendency of theory to restrict the analytical scope of social and political change against the lens of the nation-state, and descriptive empiricism, the tendency of theory to provide cultural explanations to state power by reifying micro empirical realities. It contends that the lens of the everyday allows for an empirical approach to map the mutual, and yet largely undetermined constitution of state and society over time, departing from depictions of state formation in Africa relying on meta-historical narrations, as well as the reification of micro analysis that have little scope for generalisation. The chapter interrogates the everyday state by engaging with questions about the temporality of state formation, the spatial configurations of state-society relations, and the problem of subject formation in relation to state power. In particular, it engages critically with three bodies of literature addressing state formation and state-society relations in EPRDF Ethiopia in terms of centre-periphery relations, the developmental state, and authoritarianism and political culture. The chapter elaborates an approach to study the Ethiopian developmental state as a scalar project. It also suggests that a focus on the formation of the political subject allows to revisit discussions about authoritarian governance away from political culture. This requires an empirical approach to study how state power both acts and enacts the subject into being through performative practices of recognition.