State-Building In Africa: An Attempt at a Critical Survey of the Problems (original) (raw)
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Accelerated processes of globalisation-in the form of structural adjustment plans and of democratisation processes-have seriously shaken the fragile foundations of African countries. These processes have contributed o verall to widening the geographical scope of zones of limited statehood where the traditional monopoly of violence is challenged by multiple oligopolies of violence. During the 90s, this phenomenon was at best considered as a regionally limited problem with less significance for international stability. This however changed dramatically with the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001. The resulting US national security strategy, quickly followed by the EU, considered failed states as a major national security problem due to the fact that the attacks were partly planned in Afghanistan, a then collapsed state. The present paper is an attempt to shed a clarifying light on the phenomenon of fragile statehood as well as to explore ways of international intervention. Growing on a Weberian conception of the modern state, it identifies three core functions (monopoly of violence, provision of public goods and political order), which should all be fulfilled by well functioning states. The different stages of state fragility in Africa are then defined by the failing capacity of states to fulfil one or all of these functions. Amidst the whole range of arguments about the reasons of this situation, the paper identifies the deeply rooted neopatrimonial understanding of politics as the most salient explaining variable. The paper concludes by pointing to the fact that international attempts to prevent and to stop state failure as well as to rebuild collapsed states are still at an embryonic stage. Given the multidimensional and complex nature of the problem, an integrated approach among the donor countries will be necessary, which comprises coherent analysis and strategies. The concept of structural stability, formulated by the OECD and the EU still needs to be clarified and translated into concrete policy strategies.
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Presented at a workshop on Peacebuilding and 'Failed States'. A sythesis of an oral presentation addressing three questions: 1.) How can development policies towards African countries be evaluated? 2.) In the definition of development policies, is there opportunity for African states to play an important role? 3.) How to assess the importance of internal dynamics?
War, Markets, and the Reconfiguration of West Africa's Weak States
Comparative Politics, 1997
In a recent book, I. William Zartman declares that Africa's "collapsed states" suffer "a long-term degenerative disease" and offers that "cure and remission are possible."' This and other analyses of conflict and declining bureaucratic capacity in African countries take the prevailing system of sovereign states as inevitable. Related "govemance" approaches to African political economies often prescribe social and territorial boundaries of sovereign states. That is, they focus on the development of linkages between states and societies to increase taxing capabilities, identify a distinct public interest, and build competent bureaucracies accountable to popular needs.2 Alternatively, readers are warned that "societal disengagement would, if carried out to its logical conclusion, result in the dissolution of the political community, as it has done in contemporary Somalia and Liberia."3 But this conclusion is not true. This essay explains why increasing numbers of African rulers opt for alternatives to bureaucratic, territorially bounded institutional arrangements.4 I examine the appearance of the fragmented sovereignty of Liberian and Sierra Leonean "warlord" political units and the associated enclave cities of Freetown and Monrovia. To support their authority these new units have hired foreign contractorsforeign firms and mercenariesto perform services formerly allotted to state bureaucracies. The term "political unit" reflects the ambiguous status of these new nonstate organizations and their divergence from norms of bureaucratic state organizations. None of them asserts exclusive control over internal groups, conforms to clear territorial limits, or fulfills a wide range of international obligations; they thus do not meet the classical "accreditation standard" for inclusion in international society.5 Nor do they satisfy cold war standards of Third World sovereignty that supported selfdetermination within inherited colonial boundaries, bolstered with assistance from more powerful states.6 This essay examines threats and resources available to rulers and their choices as they struggle to preserve and extend elite coalitions to support their political authority and fend off rivals. Rulers that survive develop alternative, rational forms of political organization suited to Africa's marginal position in the changing global political economy. These rulers have found that changes in post-cold war distributions of economic resources and opportunities make patron-client politics based on foreign financial and political support unsustainable. Rulers now face threats from strongmenstate
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Research Problem: Conceptual Clarification Due to the increased focus on dysfunctional states since the 9/11 attacks, sundry development agencies, academic think-tanks, policy makers and government departments have sought to better understand the phenomenon of state fragility in order to develop policies to address it. Sadly, this has led to a muddling up of the concept resulting in what might now be described as terminological chaos. Thus, adjectives like weak, failing, failed, collapsed, vulnerable, quasi, recovering, inter alia, have been used to describe different degrees of fragility. 1 The World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DfID), the United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI), the United States' Political Instability Task Force, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) have employed sui generis terms like Low Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS), complex political emergencies, difficult partnerships, and political instability to indicate their policy thrust. A corollary of this obsession of branding fragile states with catchy and newsworthy labels is the tendency to lump fragile states together for standard treatment. 2 Such branding has also been deprecated as a distraction from concrete challenges of crisis response and post-conflict reconstruction. 3 1 In an attempted taxonomy of failed states, Jean-Germain Gros placed them in five categories: anarchic, phantom, anaemic, captured, and aborted. See: Gros (1996) 2 Picciotto, et al. (2005), p. 8 3 Patrick & Brown (2007), p. 129 8 The new ECOWAS Strategic Vision seeks to gives effect to this principle of "supranationality", tracing its mandate to the peoples as opposed to states of West Africa, thereby seeking to bypass sovereign national walls to make ECOWAS decisions directly applicable in member states. See: § 4, ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework (ECPF) approaches to the study of state fragility all address different fragments of the
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Social Evolution & History, 2018
Postcolonial societies are a unique event in world history. Their emergence in the mid-twentieth century did not result from centuries-old internal social processes, but was directly determined by the formation and short-lived (by historical standards) existence and disintegration of the European colonial empires. The colonial borders reflected primarily the balance of forces between the metropolitan powers in this or that region, but not the preceding course of the region's own political, social, economic, and cultural history. With rare exceptions, many different peoples were forcibly united within a colony. Not only kinship but also cultural affinity among those peoples was often absent. At the same time, the colonial borders would divide one people or break the historically established regional systems of economic and cultural ties not less infrequently. Likewise, the colonialists would forcibly unite peoples that had never formed regional political and economic systems; moreover, had different levels of sociocultural complexity, and sometimes did not even know about each other or were historical enemies. At the same time, the colonial borders would often separate historically and economically connected peoples and societies. These features were supplemented by stadial and civilizational heterogeneity of the colonial societies. The elements of capitalism, implanted by the Europeans in different spheres, did not synthesize with a set of pre-capitalist features of the local societies. There was also a little intersection between the autochthonous and new sec