Failed states will revert to concessionary economics bypassing national governance

Evidence

But if the idea of the nation-state continues to lose any vestige of popular appeal through a failure to deliver local benefits, and if rulers lack the will or the resources to command a national polity, the continent’s poorest countries will continue to fall prey to a twenty-first-century version of nineteenth-century concessionary economics, unhampered by regulations or redress. The nation-state will become ever more marginal to deals negotiated between local chiefs and transnationals, an imbalance in bargaining power if ever there was one. A German diplomat recently foresaw as much: “In the twenty-first century German ambassadors and CEOs heading for Africa may again be authorized to sign treaties of cooperation with whatever coastal kings or leaders are able to assert some sort of control over the interior.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 334

Categorization

• XREF: Continues ch22’s theme: ‘The resource enclave treats extractable territory as imaginatively severed from its own nation’ and ch7’s radical invisibility — here the nation-state itself dissolves as intermediary. — connects to: Failed succession between economic orders invites institutional vacuum and catastrophe — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 29; Failed states push societies toward familism and alternative control organizations; The nation-state’s regulatory monopoly eroded with supranational and subnational powers — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 826
• QUESTION: Does the concessionary regression Nixon describes already have clearer contemporary examples (post-2015) he under-specified?

Broader Connections

• Failed succession between economic orders invites institutional vacuum and catastrophe #qualifies (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 29
• Failed states push societies toward familism and alternative control organizations #expands (0.72)