Regulating the distances to authorities

Although exchange relations with neighbours and local-level civil servants are of paramount importance to people living on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique, they also harbour destructive potentials. The working paper examines how residents in areas between the suburbs and the countryside seek to position themselves at a proper distance to important but also potentially dangerous people and authorities.

It is argued that house-building constitutes a potent medium for creating such distances so that exchange relations can be realized without being harmed by presumed greedy and envious people or authorities.

As such the paper explores how house-builders imitate urban norms which state and municipality claim to be using but which they are incapable of implementing. Through such processes of inverse governmentality, illegal occupancy acquires a form of pragmatic legitimacy when appearing to materialise state-defined urban norms.

The present series of working papers emerged from the “Markets for Peace? Informal economic networks and political agency” research network sponsored by the Danish Social Science Research Council (FSE) and hosted by DIIS between 2007 and 2009. The aim of the interdisciplinary research network was to gain a better under­standing of the role and significance of informal economic networks and activities on political processes.

The research network explored the dynamics of informal economic networks and activities; national, regional and international attempts to regulate informal economic activities; and the ways in which informal economic networks and activities are or are not converted into political influence. Presently a book is under preparation, in which the working papers published in this series will all feature with some changes anticipated. The book is edited by Lars Buur, Dennis Rodgers, Finn Stepputat and Christian Højbjerg.