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Dunn 2007; Bayart et al. 1999; Duffield 2001; Kaldor 1999; Reno 1995, 1998; Andersen et al. 2007; Chabal and Daloz 1999). Although many of the chapters in this volume discuss this, in this introduction I avoid such discussions. Suffice it to say that weak African states have opened up space for alternative sources of sovereignty (Hansen and Stepputat 2005) and alternative forms of governance (Utas 2009), as well as allowing ample room for violent contestations over the state in the form of military coups and armed incursions (Biró 2007; Reno 1998; Bøås and Dunn 2007; Clapham 1998). One could argue that most African states have never been more than nominally sovereign and that weak states have necessitated considerable use of violence (Mbembe 2001, 2003; Utas 2009) as well as rhizomically informal and alternative, although not necessarily opposing, structures of governance (Bayart 1993). It is essential to point out that state and civil society are intricately interconnected and interwoven and cannot be understood in opposition to each other. Neither state nor civil society is democratic in its basic set-up. The state in many African countries, Ferguson points out,‘starts to look suspiciously like civil society’(2006: 99), and civil society appears as a number of political entities, or integrated ‘parts of a new, transnational apparatus of governmentality’(ibid.: 103). 4 These political entities do not replace nation-states and national governance but overlay them and coexist. Citizens in many African states–states in the Westphalian Periphery (Biró 2007)–have an ambivalent relationship with the state. AbdouMaliq Simone remarks that in Senegal …