ABSTRACT
There are two key features to the general shaping of Bank action in sub Saharan Africa since the early 1990s: a desire to stabilise the perturbations of neoliberal imposition via conditionality mechanisms, and a related tendency to engage selectively with individual states. The Bank’s secular concerns with ordered capitalist development are most closely met in governance states, defined largely by their close and stable relations with external donors and their ability to demonstrate palpable progress along the Bank’s development model. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Bank has constructed a particular form of intervention, posed here as a form of sovereign frontier. This frontier is characterised by postconditionality reforms, liberal governance discourse and an underlying concern with the state’s ability to maintain order and stability.
