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Paper short abstract:

This communication aims to analyze how the party-state, the Frelimo, since independence, legitimates its power through the judicial administration in rural areas and its social organizations

Paper long abstract:

The studies on administrations and the state in Africa has, on the one hand, focused heavily on elites and its failures, and on the other, has neglected the penetration and the politization of administration, the formation of the state and the way one party-state works to dominate in this rural areas. This theoretical problem is also accompanied by a methodological problem. These works, except for some, have not analyzed the concrete functioning of these administrations in rural areas. For that reason, they do not restore the various forms of state formation and the bureaucratization of the African rural societies, in everyday life. That said, this work aims, through the ethnography of the work of a judge in a rural court and the making of law and justice by the social organizations of Frelimo, in the extreme north of Mozambique, to question how the state-party Frelimo, in power since the independence in 1975, works. We will try to answer two questions: How and to what extent does the work of the judge in these areas contribute to the formation of the party-state and the political legitimacy of Frelimo? What kind of relationship between the administration and society is constructed, in a context where the ruling party organisations monopolize the social framework To answer these questions, we will restore some elements of our fieldwork carried out, as part of our thesis, in the north of Mozambique, from June 2017 to March 2018 and from July 2018 to September 2018.