On territorialising power and rendering space and resources legible

On territorialising power and rendering space and resources legibleAs news reaches us of the passing of Pepe Roberts, retired member of the Editorial Working Group, it is fitting that several of the articles in issue no.144 of ROAPE, a general issue, speak to Pepe's recurrent interest in socio-economic and political transformation and change, as well as the uneven impacts and differentiated outcomes associated with the processes in question.We mark her passing in this issue with an Obituary by Janet Bujra and Gavin Williams.We also mark the passing of Terry Ranger and comrades in a collective epitaphic by David Moore.The eight papers in this issue all present detailed case studies; situate their empirical material within wider currents of political economy thinking; are interested to highlight state -citizen relations, including resistance and contestation; and are mindful of complex intersections of local and larger-scale processes and structures, as well as their myriad -and sometimes unintended -outcomes.Over and above the specific objectives set out in their individual articles, all the authors also identify clear strategic value of their contributions for critical research and/or a progressive politics.Half of the papers deal with land, taking up -and extending -questions raised in and by the articles in ROAPE issue no.128 (Bujra, Bush, and Littlejohn 2011).Three more address themes which are infrequently covered in ROAPE (banking sector reform, the African language press and urban solid waste management, respectively), while the final contribution returns us to the more familiar terrain of the political economy of power and energy.The notion of 'territorialising (state) power' in Africa, the subtitle of Davide Chinigo `'s paper, conveniently if fortuitously links the four articles on land, as well as several of the others.Chinigo `uses territorialisation to refer to strategies deployed by individuals, groups and institutions for legitimising claims to resources; governing people; controlling territory; and consolidating power.In particular, he suggests, territorialisation is widely deployed as part of processes of state formation and consolidation.And, as the latter frequently involves the formalisation of rights over, and legitimisation of access to resources, territorialisation can also contribute specifically to the reconfiguration of power over, and access to land.It is thus the question of how -and with what consequences -land registration in Ethiopia's Oromiya region 'reproduces state -peasant relations' while extending state power into this part of rural Ethiopia that he addresses.Chinigo `'s focus, then, is on state de/legitimisation of claims to land; how these shape local politics of resources, notably negotiations over, and access to, land; and, finally, contestations over land.He shows how, even though land registration 'has strengthened an already hierarchical system of land administration [while] increasing the subordination of the peasantry to the state', the politics of territorialisation of the kind in question has equally opened up 'new spaces for the negotiation of local resources', in addition to 'reconfiguring' the way political authority is deployed in relation to land (often to the detriment of farmer tenure security).He is careful to specify that such politics do not involve just the telling examples of the deployment of increased state and party authority in everyday practices which he highlights.They also refer to what, in a local context of widespread land shortage and considerable landlessness, he interprets as hidden 'discursive repertoires

Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Rendering (computer graphics · Sociology · Unintended consequences · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Computer Science · International Development and Aid · Law · Urban and Rural Development Challenges

• Imposing order from the skies? Civil aviation as a precarious site of state sovereignty in Somalia

  Open Access•Abdifatah Ismael Tahir•Political Geography•2025

  Add to list

• Mainstreaming the African environment in development

  Open Access•Reginald Cline‐cole, Phil O’keefe et al.•Review of African Political Economy•2006

  Add to list

• The accumulation of dispossession

  Open Access•R Bush, Janet Bujra et al.•Review of African Political Economy•2011

  Add to list