Paper short abstract:

The paper explores dynamics of power, authority and transformations of violence in post-war Mozambique. The concepts 'war machine'/'state' and 'naked life' are used to argue for the postcolonial context being marked by multiple, violent and adversely related sovereignities underlining its non-unity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the dynamics of power, authority and violence within the context of Mozambique. The country is taken as an example of the predicaments of the postcolonial states. Emerging from almost 30 years of civil war following liberation war in 1992, the country is now formally at peace. However, it will be argued in this paper that the particular configurations of violence and power from the country's belligerent past have not faded away, but rather have been transformed after the formal ending of warfare. In using the empirical examples of sorcery of accumulation and protection and police-related death squads, the paper will argue for the need to theorise not only postconflict violence but the imperative of locating these processes within the context of the postcolonial state. Employing Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of 'state' and 'war-machine' and Giorgio Agamben's notion of 'naked/bare life', the analysis aims at demonstrating the non-unity of the postcolonial state, arguing specifically for the existence of multiple, violent and adversely related sovereignities in these contexts. The paper is based on recurring fieldworks since 1998 in periurban and urban Chimoio, Manica province, central Mozambique.