The Politics of Informal Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

There is evidence of a new trend in recent scholarship on African political economy: an effort to tip the scale towards the latter end of the so-called state-society balance. This nascent movement portends to serve as a corrective to past academic work devoted to defining and delineating the form and nature of the African state. The statist literature has traditionally formed two camps, one based on liberal, neo-classical theory, and the other informed by the neo-Marxistdependenciamodel. No matter what the approach, in these studies the state is the central locus of macro-economic and political processes: as the centre of resource extraction and distribution, and the determinant of the nature of national politics, the state is fixated upon as the source of, and/or solution to, the economic status of African societies.