THINKING THROUGH THE AFRICAN LANDSCAPE

When Sarah Johnson '06 left for a semester in Botswana last fall, she was interested in practical issues in rural development in Africa. But her experience there drew her interest toward political theory. Having discovered that existing assumptions about rural development did not adequately account for what she had observed, she resolved to develop a different model. This summer, a Hanna Holborn Gray Undergraduate Research Grant allowed her to pursue that interest.

"In Botswana , I spent four weeks observing a community-based program for natural-resource management in a small village," Johnson explains. "These programs are very popular with development agencies, and they sound great on paper. But too often they don't take into account the complexities of local power relationships. Basically, I watched this program fall apart."

This summer, Johnson worked on campus with Bryn Mawr political scientist Deborah Harrold to theorize how power operates in Africa, in ways that often confound the sponsors of big development schemes. Her research dealt with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the conflicts involving its natural resources.

"In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the state essentially collapsed," Johnson says, "and the question I asked is, 'Where did the power go?' I'm developing a theory that links extraction of natural resources with the extraction of power from the central state."

"I have focused on the fragmentation of sovereignty," she says. "Sovereignty is traditionally tied to the power over life and death. I'm looking at how the human body is implicated in the movement of power into remote locations, in conflicts over natural resources and in this modern extraction of power."

Johnson plans to continue her research this fall and write a thesis about it next spring. This year's 10 Hanna Holborn Gray Interns will report on their research projects in September.

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