Governed differently: The political economy of state absence in Africa

The phrase "ungoverned spaces" has become a bureaucratic reflex. From the Sahel to the Horn, from the Lake Chad Basin to eastern Congo, policymakers and security analysts deploy it to describe territories where the formal state appears to have evaporated. The diagnosis is seductive in its simplicity: where the state is absent, violence proliferates; where institutions collapse, extremism takes root. Send troops, build capacity, restore order. But the diagnosis is wrong and dangerously so.…