Sudan's Political transition 1990s

STATE FAILURE IN AFRICA: CAUSES, CONSEQUENCES AND RESPONSES

PAUL D. WILLIAMS

This essay addresses the following four questions: What is meant by state failure? What causes states to fail? What is the scope of this phenomenon in contemporary Africa; and how have insiders and outsiders responded to this process? Different people find these questions important for different

reasons. For the citizens whose states fail the impacts upon their daily lives are rarely uniform: they can range from immense to negligible depending on a wide range of factors, including how much control the state previously exerted over its citizens, or how far the inhabitants happened to live from the capital city and other major urban centres. For Western governments, on the other hand, state failure in Africa is commonly viewed as both a moral catastrophe and, especially after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001, a security threat. These dual concerns were neatly elucidated by the then British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Jack Straw, in Sep- tember 2002. When confronted with state failure, Straw suggested that ‘we cannot but be concerned at the implications for the human rights and freedoms of those who are forced to live in such anarchic and chaotic conditions. Yet the events of 11 September 2001 devastatingly illustrated a more particular and direct reason for our concern. For it dramatically showed how a state’s disintegration can impact on the lives of people many thousands of miles away, even at the heart of the most powerful democracy in the world. In these circumstances turning a blind eye to the breakdown of order in any part of the world, however distant, invites direct threats to our national security and wellbeing. I believe therefore that pre- venting states from failing and resuscitating those that fail is one of the strategic imperatives of our times.’ Africa is commonly viewed as a particular cause for concern

because it is here that the phenomenon of state failure is most widespread and deeply entrenched. In the case of the British Government, this produced a spate of bureaucratic activity culminating in a report in 2005 by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit entitled Investing in Prevention. In a similar vein, after 11 September 2001 the US Government stated it was ‘now threatened less by conquering states than...by failing ones.’ As a result, the US National Security Strategy published in March 2006 acknowledged that ‘our security depends upon partnering with Africans to strengthen fragile and failing states and bring ungoverned areas under the control of effec- tive democracies.’ State failure is thus a serious concern for both insiders and outsiders and it is on Africa that the international spotlight has most commonly fallen. The prominence of such discourses about state failure has

also generated a great deal of controversy. One important line of criticism has drawn insights from the post-colonial studies literature and called upon analysts to refrain from using terms such as ‘failed states’, ‘weak states’ and ‘quasi-states’ on the grounds that they are based on ethnocentric assumptions that depict African states as imperfect copies of Western European and North American states and judge them according to external standards in order ‘to promote and justify their political and economic domination by Western states and other international actors.’1 This essay is not intended to refute the post-colonial critique for it raises many sensible questions about the use of terms like ‘failure’, ‘fragility’ and ‘weakness’. Nor is it intended to advocate the post-colonial critique by refusing to use such terms. Rather, this essay will provide an overview of the dominant discourses on state failure in Africa and will attempt to understand what responses, from both insiders and outsiders, they have helped facilitate.

WHAT IS STATE FAILURE? Discussions of state failure are essentially about the inter- relationships between patterns of authority, political control

and institution-building. Put another way, analysing state failure in Africa requires a keen sense of the shifting config- urations of power on the continent and beyond. In most of the literature on the subject, the idea of ‘failure’ is invoked in two main senses, referred to in this essay as the failure to control and the failure to promote human flourishing.2

The Failure to Control In the first sense, failure is understood in terms of the inability of state institutions to control actors and processes within a given territory. Robert I. Rotberg maintains that ‘failed states cannot control their peripheral regions, especially those regions occupied by out-groups...Plausibly, the extent of a state’s failure can be measured by the extent of its geographical expanse genuinely controlled (especially after dark) by the official government.’ It is important to remember, however, that control and failure should not been seen as absolutes. A ‘failed’ state in this sense of the term might successfully control some of its territory but not all of it. Sudan, for example, is commonly classified as a failed state yet it continues to exert effective control over large portions of its territory and can wreak havoc and terror on some of those individuals and groups who contest its authority in those areas. This suggests that viewing the phenomenon of state failure

in absolute terms and through solely statist lenses is not always particularly helpful. Rather analysts need to appreci- ate the degrees of success and failure that can exist within a single state and recognize that so-called ‘failed states’ are usually made up of numerous (and often interconnected) zones where different sources of authority may dominate the local governance structures. In any given zone the authority in question may vary. Indeed, as Rotberg noted, it may differ considerably within the same zone depending on the time of day or night. The authority structure could be an organ of the state’s official government but it may also be, among other things, an insurgency or guerrilla movement, a clan, a militia, an extended family, a spiritual leader, an international peace operation, or even a transnational corporation or a non-gover- mental organization. To give one example, the collapse of the Somali central state

did not automatically exclude the possibility that zones of alternative forms of governance and authority existed within Somalia’s officially recognized international borders. As Ken- neth Menkhaus has observed, since 1991 ‘Somalia has repeat- edly shown that in some places andat some times communities, towns, and regions can enjoy relatively high levels of peace, reconciliation, security and lawfulness despite the absence of central authority.’ These authority structures have come in various shapes and sizes. They have included local polities comprised of coalitions of businessmen, clan elders and Muslim clergy involved in administering financial services and Shari‘a courts, and larger-scale structures such as the administrative centres of the ‘Republic of Somaliland’ (1991–), ‘Puntland’ (1998–), the Rahanwin Resistance Army’s administration of Bay and Bakool regions (1998–2002) and the Banaadir Regio- nal Authority (1996). When analysing state failure in Africa in this first sense,

analysts and practitioners would thus do well to reject a state- centric ontology in favour of a neo-Gramscian frame of refer- ence, wherein the world is not simply seen as being made up of clashing states in an anarchic international system but, instead, is constituted by the complex inter-relationships between states, social forces and ideas within specific world orders.3 Adopting this ontology is far more useful for analysing state failure because as Timothy Raeymaekers correctly observed, what we are witnessing in several cases of so-called ‘state failure’ is actually better understood as ‘neopatrimoni- alism without the state’. That is, systems of patron-client relations that may or may not be linked to the official institu- tions of state power. Arguably the closest Western officialdom

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has come to adopting such a perspective is the US Govern- ment’s anxiety about what it terms ‘ungoverned spaces’, ‘defined as geographic areas where governments do not exer- cise effective control.’4 Unfortunately, this misses the crucial point that just because official governments do not control these areas it does not necessarily mean that they are com- pletely lacking other structures of governance.

The Failure to Promote Human Flourishing Failure is alsocommonly used in a second sense to highlight the ways in which states, either because of a lack of capacity or a lack of political will, fail to provide public goods to their entire population rather than favouring one or other particular segment of it. The idea that states have a responsibility to provide their citizens with certain basic rights has long been an issue of debate within international relations dating back at least as far as notions of popular sovereignty articulated by Jean Bodin in the 16th century. Since the publication in late 2001 of a report by the International Commission on Inter- vention and State Sovereignty, this line of argument is now commonly known as the ‘responsibility to protect’. Although African governments have jealously guarded traditional ideas about sovereignty and non-intervention, the responsibility to protect idea has made significant headway in recent years and with it has come a plethora of literature speaking of ‘failure’ in these terms. Despite these longstanding reservations, in Sep- tember 2005 African states, along with the rest of the UN General Assembly, formally accepted the responsibility to protect idea. As defined in the World Summit Outcome docu- ment: ‘each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the pre- vention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsi- bility and will act in accordance with it.’ When genocide, war crimes and other atrocities occur states can be said to have failed in their responsibilities to their citizens. Understood in these two senses, state failure on the African

continent is a widespread phenomenon. It is important to note, however, that both these views of failure are based upon a particular conception of statehood: what Rotberg calls ‘the fundamental tasks of a nation-state in the modern world’ and what William Zartman refers to as ‘the basic functions of the state’. The particular idea of statehood that dominates discus- sions about state failure was born in Europe and is usually associated with the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648. That year is thus commonly understood within mainstream international relations theory as representing the birth of modern interstate relations. Yet while this specific date of origin makes for neat theory, it rests upon a dubious and mythical history. As Benno Teschke has argued, even in its European birthplace the practice of Westphalian statehood as opposed to the ideal of Westphalian statehood did not emerge until well after 1648. Specifically, Teschke has shown how modern international relations based on the Westphalian ideal of statehood only began with the conjunction of the rise of capitalism and modern state formation in England. Thereafter, the English model influenced the restructuring of the old regimes of the European continent, a process that was incremental and highly uneven and was not completed until the First World War. The relevant point for this discussion is that the nature of

statehood itself is contested rather than obviously apparent. Specifically, as Christopher Clapham has argued, the West- phalian ideal rests on ‘unsure foundations’, not least because in some parts of the world ‘the essential conditions for statehood cannot plausibly be met.’ The ‘fundamental tasks’ of statehood envisaged in this Westphalian ideal revolved around the provision of security, welfare and representation. In particu- lar, the defining characteristic of the Westphalian ideal of statehood has been the right of states to exercise five monopoly powers: the right to monopolize control of the instruments of violence; the sole right to tax citizens; the prerogative of ordering the political allegiances of citizens and of enlisting their support in war; the sovereign right to adjudicate in disputes between citizens;

the exclusive right of representation in international society which has been linked with the authority to bind the whole community in international law. Even in Europe, as Teschke observed, the practical acquisi-

tion of these monopoly powers sometimes took centuries of often violent turmoil and social upheaval. Compared with Europe and viewed from the perspective of the longue durée, it is clear that most states in Africa are still mired in the relatively early stages of state formation. Consequently, it should come as little surprise that the practical acquisition of these monopolies has been uneven across the continent. Although it has been similarly traumatic and drawn out, the

process of state-building has unfolded differently in Africa than it did in Europe. Unlike in Europe where state borders were demarcated with reference to their neighbours, in Africa state power tended to radiate from a focal core (usually the capital city) that only rarely came into direct confrontation with its neighbouring governments. As a basic rule of thumb, the further one travelled from this core, the weaker the state’s control became. This fact rendered the state borders drawn up by the European colonial powers in Berlin in 1884–85 rela- tively meaningless, or at least highly porous, for many prac- tical aspects of the local inhabitants’ daily existence, including commerce or communicating with individuals who were offi- cially ‘foreigners’, but who belonged to the same ethnic or tribal groups. Understood in these terms, the issue of ‘failed states’ in

Africa is largely about the extent to which the Westphalian ideal of statehood has taken root in the rather different and in many ways inhospitable conditions found on the continent. As the Organization of African Unity’s (OAU) charter made abundantly clear, the ideal of Westphalian statehood clearly attracted many advocates among Africa’s first generation of post-colonial élites. It was also helped by the willingness of the great powers within international society to grant these states international recognition. The practical realization of this ideal, however, has been far more contested and uneven. As a result, from the outside, African states often looked like the Westphalian ideal in that they were recognized members of international society and their representatives sat on the councils of various international organizations. On the inside, however, these governments were often considered illegiti- mate by much of the local population and wielded the institu- tions of state to subdue political opponents and benefit their supporters. These were, in Robert Jackson’s famous phrase, quasi-states: legal fictions that rarely commanded much in the way of national loyalty or the power to control developments throughout their designated territory. What this means for an analysis of state failure is simply that

depending on the local conditions, ‘failure’ is far more likely in certain parts of the continent than others. More specifically, as Clapham has argued ‘those areas of Africa that maintained reasonably settled and effective state structures during the period prior to colonialism are proving best able to do so as the institutional legacies of colonialism fade.’ Where these struc- tures were weak other forms of authority (familial, spiritual, ethnic, etc.) have filled the vacuum.

WHAT CAUSES STATES TO FAIL? There is no simple or single formula for understanding the causes of state failure in Africa. Nevertheless, the available literature on the subject often makes at least two relevant general distinctions. Thefirst distinction is between states that fail because of a lack of relevant capacities and those that fail to promote the interests of all their inhabitants through political choice, often with the intention of benefiting the incumbent regime and its supporters at the expense of another group within the state. Robert Mugabe’s ongoing manipulation of ZANU—PF and state power in Zimbabwe is a paradigmatic example of a regime choosing to deny basic rights to certain segments of its population in an attempt to bolster regime security. The dynamics in this case are somewhat different from instances where a regime may well want to restore order to part of its territory but lacks the relevant capacities to do so. These dynamics are apparent in, for instance, the Ugandan Government’s inability to quash the Lord’s Resistance Army

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and Sudan’s inability to defeat the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army. Such incapacity may sometimes lead to political compromises. At other times the result is simply longstanding stalemates and the de facto partition of a state’s territory. Outside of the military sphere, a government might wish to enhance the development prospects of its citizens but lacksthe necessary resources andinstruments. The incumbent governments in Liberia and Sierra Leone are cases in point. A second distinction points to the differences between struc-

tural and contingent causes of state failure. In the structural category three main arguments are commonly advanced. Firstly, as noted above, the Westphalian ideal of statehood has not successfully taken root across all of Africa because local conditions were inhospitable to state-building and exerting high levels of state control over local societies. Although international society helped the process by granting recogni- tion to Africa’s newly independent states—many of which became the archetypal examples of Jackson’s quasi-states— it could not ensure that their inhabitants invested a great deal of faith in, or commitment to, them. Not long after indepen- dence, however, Cold War politics meant that the superpowers often made genuinely national nation-building even more difficult by stoking the fires of dissent within many African states in the name of either communism or capitalism. A second structural argument has revolved around the

challenges posed by political geography, especially resources and environmental factors. In this case the point is that some African states that were creations of the European colonial powers were not endowed with a physical environment con- ducive to administering an effective state. In particular, states such as those in the West African savannah suffered from extremely low densities of people, which made administration and social control both costly and difficult. The same was true for much of Africa since large areas of it have ecologies that cannot easily support high densities of population, not least because over 50% of the continent suffers from inadequate rainfall that makes inhospitable environments for both human settlement and agriculture. Indeed, it is arguably only the Great Lakes region and the Ethiopian highlands that have sustained relatively high densities of people. A third structural argument has applied the concept of the

security dilemma to explain how fear of an ungoverned future can propel the actors within states to hasten the collapse of central government once public order begins to erode and a situation of domestic anarchy seems likely to emerge. Here the suggestion is that the Hobbesian fear that lies at the heart of the security dilemma explains why groups begin to think that their potential rivals will not be restrained by state authority once the institutions of state have started to disintegrate. Analytically speaking, the crucial focus becomes understand- ing the ‘tipping point’ beyond which actors start to behave as if domestic anarchy exists, even if that is not entirely the case. At that stage, the dynamics of the domestic security dilemma may ensure that their conviction that state collapse and anarchy is imminent becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A fourth argument has suggested that when it comes to state

success in Africa ‘bigger isn’t better’. Specifically, the authors of a recent edited volume concluded that most of Africa’s large states have exhibited ‘varying degrees of dysfunctionality (defined as the lack of provision of welfare and opportunity to the population) and, excluding to a degree South Africa, a sustained period of civil unrest, economic decline, state atro- phy and social corrosion.’5 In a series of case studies, the authors suggest that in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Nigeria and Sudan (all of which are in the top five African states in terms of population or landmass or both), ‘the actual size of these states is itself a problem for governance’ and that rather than being natural leaders, they ‘are actually problems for their associated regions.’ The contingent causes of state failure in Africa are even more

numerous with five main factors commonly cited within the literature. Crudely summarized, these refer to the influence of bad leaders, predatory actors such as warlords and so-called ‘spoilers’, bad economic policies, bad environments and bad neighbours. First, much of the blame for state failure has been heaped

upon Africa’s leaders, not least Maj.-Gen. Mohammed Siad

Barre (Somalia), Dr Siaka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire/the DRC), Gen. Samuel Doe and later Charles Taylor (Liberia) and Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe). In many African states such leaders and their political élites have been criticized for pursuing patrimonial politics that seek to use external sources of aid and finance to reward their supporters and weaken their opponents rather than to pursue genuinely national development strategies. Second, warlords and other ‘spoilers’ have been blamed for inflaming ethnic tensions and hastening state failure. The motivations of these predatory actors vary from case to case, but a common claim is that they have pursued violent strategies in order to accumulate wealth through the control of formal and/or informal markets. In this view, weak or failing state institutions provide an environment from which such warlords and ‘spoilers’ can profit. The third set of contingent factors concerns the political

economy of state failure, especially the adoption by govern- ments of ‘bad’ macroeconomic policies resulting in fiscal deficits and balance of payments crises, and the paradoxical effects of structural adjustment policies encouraged by a variety of international donors. As Nicolas van de Walle has argued, both of these factors encouraged a ‘hollowing out’ of the state, which, in turn, increased ‘the chances that minor political incidents and disputes could cause the descent into failure.’ Such political economies did not, however, automatically produce failed states. Hence, although Zaire/the DRC and Sierra Leone were both ‘hollowed out’ before failing, states such as the Central African Republic (CAR), Malawi and Niger were also weakened by economic failure but did not suffer a similar fate. A fourth commonly cited factor relates to the proliferation

and availability of armaments, especially small arms and light weapons, in many of Africa’s weak and fragile states. An environment awash with arms makes it difficult for govern- ments to control all of their territory or protect all of their citizens because, as Michael Klare suggests, ‘antigovernment formations can readily assemble sufficient weaponry to mount a revolution or insurgency.’ A fifth contingent cause of state failure concerns the role played by actors within neighbouring states. These have tended to be either incumbent governments hostile to their neighbouring regimes (e.g. Taylor’s destabili- zation of Sierra Leone throughout the 1990s), or insurgent groups which destabilize their target state with or without support from the government of their (temporary) host state (e.g. the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s use of Uganda as a base for its operations before it invaded Rwanda in 1990, or Hutu genocidaires using eastern Zaire/the DRC to destabilize Paul Kagame’s regime after the 1994 genocide). All of these factors can play a role in state failure but the

current state of knowledge remains far too vague accurately to predict the tipping points in particular cases.

WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM? As noted above, failed states raise challenges both for the great powers concerned about what threats might come out of them and for the locals who have to endure life inside them. Indeed, it has been suggested that since ‘the end of the Cold War, weak and failing states have arguably become the single-most important problem for international order.’6 Although state failure is not confined to Africa the problem is arguably more widespread, deeply rooted and pressing here than in any other continent. Failed states can spawn a variety of transnational security

problems with terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), crime, disease, energy insecurity, and regional instability chief among them. Not all of them, how- ever, are equally prevalent in Africa’s cases. With the notable exceptions of actors operating out of Sudan and Somalia, transnational terrorism has been relatively rare in sub- Saharan Africa. The same could also be said for WMD pro- liferation. In contrast, small arms and light weapons prolif- eration, transnational crime (especially the illicit trade in drugs, arms, minerals, petroleum, timber, wildlife and human beings), infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis B, Ebola, measles, and the West Nile virus), and political instability in the Horn of Africa and the

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Gulf of Guinea oil states do pose significant threats and challenges to both the locals and the great powers. It is important to note, however, that these challenges are

unevenly distributed across Africa’s failing states. Trans- national criminals, for instance, tend not to operate in areas of complete state collapse (such as Somalia), but instead prefer areas where a basic degree of physical and financial infra- structure exists and where bureaucrats and officials are susceptible to bribery (such as Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa). Cells of transnational terrorist networks are likely to require similar levels of infrastructure and at least a degree of order if they are to use failing states for anything other than transit routes and temporary bases of operations. The major al- Qa’ida attacks against US embassies in 1998, for instance, took place in Kenya and Tanzania but were allegedly orchestrated from a partially failed state in the form of Sudan and an almost entirely collapsed state in the shape of Somalia. Viewed from a longer-term perspective, however, most terrorism in Africa has been nationally oriented and targeted against white-minority rule or in specific revolutionary settings, notably Ethiopia and Algeria. During the early stages of the 21st century, Africa has

provided many of the usual suspects on the lists of the world’s failed states including Chad, the CAR, the DRC, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In addition, Somalia is usually classified in a league of its own as having collapsed altogether rather than simply failed. Africa’s leading status in these rankings is confirmed by four popular attempts to categorize different types of state failure, namely, the World Bank’s Governance Matters data set, the Failed States Index, the UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index, and Freedom House’s annual surveys of political free- dom. The World Bank’s Governance Matters 2008 data set ranks

world-wide governance indicators, covering 212 countries and territories. It defines governance as ‘the set of traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. This includes (1) the process by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced, (2) the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies, and (3) the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them.’ The 2008 report measured six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2007: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. The results across these different dimensions confirm Africa’s place as the global centre of state failure. In particular, the continent contained eight of the world’s 20 least accountable territories, nine of the 20 most politically unstable and potentially violent territories, 13 of the 20 least effective governments, eight of the 20 territories with the worst regulatory quality, 12 of the 20 territories where the rule of law was weakest, and 11 of the 20 territories least able to control corruption. Overall, this set of indicators suggests that the African territories with the worst performing governance structures were Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the DRC, Equa- torial Guinea, Chad, and Côte d’Ivoire. A similar picture emerges from the Failed States Index 2008

compiled by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace. This measures performance along 12 political, economic, mili- tary and social indicators of instability (demographic pres- sures, refugees and displaced persons, group grievance, human flight, uneven development, economy, delegitimization of the state, public services, human rights, security apparatus, factionalized élites, and external intervention). It concluded that Africa contains seven of the world’s 10 most failing states: Somalia (most failing), Sudan (second), Zimbabwe (third), Chad (fourth), the DRC (sixth), Cote d’Ivoire (eighth), and the CAR (10th). Continuing down the scale, it suggested that Africa was home to 22 of the world’s 40 most failing states. The third popular ranking system is UNDP’s 2007/2008

Human Development Index. It focuses on indicators of devel- opment which provide a reasonable snapshot of the extent to which a particular state is promoting human flourishing. From a total pool of 177 states, UNDP concluded that Africa contains 34 of the world’s 40 most underdeveloped states, the least developed being Sierra Leone. In addition, it should be noted

that the index did not include Somalia or Liberia, presumably owing to the difficulty of gathering data. The daily realities behind these figures include the uncomfortable facts that one- half of all Africans live on less than one dollar a day, more than one-half of them lack access to hospitals or doctors, one-third suffer from malnutrition, one in six children die before their fifth birthday, and the average African’s life expectancy is just 41 years. The final popular set of indicators is compiled by Freedom

House in its annual report, Freedom in the World. This measures levels of political freedom, defined as people having ‘the opportunity to act spontaneously in a variety of fields outside the control of the government and other centres of potential domination.’ It does so by assessing the extent to which citizens enjoy political rights and civil liberties in 193 countries and 15 territories around the world. According to Freedom in the World 2008, Africa is currently home to some of the world’s most repressive regimes. During 2007, for instance, Freedom House classified 18 African states as ‘not free’, down by one from the 2006 total of 19. (in 2007 Togo moved from the ‘not free’ to ‘partly free’ category due to the success of its legislative elections.) Of these 18 ‘not free’ states, the organiza- tion placed three African states—Libya, Somalia and Sudan— in its special category of ‘the worst of the worst’, i.e. the eight states globally given the survey’s lowest possible rating. More- over, the Freedom House analysis suggested that during 2007, 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa registered reversals of significant magnitude to be registered in the survey while only six states registered significant improvements (Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Togo). During 2007 Mauritania’s improvements saw it qualify as an electoral democracy, the only global newcomer to this category. The most significant decline occurred in Kenya but the news from two of Africa’s largest states, the DRC and Nigeria, was also bad. The other countries experiencing rever- sals were Cameroon, the CAR, Chad, Comoros, the Republic of the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia and Sudan. Interestingly, the survey’s supporting essay described the People’s Republic of China’s policies as ‘an impediment to the spread of democracy’ on the continent and ‘undermining’ US and EU efforts ‘to promote honest and transparent governance’. In the past 12 months, two new indices of state failure in

Africa have appeared in the intellectual market place. In September 2007 the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance was published. Prepared under the auspices of a team led by Robert I. Rotberg from Harvard University, this project devel- oped a new definition of governance as the delivery of key political goods in five main areas.7 Using this definition, the index assessed the quality of governance in the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa against 58 individual measures. The 2007 Ibrahim Index used data from 2005 (the last year with reason- ably complete available data for nearly all sub-Saharan Afri- can states) as well as data from the years 2000 and 2002 (which were used by the index as baseline indicators). The intention is to update its information on an annual basis. At the top end of the governance spectrum, this index listed Mauritius (first), the Seychelles (second), Botswana (third), Cape Verde (fourth) and South Africa (fifth). The bottom of the spectrum was occupied by the usual suspects of Somalia (48th), the DRC (47th), Chad, (46th) Sudan (45th), and Guinea-Bissau (44th). Perhaps surprisingly, the Ibrahim index placed Zimbabwe in 31st place. This is a significantly higher position than most other indices. In March 2008 the Brookings Institution added to the pool of

indices when it launched its new Index of State Weakness in the Developing World. Led by former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Susan E. Rice, and Patrick Stewart, this index defined weak states ‘as countries lacking the capacity and/or will to foster an environment conducive to sustainable and equitable economic growth; to establish and maintain legitimate, transparent, and accountable political institutions; to secure their populations from violent conflict and to control their territory; and to meet the basic human needs of their population.’ The Brookings Index ranked the 141 developing countries, which the World Bank classifies as low- income, lower middle-income, and upper middle-income. Each

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country was assessed against 20 indicators divided into four baskets: economic, political, security and social welfare. Of the 28states in the index’s bottom quintile, 22 of them were African (African states represented 37 of the 56 states in the bottom two quintiles). The worst performers were Somalia (first), DRC (third), Burundi (fifth), Sudan (sixth), the CAR (seventh), Zimbabwe (eighth), Liberia (ninth) and Côte d’Ivoire (tenth). These ranking systems all have significant limitations and

have to confront difficult methodological questions but they do have the benefit of highlighting how unwise it is to generalize about the nature or effects of state failure in Africa. Never- theless, they all make it abundantly clear that the continent is suffering more than most other parts of the world. Thus the pertinent practical question is how locals and outsiders have responded?

HOW HAVE INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS RESPONDED TO STATE FAILURE IN AFRICA?

It is possible to identify four main types of responses to state failure in Africa. First, there have been external attempts, often led by Western governments, to reassert the failing state’s control over its territory. There have also been similar Western-led attempts to encourage Africa’s failing govern- ments to provide their citizens with human rights and basic public goods. A third type of response has occurred in relatively rare instances where international society has been willing to permit states to disintegrate and break into separate smaller units. Finally, there have been the responses of local Africans themselves. These have ranged from active participation in the struggle to rebuild and control state power to indifference and sometimes hostility towards the entire process.

Resurrection Western responses to Africa’s failed states have been selective and intermittent. Selectivity is part and parcel of any state’s foreign policy and the responses of Western governments to Africa’s failing states have concentrated on those which are perceived to pose the greatest threats to Western security concerns. The US Government, for instance, has been criti- cized for singling out only two African states—Ethiopia and Sudan—for its current Transitional Initiative to encourage democratization in fragile and post-conflict states. (The Initia- tive allocated US $275m. of its $325m. budget to just four states: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti and Sudan.) This leaves worthy candidates such as Somalia, the DRC, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi and the CAR with few funds to help democra- tization and civil society initiatives. However, Western responses to state failure have also been selective in a more geo-strategic sense. Despite suffering from some of the most serious examples of state failure on the planet, the African continent has not attracted a major transitional administra- tion of the kind sponsored by Western states in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Timor-Leste and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan. In this sense, state failure in Africa remains on the margins of Western concern even after the events of 11 September 2001. The selective response of Western governments has been

mirrored, and to some extent fostered, by the intermittent and transient media coverage given to state failure in Africa. This is usually explained by the fact that failed state stories do not meet enough of the traditional Western news criteria to keep them on the front pages of newspapers or on television screens. The United Kingdom and France appear to have more media coverage of these issues than most Western states but it remains infrequent, concentrated on their former colonies, and often involves stories that score highly in terms of drama, conflict and sensation but provide little in the way of historical background or explanation. Given this context, when Western states have responded in

concrete terms to Africa’s failing states, they have usually tried to address the two different types of failure discussed above: the failure to control and the failure to promote human flourishing. Outsiders have employed several strategies to help failing

states reassert control over the actors within their territorial borders. To date, the most resource-intensive have been those designed to disarm, demobilize and reintegrate (DDR) former

combatants. These DDR programmes are then usually fol- lowed by a process of ‘security sector reform’, the current pseudonym for building new, usually broad-based security institutions, notably the armed forces, police and intelligence services. Once again, however, and reflecting the powerful influence the Westphalian ideal of statehood exerts over the architects of these programmes, such efforts have been criti- cized for ignoring the political economy of Africa’s failed states and the crucial roles played by private actors in such settings. As part of the reform process, Western powers have been keen to strengthen the capacity of African states to conduct complex peace operations. The most recent framework was announced at the 2004 Group of Eight industrialized countries (G8) summit where the leaders pledged under the Global Peace Operations Initiative to support the training of some 40,000 African peace-keepers (out of a world-wide total of 75,000) to help make the much vaunted African Standby Force a reality by 2010. Yet, in the USA at least, this laudable programme has been underfunded. In addition to training and helping to equip African peace-keepers, Western states have also deployed small numbers of their own soldiers to so-called ‘hybrid’ peace operations in some of Africa’s failing states, including the United Kingdom in Sierra Leone, France in Côte d’Ivoire, two EU-led operations in the DRC, and the USA in Liberia. In most cases, however, it remains too early to determine whether these efforts to reassert state control have succeeded. A similar pattern has emerged in relation to external

attempts to enhance the provision of public goods in Africa’s failing states. Here the primary mechanisms have been increasing levels of foreign aid and development assistance, placing diplomatic pressure on African élites to adopt what the World Bank calls ‘good governance’, including the strengthen- ing of the African Peer Review Mechanism, and more general attempts to implant the idea that states have a responsibility to protect the human rights of their own citizens. With few exceptions, aid from most Western states has been

concentrated on their traditional friends and allies in Africa. Nevertheless, both the United Kingdom and the USA have made significant increases in certain sectors, notably in fund- ing to stem the prevalence of HIV/AIDS on the continent. On the other hand, the so-called ‘global war on terror’ has meant that significant amounts of Western development assistance has been allocated to states considered to be in the front line of the fight against terrorism, notably Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Efforts to encourage ‘good governance’ have come from a variety of sources, but since its formal adoption by the OAU in July 2001 the New Partnership for Africa’s Develop- ment (NEPAD) has remained the most comprehensive frame- work to address this issue. However, NEPAD has suffered from several problems most notably those relating to its élitist and market-driven design, the slow pace of implementation, and perhaps most significantly for both Washington and London, the failure of many African states adequately to criticize Robert Mugabe’s regime for plunging Zimbabwe into a crisis from which there will be no quick escape. However, at the same time that many African states were making excuses for the mayhem generated by Mugabe’s ZANU—PF regime they were also signing up to a charter for the new African Union (AU) that included a paradigmatic shift in relation to the responsibility to protect idea. Specifically, in stark contrast to its predecessor, Article 4(h) of the AU’s new charter permitted the organization ‘to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity’. To date, however, Article 4(h) has not been invoked. This is in spite of clear evidence that ‘grave circumstances’ have existed in the Darfur region of Sudan since at least mid-2003. Of course, these two types of response are intimately related

to one another. As a result, Western powers have started to pay greater attention to co-ordinating their responses across all the relevant dimensions of state failure. They have also acknowl- edged that there is an urgent need to prevent state failure rather than just to manage its consequences. One prominent example in this regard is the British Government’s Investing in Prevention report (see above). This concluded that attempts to resurrect failed states and prevent their (re)occurrence should adopt a ‘four S’s’ strategy:

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appropriate scale of political attention and financial resources; sustaining action over longer time horizons; developing systematic approaches to action across political, development, economic, security and other dimensions; achieving greater sophistication of understanding of long run dynamics of instability; Importantly, the report also emphasized the need to change

élite behaviour in fragile and failing states through a series of co-ordinated incentive strategies. Given the importance of contingent causes of state failure discussed above this is an important focus for action.

The State is Dead, Long Live the State A third type of response has been far less prevalent in Africa. Despite the continuing problems facing attempts to resurrect Africa’s failed states, it has been rare for the great powers within international society to countenance their disintegra- tion or what Jeffrey Herbst has called the ‘let them fail’ approach. Nevertheless, such a response is possible, as indi- cated by Namibia’s independence, Eritrea’s secession from Ethiopia, Western Sahara’s UN-endorsed (but currently stalled) referendum on secession from Morocco and the refer- endum on secession in southern Sudan scheduled for 2011 under the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. These exceptions have occurred when insurgencies have suc- ceeded in gaining and sustaining control over significant areas of territory, usually through a military struggle. The rarity of this outcome suggests two things. First, given the relatively large number of insurgencies in Africa, the small number of secessions suggests that it is difficult for such movements to achieve decisive military victories over incumbent regimes and maintain control of sizeable territories for long periods of time when they do. Second, international society’s general reluc- tance to countenance the ‘death’ of states and their breaking into smaller units demonstrates the power that the Westpha- lian ideal of statehood continues to exert even in the face of such implausible candidates for ‘successful’ state-building as Nigeria and the DRC. In Herbst’s opinion, the crucial issue is not to concentrate on

resurrecting the old failed state, but to think through what the alternatives to failed states might look like and ‘to increase the congruence between the way that power is actually exercised and the design of units.’ As the examples in Somalia noted above suggest, it is clear that alternative units and structures already exist but very few of them are granted official recogni- tion by international society. The first step in this recognition process would be for international society to countenance decertifying states when they fail to meet their sovereign responsibilities (of either control or promoting basic standards of human flourishing). Indeed, the US Administration has previously indulged in this kind of activity by designating certain countries including Iraq, Iran, Libya and the Demo- cratic People’s Republic of Korea as rogue, pariah or evil states that are unfit to participate as normal members of interna- tional society. The logical next step is to decide the criteria for selecting potential new states. This will be controversial, but a reasonable place to start, as Herbst suggests, is with the question of which actors or institutions are actually providing political order in a given territory. Herbst concludes that ‘the long-term aim would be to provide international recognition to the governmental units that are actually providing order to their citizens as opposed to relying on the fictions of the past.’

Local Competition and Local Indifference Finally, it is important to analyse local responses to state failure in Africa. The first point to note is that these have not been uniform. Some locals have competed to lead the resurrec- tion process and, hopefully, benefit from the material resources that flow from it, including foreign aid and loans from the international financial institutions. Others, however, have tried their best to ignore the collapse of central government institutions and continue to bypass state power in many aspects of their everyday lives. In southern Africa, for instance, states have long failed to meet the needs of the region’s peoples. Given the imperial foundations of the region’s states this is hardly surprising. As a consequence, as Peter Vale has argued, ordinary southern Africans have lost faith in, and increasingly bypass, a state system that ‘neither delivers security nor

satisfies a desire for community’. Instead, they have engaged in alternative forms of social intercourse related to, among other things, religious affiliations, trading associations, musi- cology, and migration patterns, all of which show little respect for the political borders erected by southern Africa’s states. In this sense, many ordinary Africans have become adept at forming accommodation strategies in a variety of different arenas to fulfil their needs when their state has failed them. Over time, this has produced many different attitudes to ‘the

state’ in Africa from squabbling élites desperate to resurrect and then control new state institutions to ordinary people who are often either indifferent or explicitly hostile to state-build- ing projects focused on the urban centres. In Somalia, for example, not only have certain groups carried on their lives in spite of the collapse of the central state but they are extremely suspicious of any attempts to revive it. Whereas the conven- tional wisdom of Western-dominated institutions such as the World Bank and the G8 dictates that an effective central state is a prerequisite for national development, many Somalis view the state as ‘an instrument of accumulation and domination, enriching and empowering those who control it and exploiting and oppressing the rest.’8 As a consequence, there have been a variety of groups hostile to international efforts to resuscitate the trappings of central government in Mogadishu. This also raises the important observation made by Menkhaus that state-building and peace-building might at times be ‘mutually antagonistic enterprises in Somalia.’ Consequently, outsiders should not automatically assume that insiders are united on the need to resurrect failed states. Instead, they should canvass the opinion of insiders and think carefully about when alternatives to failed states should be put into practice.

THE STRANGE CASE OF SOMALIA As discussed above, the dilemmas and challenges of state- building are exemplified by the case of Somalia, the collapsed state par excellence and the focus of much US counter-terror- ism activity. In particular, not only does any potential central government in Somalia face huge incapacity problems, but the process of building central institutions may well exacerbate the likelihood of violent conflict within the country and, ironically, make it a more attractive destination for terrorist organizations. Contemporary Somalia exemplifies some of the conceptual

points raised earlier in this essay. First, just because Somalia was a state without a central government this did not mean it was devoid of various systems of governance and sources of authority. In this sense, it should not be seen as one of the US Government’s ‘ungoverned spaces’. Although Somalia has lacked a permanent central government since 1991, at the local, municipal and neighbourhood levels coalitions of clan elders, businessmen and Muslim clergy overseeing Shari‘a courts have provided governance structures and become sources of authority. At the regional/provincial level, power struggles within Somalia have revolved around the capital city, Mogadishu, but also the northern regions of the ‘Republic of Somaliland’ (which declared itself an independent republic in 1991) and ‘Puntland’ (which declared itself an autonomous state within Somalia in May 1998). In addition, from 2004–06, Somalia was in the rare situation of having its recognized Transitional Federal Government (TFG) based outside its territory, in Nairobi, Kenya. Second, coalitions of insiders and outsiders have played

important roles in both keeping the state fractured and attempts to resurrect a set of central government institutions. Someinsiders have asked external actorsto provide a variety of peace operations to help the state-building project. In October 2004, for instance, the Somali President, Col Adbullahi Yussuf Ahmed, appealed for 20,000 peace-keepers to secure the country and disarm some 55,000 militiamen. Furthermore, in early 2005 the AU and then the Intergovernmental Author- ity on Development agreed to authorize the deployment of troops to facilitate the return of Somalia’s TFG to Mogadishu. However, neither of these operations were carried out. It was only in late December 2006, after the conflict that expelled the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) from Mogadishu, that the AU actually deployed approximately 1,600 Ugandan troops as part

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of its Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). These moves were, of course, criticized by those insiders hostile to the entire state- building project and by those who viewed these external forces as an attempt to install what they perceived to be an illegiti- mate TFG. These developments demonstrate Menkhaus’s point that

there exist competing views of the state in Somalia. For most external actors, the conventional wisdom is that an effective state is a prerequisite for development. This view is supported by those insiders who think they are likely to benefit from the resurrection of a central government. On the other hand, however, for many Somalis, the state is seen as an instrument of accumulation and domination, enriching and empowering those who control it and exploiting and oppressing the rest. For these insiders, state-building is something to be resisted. Arguably the two main external actors behind the most

recent state-building project in Somalia have been Ethiopia andthe USA.For Ethiopia, theprimary goal has been to avoid a situation where Islamist extremists control a unified Somalia and reawaken nationalist desires to return the Ogaden region of Ethiopia to Somali control. This explains Addis Ababa’s strong support for the TFG and its deep suspicion of the UIC. For the USA, on the other hand, the major objective is to avoid a situation where Somalia becomes a safe haven for anti-Wes- tern terrorist organizations. From Washington’s perspective, the best way to secure this goal is to support a stable, moderate central government and help it build the capacity to police its borders and root out extremists within them. To this end, the US authorities supported the self-styled Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), which in reality was simply a disorganized collection of warlords and opportunist militia. The problem with the US position was two-fold. First,

Somalia had not become a major safe haven for terrorist organizations in spite of the ascendance of political Islam and the lack of effective government institutions. For example, in 2005 US intelligence gathering in Somalia produced no evidence of al-Qa’ida bases, or that al-Ittihad al-Islam was operating as one of its subsidiaries. Indeed, it was US support for the ARPCT that helped Islamist extremists to gain ascen- dancy over more moderate Islamic voices in late 2006. Second, Washington’s idea that establishing the institutions of a central state would help reduce the threat of transnational terrorists using Somalia as a base was flawed, at least in the short-term. As Menkhaus has persuasively argued, there are six main

reasons that explain why terrorist organizations have not been attracted to Somalia during its period as a collapsed state. First, terrorist cells and bases are much more exposed to international counter-terrorist action in zones of state collapse where US Special Forces could violate state sovereignty reg- ularly and with impunity. The US air strikes in January 2007 and March 2008 against al-Qa’ida suspects in Somalia are a case in point. Second, areas of state collapse tend to be inhospitable and dangerous, particularly for foreigners. Con- sequently, since few foreigners choose to reside in such envir- onments, foreign terror cells will find it very difficult to blend into the local population and retain the degree of secrecy necessary to conduct their activities. A third factor is the double-edged nature of the lawlessness that accompanies situations of state collapse: while lawlessness reduces the risk of apprehension by law enforcement agencies, it increases the likelihood that terror cells will suffer from more common crimes such as kidnapping, extortion or assassination. As Menkhaus suggests, ‘it appears that lawlessness can inhibit rather than facilitate certain types of lawless behavior.’9 A fourth problem is that any terrorists would be susceptible to betrayal by Somalis looking to ingratiate themselves with the US authorities. Fifth, Somalia represents an environment in which it is very difficult to stay neutral and outside the inter- clan rivalries. Relatively mundane activities such as hiring personnel or renting buildings will inevitably be seen as evidence of taking sides and once this perception has been established the external actor in question becomes a legitimate target of reprisals by rival clans. Finally, the collapse of the Somali state has left it without the usual array of ‘soft’ Western

targets such as embassies and businesses. As a result, Somalia is more likely to be used as a transit point for materiel than to act as a more permanent base for cells. Even terrorists, it would seem, require a degree of political order to conduct their activities. The ‘security paradox’ identified by Menkhaus is that at least in the short-term, attempts to resurrect effective state institutions in Somalia may create an environment that is more, not less, conducive to terrorist cells basing themselves in the country. On the basis of this analysis, Menkhaus concludes that

Somalia poses a uniquely difficult challenge for would-be state-builders. First, the success of local adaptation to state collapse could impede state-building efforts by reducing local incentives to support a revived state. Second, state-building will continue to be a conflict-producing enterprise, due to the zero-sum view that most Somali political actors have of control of the state. Third, a major obstacle to state-building is the lack of revenues that a government can secure from taxes. As a consequence, any project will need major external funding. Menkhaus’s solution is for outsiders to support the establish- ment of a ‘mediated state’ in which the government co-operates with local intermediaries and rival sources of authority to provide core functions of public security and justice. The process by which such mediation is decided can only emerge from genuine dialogue between insiders.

CONCLUSIONS What conclusions follow from this analysis of state failure in Africa? In response to the first question, ‘what is meant by state failure?’, it was suggested that most of the contemporary debate is based upon a particular conception of statehood that invokes an ideal formalized at the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648. For a variety of reasons, this ideal has not successfully taken root in many parts of Africa. As a consequence, not only is state failure widespread on the continent, but significant parts of it should be understood as remaining in the early stages of the state formation process and much more turmoil should therefore be expected. In order to understand the contempor- ary dynamics of this process, analysts would do well to pay closer attention to the configurations of power on the continent and move beyond state-centric and statist approaches. One plausible alternative would be to utilize the neo-Gramscian approach with its focus on the inter-relationships between states, social forces, ideas and world orders. This would provide a set of conceptual tools to help understand the phenomenon of ‘neopatrimonialism without the state’. In terms of the causes of state failure, contemporary debates

distinguish between those states that choose to fail certain segments of their populations, and those which lack the resources effectively to control their territory. In addition, although a wide array of structural and contingent factors continue to generate discussion, collective knowledge about these processes remains limited and unable to predict the tipping points in particular cases. Finally, there is the crucial practical question of responses to state failure in Africa. For outsiders at least, the most common approach has been to resurrect the institutions of state power, usually following Weberian and liberal blueprints. However, as the case of Somalia demonstrates, the processes of state-building and peace-building may sometimes be mutually exclusive enter- prises. Moreover, resurrection strategies may, in the short- term at least, make collapsed states a more attractive destina- tion for extremist organizations. In spite of such problems, it is only rarely that international society has agreed to the disin- tegration of existing states into smaller ones. Sometimes, some insiders have joined the competition to control these new units. In contrast, other insiders have continued to bypass a state system that has consistently failed to meet their basic needs. This suggests that the real solution to state failure in Africa lies in developing political communities that can provide for the needs of their members and gain recognition in wider global politics. How closely these communities will resemble the ideal of Westphalian statehood remains to be seen.

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FOOTNOTES 1 Hill, J. ‘Beyond the Other? A postcolonial critique of the failed state thesis’ in African Identities, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 139–140. Abingdon, 2005.

2 See, for example, Dorff, Robert H. ‘Failed States After 9/11: What did we know and what have we learned?’ in International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 20–34. Oxford, 2005. Dorff refers to these two conceptions of failure as ‘the ungovernable state’ and the ‘bad government state’.

3 The seminal statements of this perspective are R. W. Cox’s, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’ in Millennium, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1981), pp. 126–55; ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An essay in method’ in Millennium, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1983), pp. 162–75; and Production, Power, and World Order. New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1987. See also Barnett, M. ‘Authority, intervention and the outer limits of international relations theory’ in Callaghy, T., Kassimir, R. and Latham, R. (Eds). Intervention and Transnation- alism in Africa. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

4 See ‘Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States’, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, US Navy, Director, Defense Intelligence Agency. Statement For the Record Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 24 February 2004. http://www.dia.- mil/publicaffairs/Testimonies/statement12.html.

5 Clapham, C. et al (Eds). Big African States, p. 1. Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2006.

6 Fukuyama, F. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, p. 92. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2004.

7 The five categories are: safety and security; rule of law, transpar- ency and corruption; participation and human rights; sustainable economic development; and human development.

8 Menkhaus, K. ‘State Collapse in Somalia: Second Thoughts’ in Review of African Political Economy, No. 97 (2003), p. 409.

9 Menkhaus, K., ‘Somalia and Somaliland’ in Robert I. Rotberg (Ed.). Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa, p. 40. Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2005.

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