Encountering the Nigerian State

The state is ubiquitous in contemporary societies, prompting scholars to assert that politics is about the study of the state. This point is underscored in Encountering the Nigerian State, an edited volume of eleven chapters. The state, everywhere, is endowed with certain attributes such as a bureaucracy and the monopoly of the use of coercion. The latter is rendered more evident in developing social formations by excesses in social control, and the Nigerian state exemplifies this trend. This volume underlines the excesses of the state and its capacity to reproduce abjection. It focuses on a range of cross-cutting issues from the informal economy of Oluwole, a haven for document forgery in Lagos Island, to the Maroko evictees of Victoria Island, Lagos; the fictional testimony of Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy; the student movement; the language of countervailing forces in state–society relations; the micro-nationalism of self-determination groups; media–state relations and their element of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles; labour–state relations; the state-perpetrated killings of the Abacha years; the Shari'a controversy; and the Koma people, who live outside of modernity.

Bureaucracy · Coercion (linguistics) · Hegemony · Modernity · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · State formation · African history and culture studies · Gender Studies · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies