Colloquium: Fractured State: Risk, Race and Rights in Mozambique

Thursday, November 6, 2025 from 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm

• Hybrid event
• A720, Loeb Building, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6
• Zoom meeting link

Bio

David M. Matsinhe holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Alberta, an MA in Sociology from the University of Calgary, and an MTh in Ethics from the University of South Africa. He was a policy analyst with focus on immigrant integration and social innovation at Employment and Social Development Canada. His research interests include African politics and development, historical sociology of emotions, group relations and collective behaviour, nationalism and violence. He teaches development theory, gender in development, development policy and social innovation in the department of anthropology and development studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Besides blogging at Refplections, he is also writing two books: Pains of Change: Tales of African Manhood and Fragments of African Memory.

Abstract

The conflict unfolding in northern Mozambique is emblematic of a broader process of state disintegration, wherein the sociopolitical forces that once bound the monopoly of legitimate violence to the central authority are rapidly unravelling. What we witness is greater than mere jihadist insurgency; it is a profound breakdown in the social structures that sustain modern statehood, marked by a diffusion of coercive power among state forces, private military actors, and insurgents alike. This disintegration facilitates a systemic violation of human rights and humanitarian norms, revealing the fragility of legal and moral commitments under the strain of crisis. Meanwhile, the dynamics of global capitalism, particularly the extraction of natural resources under neocolonial arrangements, exacerbate social alienation, undermining communal solidarities and generating resentment through the expropriation of both material wealth and symbolic belonging. Within this framework, the Mozambican state appears less as an agent of order than as a participant in the broader structure of “organised irresponsibility,” wherein the manufacture of risk becomes normalised and catastrophic outcomes become structurally embedded.