Abstract
The chapter navigates post-independence politics characterized by the struggle for partisan absolute appropriations of state spaces. It codifies commonalities across a universe of 56 postcolonial entities and their limited panoply of patrimonial governance paradigms. African states are differentiated by their different trajectories to statehood, their colonial experiences, and the character of revolutionary struggles. The neo-colonial traditions bequeathed to them, the differential salience of imposed affinities and institutions, and their heterogeneous internal constructions all influence the internal dynamics and specificities of the one-man state or one party state. After the Cold War neo-patrimonial governance emerged in peculiar constitutional systems in the post-one-man state and post-one-party state. Post-revolutionary states have suffered the same fate.
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Araoye, A. (2018). African Politics Since Independence. In: Shanguhyia, M., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59426-6_28
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