state failure in africa: causes, consequences and responses

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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