Post-populism in Zambia: Michael Sata’s rise, demise and legacy

Models explaining populism as a policy response to the interests of the urban poor struggle to understand the instability of populist mobilisations. A focus on political theatre is more helpful. This article extends the debate on populist performance, showing how populists typically do not produce rehearsed performances to passive audiences. In drawing ‘the people’ on stage they are forced to improvise. As a result, populist performances are rarely sustained. The article describes the Zambian Patriotic Front’s (PF) theatrical insurrection in 2006 and its evolution over the next decade. The PF’s populist aspect had faded by 2008 and gradually disappeared in parallel with its leader Michael Sata’s ill-health and eventual death in 2014. The party was nonetheless electorally successful. The article accounts for this evolution and describes a ‘post-populist’ legacy featuring of hyper-partisanship, violence and authoritarianism. Intolerance was justified in the populist moment as a reflection of anger at inequality; it now floats free of any programme

Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding:The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

This paper examines ‘the local’ in peacebuilding by examining how ‘local’ transitional justice projects can become spaces of power inequalities. The paper argues that focusing on how ‘the local’ contests or interacts with ‘the international’ in peacebuilding and post-conflict contexts obscures contestations and power relations amongst different local actors, and how inequalities and power asymmetries can be entrenched and reproduced through internationally funded local projects. The paper argues that externally funded projects aimed at emancipating ‘locals’ entrench inequalities and create local elites that become complicit in governing the conduct and participation of other less empowered ‘locals’. The paper thus proposes that specific local actors—often those in charge of externally funded peacebuilding projects—should also be conceptualised as governing agents: able to discipline and regulate other local actors’ voices and their agency, and thus (re)construct ideas about what ‘the local’ is, or is not

Law, law everywhere

Comment on Obarrio, Juan. 2014. The spirit of the laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Gender Relations in African-Language Literature: Interpretative Politics and Possibilities

No Abstract Available African Sociological Review 8, (1), 2004, pp. 154-17

Ideaalinen, materiaalinen ja antropologia

Kirjallisuusarvostel

Multivocal morality: Narrative, sentiment, and Zambia’s radio grandfathers

Multivocal morality concentrates attention on the ideologies of voice in efforts to narrate boundary-crossing moral dilemmas. This article’s focus on the relationship between narrative and sentiment in moral transgression brings together two distinct bodies of literature. One is anthropologists’ recent statements about a disciplinary shift from the study of law-like morality to ethical reasoning. The other is literary scholars’ emphasis on the novel as the privileged genre of narrative in generating moral sentiments such as sympathy and compassion. While anthropologists risk turning a blind eye to their discipline’s past achievements in understanding the complex interplay between customary obligation and moral sentiment, literary scholars foreclose an open discussion about the genres and media by which narrative may generate moral sentiments. The importance of attending to the notion of voice is elaborated through the work of two self-styled grandfathers on Zambian radio who, thirty years apart, performed the same story about strangers within. Despite the different eras of broadcast, they both assembled multiple voices in order to generate the moral sentiment of sympathy. The customary codes of elderhood informed multivocality not by giving others their voices as an act of charity or justice but by having moral authority to assemble those voices in the first place