Autochthony and the Crisis of Citizenship: Democratization, Decentralization, and the Politics of Belonging

The recent upsurge of “autochthony” and similar notions of belonging is certainly not special to Africa. All over the world, processes of intensifying globalization seem to go together with fierce struggles over belonging and exclusion of “strangers.” A central question in the contributions to this special issue concerns the apparent “naturalness” of autochthony in highly different settings. How can similar slogans seem so self-evident and hence have such mobilizing force under very different circumstances? Another recurrent theme is the somewhat surprising “nervousness” of discourses on autochthony. They seem to promise a basic security of being rooted in the soil as a primal form of belonging. Yet in practice, belonging turns out to be always relative: there is always the danger of being unmasked as “not really” belonging, or even of being a “fake” autochthon. A comparative perspective on autochthony—as a particular pregnant form of entrenchment—may help to unravel the paradoxes of the preoccupation with belonging in a globalizing world.