Historically capital cities in less developed countries such as Sierra Leone and
Afghanistan have served as sites of deliberate attempts to bring about change
in both local and national political systems. Ranging from modernist agendas
to contemporary donor-driven ‘reconstruction’ efforts, strategies to build
effective state structures, including local governance institutions, have been at
the core o f such politics.
Drawing on a multidisciplinary methodology that combines historical analysis
with micro- and meso-level field research, the thesis explores the dynamics of
agency and structure in an investigation of the function o f capital cities as
political arenas. It reviews key strands of urban political theory for their
applicability to developing country contexts and situations o f state fragility.
The thesis finds existing approaches to be insufficiently suited to explaining
political processes operating in and on war-affected capital cities. Current
theoretical treatments present cities as distinct or contained political spaces,
which in these contexts they are not. They also fail to account for radical
changes in the polities in which they are embedded and underestimate the
degree o f coercion exercised towards local stakeholders by supra-local actors,
highlighting the need for a revised interpretative framework.
The study juxtaposes policies and programmes targeted at urban and national
level institutional change with urban political trajectories in war-affected
Freetown and Kabul. The thesis examines how external resources and lines of
control create political axes that intersect and transcend urban spaces. The
research finds that these axes work to the detriment o f local political
deliberation and explains why institutional reforms aimed at strengthening
local political agency have given rise to the opposite outcome. The research
thus illustrates the importance of political economy factors related to
international intervention and shows how these have served to influence the
nature of capital city politics in least developed countries.
Empirically the study establishes why the two capital cities function as
linchpins of international assistance yet fail to benefit from local political
empowerment and equitable urban recovery. It is concluded that local politics
in these two cities are overdetermined by national and international interests
and agendas. Theoretically the thesis offers the concept o f ‘tri-axial urban
governance,’ which combines historically informed political economy analysis
with an explicitly spatial framework for analysing politics in and on waraffected
cities. This reconfigured conceptual scaffolding exposes power
relations operative in city politics in fragile states and explains their impact on
dynamics of structure and agency.