Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The insertion of African polities into global economic forces has for a long time been based on crude extraction rather than transformative production, and there is an evident need to historicise such resource dependence and the cyclical downturns of commodity booms. Accounting for state formation in Africa continues to be, as it would appear, a particularly vexing problem in the social sciences. The book conceptualises stateness – the ensemble of imaginaries and practices that constitute the field of 'the state' – as an open-ended process of formation that is always contested and incomplete, and constantly remade by processes of negotiation, accommodation, complicity and resistance between different state and non-state actors. It develops an approach from a number of conceptual premises and engage with debates on both the state in Africa and extractive industries, as well as the links between the two.