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Private Governance and the Public Good: Rule-Making Beyond the State

Despite the overwhelming focus on states as rule-makers and arbiters of order, across much of Africa it is private actors that establish regulations. In extractive concessions or special economic zones, policies may be substantially established by corporations. Elsewhere, contract law and arbitration clauses shape what is permissible, costly, or encouraged. In other examples, carbon credit schemes and community conservancies produce new rules for land-usage, such as where and how pastoralists can graze their cattle. Meanwhile, although police and military are central actors in “enforcing order” within African polities, it is equally important to understand how private security apparatuses (from global security contractors to militarized wildlife rangers) operate within such orders and indeed produce their own parallel regimes of rules and governance. The questions of where and how law, rules, and order are (re)produced beyond the state, opens our analytic attention to the myriad sites of decentralized, distributed, and privatized practices of order-making.

This panel seeks papers from across the disciplines that explore the processes and consequences of private rule-making, especially those that are justified in the name of the public good, general interest, or other ethical virtues (such as public security, public health, nature conservation, etc.) What forms of sociality, relations of power, conflict or arbitration are produced within such private regimes of law and order? What are the geographies of private rule-making and how do they trouble (or reinforce) other geographies of power and contestation across spatial scales? Who and what is constructed as “the public” and “the good” in such private regimes of order, and how do such notions intersect with (or problematize) traditional understanding of “the people,” “the nation,” or “the social contract”? What are the genealogies and historical lineages of such private-rule making practices and where are they situated with colonial and postcolonial histories?

Critical engagements with notions of ‘twilight institutions,’ ‘neoliberalism,’ ‘private indirect government’, ‘NGO-ization’ and other concepts are welcome, but we also hope to foreground new objects of concern, including specific technologies or devices of governance and emerging imaginaries of private order and public good.

Please submit an abstract of 200-250 words to Zoltán Glück (gluck@american.edu) or Kevin Donovan (kevin.donovan@ed.ac.uk) by 10 March 2024.

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