Authoritarian clientelism

The case of the president’s ‘creatures’ in Cameroon

Bibliographic Data

ID8079516
AuthorsSergiu Mișcoiu (0000-0002-3148-8817, corresponding author), Louis‐Marie Kakdeu, Louis-Marie KAKDEU
Year2021
Volume56
Issue4
Pages639-657
Publication date2021-01-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueActa Politica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-6810 • E-ISSN: 1741-1416
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1057/s41269-020-00188-y
OpenAlexW3118640778
LanguageEN
Citations received24
References cited42

Within this article, we aim at exploring the topic of clientelism in Cameroon as a species of a wider phenomenon affecting Central and Western Francophone Africa. Our argument is that, in spite of the repeated efforts of reinforcing the local power structures, we have witnessed a process of centralisation of clientelism: the new networks are shaped around the ‘Creatures’, who are the President Paul Biya’s formal or informal appointees and play the role of nodal elements relying the rest of the chain to the central command. This happened on the expenses of the locally dispersed and more autonomous clientelistic groups that were either included in or smashed by the pyramidal Creatures’ structured. In order to test our assumption, we analysed a specific body of literature on the theorization of clientelism and on its African and Cameroonian specificity and organized four focus groups with the actual and former members of the clientelistic chains at different levels (central, regional and local). If our main presupposition proved to be generally correct, one of the sub-arguments was only partially validated through this empirical component of our research

Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis · Authoritarianism · Centralisation · Clientelism · Comparative politics · Creatures · Democracy · Epistemology · Phenomenon · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Presupposition · Sociology · African Studies and Ethnography · African Studies and Geopolitics · International Development and Aid · History · Law · Philosophy

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