How Nigerians see the state

In this essay, I take up Scott’s call for greater attention to local knowledge, experience, and practices. But instead of exploring the benefits for development, I apply Scott’s advice to add another vantage point to his perspective on the state. Focusing on Nigeria, I reverse the optic in Seeing like a state, and instead ask how Nigerians see the state and what we might learn from their point of view—about the contemporary Nigerian state, explicitly, and about similar postcolonial states, implicitly.