Short Abstract

This panel explores struggles over solidarity and redistribution, asking how formal systems of social and financial protection, such as health insurance, social housing, or pension reforms reconfigure and rearrange informal relations of solidarity, which the formal systems are often reliant upon.

Long Abstract

African governments continuously promise to introduce or expand welfare, particularly infrastructures of social and financial protection such as health insurance, social housing, pension schemes or cash transfer programmes. Such political pledges generate hopes for more robust forms of social contract and social citizenship – hopes that appear especially poignant as citizens face continued austerity, the privatization of public services, economic precarity and inequality, and drastic cuts in foreign development aid.

Actual moves towards welfare are, however, largely fragmented, often benefiting the already privileged while offering ‘thin’ forms of social protection to targeted groups. They are deeply embedded in financial capitalism while enmeshing financial profit, digital literacy, moral expectations, data production and private enterprise with citizenship and the state. Their bureaucratic and financial complexities, and the exclusions built into them, make them less reliable and responsive than informal practices of solidarity embedded in personal relations. Indeed, they are often heavily parasitic upon long-standing informal practices of solidarity and the associations and networks based on kinship, neighbourhood, religious or professional relations through which people organize, distribute and negotiate support for each other.

This panel calls for papers exploring intersections between formal and informal infrastructures of protection and redistribution, the stratifications they produce and the moral economies and relational labour they rely upon. What insights does ethnographic attention to these in-between spaces generate into citizenship, the state, and struggles over rights and responsibilities, solidarities and (re)distribution? How do formal systems of protection reconfigure other forms of solidarity alongside ideas about responsibility and obligation?

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