Sovereignty and underdevelopment: juridical statehood in the African crisis

Abstract

When we speak of 'the state' in Tropical Africa today, we are apt to create an illusion. Ordinarily the term denotes an independent political structure of sufficient authority and power to govern a defined territory and its population: empirical statehood. This is the prevailing notion of the state in modern political, legal, and social theory, and it is a fairly close approximation to historical fact in many parts of the world —not only in Europe and North America, where modern states first developed and are deeply rooted, but also in some countries of South America, the Middle East, and Asia here they have more recently emerged. Nevertheless, even if the state is an inescapable reality, many so-called states in Tropical Africa, are seriously lacking in the essentials of statehood.