Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya

"This is the most recent book and a really terrific study of the development of the Kenyan bureaucracy. It reflects the challenges that are brought out in the other books, which is how, in a very ethnically divided society—and Kenya is fantastically diverse with many languages and ethnic groups—do you manage the country’s ethnic elites, who are competing for resources and power, and yet keep things running? That’s the challenge for the state. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Hassan looks carefully inside the state and shows that there’s a lot of strategic deployment of particular bureaucrats by politicians. This happens both during the authoritarian periods and the more recent democratic periods in Kenyan history. She reminds us that these bureaucrats are often driven by different loyalties. They have different ethnicities. As a result of their own personal positions, and because of different relationships to politicians, you see a lot of variation in state capacity within a country. It’s often tempting for all of us, when we see certain government functions not performing particularly well, to attribute this to some randomness in particular people that we encounter, or to management or just a belief that people who work in government lack competency. Hassan shows us that it’s about politics, that there’s this strategic deployment of people, and the autonomy that they have to carry things out. That very much reflects the fact that politicians want to stay in power. They don’t want challengers to have too much of their power. So it’s a bit of a dance in terms of allocating the people who can manage things well. Social scientists operate by looking at the evidence that they find about certain sets of problems, which allows them to describe how and why certain capacities might work better, and some might work worse. But I think we’re always cautious about recommending a solution without additional evidence. So, yes, this book is more about describing how things are than about offering a solution for how they might be. As someone who has studied South Africa for my entire career, I wanted to investigate whether the democratic transition in 1994, launched after centuries of institutionalized white supremacy, ended up yielding some kind of success for South African society. I focus on a particular municipality, Mogale City, but I also look at the larger national picture over time. And while there are still many problems—huge inequality, unemployment, crime—that all persist in South Africa, I detail the many ways in which this experiment with democracy has been very successful. Democracy has yielded important material gains, it has given voice to so many people in this ethnically and racially divided society. Importantly, it’s offered a dignified existence in the face of such a long legacy of great indignities levelled through the history of white rule in that country."