Links o’ the day

May 18th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I’ve been waffling about the appropriate forum in which to post interesting links related to the content of this blog for a while.  To date I’ve mostly put them on Twitter and (to a lesser degree) Google Plus, but those aren’t the easiest fora to navigate due to the volume of content.  Thus, expect sporadic link round-ups from now on.

  1. La vie quotidienne in Africa: Everyday Africa and every sixty seconds in Africa…
  2. Re-imagining Somalia: TEDxMogadishu and Vintage Somalia
  3. Thoughtful meditation on race, power, and hipsters in Ghana
  4. Development economics brings us the role of hope in Indian economic behavior and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics

Conflict minerals and Kony2012

March 14th, 2012 § 6 Comments

Everyone who cares about African development has surely heard both sides of the Kony2012 debate by now, and frankly the sight of another #stopkony hashtag is enough to make me close my browser tab at this point.  Thus, this is not a post about Kony2012!  It is, however, a post about an analogous phenomenon: the way in which the Enough Project used an oversimplified and inaccurate narrative about the conflict in eastern Congo to “raise awareness” in the West, and translated that awareness into  harmful policy on the ground.  Laura Seay recently wrote an excellent report [PDF] on this topic for the Center for Global Development.  It’s a timely reminder that this type of poorly informed Western activism can have very real consequences for ordinary Africans.

The central problem with Enough’s narrative about conflict minerals is this: whilst rebel groups in the eastern DRC were profiting from mineral sales prior to the September 2010 ban on exports, minerals certainly weren’t causing the ongoing conflict, and they weren’t the rebels’ only source of funding.  Cutting off one source of funds has done nothing to resolve many rebels’ underlying grievances about land use and citizenship, or to fill in the great vacuum of state authority in the Kivus which is so conducive to armed violence.  Furthermore, most rebel groups have access to funds from other activities, including logging, agriculture, and informal taxation of local populations.  (If anything, they’ve probably increased their levels of extortion from Congolese citizens since the mineral export ban in an effort to compensate for revenue shortfalls.)  Whilst mineral exports were one of the factors perpetuating the conflict, the belief that they were its linchpin is clearly inaccurate. Effectively banning mineral purchases from the DRC has thrown hundreds of thousands of miners out of work, with few prospects for alternative employment, for the sake of a policy that has done little to reduce levels of violence in the region.

Interestingly, mineral exports may have actually facilitated the event that did significantly reduce the frequency of violence in the Kivus: the January 2009 arrest of Laurent Nkunda, leader of the CNDP militia and a key political actor driving the conflict in eastern DRC.  Laura notes that President Kabila’s seemingly inexplicable decision to ban mineral exports (an activity from which many top Congolese politicians profit) ahead of the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act was likely driven by two factors: a desire to convince eastern voters that he was paying attention to the region’s problems, and an interest in consolidating FARDC control over mines to ensure Rwanda’s continued access to minerals.  This latter consideration appears to be a key element maintaining the continued cooperation between the DRC and Rwanda.  This same detente, of course, led to Nkunda’s arrest.

Laura also makes several other points about the political economy of Congolese mineral exports which I hadn’t heard before.

  • The much-cited figure about how the DRC has 80% of the world’s coltan supplies is likely inaccurate; the real statistic is probably less than 10%.  However, mining revenues (from all minerals) still play an outsize role in the country’s economic life.  They “[account] for 80% of the exports, 72% of the national budget and 28% of GDP according to the latest available statistics.”
  • “If minerals cause or drive conflict in a failed state, then we would expect to see most, if not all, of the Congolese mineral trade to be militarized and/or the object of competition between armed groups. This is far from true, however. The mines of Kasai and central Katanga are completely free of violence, as are many mines in the heart of the conflict regions in North and South Kivu and Ituri.”

It’s a report that’s well worth reading, for a contextualized take on the conflict minerals narrative as well as a pointed reminder of the dangers of misguided Western activism.

Book review: When Things Fell Apart

February 22nd, 2012 § 3 Comments

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.

Jean-François Bayart on globalization & the state

February 19th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

There’s a new interview up at Theory Talks with Jean-François Bayart, author of the seminal work The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly.  Money quote:

Not only does neoliberal globalization not undermine the state, but more fundamentally, for two centuries, it is indeed globalization that spawned the universalization of the nation-state as a mode of political organization.  …  [For instance,] the integration of the former Soviet economies into the global capitalist system has not occurred in par with the dissolution of the Soviet space in I don’t know what kind of political and non-state no man’s land, but rather with the creation of a whole series of states which vindicate their nation-statehood, even though we know that these nations are very recent and by-products Stalinist theories of nationalities at that.

One might even go further than this and point out that not only has globalization supported the spread of the Westphalian state, but it’s also spread very specific forms of governance, such as multi-party democracy.

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.

Book review: More Than Good Intentions

February 13th, 2012 § 1 Comment

Only eight months after I finished the book, I thought I’d finally review More Than Good Intentions, by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel.  Dean is my supervisor at Innovations for Poverty Action, as well as the organization’s founder, and what I particularly appreciated about the book was its clear explanation of how academic research in behavioral economics can lead to solutions for real problems of social policy in the developing world.  Given the level of popular discontent with neoclassical economics, fairly or unfairly, after the financial crisis, works like this go a long way towards demonstrating that the economist’s conceptual toolbox can contribute to making the world a better place.

More Than Good Intentions opens with a short review of the Easterly-vs.-Sachs saga, and essentially sidesteps the debate about whether aid ever works with a call for more evaluation of extant aid programs.  Their chosen tool is the randomized controlled trial.  Of course, there are any number of development problems that are not amenable to randomized evaluation.  Questions about the ethnicized distribution of government resources or the transnational funding networks of rebel groups really call out for other epistemological approaches.  What RCTs can do well is evaluate program-based aid in contexts where funding shortages mean that some potential beneficiaries can’t be included, and this is precisely the approach taken by the research projects summarized in the book.

The rest of the book is thematically structured around financial activities (borrowing, saving, consumption) and non-financial activities (agriculture, healthcare, education).  The financial sections of the book are the best non-technical introduction to the topic that I’ve seen. Dean’s interests tend towards microfinance and decision-making, and these chapters give a thorough overview of contemporary Western narratives around microfinance and the many reasons why the financial needs of the poor are more varied than simply “getting a loan.”  For instance, whilst an RCT conducted in South Africa showed that randomly extending microfinance loans to people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten one did raise those clients’ incomes, qualitative data from the Philippines also showed that the rigid structure of microfinance products drives many people back to the neighborhood moneylender.  (The takeaway here isn’t that moneylenders are evil, but that microfinance banks might take a lesson in customizable loan repayments from them.)  Another RCT in Peru used list randomization [PDF] to show that nearly a third of microfinance clients use their loans for household consumption instead of business needs – technically a violation of their loan agreements, but a more accurate reflection of their current financial needs.

The non-financial chapters are also consistently interesting, although they tend towards summarizing notable research and policy innovations rather than placing the results within a global context.  They’re like the greatest hits of development research.  For instance, the agriculture chapter doesn’t provide an overview of agricultural modernization attempts in Africa, but it does shed light on why Kenyan farmers don’t purchase fertilizer when they need it (it’s hard for them to save money after the harvest), and how Ghanaian pineapple farmers spread information about new agricultural technologies.  Similarly, the education chapter doesn’t go into great depth about the history of universal primary education, but it does demonstrate that programs as simple as providing uniforms or cash grants to poor students can dramatically improve attendance.  One of the most remarkable studies of recent years showed that treating Kenyan students for intestinal worms with a twenty-cent pill reduced absence rates by up to 25%.  This result was so spectacular that the researchers started an NGO, Deworm the World, dedicated to reproducing this success.

All in all, More Than Good Intentions makes a strong case for the relevance of behavioral economics to development policy.  It’s also an excellent popular introduction to some of the fundamental questions of foreign aid and development economics.  I gave a copy to my parents to answer their perennial question of “so what exactly do you do in development work again?”  So far it seems to be working.

What to read on Burundi

February 9th, 2012 § 5 Comments

Burundi is a fascinating place.  It’s one of the few nations that survived the transition from pre-colonial polity to Westphalian state with its original territory mostly intact, which could be a history lesson all by itself; its pattern of ethnicized access to resources and resultant political violence is just as heartbreaking as Rwanda’s; it’s utterly beautiful.  (Check out the second photo here.) And it’s an excellent case study in the ways in which our Western gaze towards Africa is pulled towards the topics we find it easy to understand: natural resources & wildlife, unusually large-scale or savage violence, apartheid, piracy.  Lacking much by the way of resources and unique fauna, its civil war somehow deemed less interesting than the Rwandan genocide, and (happily) free of “whites only” signs and pirates, Burundi is turned into a blank spot on our imagined map of Africa.

This came through quite clearly when I was researching post-conflict ethnic reconciliation in Burundi for my independent study last semester.  There’s nowhere near the richness of the literature on Congo or Rwanda, although it seems that there’s a promising crop of young researchers like Cara Jones, Meghan Lynch & Cyrus Samii who have ongoing projects in the country.  That said, there are still a few good books to start with.

  • I haven’t read this yet, but The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History by Jean-Pierre Chretien looks like it contains a great overview of pre-colonial Burundi.
  • Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, by Rene Lemarchand.  Published in 1996, it covers the period from colonization to Melchior Ndadaye’s death in 1993, at the start of the civil war.  Lemarchand is one of the foremost Burundi scholars around, and it’s a lucid take on the way in which the country’s ethnic divide grew steadily deeper and more violent over the course of the 20th century.
  • The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa, also by Lemarchand, collects several of the author’s recent essays on Burundi.  Not nearly as thorough as his earlier book, but useful for getting up to speed on Burundian politics through the 2005 elections.
  • I relied heavily on two articles in writing my paper: “Ethnicity and Political Violence: The Challenge to the Burundi State” [PDF] by Patricia Daley, and “Making Peace after Genocide: Anatomy of the Burundi Process” [PDF] by Howard Wolpe.  The former is a readable overview of the Burundian civil war, whilst the latter analyzes the drawn-out peace negotiations that finally ended the war in 2005.
  • Life After Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi, by Peter Uvin, is my favorite book on the country.  After the war’s end, Uvin interviewed several hundred ordinary citizens about daily life in contemporary Burundi.  He’s a thoughtful chronicler, and it’s great to see the opinions of average Burundians taken seriously.  [Update as of 30 March 2012: I've heard more recently that other Burundi scholars have doubts about the representativeness of Uvin's sample and the quality of his questionnaires.  So now I'm not sure what to make of his conclusions.]
  • Burundi: Biography of a Small African Country, by Nigel Watt, offers up a less academic take on the country’s history, also peppered with extensive quotes from Watt’s Burundian friends.

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.

Pres. Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi at the Wilson Center

October 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Went to see a decently interesting discussion with Burundian president Pierre Nkurunziza at the Wilson Center last week.  (There’s video of an interview he later conducted at the Center here.)  As speeches by politicians tend to be, his presentation was a polished and upbeat discourse on Burundi’s post-war reconstruction, focusing on the country’s provision of free primary education and healthcare, and the success of consociationalism at keeping the peace.  Perhaps due to the fact that he’s not up for re-election any time soon, the questions were considerably gentler than those thrown at DRC presidential candidate Leon Kengo wa Dondo during a speech he gave at SAIS a few days previously.

(Adding to my collection of blurry photos of African politicians)

That said, I was interested to note that the first commentator pre-empted my own question by asking about whether the country’s ethnic reconciliation would be durable.  The responses given by both Nkurunziza and former Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region Howard Wolpe fit the simplified formula I’m investigating in my thesis very well: powersharing + war fatigue = ethnic reconciliation.  No discussion of mechanisms at all, although I didn’t really expect such in this type of public forum.

Recommended reading on ethnicity in Rwanda & Burundi?

September 29th, 2011 § 14 Comments

As mentioned in a previous post, I’m currently working on an MA thesis about post-conflict governance in Rwanda and Burundi.  Specifically, I’m interested in the ways in which popular ethnic reconciliation has occurred (or not occurred) in both countries.  There’s a decent amount of scholarly attention paid to Rwanda’s official denial of ethnicity and this policy’s detrimental effects upon popular reconciliation, but when discussion of Burundi occurs, it’s usually limited to the observation that consociationalism seems to have been efficacious in reducing ethnic tensions.  I haven’t found much research into the mechanisms by which Burundi’s reconciliation has occurred, which strikes me as a very interesting question. Since I can’t pop over to Burundi for fieldwork between now and December, I’m mostly planning to review the extant literature on this question and highlight areas for future research.

My current reading list is below; any additional suggestions or comments would be most welcome!  (I have more literature sitting unsorted on my hard drive, but this is what I successfully glanced through before my prospectus was due this week.)

Burundi

Rwanda

Rwanda & Burundi

Ethnicity

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