Seeing like Bureaucracies: Rearranging Knowledge and Ignorance in Somalia

Bakonyi, Jutta

Abstract

Development promotes bureaucratization, and bureaucracies are based on knowledge and produce knowledge. Failures of development are therefore regularly attributed to a lack of knowledge. The article argues that the quest for knowledge is embedded in the managerial rationality of interventions. This rationality also structures the developmental knowledge field and thereby generates ignorance. The example of a state-building program in Somalia is used to empirically explore how the generation, administration, and transfer of knowledge was intertwined with ignorance. It shows what knowledge missed, obfuscated, ignored, or even hid and how knowledge and ignorance were arranged in the daily state-building practice. This approach sheds light on relations and mechanism of power exerted in development and helps to explain its effects. In Somalia, omission, silence, secrecy, and strategic and bureaucratic ignorance enabled the program to delineate the interventionist terrain as technical and to depoliticize state-building. They also helped to expand liberal modalities of government to “remote” and “unruly” Somali villages.

Citation

Bakonyi, J. (2018). Seeing like Bureaucracies: Rearranging Knowledge and Ignorance in Somalia. International Political Sociology, 12(3), 256-273. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/oly010

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 21, 2018
• Online Publication Date: May 29, 2018
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Mar 28, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 5, 2018
• Journal: International Political Sociology
• Print ISSN: 1749-5679
• Electronic ISSN: 1749-5687
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 256-273
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/oly010
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1336879