Shadow State Research Articles

Interrogating the agency of non-profit labour market intermediaries: Casting light on ‘shadow spaces’ through an institutional-relational view

In a context of government cutbacks, non-profit labour-market intermediaries are assuming a more significant role in efforts to combat precarious employment. Yet such organizations are still subject to state funding regimes, regulations, oversight and neoliberal logics. As such, some scholars argue that they constitute “shadow state” spaces. In this paper, we move beyond the ‘shadow’ concept, casting light on the ways that different state-non-profit relations shape non-profits’ agency to define and realize their respective mandates. Building on a relational perspective, we hold that links between non-profits and the state are not linear. We complement this perspective with an institutional-relational approach to consider how a non-profit’s distinct institutional configuration (i.e., regulations, funders, and partners) enables or forecloses agency vis-à-vis the state apparatus. Through an examination of two non-profit labour market intermediaries that serve immigrant workers in Montreal/Tio’tia:ke, our analysis lends insight into institutional elements that can enlarge a non-profit organization’s space to maneuver.

Ethno-Cultural Associations as Shadow States: The Case of Ijebu Province in Western Nigeria, 1900-1960

Extant scholarly works on ethno-cultural associations (ECAs) have done little to provide a robust historical perspective on their roles in community development of British colonies in continental Africa. Thus, this paper is an attempt to fill the gap in the body of knowledge on ethno-cultural associations in colonial Africa with specific reference to Ijebu province in Western Nigeria. The study is aimed at providing a critical historical discourse on the social, economic and political roles of ethno-cultural associations in colonial Ijebu province of Western Nigeria. The study utilises primary and secondary sources. While archival materials and oral interviews provide the primary data in this discourse, books, journal articles and newspaper reports are explored as secondary data. The study found out that the efforts made by the ECAs through several strategies in colonial Ijebuland brought about meaningful development at the community level. We also found out that the ECAs represented indigenous organizational structures developed by the Ijebu people and functioned as community-wide forums for problem identification and prioritization, social and financial resource mobilization and development project implementation at the community level in colonial Ijebu province of Western Nigeria. The study concludes among other things that the ECAs were more or less shadow states and that their efforts must be seen against the background of the failure of the colonial state and the Ijebu Native Administration between 1900 and 1960.

Shadow state structures and the threat to anti-corruption enforcement: evidence from Uzbekistan’s telecommunications bribery scandal

The role which corporate and financial secrecy vehicles play in enabling transnational corruption has justifiably received growing scholarly and policy interest. Less attention, however, has been given to the enabling role played by political secrecy vehicles. Political secrecy vehicles denote arrangements that allow individuals to clandestinely exercise public authority, which is concealed by a formal bureaucratic façade. This article develops analytical categories for deconstructing political secrecy structures and pinpointing the threat they pose to anti-corruption enforcement. These structures and threats are then empirically explored through an investigative case study. The case study plots how shadow political space in Uzbekistan and the simulacra of impartial public administration, was utilised by a kleptocratic syndicate to conceal an international bribery scheme, and then weaponised by the conspirators to successfully frustrate enforcement efforts in Europe. Drawing on key lessons from the case study, proposals are made for how the threats posed by political secrecy structures can be jurisprudentially and practically counteracted.

The entrepreneurial shadow state delivering a smart city

ABSTRACT Among the many issues that have been discussed under the scholarship of entrepreneurial state, the place of and strategies to mobilize, a shadow state apparatus have so far received little attention. It is particularly relevant from state practices in the Global South. This article gives an account of shadow practices that an entrepreneurial state undertakes in its attempt to deliver a smart city project. It documents a host of practices that essentially blur the boundaries of the formal and shadow state to smoothen business deals and take the neoliberal agendas of the entrepreneurial state forward. The article demonstrates that these shadow practices by formal state actors take place due to the demands of the entrepreneurial zeal of the state, a key facet of neoliberalism. The article contributes toward the scholarship by bringing into focus the salience of caste and kin networks in the quotidian operations of the shadow state.

Digital expression from the shadow states: The in-betweeners in the late-capitalist era

ABSTRACT This article examines the social media-induced affective notion of fame from the perspective of people living in peripheries, such as the region of Northeast India, whom the mainstream media (and by extension, the popular imagination) have always obscured, or somewhat suppressed. When they come across these visibility-inducing social media platforms, does this lead to the creation of new forms of celebrityhood? This article observes three specific people from the region – a filmmaker, a small-time Bollywood actor, and an Instagram dancing sensation. The case studies outline their usage of the affordances of the social media platforms through which they acquire a kind of cultish fame. It examines how they leverage fame to instil the greater North-east region in the popular national imagination. This article claims that social media is not merely a platform for these artists to connect with and maintain their audiences, but also a place to create awareness, to define their identity and reveal the socio-historical fractures that they have inherited. This article extends the notion of micro-celebrity (Senft, ”Keeping It Real on the Web”) to dwell on the relationship between media-managed obscurity and social media-enabled self-promotion to conceptualise the category of in-betweeners.

CORRUPTION AND THE LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRIES (LDCS): AN ANALYSIS OF THE CAUSES, SCOPE, AND IMPACT OF CORRUPTION ON THE LDCS

The article examines the links between corruption and development in the developing world. There is a close relationship between corruption and development, which is why ending corruption needs to be at the core of any developmental agenda for the least developed countries (henceforth LCDs). Moreover, this article includes a discussion on the causes, scope, and impact of corruption on the state and society in the LCDs. As there is a lack of oversight, transparency, central guidance and direction, coupled with institutional deficiencies and incompetence, there is a tendency towards predatory, rentier state in the LDCs. Besides this, there exists a kind of shadow state in the LDCs as corruption leads to the emergence of an informal economy. Furthermore, this article explores the detrimental effects of corruption on equality in society, investment in the public as well private sectors, and on the state budget. Finally, this articles not only sheds lights on the internal ecology of corruption and its external repercussions, but also points out some mechanism whereby corruption can be combated and contained. Keywords: Corruption, causes of corruption, reasons behind corruption, measures to stop Corruption.

On classical and hybrid shadows of quantum states

Classical shadows are a computationally efficient approach to storing quantum states on a classical computer for the purposes of estimating expectation values of local observables, obtained by performing repeated random measurements. In this note we offer some comments on this approach. We note that the resources needed to form classical shadows with bounded relative error depend strongly on the target state. We then comment on the advantages and limitations of using classical shadows to simulate many-body dynamics. In addition, we introduce the notion of a hybrid shadow, constructed from measurements on a part of the system instead of the entirety, which provides a framework to gain more insight into the nature of shadow states as one reduces the size of the subsystem measured, and a potential alternative to compressing quantum states.

Shadow process tomography of quantum channels

Quantum process tomography is a critical capability for building quantum computers, enabling quantum networks, and understanding quantum sensors. Like quantum state tomography, the process tomography of an arbitrary quantum channel requires a number of measurements that scales exponentially in the number of quantum bits affected. However, the recent field of shadow tomography, applied to quantum states, has demonstrated the ability to extract key information about a state with only polynomially many measurements. In this work, we apply the concepts of shadow state tomography to the challenge of characterizing quantum processes. We make use of the Choi isomorphism to directly apply rigorous bounds from shadow state tomography to shadow process tomography, and we find additional bounds on the number of measurements that are unique to process tomography. Our results, which include algorithms for implementing shadow process tomography, enable new techniques including evaluation of channel concatenation and the application of channels to shadows of quantum states. This provides a dramatic improvement for understanding large-scale quantum systems.

Fighting Over the Bangka Sea: The Tin Mining Conflict in the Marine Area of Bangka Regency

: The tin mining conflict in the marine area of Bangka Regency involves four main actors: the government and PT Timah as the spearhead of the tin exploitation, illegal miners, fishermen, and tourism businessmen. This research uses qualitative methods by collecting data through in-depth interviews and literature studies. This article found that economic factors are accounted for by the node that equalizes the motives of actors to be present in the socio-economic dynamics of the region. However, there are two different patterns of sea utilization, namely tin mining, which causes damage to 57.09% of coral reefs, reduces fishing hauls and threatens 16,000 traditional fishermen who depend on the sea for fishing, and the development of tourism, which requires the maintenance of marine ecosystems, on the other hand, it can cause conflict between actors. The unequal power network between actors causes the distribution of benefits over the sea in Bangka Regency to be unsatisfactory. The operationalization of state power through spatial arrangements in the form of mining business licenses has made the state the actor that receives the most economic benefits. Relations with state actors in the workings of the shadow state allow illegal miners to gain economic benefits because they can be connected to the global tin business chain. On the other hand, the combination of the lack of power, pseudo-participation in policy formation, and the stalemate of alternative participation has resulted in the marginalization of fishermen.

A Tale of a Rentier Social Contract and Diminishing Economic Rents: Multinationalism and Resource-Seeking Capital in Contemporary Africa

The invisible hand of private global enterprises in the political and economic landscape of Africa’s rentier states best exemplifies the extent to which Multinational Corporations (MNCs) now personify the variant/competing strategic resource-seeking interests of two fronts, i.e., (i) the emerging economy MNCs [BRICS nations, with China and Russia in particular] and (ii) the EU (European Union) and North American states. We have also seen from these fronts, a growing prioritization of economic/political hegemonies over mutually-beneficial bilateral relationships that ensure shared economic development and stability (with respect to ideals, such as good governance, human rights, and democracy) in the Global South. Inadvertently, this has emboldened the proliferation of oligarchs and shadow states whose resilience is contingent upon the existence of autocratic infrastructure, inequality, and a shrinking democratic space. In rentier states, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), positive spillovers (in both development and economic terms) have been dwindling—notwithstanding the ubiquity of private global enterprises therein. Using the Rentier State theory and the Agency thesis, the article explores the operations of MNCs in Africa. Through a content analysis of literature on global capital, institutions, and the role of multinationals in resource rich states, the article focuses on the DRC to highlight what we know and do not know on the negative side of globalization. Some of the negative outcomes of the unregulated power of private global enterprises (as discussed in the article) include their involvement in electoral process interferences, authoritarian collaborations, the establishment of oligopolies, shadow states, etc., to the detriment of equitable development (within rentier states), and a salience of inequities within the global natural resource trade.

Under the canopy of development aid: illegal logging and the shadow state

ABSTRACT The term ‘Shadow State' refers to illicit extraction and patrimonial resource grabs. This paper documents the history of Cambodia's Shadow State and its interlocutors in the timber trade, drawing connections to contemporary timber extraction involving syndicated logging, government officials, and USAID. We use this to discuss three interrelated things: How infrastructures for Shadow State extraction morph with policy changes and persist through time. How climate change politics connect a long history of violent resource extraction, and how the ‘shadow’ state is knowingly hidden within the modern state. The implications of our findings for social and environmental justice cannot be ignored.

Outsourcing Bureaucracy to Evade Accountability: How Public Servants Build Shadow State Capacity

The solution to weak bureaucratic capacity in developing countries is often presumed to be more accountability. This paper shows how accountability initiatives, intended to reduce corruption, can actually hinder the development of capable government agencies by making it harder for directors to recruit experts and spend their budgets. It further highlights a common way public servants escape the accountability rules that limit their effectiveness: outsourcing bureaucracies to nonstate organizations. This practice of outsourcing bureaucracy to avoid accountability rules creates what I call “shadow” state capacity and, paradoxically, it may help explain “pockets of effectiveness” among government social programs in developing countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews and descriptive statistics, I show how outsourcing was a critical factor in producing two of Brazil’s most vaunted social sector programs. However, I also suggest that outsourcing bureaucracy may ultimately limit state capacity, even if it helps to build capable programs in the short run.

Seeing like a church: Reconstruction after Typhoon Sendong in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines

In post-disaster situations where there is a weak government, opportunities arise for so-called non-state actors to re-imagine, re-create, and govern portions of society and landscapes. The process of resettling survivors is an improvement project in which certain actors and institutions assume the functions and authority of a shadow state. This paper studies the activities of Catholic trustees in disaster relief and resettlement in Northern Mindanao, Philippines after Tropical Storm Sendong, and asks how and to what ends they engage with purportedly secular humanitarian efforts. It is based on fieldwork in Cagayan de Oro, which used an ethnographic approach and qualitative methods. The intentions motivating trustees’ interventions, and the selection of activities, reveal clear Christian undertones. This unsurprising finding suggests Catholic trustees “saw like a church”; there was a demonstrated intent to govern, in the Foucauldian sense of governmental rationality, guided by the exercise of old and new pastoral power, largely mirroring a Christian social mission. Through their actions, trustees (re)asserted the historical hegemonic position of the Catholic Church in Philippine society. This framing of disaster management challenges mainstream secular discourses and practices of development and disaster management and their treatment of faith-based organizations as just another development actor.

Seeing like a shadow state: an ethnography of homeless street outreach in the USA

ABSTRACT How do street outreach workers (SOWs) help govern homelessness? I present an ethnography from the USA to answer this question. Biopolitics is a mode of governance that manipulates fertility, morbidity, and/or mortality rates. The biopolitical turn in U.S. homeless policy obliges federally contracted SOWs – components of the shadow state – to perform morbidity assessments so local bureaucrats can manage exits from homelessness. Routine displacement of unhoused individuals generates surveillance gaps that SOWs fill by recruiting stakeholders with spatial information into their governing coalition. After finding a homeless contact, SOWs assess their morbidity in public spaces and upload this information to a centralized database that system managers use to monitor and manipulate population trends. Homeless contacts who cannot be located are uncounted, misclassified, and/or deprioritized for permanent housing assistance. The centrality of standardized health assessment highlights the salience of biopolitics to SOWs who enable local bureaucrats to see homeless subpopulations.

Shadows of the shadow state: Grassroots, refugee-led organizations within a multi-scalar and contested resettlement institutional domain

In discussions of welfare state restructuring, the focus has largely been on institutions that are well established and funded by the state. This study, focusing on the U.S. refugee resettlement institutional domain, theoretically examines organizational entities that are refugee- run and grassroots, and how they fit as peripheral to their larger, state-funded counterparts. Third-order devolution, as conceptualized in this paper, is the extended delegation of social responsibilities from the state and then unto state-contracted organizations of the third sector, and then further unto state-detached organizations of the informal sector. “Informal,” “unofficial,” “quasi”-organizations run by and for refugee communities in these most peripheral levels at the grassroots are forwarded as shadows of the shadow state. That is, pressure is exerted further downward, but without means nor legitimacy, in multiscalar governance of U.S. refugee resettlement. The contestations and relationalities that constitute the shadow state must thus be viewed against a voluntary sector that is heterogeneous, multi-scalar and power-laden, rather than unitary. Theoretical considerations also raise questions about new organizational forms in addressing resettlement and migration, and the tripartite relationship between the state, state-contracted/funded organizations, and state-detached organizations at the grassroots.

Seeing like the shadow state: philanthropy, memory, and public housing redevelopment in Syracuse, NY

ABSTRACT This article examines Blueprint 15, a planned neighborhood redevelopment and public housing transformation in Syracuse, NY. It argues that Blueprint 15 provides an ideal project through which we can interrogate the role of the philanthropic and non-profit sectors in urban governance in the twenty-first century in a way that attends to Peck’s (2004) call for attention to actually existing neoliberal cases. Analyzing Blueprint 15 confirms something that has been noted in many studies—the trend of devolving or offloading urban governance to these sectors—while also, as we will argue, demonstrating some nuanced ways in which shadow state institutions go about their work. In particular, we draw on Scott (1998) to argue that shadow state actors mobilize local, albeit selective memories of urban renewal to make both neighborhood space and populations legible in ways that reinforce their particular governing logics. Thus, something as highly intangible as memory is mobilized to concretely remake urban space.

Does Economic Restructuring during Covid-19 in South Africa amount to Disaster Capitalism?

I explore the ANC government’s cadre-based (BBBEE/Broad-based Black economic empowerment) narrative in restructuring the economy amidst the pandemic, as an ideological vehicle to achieve an unstated nefarious purpose. The narrative that I aim to capture through the lenses of Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism read with Reiman’s “pyrrhic defeat theory,” is built around the fictitious idea of Black economic empowerment. Ultimately it serves as a vehicle for fraudulent personal enrichment by politicians and well-connected tenderpreneurs. This double theoretical vision is meant to augment and explain the opportunity that the Covid-pandemic provided for its exploitation as an example of disaster capitalism. I traverse the events which led to the current global pandemic as well as the way or ways in which a faction within government and its institutions has generally colluded with Big Business to profit from it. I consider the South African government’s initial response to the pandemic as well as the ways in which such a response morphed into a self-enrichment scheme under the guise of BBBEE. This remains plausible even if one concedes that this purpose was not by original design or is solely driven by a faction within the ruling party. This discussion is preceded by an overview of the VBS Mutual Bank fraud scandal, foreshadowing my demonstration of how the pandemic proffers an opportunity for the RET-group within government to transform into a criminal shadow state as a going concern. In conclusion, I draw on the Covid-19 experience to suggest lessons for the future economic management of pandemics.

Socialisation vs the Market: The Peculiarities of Russian Capitalism

The author shows the changes that the system of commodity relations is undergoing in the early 21st century. These changes are seeing the market take on an all-encompassing character, and we are witnessing a comprehensive manipulation of market actors by corporate capital. The present-day market is limited and undermined not only by state regulation but also by a process of socialisation, which represents the totality of transitional relationships and institutions. Having characterised this new quality of the relations of the market, the author demonstrates the specific nature of these processes in contemporary Russia, where the most modern forms of market relations and the most archaic are being propagated simultaneously. The green shoots of socialisation are characterised by the contradiction between the retention of a number of the achievements of the preceding system, and the development of shadow state regulation and ‘manual control’.

An Analysis of the Historical Roots of Partisan Governance within the ANC: Understanding the Road to State Capture

ABSTRACT Despite constitutional aspirations for good (impartial) governance since 1996, partisan governance nearly brought South Africa to the brink of economic, social, and political implosion. For the duration of his tenure (2009–2018), President Zuma spent public funds for private ends with impunity and enabled the creation of a shadow state, which effectively siphoned millions out of the public purse into private hands and hollowed out the country's state-owned enterprises. The question posed here is: How did the Zuma administration manage to ‘capture the state' in a context where the 1996 Constitution enshrines impartial governance? Using the analytical framework of good governance, this article aims to understand the governance approach of the African National Congress (ANC) in terms of its overarching national plan, the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and its strategy of cadre deployment. Using document and conceptual content analysis of ANC policy documents it is noted that the ANC’s governance approach is inherently partisan, with historical roots. In line with the Marxist tradition, governance based on partisanship was established together with the blurring of lines between party, government and state. This framework of partisanship, justified with the language of transformation, allowed for repurposing the state for private ends.

The slippery slope to State capture: cadre deployment as an enabler of corruption and a contributor to blurred party-State lines

Drawing on both legal and political sources, this article scrutinises the policy of cadre deployment that the African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party in South Africa, has implemented, and continues to apply. The analysis begins by recalling and commenting on the only reported judgment in South African jurisprudence that dealt with the political influencing of municipalities' exercise of their public power to make appointments, namely, Mlokoti v Amathole District Municipality & another 2009 (6) SA 354 (ECD). What the Mlokoti case has confirmed is that the legal foundation for the exercise of public power is found in the Constitution and its enabling legislation, and not in party political policy, such as the ongoing practice of cadre deployment. In an investigation of cadre deployment, the article then demonstrates that this ANC policy, particularly judging by its stated purpose, is incompatible with the constitutional State and, instead, enables the rise of the shadow State. Unsurprisingly, therefore, political commentators increasingly observe that, apart from the revelations at the Zondo Commission of Inquiry, State capture in South Africa in fact commenced when the ANC assumed political power in pursuit of the National Democratic Revolution. It is argued that the pursuit of a National Democratic Revolution in South Africa is directly at odds with the vision and goals of the 1994 constitutional pact. Convening a bipartisan national convention on philosophical and other approaches to the fight against corruption may offer a solution. Here, a starting point would be to reconsider the country's anti-corruption strategies to pay proper attention to the ethical causes of this scourge.