Representation without a state: studying the long-term political consequences of neoliberalism in the countryside

The neoliberal attack on the state and public policies had long-term consequences for how people engage in politics. Growing inequality has laid the ground for populist movements across the globe, while the loss of formal sector jobs has shrunk union membership and weakened established interest representation. In African countries, the retreat of the state was severely felt in rural areas, where state-supported cooperatives and crop marketing had previously provided smallholders not only with a certain level of social security but also with channels for communicating with the political centre. With the dismantling of rural state institutions in the 1990s, a gap in political representation thus emerged. This has implications for how social questions are constructed and communicated. As peasants became disconnected from the state, international agencies turned towards community participation and discovered the “voices of the poor”. Today, with the internationalisation of social policy, rural people are represented in a myriad of research reports to inform “evidence-based” policymaking. And a growing transnational peasant movement is re-politicising the unequal access to land and productive capacities in global fora. Thirty years after the credibility of the state began its descent, a question merits more attention: how has austerity changed modes of politics in rural areas and with what effects on the politicisation of social inequality? My paper presents some initial findings from Zambia based on which I develop a future research agenda for zooming further into these mechanisms.