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When an African country avoids conflict: Purposive actions and actors in post-colonial state-building in Ghana

ABSTRACT Post-colonial Africa is often represented as a tinderbox of conflictual ethnonational identities. Within this reckoning emerges the weak and failed states corpus. Against this background, if an ethno-plural African country builds an effective state with a vibrant democracy, its political development presents an interesting case. This article contends that Ghana’s ‘success’ with state-building is because purposive actors have harnessed citizens’ expectations beyond initial ethnonational imaginings into higher civic expectations. It argues that political agency, conceptualised as intentional acts of (elite) political agents in overcoming the problems of living together in a multi-ethnic society, should go ahead of the institutionalist accounts of Ghana’s state-building success. The analysis demonstrates Ghana’s political agency in two ways. First, it is argued, at independence, political leaders focused on the need to build an (objective) Ghanaian state as a superordinate goal. Second, various actors worked to create a political discourse framing the Ghanaian as ‘peace-loving’.