Name: Claudia Favarato
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: favaratoclaudia@gmail.com
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: University of Lisbon
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Proposal Type: Paper
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Paper Title:  Consenso di irmandade: Reading Bissau-Guinean Political Thought through Comparative Political Theory
Abstract:
Broadly speaking, the sub-Saharan regions receive little attention from political theory studies. Moreover, political theory in the continent is strictly intertwined with political philosophy or political anthropology. In this sense, comparative political theory (CPT) provides the theoretical frame to integrate the canons of the discipline with political thoughts and theories from marginalised areas. Although it is arguable that the efforts of CPT in Africa have, thus far, accorded less attention to indigenous, ordinary political thought than to “big thinkers”, the discipline offers a comprehensive frame for the understanding of political power. This paper aims to expose endogenous political thought of Guinea-Bissau through the reading lenses of CPT. The main benefit of this approach is that it enables the researcher to understand local conceptions of power and political relations beyond the state. The analysis uses a deductive-inductive approach. The data from fieldwork (2016; 2019; 2020) are gathered from individuals of different ethnical groups, thus transcending the religious and ethnical differentiation. The study focused primarily on discerning the principles underpinning power in the indigenous polity, where a communitarian understanding of the individual prevails. The reliance on the past, the land (tchon) and the kinship (djorson) determine the conceptualization of the functioning of the polity, ultimately governed by rules of participatory politics and “brotherhood consensus” (consenso di irmandade, in local creole). However, the tenets underlying indigenous political thought adapted and changed in the bi-directional process of Africanisation of power, due to the overarching presence of the state. The final aim of this paper is to shed some light on the reciprocal cooccurrence between the endogenous polity and the state (semi-presidential liberal democracy) on constituting Bissau-Guinean political thought today.