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Introduction

Martha Wilfahrt
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? This book offers a novel answer to this question by looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa: local actors are better able to cooperate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms of appropriate comportment in the public sphere demarcated by group boundaries. In this introductory chapter, I lay out the main contours of my theory as well as the implications that the argument holds for key debates in Comparative Politics, including the use of narratives as a lens into actors’ political strategies, the social identities we prioritize in our research, prospects for state-building in sub-Saharan Africa, and our understanding of how historical legacies shape contemporary development outcomes.

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Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics
Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa
, pp. 1 - 21
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Introduction
  • Martha Wilfahrt, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book: Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics
  • Online publication: 14 August 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108996983.001
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  • Introduction
  • Martha Wilfahrt, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book: Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics
  • Online publication: 14 August 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108996983.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Martha Wilfahrt, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book: Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics
  • Online publication: 14 August 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108996983.001
Available formats
×