Gradualist Lawfare, Urban Politics, and Local Power in Angola

Abstract Angola is among a handful of African countries where local elections have yet to materialize. This book situates the persistent deferral of local democracy in Angola within wider debates around the contested nature of local government in African cities. It advances the notion of ‘gradualist lawfare’ to examine how recurrent legal changes have served to pay continued lip service to the promise of local elections, while creating the conditions for their perpetual postponement. Based on more than a decade of in-depth fieldwork, the book examines the various uses and effects of gradualist lawfare through an ethnographic study of the workings of urban neighbourhood-level committees in the Angolan capital of Luanda. It argues that the study of such committees offers useful insights into the operations of a wider category of state-sanctioned ‘local power’ that allows authoritarian regimes to resist the effective devolution of political power. By examining the use of gradualist lawfare in the making and unmaking of local power, this book bridges the literature on autocratic legalism with contributions from sociolegal and urban studies, shedding new light on the global rise of authoritarian lawmaking in cities and the politics and potential of efforts to (re)claim local power from below.