Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Teaching about the state

It's not always easy to get everyone up to speed on the basic concepts. Here's a good article from the New York Times about Mali in which reporter Adam Nossiter uses the concept of state in a proper political science way.

Remind yourself and your students, that the state in a place like Mali takes on considerably more responsibilities than it does in Western countries. Those responsibilities strain the capacities of those poor countries.

Islamists Struggle to Run North Mali

The radical Islamists who control northern Mali appear incapable of managing basic services — including electricity, water and schools — and in some cases are asking for the return of state functionaries to run them…

Mali in West Africa

[T]he Islamists’ grasp on administering the vast desert region, which is larger than France, seems much less secure…

“They asked for the state to resume its functions, because it’s too complicated for them to manage,” said Daouda Maïga, who used to run a state development program in Kidal…

About 400,000 people have fled the north since the Islamist takeover, creating a vacuum of talent that the Islamists have apparently been unable to fill….

Some… were surprised by the supplicatory tone of the Islamists, many of them religiously indoctrinated guerrilla fighters used to living lives of isolation in the desert…

“There are so many things that the state does, that they cannot do,” Mr. Maïga said. “Run the water system, the electricity, schools.” In Kidal, there is electricity one night a week at most, he said, and the same was true for water and telephone service.

[T]he Islamists wanted help running all state services except justice and security…