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

• Jay Ufelder points out that the post makes it sound like these disputes are static, whilst they’re actually dynamic and interactive (with which I completely agree!).  He suggested reading Patrick Regan & Daniel Norton’s 2005 paper “Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization in Civil Wars” [PDF].*
• Daniel Solomon asks about what differentiates “violent protest” from rebellion, as he considers these similar categories, whilst Zach Warner does see them to be different.  In his opinion, rebellion aims at changing the social basis of political power, whilst violent protests represents dissatisfaction with the outcome of current political structures.
• Dan and Zach also point out that the empty boxes in the dispute matrix could be attributable to mixed strategies of repression, as dispute may provoke both military campaigns and violent repression of civilian voices.
• Rebecca Weissburg suggested checking out Nic Cheeseman‘s work, and Dan suggested Alex de Waal’s recent essay on ending mass atrocities.  Dan has used both Cheeseman & de Waal’s work in his own article on participatory violence and local peacebuilding in Kenya.

I’m totally with Jay on the interactive nature of political dispute, and I don’t think I made that point clearly enough in the last post.  I was thinking of the 3-by-3 matrix more as a set of outcomes on a decision tree than as a way to simply categorize different types of conflict.  Mostly I was wondering if this would be a useful way of thinking about A) why similar initial political conditions and grievances produce different types of disputes, as you move along a decision tree, and B) how disputes shift between categories as both civilian & government actors change their strategies.  Of course, as Dan and Zach correctly point out, the shortcoming of the decision tree model is that it doesn’t do well at capturing instances when many types of disputes are operating simultaneously – say, peaceful protests in a capital coupled with armed rebellion in an outlying district.

Dan is quite right to point out that I didn’t define the distinction between violent protest and armed rebellion clearly.  The distinction I generally had in mind was of peaceful/violent civilian protest -  that is to say, (semi-)organized civilian movements – as compared to the decision to form rebel militias and launch an armed rebellion.  Of course, actors with different grievances/motivations/capabilities within a given country could well engaged in different strategies simultaneously – and I’m starting to wonder how often the same actors actually transition from one type of protest to another.  Do protesting civilians often go off to create or join militias?  And conceptualizing “protest” as a civilian activity seems to imply that militaries can only ever engage in rebellion or coups when they’re politically dissatisfied, which isn’t true.  This is why I don’t think this framework holds up, in the end – there’s too much of a conceptual muddle about these different categories of dispute, and I don’t feel like I have enough information to clean it up.  But I’m glad the conversation happened!

*I’m including the PDF instead of a link to the journal article to facilitate access for readers who aren’t affiliated with universities and thus don’t have subscriptions to many journals.  I think this will be standard policy around here from now on.  Gated articles might be good for journals’ financial health, and that’s not a negligible consideration, but it’s definitely bad for intellectual debate.

Consider the ways in which citizens may express opposition to government policy.  This could run the spectrum from peaceful protest to violent rebellion on the civilian disputant side, and from active accommodation to a violent military campaign on the state side.  Naturally, such disputes are relational and contingent – the actions taken by either party provoke a reaction of some type by the other party, which itself will condition future actions by the first party.

I was thinking of this because most of the work I’ve seen on African politics in the 1990s seems to focus rather narrowly on either pro-democratic protest or civil war, without considering them as examples of political dispute on different ends of the same spectrum.  Some of this literature is discussed in my recent post on Robert Bates’ latest book.  As I noted in that post, the same combination of factors (economic stagnation + political unrest) led to fairly peaceful democratic change in some countries and civil war in others.

I’m not asking here about why some countries consolidated democracy and others reverted to authoritarianism or fell into conflict; the income hypothesis seems to predict democratic consolidation pretty well.  And I’m not asking about why some countries had civil wars at all and others didn’t; there’s a lot of work out there on the structural determinants of civil war, notably Collier & Hoeffler.  But I do think it’s interesting that, facing similar sets of political disputes around the same time (the 1980s and early 1990s), some countries followed contingent paths that led to relatively peaceful political change, whilst others drifted towards the use of violence.

As a first take at an organizing structure for this thought, here’s a graph representing the spectrum of citizen & government positions during a political dispute.  (Click to enlarge it.)  It clearly still needs some work.  Does anyone find this useful?  Am I just replicating someone else’s work without knowing it?  (It looks like Regina Bateson at Yale has a working paper addressing a similar topic, and there’s definitely Rebel Rulers, but I haven’t seen much else about the relational, contingent nature of political conflict.)  Would love to hear your thoughts, oh readers!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That said, I definitely thought the most interesting article I came across was Simon Turner’s “Corruption Narratives and the Power of Concealment: The Case of Burundi’s Civil War.”  It’s a chapter in a book called Corruption and the Secret of Law, and focuses on the way in which discussions of corruption reflect broader concerns about the Burundian political cosmology.  More concretely, allegations of corruption are often used to convey the sense that an unworthy person has gained political power through secretive and illicit transactions – even if there’s no evidence of actual corruption.  Viewed in this way, corruption can be seen as analogous to witchcraft, which also grants “illegitimate” and “immoral” types of power to its practitioners. More troubling is the perception that power built on the tenuous base of corruption or witchcraft can easily crumble when its illegitimacy is brought to light, perhaps leading again to conflict.  There’s also a profound symmetry here with Peter Uvin’s assessment that Burundians tend to view politics in terms of people, and not of institutions.  When he asked ordinary Burundians about the changes they’d like to see in the country’s political life, almost all of them expressed a desire for more upright and moral people in office, rather than, say, better enforcement of anti-corruption laws.  (This and any number of other fascinating observations can be found in Life After Violence.)

In other words, one could conceivably argue that corruption may have differential effects on Burundian political stability at the national and popular levels of analysis.  Lemarchand writes in Dynamics of Violence that “the [Burundian] government is not meant to govern; its purpose is to offer an attractive alternative to rebellion” by institutionalizing interethnic access to state resources.  Given that up to 20% of the country’s GDP was lost to embezzlement in 2006, corruption presumably plays a large role in the distribution of state resources across ethnic lines (source, PDF).  However, at the popular level, the perception of official corruption does seem to lower the legitimacy of political actors, but for moral reasons rather reasons of illegality or breach of the social contract.