Postcolonial Bureaucracies

• The article is titled "Postcolonial bureaucracies: power and public administration in ‘most of the world,’" by Markus-Michael Müller, published in Postcolonial Studies, 2013.

Examining Postcolonial Bureaucracies

• Edward Said stated in Orientalism that it inscribed itself into the material design and practices of bureaucratic institutions and actors in Europe, European colonies, and colonization efforts.
• The postcolonial effect of geopolitical knowledge portrays the West as the only location with dominant thought categories to describe the rest, classify, understand, and "improve" is visible in debates on so-called 'failed states'.
• The Weberian conception of bureaucracy is defined as a permanent structure with rational rules fashioned to meet calculable and recurrent needs via normal routine.
• This debate uses a reified vision of Western bureaucracies as the point of departure for institutional benchmarking against which non-Western bureaucracies are measured.
• One debater argues ‘failed states', usually beyond the West, are haunted by ‘flawed institutions', the state bureaucracy has lost its of professional responsibility and exists solely to carry out the orders of the executive, and in petty ways, to oppress citizens.
• The predominance of exoticizing portrayals of non-Western bureaucracies that informs much social science literature can be explained by the lack of in-depth empirical studies on the everyday workings of postcolonial bureaucratic institutions.
• There is an intellectual counterpoint for critically interrogating such perspectives.
• There is an absence of ethnographic studies, yet anthropologists have been slow to treat state bureaucracy as a site for ethnography and bureaucrats as participants in a complex social arena.
• This review essay discusses three ethnographic studies that, by uncovering the intersections of power and public administration in postcolonial societies, offer empirically grounded, theoretically innovative studies that can provide for an intellectual counterpoint.
• By focusing on the questions of bureaucratic violence, the power of artifacts, and the politics of waiting, these books offer fresh and unconventional theoretical perspectives for a deeper understanding of the everyday workings of bureaucratic power in ‘most of the world’ by moving beyond the analytical limits and blind spots of the taken-for-granted Western-centric Weberian ‘iron cage’.

Bureaucratic Violence

• Akhil Gupta’s Red Tape, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India examines why the postcolonial Indian state, despite its goals of fostering development and improving life, has largely failed.
• The most visible evidence is persisting high levels of extreme poverty and some two million people dying in India annually due to extreme poverty and the (in)action of government bureaucracies.
• Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics and governmentality, Giorgio Agamben’s work on bare life, as well as Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence, Gupta argues that 'extreme poverty should be theorized as a direct and culpable form of killing made possible by state policies and practices.
• Extreme poverty should be considered as a specific form of state violence, structurally reproduced in and through the arbitrary practices of the postcolonial Indian state bureaucracy.
• An 'intimate connection between violence and caring' emerges from everyday bureaucratic practices in India that ‘is systematically produced by the very mechanisms that are meant to ameliorate suffering’.
• Gupta illustrates this using ethnographic fieldwork examples in the Mandi sub-district of Uttar Pradesh in northwest India.
• Gupta considers corruption a paradigmatic case of structural violence which commodifies public services and goods.
• Corruption denies people without sufficient economic, cultural, and political capital access to services, thereby keeping them in permanent poverty.
• Literature on corruption has heavy ‘Orientalist overtones', frequently juxtaposing ‘the honest, hardworking, and sober North with the image of a decadent, deceptive and savage South'.
• Gupta aims at moving beyond a ‘normative enterprise' based on a taken-for-granted ‘model of the Weberian bureaucrat' and a heavy dose of exoticizing 'fantasy and Othering'.
• He presents a continuum of everyday encounters between the rural poor and state agencies that point toward the politically productive dimension of corruption.
• Corruption includes a pedagogic dimension, instructing poor people about the possibilities (and limits) of entering into formal and informal negotiations with bureaucrats.
• Moreover, corruption practices and discourses also produce powerful vernacular state imaginations which reinforces the legitimacy of the state and state sovereignty as such.
• They do this by presenting the state as the ultimate power capable of correcting the wrong-doings of its own institutions and bureaucrats and improving the life of those at society’s margins.
• Corruption reinforces the idea that the legitimacy of the state depends upon its efforts to help the poor, excluding the people on whom popular sovereignty rests in the constitutive contradiction of the developmental state.
• Corruption is a central aspect of those routine operations of the bureaucracy that enable the very gesture of inclusion to produce an outcome that is its opposite.
• Rural poor state imaginations are centered on corruption along with bureaucracy - corruption, the suspicion of corruption, and stories of corruption mediate officials' understanding of the state.
• Discusses bureaucratic writing as a key modality by which structural violence is inflicted on the poor.
• Bureaucrats make decisions based on what their predecessors wrote, likely influenced by the interest of local elites, sometimes helping perpetuate structural violence on the poor.
• Writing is an important means through which intra-bureaucratic conflicts and power relations are fought out, largely at the expense of the rural poor.
• Bureaucratic power struggles are thought out through petitions and complaints that invoke kickbacks or wrong allocation of funds, which factions claim have negative consequences.
• What is at stake in conflicts through bureaucratic writing is not a serious bureaucratic commitment to improving the livelihood of the rural poor, but is about how social surplus was to be split among elites, whether to politicians or bureaucrats.
• The everyday implementation practices of welfare programs closely examine the impact of neoliberalism on perpetuation of structural violence in India.
• Contrasting two welfare programs created in 1975 and 1988/1989, which predominantly aimed at including women as objects of governance and government employees, into the biopolitical management of the Indian state.
• Gupta finds continuity between both programs, including their contribution to the perpetuation of structural violence as both committed to mapping the population for better service, management, and control.
• Both programs depended upon the exploitation of underemployed women disadvantaged by patriarchal social structures.

Artifact Power

• Matthew S Hull's Government of Paper, The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan complements Gupta’s emphasis on writing as a state practice that contributes to structural violence.
• The book aims to show how material artifacts influence bureaucratic practices and urban governance in Islamabad.
• The study is an anthropology that has a dialogue with Actor-Network Theory.
• Bruno Latour argues 'the material world pushes back on people because of its physical structure and design'.
• Hull aims to use his ethnographic work to develop a ‘comprehensive social theory of material artifacts' by combining their emphasis with an anthropological perspective interested in understanding the meaning(s) of artifacts for their users.
• Analyzing the planned creation of Islamabad along the lines of the urban Master Plan developed by Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis in the 1960s, Hull demonstrates the impact of material artifacts on the emerging urban order.
• The Master Plan aimed at isolating Pakistan's bureaucracy from society by creating a hierarchical urban geography, separating the bureaucratic spaces from the rest of Islamabad.
• The order emerged because documents such as government apartment files, house plans, and site maps work not only as bureaucratic control instruments but also as media of dissent and negotiation between government and populace.
• Documents convert into 'mediators of a shadowy engagement between government servants and others'.
• These shadowy engagements and the role of material artifacts in shaping their outcomes are analyzed through face-to-face encounters in the urban planning bureaucracies.
• The study focuses on parchis (visiting cards/paper slips) that show connections between holders and powerful supporters, to uncover power relations from mediated encounters.
• Local bureaucrats face difficulties in verifying parchis and evaluating their owners' claims to support, supporting their interests through an act of irregular/illegal bureaucratic intervention.
• Stressing the role of material artifacts, such as ‘fabricated’ documents or parchis in interactions with bureaucrats, Hull adds material element to understanding postcolonial popular politics/Chatterjee's ‘politics of the governed.'
• Focusing on mobilization power and the capacity of the governed to push bureaucrats and politicians to bend rules outside of law or procedure, studies like that of Chatterjee neglect the impact of material artifacts on informal processes influencing the governed.
• Material artifacts mediate encounters between bureaucrats and citizens inside bureaucratic institutions in Islamabad.
• Their productive power is indispensable for establishing political power in different locations of the urban political field.
• Hull’s discussion of village elders negotiating land expropriation and compensation schemes illustrates the role of artifacts.
• Artifacts empower leaders in the Islamabad area and maintain their political power/authority.
• Bureaucrats’ power is based partly on their capacity to produce and move documents, village leaders are essential nodes of the path made by various graphic artifacts essential to profiting from compensation.
• Hull's crucial finding is material artifacts' mediating power in state-society relations, blurring the rigid distinction and isolation of the bureaucracy envisioned in the Master Plan.
• Hull concludes that the Master Plan confined political participation to the bureaucratic arena itself rather than provoking civil society opposition to it by returning to how it controlled, regulated, and ordered Islamabad.
• Hull’s book and its emphasis on the role of material artifacts in bureaucratic encounters both complement and complicate Gupta’s analysis of structural violence.
• Local bureaucratic practices illustrate the ‘powers of association’ are produced by the power of material artifacts in local urban governance, far from exclusively dominating and excluding urban residents or contributing a veritable 'participatory bureaucracy.'

Bureaucratic Domination

• Javier Auyero’s Patients of the State, The Politics of Waiting in Argentina shifts the discussion of postcolonial bureaucracies to contemporary Latin America.
• The book builds on an observation of clientelism, political contention, and environmental suffering in Argentina that examines waiting poor people in interactions with state bureaucracies, politicians, and political brokers.
• Auyero proposes understanding waiting as ‘temporal processes in and through which political subordination is reproduced' via a thick description of how the dominated perceive temporality and waiting.
• Auyero points towards a specific form of subordinate political subjectivation where marginal urban populations ‘learn to be patients of the state’ through the incorporation and incarnation of a ‘daily lesson in political subordination’ enacted through state bureaucracies.
• Auyero addresses the lack of scholarly attention to waiting by developing this argument based on ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires.
• Making waiting and the production of state patients readable as a form of structural violence, Auyero pushes Latin American research on politics, power, and marginality beyond topics like vote buying, coercion, and physical violence, in ways that enhance perspectives on political subordination.
• Auyero sets the stage for the analysis by guiding readers through areas representing growing urban polarization, impoverishment of locals, and the informalization of the urban economy under neoliberalism.
• He points to three coexisting and intersecting forms of formal and informal regulation of neoliberal urban marginality: the iron fists of the local state, the clandestine kicks exercised by wielders of informal coercion, and the invisible tentacles exercised by the frequently underfunded.
• The book illustrates how these practices interact, reinforcing each other and shaping waiting, experiencing it as relationships of power, domination, and subordination.
• Everyday encounters with public agents are evident in this analysis, Auyero's description demonstrates that the patient perspective is the practices and decisions of arbitrary welfare bureaucrats, exposing the patient to uncertainty/confusion.
• Bureaucratic randomness inducts poor people as the feelings of powerlessness mean they cannot understand the process nor control it.
• This dimension is not confined to the physical space of bureaucratic institutions but radiates through landscapes in Buenos Aires, such as a contaminated shantytown whose residents wait for eviction, relocation, or medical test results.
• Residents tend to perceive that 'that the motor of the initiative of transformative action lies elsewhere with outcomes determined by those who, in the residents’ own words, seldom “come down” to the neighborhood.
• It is the mundane and routinized ‘patient model’ of domination, more than physical coercion, that produces complicity from the dominated.
• Poor people’s subordination to the state’s mandates is created and re-created through acts of waiting and the obverse generated by making others wait is equally true.
• Street-level bureaucrats make poor people learn to comply with changes to wait.
• Waiting exhausts poor people, ending up dropping out of sight that is applying for an ID, not attending the next meeting, and so forth.
• Unreliability paradoxically binds the destitute to the state who, with their needs, cannot afford to quit.
• Auyero provides an account of how waiting's politics contributes to reproducing inequality in Buenos Aires.

Conclusion

• The three books offer empirical/conceptual insights beyond the idiosyncratic features of the different research locations.
• It might be hard to see the routine practices of state agents in rural development bureaucracies, or the workings of the welfare bureaucracy in Buenos Aires, escaping artifacts documented by Hull.
• Each of the bureaucracies encountered will produce its place-specific politics of waiting as well as contribute to structural violence.
• The theoretical contributions of these texts make inspiring that forces dominant understandings of bureaucratic practices, rationalities and power to be reconsidered.
• They are empirically-grounded theory building which creates indispensable reading for any student interested in encountering the workings of public administration, state power and structural violence ‘beyond the West.