State-Building: Popular Critiques in Five African Countries

With speaker Julia Gallagher, Reader in International Development, King’s College London

Julia’s talk explores how thinking about the state as a work of architecture can help us understand how citizens experience, critique, and ultimately help make the state. She makes three suggestions. First, architecture makes a good analogy for the state, helping describe it and make it legible. Second, state-buildings enable citizens to experience the state directly, enabling them to explore their own relationship to it. And third, buildings can be used as provocations for popular critique, enabling citizens to evaluate the state.

The work is informed by research in five African countries – South Africa, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, the DRC, and Ethiopia – gathered by creating public discussions about state architecture through citizen focus groups, exhibitions, and film screenings.

Biography

Julia Gallagher is a Reader in International Development at King’s College London. Her research focuses on state-building and state-society relations in sub-Saharan Africa. She has written about Western ideas and images of Africa, China in Africa, and on Zimbabwe's politics and international relations. She currently leads an ERC-funded project on the politics of state buildings and architecture in Africa and has published work on aesthetics and the state in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, and South Africa.

The IDD Guest Seminar Series brings scholars and practitioners working on international development to the University of Birmingham to share their latest research and ideas. All seminars are open to staff, students, and the general public.