The 2012 crisis in Mali: Ongoing empirical state failure
研究了2012年马里危机期间农村居民对公共服务的需求，发现他们更关注长期的基础设施匮乏而非短期的政权崩溃，并指出这一现象在非洲多国普遍存在。
In 2012 Mali faced a crisis disrupting nearly twenty years of democratization – a coup and rebel insurgency. This article investigates policy priorities amongst rural Malians living on the border of state and rebel-controlled territory during the crisis. While academic and policy-making communities have focused largely on Mali's recent and sudden regime and territorial breakdown, the villagers defined the crisis in terms of their unmet needs for public services and infrastructure amidst high food and water insecurity. Concern for the sudden ‘juridical state’ breakdown – the collapse of the democratic regime – was trumped by the focus on long-term ‘empirical state’ breakdown. Using recent Afrobarometer data on diverse dimensions of empirical statehood, we show that the problem of rural neglect emphasized by seminal scholars is persistent not only across Mali, but also across many African countries. The tendency of academics and policy makers to focus on the immediate or more volatile political problems of the coup and rebel insurgency facing the Malian state, while important, risks understating and underestimating the power of slow-moving crises of daily life that are more important to rural citizens.