Since the last quarter of the 20th century, states throughout the world have come under increased pressure. In Africa in particular, high levels of debt, international constraints, poor governance and civil conflicts have led many states into recurring functional and legitimacy crises. This has been translated into discourses about the so-called "failure" of the state on the continent. While these discourses still abound in policy and academic circles, there is a need for alternative arguments and concepts that seek to understand what individual African states are and how they work, rather than emphasizing what they are not vis-à-vis Western models. This is why swisspeace developed a research project funded by the NCCR North-South on 'negotiating statehood' with the intention to produce a "political ethnography" describing how various African states actually work and how statehood emerges from negotiation processes between local, national and international actors.
