Book review: When Things Fell Apart
February 22nd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I went into Robert Bates’ recent book When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa with high expectations. His 1982 work Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies remains one of the best pieces of African political analysis I’ve ever read, displaying an admirable willingness to take African domestic politics seriously, and thereby producing a insightful overview at the process of agricultural policy-making. (I must confess here that I thought this sounded like a resoundingly dull topic until I read the book, at which point I realized that Bates had captured many of the fundamental dynamics of African politics in the post-colonial era.) At any rate, I fully expected the same insight from When Things Fell Apart – and was disappointed to put it down feeling like I had learned little of value. The book is a decent primer on African politics in the 1980s and 1990s for the reader who’s unfamiliar with the topic, but it doesn’t even define “state failure” clearly, let alone provide an adequate metric for determining why some African states failed and others didn’t. One could be excused for coming away with the conclusion that the entire continent imploded in the 1990s. Such an important topic deserves a more clearly-written book (as other reviewers seem to agree).
A bit of background: my primer on African politics in the 1980s and 1990s was Michael Bratton & Nicholas van der Walle’s 1997 book Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (which I read for a course with the excellent Peter Lewis). Democratic Experiments isn’t what I’d call compulsively readable, but it does draw a clear picture of the generalized path that many African countries followed from authoritarianism to democratization. Generally speaking, the profound economic crisis of the 1980s unsettled many African autocrats’ grips on power, and by the end of the decade protests over economic stagnation and single-party rule were common. Many leaders reluctantly switched to multiparty democracy under such pressure, whilst others were able to repress domestic dissent but were still pushed towards democracy by international donors. Of course, some states avoided democratization entirely, as in Sudan with its civil war, Somalia with its total collapse, and Zaire with Mobutu’s preternatural skill at clinging to power.
So, in short: prolonged economic stagnation weakens leaders’ holds on power and provokes political unrest, which might lead to democracy (Ghana), civil war (Somalia), or both in succession (Rwanda & Burundi). I was really hoping that Bates’ book would start from this point and investigate the determinants of why some nations collapsed and others weathered this period intact. Instead, Bates takes the same stylized elements as Bratton & van der Walle (economic crisis + resultant instability in the political system), adds a structural assumption about politicians’ heightened discount rates in times of crisis, and comes up with a recipe for violent political infighting over access to resources and resultant state collapse. This is the flip side of the processes of democratization explored in Democratic Experiments, and it’s a plausible analysis for many of the states that did in fact fall into civil conflict.
However, Bates never actually defines “state failure,” nor identifies the set of African states or even the specific time periods to which this analysis applies. His working definition appears to mean “civil war during the 1990s,” based on statements like the opening sentence of his conclusion, which discusses Liberia and Somalia. It’s an odd oversight for a political scientist, given that the Liberian civil war is arguably a different type of “state failure” than the complete collapse of the central government in Somalia. (Rwanda and the DRC are also great examples: both were sites of great violence in the 1990s, but today Rwanda has one of the strongest governments in Africa, whilst the Congolese government doesn’t even control all of its own territory.) For that matter, evidence for the book’s arguments is culled from across the continent, including anecdotes from states such as Ghana and Zambia (which have never had civil wars) alongside the obvious choices of war-torn Burundi and DRC. Bates’ reasonable analysis of the risk factors for state collapse is greatly weakened by this inability to apply his hypotheses to specific African states.
Violence and agency in the DRC
February 16th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
In yet another bit of backdated conference blogging, the Great Lakes Policy Forum held an excellent session on “Telling the Story of the Congo” last October. (Notes aren’t up at their site, but Wronging Rights lived-blogged the session.) The first day of the two-day event (which was all I was able to attend) focused on the partial and often inaccurate narrative about the conflict in eastern Congo which has gained currency among policymakers in the West. One of the first speakers opened with a striking exercise: he pulled a map of the DRC up on the overhead and pointed to a variety of cities throughout the country, asking the audience how many people had visited each. A healthy number had visited Kinshasa, and nearly as many had been to Goma or Bukavu, but very few had been to Lubumbashi or Kisangani, let alone Mbuji-Mayi or Mbandaka. This is a very real result of the way in which our collective imagined geography of the DRC has shrunk to the extreme west (Kinshasa) and extreme east of the country, rendering the rest of the country not as no-man’s land, but as non-existent land.
As the same speaker noted, the current Western framing of the DRC as a land torn by sexual violence and mineral-fueled conflict tends to pass over questions of domestic politics and governance, stripping the Congolese of political agency within their own country. By way of example, he noted that a recent case of rape in North Kivu drew criticism of MONUSCO for their failure to prevent it; however, few commentators asked who committed the rapes, or where the army or police were at the time. Sexual violence is clearly a symptom of the eastern DRC’s broader security problems, but the international community appears more interested in topical solutions aimed at reducing rape rates than in sustained engagement with the larger issue of security sector reform.
Several speakers were similarly critical of the Western narrative around minerals and conflict. One pointed out that mining is in fact not the only revenue source for many armed groups, and that it’s unclear whether cutting off this particular source of funding would decrease or exacerbate violence. Another speaker, more accepting of the idea of a positive correlation between mining revenues and violence, said that the international community’s exclusive focus on eastern Congo overlooked continued conflicts over natural resources in the center of the country. In his words, places like Kikwete and Mbuji-Mayi are “more like war zones” today than Goma is. Ultimately, the canonical view of conflict minerals in the eastern DRC appears to have been created largely by Western activist groups such as the Enough Project, with very little input from the Congolese, and without sufficient attention to the contextualized and ultimately local ways in which violence plays out.
Straus on remaking Rwanda
January 25th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Catching up on yet another batch of backdated conference blogging, I went to see Scott Straus discuss his edited volume Remaking Rwanda at CSIS last October. It’s a thought-provoking book, as is his previous work, The Order of Genocide, which contains a very insightful analysis of the microdynamics of the genocide. Remaking offers a largely critical look at Rwanda’s post-genocide domestic politics, with only brief acknowledgement of the RPF’s real successes in realms such as primary education and economic growth before proceeding to pillory the government for its repression of political dissent and attempts at social engineering.
Rather than revisiting the book’s conclusions directly, Straus used the conference to engage with the question of why the Western meta-narrative about Rwanda had shifted from a largely positive one in the early post-genocide period to the flurry of critiques that constitute it today. In part, he felt that the shift was warranted. Rwanda’s obvious intervention in the DRC contributed to an early change in public opinion, supported by the increasing number of defections from the RPF and the repressive manner in which the 2010 elections were handled. The 2009 death of Alison des Forges, who was an early critic of the RPF’s slide towards authoritarianism, then spurred the generation of a number of commemorative conferences and works on Rwanda at a time when scholars were abandoning the self-censorship that had previously characterized much writing on the country. Remaking Rwanda was one such work.
That said, Straus also acknowledged the complexity of Rwanda’s contemporary politics. Whilst “it’s not a secret” that the RPF has installed an authoritarian regime, he also noted the challenges of governing a post-conflict country, and suggested that we are in need of better methods to evaluate the effects of authoritarianism in different contexts. In part, he seemed to feel that this pointed to a need for more comparative work on Rwanda, and explicitly called for more comparisons with Burundi. Of course, as another commentator pointed out, there’s an even larger set of potential comparative partners out there, since practically every leader in East Africa today came to power out of conflict.
Having had a few months to think this through, it does seem to me that much research on Rwanda is limited by a lack of comparison. I do think there are good reasons to believe that genocide is a form of violence that’s analytically distinct from other types of civil conflict, but it also seems that some perspective is lost in treating Rwanda as completely unique. Regression to authoritarianism (or illiberal democracy, or some other non-democratic form of rule) was common in the 1990s even among African states that hadn’t suffered conflict. Straus’ more specific concern is that repression and “growing de facto ethnic inequality” will someday re-ignite all the familiar conflicts, which seems a likely outcome to me – one certainly sees the same pattern in both Rwanda and Burundi’s historical periods of ethnic conflict. That said, one might gain a better understanding of the specific conditions that contribute to the re-ignition of conflict, or to its avoidance, in comparative perspective. Uganda and Ethiopia might both be interesting places to start.
Alarming sentences
September 26th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
From Stef Vandeginste, “Power-Sharing as a Fragile Safety Valve in Times of Electoral Turmoil: The Costs and Benefits of Burundi’s 2010 Elections” [PDF]:
Burundi’s experience seems to contradict the classical criticism that consociational power-sharing “freezes” people’s identities and therefore deepens the segmental cleavages and divisions… Instead, the acknowledgement and institutionalisation of the segments’ political relevance may be seen as a first and necessary (though by no means final) step in the process of de-ethnicising political competition and of overcoming decades of politico-ethnic violence. (In which case neighbouring Rwanda still needs to embark on its own consociational journey, presumably after a next round of politico-ethnic violence). (p. 82, emphasis added)
Not that I don’t also think this is likely. But it’s a bit chilling to hear the prospect of additional violence in Rwanda discussed so casually.
Grievance, rainfall, & migration in Burundi
September 18th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Currently reading an interesting paper by Eleanora Nillesen & Philip Verwimp on whether agricultural shocks (namely rainfall shocks) increased people’s likelihood to actively participate in Burundi’s civil war. They find that, whilst negative shocks to the price of coffee (the country’s principle cash crop) didn’t increase rebel recruitment, drought shocks were positively correlated with recruitment, perhaps underlining the greater role of agriculture in helping households manage risk – it could be a greater blow to lose consumption crops than to receive a lower yearly payment for a cash crop. (It was especially interesting to read this in light of Heather Sarsons’ recent work [PDF] questioning the use of rainfall as an instrument for wages from agricultural labor, based on new data from India. She suggests that, unsurprisingly, rainfall may affect people’s participation in political protests through channels other than the creation of grievance & reduced opportunity cost of involvement. Since N&V weren’t using rainfall as an instrument, this critique doesn’t directly apply to their work, but it’s still useful to think through the multiplicity of ways in which rainfall affects people’s lives in developing countries.)
N&V also included a small methodological note which I found especially telling in re: the social importance of land in Burundi. The sample for the data underlying this paper was drawn from households who completed the 1998 Burundi Priority Survey, which was a joint project of the Burundi Institute of Statistics & Economic Studies and the World Bank. Interestingly, despite the fact that N&V collected a second round of data in 2007, after multiple years of war, they noted only 13% attrition from their original sample. As they write, “In Burundi the pressure [on] land is extraordinary high… As a result people may have only have fled [from the conflict] at the very last minute, if there was no other option, and return[ed] immediately after the violence…to ensure their claim to land. Most often, our survey team would find the households in the same location as in 1998″ (p. 6). Pretty remarkable.
War, growth, and political activism in Africa
July 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Following up on my previous post about Chris Blattman’s work with ex-combatants in Northern Uganda, I came across another interesting piece [PDF] by him and a earlier article [PDF] by John Bellows and Edward Miguel about the effects of war on post-conflict political participation. Bellows & Miguel’s 2006 piece captures a variety of interesting findings about the medium-term effects of conflict on both consumption and local institutions in Sierra Leone. Using data from 2005, three years after the end of the 1991-2002 civil war, they find that areas experiencing greater amounts of violence during the war did not have lower consumption levels than less-affected areas by 2004. Whilst this result is consistent with the neoclassical assumption that destruction of capital may lead to faster growth converging back to steady state growth, they also supply helpfully specific hypotheses for this return to growth, including the continuing availability of diamond wealth in some of the regions which experienced the highest levels of conflict, the reconstruction work of NGOs, and the fact that soil was allowed to lie fallow in many areas during the war.
More interestingly, however, Bellows & Miguel also find that areas with greater levels of war-related victimization (and not simply greater numbers of battles) have higher attendance at community meetings and higher levels of voter registration in the post-conflict period. These results hold after controlling for the number of NGOs doing reconstruction work in these regions. Contrary to the popular expectation that war destroys the social fabric, these results indicate that in some cases, conflict may actually increase local-level political activism.
In a 2007 publication, Blattman uses his unique dataset from northern Uganda to investigate political activism among returning combatants in the post-conflict period, and finds a similar result: youth who were abducted by the LRA are more likely than non-abducted youth to become community leaders and to vote on national referenda. He suggests that the act of witnessing violence may be the primary motivator behind this increasing political activity, as witnessing violence was significantly correlated with greater political involvement in ways that perpetrating or receiving violence, or carrying weapons, were not. What’s best about this piece, however (and at least from the standpoint of mainstream development economics), is its inclusion of qualitative data. A number of former abductees described their abductions as experiences that left them more mature and worldly, less willing to uncritically accept the political positions of local leaders, and increasingly interested in making something of their lives. This obviously applied to a minority of abductees overall, just as political leadership is inherently a minority trait in any population, but still offers a fascinating bit of insight into a little-discussed aspect of post-conflict reintegration.
Steps towards mineral certification in the DRC
June 28th, 2011 § 3 Comments
The Wilson Center held an interesting event last week on steps towards the development of a certification process for conflict-free minerals in the DRC, with representatives from an admirably broad variety of interest groups participating in the discussion. (This included representatives of the US and Congolese governments, one of the negotiators of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, an industry CSR type, and researchers from the Enough Project.) Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy & Agricultural Affairs Robert Hormats briefly discussed one of the most substantive steps that I’ve yet heard of towards an actual certification process, namely a USG-funded pilot supply chain of certified minerals. A common concern, however, was that these early moves towards reopening clean supply chains aren’t enough to mitigate for the damage done to the industry (and the incomes of its artisanal miners) by the Dodd-Frank act and the mining ban instituted by the Congolese government last fall. According to Tim Monin, the director of CSR at Advanced Micro Devices, the volume of trade has fallen by more than 90% since this time last year. It’s not clear to me what, if anything, is being done to assist displaced miners until trade picks up again (or until they find alternate employment – always a scarce commodity in the Congo).
Severine Autesserre on the failure of peacekeeping in the DRC
May 8th, 2011 § 1 Comment
As mentioned in an earlier post, Severine Autesserre recently joined Frank Fukuyama at SAIS to discuss state-building in the DRC. (My hat is definitely off to African Studies at SAIS, who have pulled together some fabulous events this term despite being a relatively small department.) Autesserre’s talk largely drew from her recent book on the failure of international peacekeeping in the Congo, and made clear the insight she’s gained from the more than ten years she’s spent living on and off in the DRC.
As scholars like Laura Seay have noted, the continuing conflict in eastern Congo is fundamentally predicated on local factors, like land rights and citizenship, and Autesserre makes a similar argument about the failure of peacekeeping to reconstruct eastern Congo. Whilst a common criticism of forces such as MONUC is that they enforce a hegemonic Western “liberal peace” agenda of free markets, free elections, and human rights, which may not be appropriate for the reconstruction of countries like the DRC, Autesserre points out that most peacekeepers are not in fact neutral enforcers of Western liberalism. Instead, they often act in manners influenced by their own (frequently non-Western) beliefs & backgrounds, and within the constraints of a state that remains durably more interested in extorting its citizens than protecting them. Even if the liberal peace agenda were sufficient to reconstruct the DRC, it has proven quite difficult to carry out on the ground.
Whilst the salience of promoting democracy and human rights may go unquestioned among the top echelons of the UN, Autesserre observes that peacekeepers usually have substantial operational autonomy on the ground. This may lead to correspondingly idiosyncratic interpretations of their mandate. For instance, peacekeepers whom Autesserre interviewed during fieldwork in North Kivu often preferred technical missions such as military training to more open-ended missions to reduce human rights abuses by the FARDC. Some of this hesitance surely has to do with the sheer challenge of promoting better human rights records among the FARDC, but Autesserre also recounted an instance where reports of the recruitment of child soldiers were written off by South Asian peacekeepers, one of whom observed to her that he’d known children who had found discipline and purpose after they were recruited into his own nation’s military.
Many peacekeepers also doubted the overall value of their mandate to support the FARDC, an understandable concern given that civilians often suffer more from its predations than from those of rebel groups. (C.f. this 2009 HRW report on sexual violence in the DRC.) Autesserre notes that “the Congolese state is still a predatory structure,” and shares the worries of some peacekeepers that reconstructing the state may simply amount to a reconstruction of the state’s ability to harass its citizens. Unsurprisingly, many Congolese civil society groups have felt that MONUC was misguided or even malicious in attempting to work with local government bodies to build their capacity. With this in mind, Autesserre closed in calling for fundamental revisions to the normative ideas of state-building that MONUC (and now MONUSCO) have been called to carry out. She shared Fukuyama’s insistence that it’s dangerous to consolidate state power before establishing the rule of law, and proposed sequencing judicial sector and security sector reform before attempts at rebuilding the capacity of the Congolese state.
Elections & Peace Consolidation in the DRC
April 7th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Wrapping up my backdated blogging of DRC events from earlier this year, I attended an interesting speech in January by Ambassador Roger Meece, the UN’s Special Representative for the DRC, at the Wilson Center. As the head of MONUSCO, and a key player in the international effort to support the 2006 elections in the DRC, Meece seemed to take a perhaps overly rosy view of the country’s stability in this public forum, but there were some good points raised regardless.
On the note of the MONUC –> MONUSCO shift, Meece pointed out that stabilization was initially a question of removing foreign armies during the war. The 2006 elections were seen as an exit strategy for MONUC in some quarters, but obviously questions of stability remain pressing. Today, whilst the necessity of economic development for stability is broadly accepted, he feels that peacekeepers remain uncomfortable talking about this. (Of course, economic growth is well outside MONUSCO’s mandate.)
Meece also felt that the 2006 elections are often given short shrift, saying that they “changed governance in the Congo permanently” through both the inculcation of democratic mores and the practical implications of creating new regional assemblies and granting some independence to parliament. That said, he curiously elided the topic of Kabila’s decidedly non-democratic constitutional tinkering, even after I asked him about it directly. (He responded with a reiteration of his belief [or hope] that Kabila is “committed” to the 2011 elections.) However, he also heard that a number of opposition leaders came to MONUSCO whilst he was out of the country and said that a single round of elections was acceptable, which he found quite surprising.
Congo: The UN Mapping Report & the Responsibility to Justice
March 28th, 2011 § 14 Comments
Continuing my quest to catch up on Congo-related conference blogging, I wanted to share some notes from the December 2010 Great Lakes Policy Forum discussion of the UN mapping report. The GLPF’s official summary can be downloaded here, and Laura Seay has her own summary here.
One commentator took on the political economy of the report’s publication, noting that many Congolese found psychological and emotional value in seeing the UN provide proof of crimes they had long known to have occurred. However, the report’s existence also complicates peacebuilding efforts in the region. “There’s blood on almost everyone’s hands,” as almost every government in the region has some members who’ve been guilty of massive human rights abuses at some point. This is clearly visible in Rwanda’s treatment of Laurent Nkunda, who will “probably never go on trial” because he knows too much about the crimes committed by all sides during the wars. In the end, she believes that transitional justice is unlikely to happen unless outside donors put strong pressure on regional governments.
Another commentator provided a bit of historical perspective on both violence and justice in eastern Congo, pointing out that political and social coalitions around justice in the DRC are very weak and fragmented now compared to 5 or 6 years ago. There has been a simultaneous growth in the entrenchment of violence with economic interests, especially trade and mining. Part of this entanglement was due to the desire of foreign armies to “do war on the cheap” by getting locals to do their killing for them, which provided space for “sophisticated entrepreneurs of violence” to use access to weapons to their own commercial ends.
Whilst the report itself only covered the period 1993 – 2003, the ensuing discussion also touched upon more recent developments in both Congo and Rwanda. As one speaker pointed out, there’s been a welcome increase in Western attention to gender-based violence in the eastern DRC of late – but it’s important to avoid reducing issues of justice to the prosecution of rape and war crimes. What the Congo ultimately needs is a “massive institution-building project” on the scale of decades, in order to rebuilt judicial systems that might handle everything from property rights and contracts to war crimes. The international community has also largely elided the issues of land rights and citizenship for Rwandaphone Congolese in the Kivus, which remain at the heart of the ongoing conflict in the region.
That said, the “idea that the Congolese are doomed to fight each other is ridiculous.” There are spaces in the DRC that are relatively well-governed, such as Butembo and Katanga. More attention is needed to the factors that enable better governance in the Congolese context.
Finally, a number of interesting points that didn’t quite fit in elsewhere in the above narrative also came up:
- Rwanda was described as “a boiling cauldron under a surface that looks calm,” with Hutu resentment running high, and ethnic identities remaining highly salient despite official attempts to ban their use.
- The US values stability over all else in the region. Kagame and Mobutu both contributed to stability, as did Museveni, and the US is willing to turn a blind eye to many other abuses because of this.
- Africa more generally is “kind of the neglected stepchild of diplomacy,” with some dedicated diplomats, but others who got dumped there with little previous knowledge of the region.
Did anyone else attend this meeting of the GLPF, or the one that took place on March 24 on human security in the DRC? Would love to hear thoughts if so!
