The Country as a Subject
Analyses of state dynamics, institutional behaviour, governance patterns and the incentives that organise public life across Africa and the wider world.
01
State Dynamics
Africa's post-colonial federations are not a constitutional arrangement so much as continually renegotiated set of incentives. Reading them as code rather than as text clarifies almost everything.
02
Institutional Reading
Most reform programmes across Africa and beyond fail not because of resistance, but because the institutions they are passed through metabolise them. The metabolism, not the policy, is the story.
03
Public Psychology
Public life in many modern states is governed by a perpetual electoral psychology. This is not a flaw of the political class; it is a stable equilibrium that serves a great many people.
04
Power Incentives
Capture rarely arrives as scandal. It arrives as routine: procurement patterns, appointment timing, an unremarkable budget line. The unremarkable is the point.