Reforming and making the State on the administrative periphery : the cases of the Judiciary and Public Health in Mozambique-Cabo Delgado and Niassa (1975-2020)

Abstract

For more than three decades, the question of State reforms and public action has been a central element in the development agendas of African countries as well as a subject of study in the social sciences on African societies (political science, sociology and anthropology). Some of these studies have highlighted the inability of African states to reform themselves, or even to formulate or implement public policies. Others insisted on their ability to appropriate international policies and agendas, thus showing the creativity of local administrations. The two approaches to reforms and public action in Africa have shown, it is true, that they participate substantially in the process of construction and the formation of the State, but they neglect, on the one hand, the nature of the political regime to explain the logic of development and implementation of public policies and, on the other hand, do not sufficiently insist on the place of the concrete administrative capacities of these African States in the process of implementation of structuring public policies in rural areas. Moreover, these analyses give little importance to the processes of partisan politicization and the role that reforms and policies play in the consolidation of authoritarian regimes and states, as is the case in Mozambique. This thesis, according to an ethnographic approach, seeks to trace the historicity of the reforms of the judiciary and health institutions in order to see to what extent they participate, on the one hand, in the process of territorialization and formation of the State, and on the other hand, the territorialization of the structures of the Frelimo party-state in rural areas. By studying the concrete process of functioning of these administrations in rural areas, the expansion of the judicial and health network and the participation of non-state actors, this thesis analyzes the complex process of institutionalization of the State in societies with low capacities a