60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

contextualising violence in colonial africa 69
environment. Origins of confl ict appear to be related to specifi c control
relations in development which suggest a possible defi nition of
‘empire’ beyond territorial rule or formal empire.
Secondly, the argument about lineages of confl ict shows the importance
of an additional dimension to the controversy about the violent
versus the ‘ramshackle’ colonial state. The colonial state was perhaps
not a rational and self-contained instrument of bureaucratic power,
and certainly not infi nitely successful in its agency (Berman 1997 vs.
Young 1994). Neither were colonial policies consistently supporting
metropolitan economic accumulation (Berman and Lonsdale 1980),
let alone conducive to the stated welfare objectives of European nation
states. Yet colonial states were still subject to the developmental
vagaries of the imperial state. It was this framework in which colonies
became solicited by, reacted to, or were ignored by the imperial
centre.
Thirdly, in the debate about the postcolonial state and violence it has
been suggested that social relations of domination were due to conditions
of scarce resources under which some states operate (Bayart
1993: ch. 9). Alternatively, authors have attributed the existence of oppressive
postcolonial regimes to the legitimisation of these states in the
international order, implying that the international state-system was
in need of reform (Jackson/Rosberg 1986). But the present argument
about confl ict, nation states and empire would suggest that the strategies
and mechanisms that could engender violence were peculiar to a
given state and also structured in historical context. The mechanisms
of control in colonial empires were very specifi c. Moreover, since lineages
of confl ict were part and parcel of constructions of European
national development they were not subject to reconsideration in any
simple manner. The means of control also diff ered widely between
states. Formally independent non-Western states ‘imported’ the modern
state not least in order to cement the rule of the old state’s elite
with new techniques of administration and policing (Badie 2000: ch.
3). Doctrines of the colonial state were primarily discussed in the imperial
centre. In Western states, it was economic and political power
that conveyed a wider range of control options in international relations.
Yet these states, too, were not only constrained by problems of
economic management but also trapped by their assumptions about
the requirements of control in normative development.
This observation would seem to underscore, fourthly, the argument
that the use of force in the colonial world was rooted in Western ideas
of modernisation as universal evolution. Indeed, the development