The material roots of the suspended African state: arguments from Somalia.

Purports that African underdevelopment deepens because 1) the envelopment of the global capitalist order continues to condition central variables such as prices, technology, and ideology, which in turn impinge on the pace of accumulation; and 2) the political moment is estranged as a result of the material disconnection of the state from the producers, the bed-rock social forces of African life. This debilitating suspension of the state is less an inherent function of the peasant economy than it is more of the inherited and indigenised type of political culture. Reviews relevant literature on the peripheral state, sketches the Somali variant of its historical and social hinterland, and then discusses the record of the post-colonial state's role in development, and suggests an alien material nesting place for it. -from Authors