The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly
Jean-Francois Bayart
Politics as appetite: power pursued through patronage and the belly.
Bayart interprets African politics through the metaphor of the belly, in which power and wealth are pursued and shared through networks of patronage, accumulation and reciprocity. Rejecting views of the African state as merely imported or simply failed, he shows elites and their constituents actively producing political order from the bottom up. The book gave analysts the concept of the politics of the belly, reframing clientelism and corruption not as dysfunction but as a coherent and durable logic of governance.
Its legacy. The phrase politics of the belly entered the scholarly lexicon.
- Author
- Jean-Francois Bayart
- First published
- 1989
- Genre
- Political science
- Theme
- The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
More from The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
- Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism — Mahmood Mamdani
Colonialism split Africans into citizens and subjects, and independence kept the divide.
- On the Postcolony — Achille Mbembe
Power in the postcolony rules through spectacle, excess and grotesque intimacy.
- The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence — Martin Meredith
Fifty years of independence, from the hopes of 1960 to their unraveling.
- It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower — Michela Wrong
An anti-corruption czar blows the whistle on his own government.