Abstract
How can we understand policy deadlocks and inactions embedded in the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon? The context sparked by corporatist demands of lawyers, teachers, and students in 2016 has included persistent rising numbers of killings, human rights issues, unending military battles, and contestations on multiple policy attempts to stop the crisis. The article looks at the Anglophone crisis as an issue of policy expertise. Policy expertise encompasses discursive practices that scan the crisis as a site of policy controversies producing deadlocks and inactions. It departs from critical policy studies towards expertise while considering the cultural context as a lens to observe and interpret expertise as a social relation. It, however, goes further, shoring up contestations and public distrust brought about by cultural differences and cultural knowledge. It places a stronger emphasis on the “historical context” to supplement the cultural context of expertise and encompass new cultural boundaries. The analysis stems from a critical postcolonial perspective, while introducing the ‘hybrid’ cultural contexts, ‘hybrid’ institutional designs, and ‘virtual’ discursive spaces which acknowledge the specific cultural character of a case study in the Global South. Using the interpretive methodology, the analysis has relied on documented history, policy discourses in different media, and interviews.
Highlights
Policy discourses centered around the position of Anglophone citizens in terms of Cameroon’s socio-cultural, historical relations with the State or Cameroonian government
2 This paper focuses on the cultural politics of expertise as a way of analyzing the hybrid cultural boundaries of expertise and puts forward the example of the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon
In the attempt to understand how the Anglophone crisis was framed as a policy problem, the analysis of this dataset enabled us to identify the main categories of policy discourse on the crisis, the actors’ profiles, and their historical relations with the crisis, the Cameroonian state, and the crisis dynamic
Summary
10 The Anglophone crisis reveals the bounded cultural roles of the experts of the Cameroonian State. Expertise policy scholars have pointed out the lack of democracy, deliberation, and social participation in the policymaking process, using policy expertise. They have not offered an understanding of long-standing policy deadlocks such as that surrounding the Anglophone crisis. From a postcolonial state’s cultural perspective, cultural hybridity puts the Cameroonian State’s cultural knowledge inbetween the standard, traditional and postmodern worlds. It illuminates ideologies embedded in the postcolonial State’s political structures while clarifying the historical origins of particular social methods
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