The Read: Adnan Naseemullah, Patchwork States: The Historical Roots of Subnational Conflict and Competition in South Asia
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I know the author and have long appreciated his thinking on a wide variety of topics. But also this book helped me further think through a difficult bit of long-form writing I’ve been doing about postcolonial rule and sovereignty in Zimbabwe.
Is it what I thought it was?
I had a sense of what the book’s approach was going to be, and it matched my expectations. But I was really pleased at how accessible it was for me as a non-specialist in South Asia, and at how it rooted its political analysis in historical context. I also found some of the cleanly laid out conceptual infrastructure to be very useful and easy to apply in other contexts.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
As I said, it’s informing my own attempt to narrate a particular relationship between colonialism, postcolonial authority and citations of the “customary” through chiefship in the context of Zimbabwe.
I haven’t ever thought about trying to teach a course at a broader comparative scale about postcolonial politics and sovereignty but I did find myself thinking about that a bit as I read. I think it would have to be a co-taught class and right now I am not sure there’s anybody in the same groove outside of my department, though there are definitely folks inside the department who are. So maybe?
Quotes
“Territorially distinct governance institutions that constitute the modern South Asian state have concrete roots in the process of state-building under colonial rule. In contrast to much of the research on political order in South Asia, which focused on political institutions after independence, and analyses of colonial legacies that identify the long-run effects of specific institutions, I examine the construction and persistence of a diverse set of governance arrangements before independence.”
“British colonial authorities quite deliberately formulated and maintained differentiated forms of rule over subject peoples and suzerain polities…This had the effect of prefiguring differences in the local capacities of the state.”
“For much of the agrarian hinterland and far peripheries, however, the powerful institutions of the British mercantile imperial project were simply not evident.”
“Beyond material greed, existential insecurity was ever-present as a powerful motivation for governance arrangements in colonial India, as historians of the British Empire have persuasively argued by social scientists have largely ignored.”
“I formulate a typology of governance arrangements in colonial India: metropolitan, modernizing, intermediate, conservative, chieftancy and exceptional.”
“The deliberate if limited efforts of postcolonial governments to construct new state institutions and transform governance for the national goals of development and security did lead to the limited convergence of the diverse range of colonial governance arrangements. This has yield a narrower set of postcolonial governance categories: metropolitan, modernizing, conservative and exceptional.”
“Systemic violence and contention can be consistent with settled, institutionalized, interpenetrative relationships between state and society, or in other words, our everyday notions of political order. Ethnic riots, electoral clashes and even targeted killings are characteristic of sovereignty-neutral violence; they represent the darker but no less real side of political competition—the struggle of who gets what, when and how.”
“In geographical contexts where there is much less capacity and negligible interpenetration between the state and social groups—especially in exceptional districts—actors have a greater propensity for engaging in conflict over the very terms of state authority. This is what I term sovereignty-contesting violence.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
One simple thought the book left me with is that this kind of integration of historically cogent analysis with contemporaneous interpretations of political conflict, electoral politics, and so on should not be as difficult or unusual as it seems to be sometimes in certain political science departments or programs. (My local colleagues are a fabulous exception to this observation.)
I couldn’t help but process Naseemullah’s arguments against two historiographical literatures in my own field, and his approach seemed like a really valuable insight into the issues that emerged with that work. (In an early chapter, he does do a bit of comparative analysis at a broad scale and emphasizes some ways in which sub-Saharan African politics are shaped by some different dynamics, so I want to respectfully note that before driving this discussion towards what I know best away from examples I know less well.)
The first is what was often called “the invention of tribalism”, a scholarly literature that mostly emerged out of southern Africa in the final two decades of struggle against the white settler state in Rhodesia and Namibia and the apartheid state in South Africa. In brief, it was an argument that applied the concept of “invented tradition” crafted by the Africanist scholar Terence Ranger and the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm to the more specific case of claims about “tribal” or ethnic identities in South Africa. This literature was in turn to some extent a subset of the way that many African nationalists and their scholarly allies attempted to dismiss late imperial concerns about “tribalism” and its possible impact on independence via asserting that divisions between different groups within the imminently independent nations were a creation of colonial rulers who deliberately applied used a “divide and rule” strategy to pit people who spoke different languages against one another and to artificially reify sociopolitical identities that had previously been fuzzy, negotiable and shifting into hard, fixed categories that pinned individuals to particular places and restricted their mobility and rights.
Broadly speaking, all of those were valid and accurate critiques, but at the same time, they also tried to loudly talk past some real differences between people within (and across) national boundaries and the extent to which those were not merely instrumental “inventions” of colonial administrators. What Naseemullah helps me to think about is that the political forms that were sometimes attached to these projects of colonial-era identity production were in fact somewhat divergent. Which makes me think of the second historiographical cluster of work, which is scholarship that follows on Mahmood Mamdani’s influential book Citizen and Subject. Mamdani wasn’t the only scholar at the time that book was first published to pointedly insist that emphasizing differences in types of colonial administrative regimes was a distraction from understanding their essential formal similarities, but he was one of the most influential and articulate authors to do so.
It now feels important to stress that in many ways administrative variations as well as the degree to which different regions and territories were or were not integrated into imperial authority have been quite consequential in the postcolonial era in Africa—in many of the same ways that Naseemullah analyzes across South Asia. What Naseemullah calls “sovereignty-neutral” and “sovereignty-contesting” violence and tactics seem very similarly visible in sub-Saharan African political life. (I found this terminological distinction especially useful.)
Coming back to the book itself in its own terms, it’s apparent why Naseemullah’s comparative-historical approach might not recommend itself to that fraction of political scientists who are most concerned with formulating interventions, policies, and other institutionally salient ways of processing research findings into practical outcomes. (And possibly also why historians are not always a welcome presence in contexts where contemporary actors are seeking solutions to particular problems.) Naseemullah’s explanation of political violence in South Asia is powerfully explanatory of “spasmodic and stochastic patterns of violence across territory”—I think to the point of even being predictive, in a broad sense, of the continuation of those patterns against the historically-derived variations in histories of governance and administration that he described—but the explanatory power of his analysis precisely inhibits “solutionism”. (Here again I’m reminded of Mamdani arguing in Citizen and Subject that African states simply need to liquidate or eliminate the ‘customary’ as a domain of governmental power in order to create powerfully unitary sovereignties—which is either a bafflingly complex recommendation or a chillingly dangerous one in terms of what elimination might be understood to mean.) In a sense, Naseemullah’s nuanced and persuasive analysis suggests that the only answer to a political problem that derives from a “patchwork” of sovereignties is politics, not some form of reductive modelling of a policy apparatus that it is assumed can be deployed by some neutral, view-from-nowhere set of state actors or international institutions.
Naseemullah also has some really complex, interesting and I think usefully debatable or discussable ideas about how to understand colonialism and its legacies that do not fall into any neatly composed orthodoxy or pre-arranged intellectual politics. He aims some of those thoughts at highly influential works by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson but I think they have a wider range of implications. I was particularly interested in terms of my own current work in his argument, made both at the level of specifics and in wider theoretical terms, that the “endogamous shock” of decolonization has to be taken as a source of contingent outcomes in the development of political institutions in postcolonial states in its own right, rather than as noise that obscures the more fundamental causal force of colonial systems and institutions in shaping postcolonial outcomes.
This is one of those books that makes me wish I had access to (and time for) some sort of comparativist reading group of scholars from different disciplines and with different geographic areas of specialization—I feel as if it would stimulate a lot of very good discussions.