“Till Death Do Us Part”?

As such, the paper examines not only the responsibility of domestic and inter- national actors in enabling the longevity of such regimes, but is especially concerned with the dialectic between both sets of actors, as well as with the influence of specific norms and constructs in shaping the behaviour of these actors. [...] Chapter five investigates Eyadéma’s regime, and seeks to explain the survival of the Togolese president, whose regime is perhaps the most paradoxical one of all three cases, on account of the the global tolerance for the highly undemocratic “Republic” of Togo. [...] Jean-François Bayart’s book, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (1993) is a vivid account of the post-colonial state in SSA, in which Bayart describes the African political scene as one characterized by the ‘politics of the belly’.5 In his use of the term, Bayart (1993, 242) insists that there be no hierarchy that subordinates one concept over the other. [...] In this general background, the rest of the section will examine whether optimism towards the role of ideas in IR theory and the promise of constructivism is justified; and what that may imply for the study of African politics in IR. [...] The emergence of the term can be traced back to the 1990s in the circles of the World Bank, and became the key condition on which donor countries assessed the eligibility of a recipient country (Nanda 2006, 269).