Revolutionising Local Politics? Radical Experiments in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Uganda in the 1980s

J. Tyler Dickovick

Review of African Political Economy, 2009, vol. 36, issue 122, 519-537

Abstract: This article compares three African countries whose attempts to transform local governance in the 1980s were among the most dramatic, particularly in rural areas: Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara (1983--1987), Ghana in the early years of the Jerry Rawlings presidency (1981--1992), and Uganda under Yoweri Museveni (1985--present). Despite surface similarities, especially in the establishment of local ‘people's defence councils’ or ‘resistance councils’, the three experiments had quite different outcomes, as a function both of antecedent conditions in state--society relations and of regimes' choices. A structured comparative-historical argument highlights differing state strategies vis-à-vis important social forces, especially traditional chiefs. Regimes' choices between confrontation , coexistence , and the construction of new relations with social forces resulted in different degrees of local political change. The ‘revolutionary’ local experiments provide insight into a general theory of African politics, in which states' transformational powers in rural areas remain circumscribed by entrenched local forces.

Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1080/03056240903346137

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