Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the interplay between Somalia’s status as a primary internationalised theatre of the ‘Global War on Terror’ and localised political conflict, whilst examining the significance of a distinctive media ecology for the proliferation of multiple narratives of complex conspiracy.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of ongoing conflict and political reconfiguration in Somalia, this paper explores the notion of conspiracy theorisation as an important mode of local political-religious debate. The decentred nature of the modern electronic Somali media ecology is conducive to multiple internationalised narratives engaging the region's geopolitical significance and the malign conspiratorial intent of a wide range of linked external actors. These include the old 'Christian' enemy of Ethiopia, and the cultural 'neo-colonialism' of the 'West'. Importantly, I argue that such narratives are not merely limited to 'extremists' but find expression in wider circuits of more 'mainstream' Somali media discourse. Al Shabaab is also often popularly conceptualised in terms of conspiratorial agency around particular state-contestation agendas and is discursively 'spectralised' as a problem affecting the broader Somali Ummah. Although instrumentalist manipulation of the conspiracy-laden public sphere by elite actors occurs, this paper argues that globalised Jihad as a particular ideology in this communicative political context requires critical attention. Conventional policy or security studies narratives which attribute Al Shabaab violence to the brainwashing of uneducated youths and 'harsh' applications of Shariah against a 'moderate' or 'Sufi-orientated' Somali public often overlook the complex interplay of religious orthodoxy and factional political interests within a wider context of Somali state reconstruction. The paper unpacks the interplay between Somalia's status as a primary internationalised theatre of the 'Global War on Terror' and localised political conflict, whilst considering the significance of the distinctive media ecology for the proliferation of multiple narratives of complex conspiracy.

Paper short abstract:

Contemporary political debates in Oyo State, Nigeria challenge dominant understanding of transparency. Good Governance style reforms, by implicating reformist state governments in international networks which are seen by many as unknowable or even conspiratorial, undermine transparency in people.

Paper long abstract:

Transparency has become a core component of the anti-corruption and good governance discourses over the last two decades. Making information about government activities publically available is seen as instrumental to accountability: unless citizens know what their government is doing they can't hold it to account. However, questions of what sort of information should be transparent and to whom, have often been elided by universalist conceptions of good governance. This paper uses the case study of Oyo State in Southwest Nigeria to bring mainstream debates about transparency into conversation with the study of conspiracies and unseen politics.

In Oyo, media commentary and popular debates attest to the strength of popular concerns over transparency in politics. Nigerian scholarship has repeatedly focused on the persistent influence of 'cartels', 'mafias' and other unseen connections in the distribution of state power and resource distribution. Historically these conspiracy theories have played on fears of ethnic and regional domination. However, tracing these concerns into the new context of reformist 'good governance' states, such as Oyo, they take on new forms. The unseen connections that animate contemporary distrust are those between reformist leaders and their development partners in the spheres of international private investment, donor institutions and remote metropolitan centres. Relationships, networks and policies that constitute 'good governance' as understood by donors and elites, are in themselves seen as untransparent.

The paper contributes to theoretical debates, arguing for the importance of transparency in people. As such, it challenges to the claimed universalism of dominant understandings of 'good governance'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the public representations of elite secrecy and imaginaries of the occult in Cameroon, a former French colonial outpost, and their wider implications for approaching the contested character of contemporary French-African relations .

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on elite affiliations to Freemasonry in Cameroon and its role in animating popular discourses and rumors about the 'secret' lives of elites as well as witchcraft accusations against some of these elites. Freemasonry is a global esoteric society whose origins in African contexts such as Cameroon cannot be dissociated from imperial colonial projects during the late 19th century. Today, in these African settings like in France itself, Masonic elites are under increasing suspicion of being dangerous agents of an illegitimate, dark and secretive power structure (Freemasonry) that constitutes a "para-state", a state within a state. Furthermore, in the case of French West African states such as Cameroon elites presumed to be affiliated to Freemasonry elites are further suspected of being agents for the perpetuation of neocolonial domination of African countries by France during the postcolonial era.

By focusing on Freemasonry as an object of popular suspicion against elites in Cameroon, the paper attempts to analyze how these locally-inflected trajectories of elite suspicion in Cameroon fit a more global atmosphere of conspiracy theories against elites, one that connotes with popular anxiety and suspicion of elite power that prevails today. But in doing so, the paper will also attempt to clearly delineate how these trajectories of popular suspicion against elites in Cameroon, like in many other former French African colonies, depart from these global imaginaries of elite conspiracies to articulate a specifically broader critique of postcolonial relations between France and Francophone African states through the rubrique of "Franceafrique."

Paper short abstract:

This study explores the relationship between "public authorities" and livelihoods in an oil-bearing community. Ethnographic fieldwork in Gamba, Gabon shows that urbanization, a by-product of local oil exploitation, can displace lineage solidarities while contributing to material stagnation.

Paper long abstract:

This study uses political economy and ethnography to explain local political dynamics in the Département de Ndougou, Gabon, home of the gigantic Rabi-Kounga oilfield. As spatial and temporal contexts marked by intense forms of monetization, oil-bearing communities within oil-dependent states provide a unique opportunity to investigate the evolution of local, business, and state interactions.

Since the discovery of Rabi-Kounga in 1985 by Royal Dutch Shell, the Département de Ndougou has contributed to roughly half of Gabon's government revenue. Using ethnographic fieldwork, government and NGO data, the paper begins by tracing a diachronic history of the Ndougou's local institutions from the pre-extractive era (1950s) through the summer of 2015, when the author had occasion to conduct fieldwork. The study then proceeds with a brief analysis of competing institutions vying for authority in a contested space, as well as their effects on the evolving spiritual and material well-beings of the Ndougou's inhabitants. Taken into account are not only electoral and ministerial institutions, but also Shell-Gabon's initiatives, administrative chiefs, chefs de terre, first-comer clan lineages, NGOs, religious institutions, and grassroots associations.

The paper argues that rather than instigate violent contestation and prebendalism, the local oil industry in Gamba engendered familiar processes of urbanization and rural exodus. Monetization gradually displaced clan solidarity, customary land tenure, and agricultural practices in the Ndougou, as chiefs and other notables sought private employment or public work in Gamba's ineffective, and largely absent, state apparatus. Furthermore, employment, jealousy, and witchcraft undermined a communal spirit and associative life, leading to material stagnation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the political, social and symbolic role of travel permit which were issued by the “Mussulmen affairs office” in order to control all movements of educated Muslims in colonial French West Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the implementation and utilization of travel permits for educated Muslims. By "educated Muslims", I include all those persons who knew Islamic written texts. In a time, when colonial control over Africans had still been relatively weak, the mobility of these people was considered as a threat to the colonial project, paving the way for "Islamic anticolonial and anti-French propaganda". With the objective to fight these movements, the colonial administration adopted special travel permits for "educated Muslims" in 1906. Religious leaders, "marabouts", teachers of Koran schools and other "educated Muslims" had always have a special authorization of the local governor, when they wished to travel beyond their circonscription. In my research, I consider the period from 1906, when the "Mussulmen affairs office" was created, to 1946. This office, which was responsible for issuing the travel permits and controlling the mobility of educated Muslims, marked this period. On a theoretical level, my research is inspired by the studies of Gérard Noiriel on the history of French passports from the First to the Third Republic. Noiriel suggests that the passport was used to control the territory and to represent a continuous authority of the state. This paper thus argues that the travel permits for educated Muslims were contributing to the production of a "homogenous" territory, which excluded all forms of multiple spatial configurations.