Conclusion.: Uncapturability, Dynamics, and Power

Ethnography harbors the power of critique—political, social, and theoretical. Ultimately a capacity to destabilize, this orientation also applies when writing an account of the violence inherent to processes of state formation in Mozambique. While such critical potential may be realized in a number of ways, here I have privileged perspectives forged on the margins of the centers of power, supplemented by historical sources. But there is more to it than this: by privileging a decentering of institution-based notions of the state informed by multiple readings of Deleuze, a wholly different picture of what a state is—and might be

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv8bt1ff.19