The Materiality of State Failure: Social Contract Theory, Infrastructure and Governmental Power in Congo
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829813484818 |
| Author | Peer Schouten |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
41(3) 553 –574
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829813484818
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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
The Materiality of State
Failure: Social Contract
Theory, Infrastructure and
Governmental Power in Congo
Peer Schouten
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract
Congo’s state failure is usually analysed in terms of a ‘broken social contract’, reflecting the degree
to which mainstream understandings of state failure are conditioned by classical social contract
theory. This article takes a different route to understanding Congo’s predicament by building
on insights from actor-network theory (ANT). ANT’s insistence on society as a socio-material
entanglement, it shows, translates into increasing attention to the role of material infrastructures
in constituting governmental power. Conversely, this approach also allows the highlighting of the
importance of the absence of the material underpinnings of rule in drawing up more nuanced
accounts of state failure.
Keywords
Actor-network theory, Democratic Republic of Congo, materiality, social contract theory, state
failure
Introduction
Take away the world around the battles, keep only conflicts or debates, thick with humanity
and purified of things, and you obtain stage theater, most of our narratives and philosophies,
history, and all of social science: the interesting spectacle they call cultural.
Michel Serres1
Corresponding author:
Peer Schouten, University of Gothenburg, Vasagatan 33, 41137 Göteborg, Sweden.
Email: peer.schouten@globalstudies.gu.se
484818MIL41310.1177/0305829813484818Millennium: Journal of International StudiesSchouten
2013
Article
1. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 3.
554 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(3)
Congo’s state failure is commonly analysed in terms of a ‘broken social contract’. Further
elucidating the classical theoretical underpinnings of the study of state failure, explana-
tions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s problems often directly invoke
Hobbes to paint Congo as anarchical, a ‘state of nature’. In this article, I want to suggest
that in locating the source of Congo’s predicament – and state failure more generally – in
social processes or the absence thereof, mainstream approaches to International Relations
(IR) present a distorted view of what state failure is about. Rather than a purely ‘social’
evil, Congo’s state failure also needs to be understood in ‘material’ terms, that is, as a
consequence of the absence of the physical infrastructure that is constitutive of modern
government.
This article argues that we can better understand state failure and challenges to gov-
ernmental power in the developing world by deploying insights from actor-network
theory (ANT). ANT takes issue with the society/nature dichotomy that underpins social
contract theory, arguing that societies have always already been entanglements of social
and material, technical and natural ‘things’. The work of, for instance, Andrew Barry,
Jane Bennett, Sheila Jasanoff and Timothy Mitchell offers exciting examples of what it
implies for our understanding of politics to reintroduce the absent ‘things’ that Michel
Serres refers to in the above quotation.2 Building on such advances, this article shows
how ANT can help to articulate the role of materiality in accounting for governmental
power and state failure in Congo.
However, taking ANT to Congo is by no means self-evident. ANT has hitherto largely
been used to study complex socio-technical entanglements such as laboratories and other
highly modern settings in Europe or the US, where the infrastructure of rule is so perva-
sive that we generally fail to notice it. ANT’s focus on how technology is weaved through
social relations has contributed to a better understanding of the intricacies of power in the
‘developed world’, but ANT has remained remarkably silent about its implications for
politics and development in the developing world. What is specific about contexts such
as Congo is not the ubiquity of technological infrastructures, but rather the relative
absence, and progressive disintegration, thereof. In that regard, Congo’s predicament
presents a critical case for ANT. This article aims at turning ANT’s gaze south, to open
up a set of questions regarding state failure as a socio-material predicament and the kind
of disparities in governmental power that result from differences in infrastructural capac-
ity in Congo between the construction sites of global politics – the mining camps,
humanitarian assemblages and similar complex socio-technical systems – and the sur-
rounding landscape and people.
While IR thrives on importing ideas from other disciplines, ANT is still hardly
accepted as an analytical approach to international politics. In order to articulate the
contribution that ANT can make to the analytics of political power in relation to state
2. Andrew Barry, ‘Political Situations: Knowledge Controversies in Transnational Governance’,
Critical Policy Studies 6, no. 3 (2012): 324–36; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political
Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Gabrielle Hecht, ed.,
Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2011); Sheila Jasanoff, States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science
and Social Order (New York: Routledge, 2004); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt,
Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
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