Abstract
How can we better understand areas where the authority of the central state is largely absent? Although we live in an international system dominated by states, there are numerous areas where their authority is uncertain. To better understand this reality, Lombard engages in a historical and contemporary description of life and interactions in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) Northeastern region, a “stateless-state space” (158). Based on many years of research in the CAR, Lombard develops an innovative analytical framework focused on raiding and hunting to help readers understand the people in areas like Northeast CAR.
In nine chapters, Lombard carefully analyses the personal encounters between various people from the late nineteenth century to present-day CAR. She persuasively advances an alternative political-economic mode of understanding contemporary modern life, that is a mode of acquisition (13). This is different from the capitalist mode of production and accumulation that has normalised our understanding of the world. In acquisitive mode, people either raid or hunt humans and non-human like goods, much like a “hunting game.” This “game” is centred around armed conservation, hunting animals and humans, and hunting poachers and slaves. It formed a constellation of acquisitive projects around which the diverse interests of Europeans and Central Africans coalesced. Europeans hunted men for labour and porterage, later moving into hunting wild animals. Similarly, Muslim sultanates hunted men for their commercial endeavours. In the hunting game, actors extract, tax, and use violence to seek recognition of their status, rather than to govern people (28). Such acquisitive projects involve the use of violence to claim status, a status that is never really fixed, but continually open to (re)negotiation. This renegotiation highlights how norms are disputed in contemporary everyday practices and encounters between Europeans and Africans.
Chapter 1 discusses Lombard’s theory of acquisition, that is hunting and raiding. In chapters 2 and 3, Lombard examines acquisitive politics during the colonial period spanning Muslim sultanates to French colonisers. In chapters 4 and 5, Lombard focuses on big-game hunting projects and their influence on the CAR’s Northeast and Eastern regions. One reads colonial history through hunters’ memoirs and the kinds of encounters taking place in the early 1900s. Hunters occupied the CAR as a space in which they could do what they wanted. The legacies of such big-game hunting projects, and their European funders, are a set of laws in contemporary CAR that completely disregard the people’s way of life in Northeast CAR.
Chapters 6 and 7 discuss other repertoires of action in the hunting zone, which are camouflage and denunciation. In the stateless-state space, law is not an accurate guide to understand social interactions (119); hence, people developed skills that allow them to claim status and not be ignored. By camouflaging, people can “further their own acquisitive or status projects” (146). The acquisitive process can leave someone without recourse to right wrongs. As such, denunciation and vengeance become useful tactics to avoid being ignored. In chapter 8, Lombard discusses the life trajectories of contemporary actors in the CAR’s Northeast, showing the influence of camouflage, denunciation, and hunting in that space. She finally concludes in chapter 9.
The book makes at least two important contributions to current political debates. First, this book is a corrective to arguments premised on a myth of ungoverned spaces existing throughout Africa which is conducive to colonial interventions, that is, development projects and peacekeeping missions. Rather, Lombard allows us to examine the interactions between people leaving aside the assumption that governance is a well-thought-out project. As Lombard states, “I wanted to explore politics as they are, rather than in terms of what is missing” (2). This is useful for understanding areas like the Sahel or any other space with limited state presence.
Second, the book interrogates the CAR’s colonial history and beyond, shedding cursory light on what it meant for Europeans to encounter Africans and others. Indeed, “uncertainty about the status of people newly coming into sustained contact with one another created fluidity of opportunity as well as of threat” (40). Violence was useful to many people who met in the hunting zone and not just Europeans. In these everyday interactions, law and ethics seemed less important not because they were non-existent but because laws could not be applied or because actors developed camouflage in order to subvert statecraft (159). Lombard demonstrates the relevance of her conceptualisation by not retelling the story of raiding, as historians of CAR have who made normative judgments about the usefulness of violence in the Northeast.
Considering these important contributions, one question remains. Even if law is not an appropriate guide to action in a stateless-state space, it seems acquisitive politics entertain a relationship with accountability that could be further explored. Several entrepreneurs in the hunting zone are able to acquire goods and use camouflage and denunciation to avoid sanctions. Without doubt, hunters are themselves sometimes hunted (72), but why is the population unable to hold these entrepreneurs accountable? If this is because law is not a helpful guide, then current CAR watchers must take note of this important contribution and the way camouflage is useful to them.
What Lombard describes can be extended to Bangui’s political elites and how they acquire goods forcibly from people who cannot contest such acts. Hence, accountability or a lack thereof seems to play a role that is uncertain. For instance, rebels do not want to be held accountable for their actions, partly because political elites are not held accountable either. In the middle of this hunting game, the many people who cannot contest or claim their status suffer.
This book is a must-read from Lombard. The state, its formation, and its modes of production and influence on people remain important for ongoing debates. Lombard encourages us to look closer at the interactions and encounters between people where the state has liminal presence. Europeans and Africans’ interests coalesced over hunting and raiding projects where violence and camouflage were useful to them.