state failure in africa: causes, consequences and responses

STATE FAILURE IN AFRICA: CAUSES, CONSEQUENCES
AND RESPONSES
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 British Secretary of State for
Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Jack Straw, in September
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 September
11 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 preventing
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 effective
democracies.’ State failure is thus a serious concern for
both insiders and outsiders and it is in 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 interrelationships
between patterns of authority, political control
PAUL D. WILLIAMS
and institution building. Put another way, analysing state
failure in Africa requires a keen sense of the shifting configurations
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 appreciate
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-govermental
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 Kenneth
Menkhaus has observed, since 1991 ‘Somalia has repeatedly
shown that in some places and at 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–present), ‘Puntland’
(1998–present), the Rahanwin Resistance Army’s administration
of Bay and Bakool regions (1998–2002) and the
Banaadir Regional Authority (1996).
When analysing state failure in Africa in this first sense,
analysts and practitioners would thus do well to reject a statecentric
ontology in favour of a neo-Gramscian frame of reference,
wherein the world is not simply 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 ‘neopatrimonialism without the
state’. That is, systems of patron-client relations that may or
may not be linked to the official institutions of state power.
Arguably the closest Western officialdom has come to adopting
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GENERAL SURVEY State Failure in Africa
such a perspective is the US Government’s anxiety about what
it terms ‘ungoverned spaces’, ‘defined as geographic areas
where governments do not exercise 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 completely lacking other structures of
governance.
The Failure to Promote Human Flourishing
Failure is also commonly 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 Intervention
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 September
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 document:
‘each individual State has the responsibility to protect its
populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and
crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention
of such crimes, including their incitement, through
appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility
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 but the failure to
promote human flourishing has arguably been greater than
the failure to control. Nevertheless, it is important to note 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 discussions 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 Westphalian
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 particular,
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 acquisition
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 relatively
meaningless, or at least highly porous, for many practical
aspects of the local inhabitants’ daily existence, including
commerce or communicating with individuals, who were officially
‘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 illegitimate
by much of the local population and wielded the institutions
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 structures
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. The first 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
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GENERAL SURVEY State Failure in Africa
Government’s inability to quash the Lords Resistance Army
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
lack the necessary resources and instruments. The incumbent
governments in Liberia and Sierra Leone are cases in point.
A second distinction points to the differences between structural
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 recognition
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 independence,
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 conducive
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 understanding
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.
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.
Firstly, 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/Democratic Republic of the Congo—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. Secondly, 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 governments
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, 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 governments
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. Charles Taylor’s
destabilization 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 to accurately
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.’ 5 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, however,
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 proliferation.
In contrast, small arms and light weapons proliferation,
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
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. Transnational
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 infrastructure
exists and where bureaucrats and officials are
susceptible to bribery (such as Kenya, Nigeria and South
Africa). Similarly, 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
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GENERAL SURVEY State Failure in Africa
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 Burundi, 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 was recently confirmed by the World Bank’s Governance
Matters data set released in 2005. This data set ranks 209
countries and territories along the six dimensions of voice and
accountability, political instability and violence, government
effectiveness, regulatory burden, rule of law and control of
corruption. It concluded that 22 of the 44 areas ranked in the
bottom quintile of its survey were in Africa with the continent
housing five of the world’s 10 weakest states: Somalia (the
weakest), the DRC (4th), Liberia (6th), Zimbabwe (8th) and
Sudan (10th). While it is unwise to generalize about the nature
or effects of state failure in Africa, it is clear that the continent
is suffering more than most. 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 governments
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 criticized
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 Initiative
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 Central African Republic with few
funds to help democratization 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
administration 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, demobilise and reintegrate (DDR) former
combatants. These DDR programmes are then usually followed
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 criticized
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 (G-8) industrialized countries
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 strengthening
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 funding
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 Development
(NEPAD) has remained the most comprehensive framework
to address this issue. But 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 to adequately 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,
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GENERAL SURVEY State Failure in Africa
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 acknowledged
that there is an urgent need to prevent state failure
rather than just manage its consequences. One prominent
example in this regard is the Investing in Prevention (see
above). This concluded that attempts to resurrect failed states
and prevent their (re)occurrence should adopt a ‘four S’s’
strategy:
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 disintegration
or what Jeffrey Herbst has called the ‘let them fail’
approach. Nevertheless, such a response is possible as indicated
by Eritrea’s secession from Ethiopia, Western Sahara’s
UN-endorsed (but currently stalled) referendum on secession
from Morocco, and the referendum on secession in southern
Sudan scheduled for 2011 under the terms of the Comprehensive
Peace Agreement. These exceptions have occurred when
insurgencies have succeeded in gaining and sustaining control
over significant areas of territory, usually through a military
struggle. The rarity of this outcome suggests two things.
Firstly, 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.
Secondly, international society’s general reluctance to countenance
the ‘death’ of states and their breaking into smaller units
demonstrates the power that the Westphalian 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 recognition
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 Government has previously
indulged in this kind of activity by designating certain
countries including Iraq, Iran, Libya and the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea as rogue, pariah or evil states
that are unfit to participate as normal members of international
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 resurrection
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, musicology,
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 building
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 conventional wisdom
of Western-dominated institutions such as the World Bank and
the G-8 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.’ 6 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.’ This was the case when violent clashes
occurred in south-central Somalia in 2002 which were ‘partially
linked to political jockeying in anticipation of the Inter-
Governmental Authority on Development sponsored peace
talks.’ What this suggests is that 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.
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 contemporary 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 to effectively control their territory. In addition,
although a wide array of structural and contingent factors
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GENERAL SURVEY State Failure in Africa
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. Only rarely have they agreed
to the disintegration 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.
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 Transnationalism
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
Fukuyama, F. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the
21st Century. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2004.
6
Menkhaus, K. ‘State Collapse in Somalia: Second Thoughts’, in
Review of African Political Economy, No. 97 (2003).
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