Fall 2023 Fellow

I am a political scientist, and my current research, described below, is funded by a Fulbright global scholar award. In it, I compare decentralization of government power in Mozambique and Colombia. My intellectual path to this topic has been circuitous.

I have two intellectual homes: area studies and comparative politics. Area studies emphasizes foreign language acquisition, extended periods abroad, and granular familiarity with systematic knowledge of a particular foreign country or region. Comparative politics, complementarily, gives us a theoretical vocabulary to understand what is universal among human societies and what is particular.  

My area studies background comes from a quarter century’s study of Latin America and includes study at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, erstwhile proficiency in Quechua, and about 30 professional trips to the region.

My comparative politics background comes from study at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, and the application of methodological and conceptual tools from that training to fieldwork in India, Latin America, and Africa since 2014.

My object of study is the state, defined by Max Weber as a human community with a monopoly of legitimate force in a given territory. Nietzsche wrote that the state was the coldest of all cold monsters. Thus, more properly, my object of study is the democratic state, or the state that mitigates the worst characteristics identified by Nietzsche while still providing basic functions needed for collective living in a modernized and complex environment.

I utilize midrange theory and ethnographic field methods. Midrange theory is neither fully nomothetic, as is the abstract field of economics, nor fully ideographic, as are anthropology and history.

My fieldwork usually consists of unstructured interviews, which are identified through a snowballing methodology, and direct observation. The result is ethnographic data, which I synthesize with knowledge from an ‘all sources’ review of relevant area studies and appropriate theoretical knowledge.

This approach has allowed me to produce what I describe as a comparative ethnography of public administration in developing countries, which I explored in my first book, Prison Bureaucracies in the United Stated, Mexico, India, and Honduras (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018).   

Since independence from Portugal in 1975, Frelimo—which was founded as a military force to expel the Portuguese—has controlled Mozambique’s national political institutions. If opposition parties, such as Renamo and MDM, are to share in Mozambique’s governance, therefore, it will for now be at the provincial and local levels. Mozambique has 11 provinces (akin to US states or Latin American departments) and 154 districts (akin to US counties or Latin American municipalities).

Both Colombia and Mozambique are post-conflict societies in which the government has had trouble making its presence felt in isolated rural areas. Both countries formally decentralized government institutions in the 1980s and 1990s, in part to respond to this institutional deficiency.

In 1986, Colombia changed the method of selecting 1,009 local officials throughout its national territory from appointment to direct election. Mozambique’s 1992 democratic constitution provided the legal framework for a multiparty democracy, and subsequent political negotiations provided for the election of local officials in 33 to 65 of the country’s 154 local districts.

However, Mozambique’s decentralization, which was always shallower by design, has been much more fitful and troubled in actual implementation. Election of mayors, called presidente do conselho in Mozambican Portuguese, has been limited to a subset of the 154 districts in the country, and all districts—whether possessing an elected mayor or not—have an administrator appointed by the partido no poder (party in national power), which has been Frelimo for the 48 years of Mozambican independence. Governors of Mozambican provinces, elected since 2019, similarly serve alongside centrally appointed secretaries of state. These subnational government institutions have been described by scholars of Mozambican as “bicephalous.”

Other roadblocks to more fundamental decentralizations have been erected in Mozambique. In 2019, both Frelimo and Renamo supported the change from direct election of mayors to indirect election of mayors by party list. In 2023, Frelimo reneged on a 2018 deal with Renamo to extend election of mayors to all of Mozambique’s 154 districts by 2024, leaving this reform which is codified in Mozambique’s constitution for an undefined time in the future.

What are the prospects for further decentralization in Mozambique? My research suggests that desire for decentralization, far from being an imposition of donor conditionality, has significant local support. For instance, one group of community leaders in rural Manjacaze told me of their desire to be ruled not by their current chefe de posto(chief of post), but by a more competent chefe de posto from a neighboring administrative division. Urban intellectuals, from the cosmopolitan and Frelimo-dominated Maputo to the opposition centers of Beira and Quelimane, publish scathing criticisms of Frelimo’s slow-walking decentralization reforms.

And decentralization has substantively increased, as between 1998 to 2023 the number of districts with elected officials has increased from 33, to 43, to 53, to the current 65.

Under Review:

The Journal of Global South Studies is reviewing my article manuscript, titled “Decentralization, Rural Areas, and National Political Integration in Mozambique, Colombia, and Bolivia”, and publisher of my first book, Lexington Books, is expecting a book proposal for Rural Politics in the Global South in October of 2023.