Local Power at Work: Law and Politics in Urban Angola

Building on my long-term research on urban politics and governance in Luanda, Angola, my first book project, Local Power at Work: Law and Politics in Urban Angola, examines the (un)making of state power in the understudied context of African cities. Bringing together a growing political science scholarship on the ways in which the law can be weaponized for anti-democratic purposes with socio-legal studies, the book investigates the ways in which national governments go about limiting the power of cities through the use of the law, but also how the law can be mobilized by a variety of actors inside as well as outside of the state in order to contest, circumvent or defy such efforts. In so doing, the book not only decenters existing understandings of local power in Africa as either lawless or forcibly cast in Eurocentric molds, it also sheds new light on the global rise of authoritarian lawmaking and the politics and potential of the emergence of strategies of contention to (re)claim local power from below.