Edited by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff - 13 Congreso de ...

John L. ComaroffandJean Comaroff
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to saturate the state itself, yielding a politics of illusion that, more than just
front the appropriation of resources by ruling elites, has erected an edifice
of "simulated government": government that concocts false censuses and
development schemes, even holds fictitious elections. Bogus bureaucracy,
in fact, has surfaced as a pervasive theme in analyses of postcolonial politics.
Reno (1995, 2000), for example, speaks of "the shadow state" in
Sierra Leone and beyond, in which a realpolitik of thuggery and profiteering
is conducted behind a facade of formal administrative respectability;
similarly, Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou (1999: 20f£.) stress that, in the "felonious"
state, hidden power brokers, doppelgangers of a legitimate civil
service, control political and economic life, often ostensibly under the
sway of partisan spiritual forces. Shades here again of Derrida's (1994: 83)
"phantom-states," in which organized crime performs for citizens the
functions once provided by government. In these circumstances, the official
edifice becomes the counterfeit, predation the reality. Indeed, as James
Ferguson (2006: 15) remarks, there is "an abundance of shadows" in recent
accounts of African political economy. But not only there. Saddam Hussein's
"shadow state" was said to "defy democracy" in Iraq;47 nocturnal
"shadow players" are alleged to thrive where offshore banking meets illegal
money laundering in Belize (Duffy 2000); "shadow" business is
blamed for thwarting economic growth in Peru. 48 Conversely, the fragile
peace that currently prevails in Ambon, Spyer (chapter 5 below) says, was
made "in the shadow of the law." Ferguson (2006: 16£.) insists, correctly,
that there is more at work here than old colonial archetypes: the trope conveys
a contemporary sense of inscrutability. And also a doubling, the existence
of parallel worlds of clandestine government, irregular soldiers, and
occult economies that revives long-standing talk about "dark" vestiges of
the modernist idyll. But shadows, he reminds us, are less dim copies than
likenesses, others who are also selves. After all, many have insisted that the
vaunted European state is itself as much a chimera as a reality (Miliband
1969: 49; Abrams 1988: 76).
The Shadow and the Thing Itself
The resonance between shadow and counterfeit realities also captures
something of the effects of neoliberal deregulation on governance, something
evident worldwide but most marked in postcolonies: the unsettling
counterpoint between the outsourcing of the state and the usurpation of
sovereignty, not least in the realm of policing and warfare. Government, as
it disperses itself, becomes less and less an ensemble of bureaucratic institutions,
more and more a licensing-and-franchising authority. This, in turn,
Law and Disorder in the Postea/any: An Introduction
provides fresh opportunities, at all levels, for capitalizing both on the
assets of the state and on its imprimatur. Kickbacks have become a sine
qua non of office in many places, countries with sustained cultures of corruption
heading the list. In India, for one, bribes are said to be routine in
securing contracts, loans, and handouts, although, as Akhil Gupta (1995:
384) notes, high-level functionaries raise large sums from relatively few
clients, while their humbler counterparts collect small amounts from
larger constituencies-and hence are more visibly "corrupt."49 Nothing
new, this, for those familiar with politics in cities like Chicago. But in
South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, these practices are often disarmingly
explicit and unpoliced. To wit, police and customs personnel, especially
where their pay is low or unreliable, frequently take part in modes
of extraction in which insignias of public position are deployed to raise
rents (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2001; Roitman 2005: 186). Reports
of cops who turn checkpoints into private tollbooths are legion; an Economist
team driving in 2002 from Douala, Cameroon, to a town less than
five hundred kilometers to the southeast encountered more than fortyseven
roadblocks.50 Revenues are also routinely raised by impersonating
the state: by putting on counterfeit uniforms, bearing phony identity
documents, and deploying other fake accouterments of authorityY In like
vein, as sovereignty splinters, agents of a motley array of statelike entities,
from quasi-corporate religious organizations to militias, find ways of
demanding recognition and tribute.
The readiness of ordinary people to exploit the interstices between official
and backstage realities, and to seize insignias of authority, may be
symptomatic of the tendency under market fundamentalism everywhere to
blur the lines separating licit from illicit business. Heightened pressure to
make profit, to undercut competition and reduce costs, has spawned ever
more complex articulations of "formal" and "informal" production. As a
recent account of the construction industry in Miami makes plain, convoluted
chains of subcontracting now tie the most reputable firms to traffickers
in illegal immigrant labor, building criminality into the very heart of the
"American dream business."52 In the murky world of outsourcing, the informal
shades into the illicit, whether it be in hiring undocumented workers,
greasing palms, or moving contraband. This reinforces our earlier observation
about the dangerous liaisons between north and south, about the
ways in which "respectable" metropolitan trade gains by deflecting the
risks and moral taint of outlaw commerce "beyond the border." An increasing
proportion of postcolonial enterprise may appear shady and brutal,
but it is integral to the workings of the global scheme of things.
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