State Failure in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Crisis of Post-Colonial Order

Catherine Scott

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786722102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

How should failed states in Africa be understood? Catherine Scott here critically engages with the concept of state failure and provides an historical reinterpretation. She shows that, although the concept emerged in the context of the post-Cold War new world order, the phenomenon has been attendant throughout (and even before) the development of the Westphalian state system. Contemporary failed states, however, differ from their historical counterparts in one fundamental respect: they fail within their existing borders and continue to be recognised as something that they are not. This peculiarity derives from international norms instituted in the era of decolonisation, which resulted in the inviolability of state borders and the supposed universality of statehood. Scott argues that contemporary failed states are, in fact, failed post-colonies. Thus understood, state failure is less the failure of existing states and more the failed rooting and institutionalisation of imported and reified models of Western statehood.
Drawing on insights from the histories of Uganda and Burundi, from pre-colonial polity formation to the present day, she explores why and how there have been failures to create effective and legitimate national states within the bounds of inherited colonial jurisdictions on much of the African continent.

CHAPTER 1

THE FAILINGS OF THE FAILED STATE ‘THESIS’

Introduction

The ‘failed state thesis’ is bedevilled by innumerable flaws. Even the very notion of a thesis is arguably a misnomer – if ‘thesis’ is taken to mean a coherent set of ideas or theory. The emergence of the term ‘state failure’ was not accompanied by an authoritative definition and conceptual opaqueness has continued to characterise and mar studies and identifications of state failures. The result has been a vast array of differing, often contradictory, definitions, resting on an equally vast array of contradictory indicators or symptoms – all defying a workable definition that has utility as a tool for analysis and for appropriate responses to state failures. This has inevitably led to the homogenisation of a wide variety of disparate crises under the single banner of state failure.

Moreover, the definitional criteria of state failure have been gradually expanded, notably after 9/11, in a self-prophesying way so that such designations both create threats and justify a response to them. Even before then, but especially since, the literature on state failure has tended to favour solutions over understanding – leaving something of an analytical vacuum. The overwhelming majority of studies focus on what to do about the real or perceived ‘problem’ of state failure and its local, regional and/or international manifestations, leading not only to an increasing securitisation of the term but also to the portrayal of failed states as miscreants on account of their nonconformity to accepted standards of political organisation. These normative implications of state failure, coupled particularly with the homogenisation of disparate crises under the state failure banner, have led some critics to suggest that the term should be abandoned, resulting in a burgeoning number of alternate (but often equally imprecise) descriptors for essentially the same phenomenon.

The present chapter considers these various failings of the failed state ‘thesis’ in turn. The first section outlines the evolution of how state failure has been defined in academic and policy discourse, along the way highlighting some of the problems inherent in those definitions; the second section discusses the relationship between state failure and state collapse; the third section evaluates the rhetoric associated with these terms, the ways in which they have been used for political ends and the normative implications therein; the fourth section discusses responses to state failure in relation to the issues raised in the previous section; the fifth section challenges calls for the abandonment of the term and considers the parallel discourses that have accompanied the failed state ‘thesis’; the final section concludes and offers some tentative thoughts on how we might begin to develop a more nuanced understanding of state failure.

An Elusive Concept

More than 20 years after the coining of the term, there remains no general agreement on what precisely constitutes a failed state nor on how many such entities exist (or have existed). Indeed, the number of failed states varies according to how one defines them: as Gros astutely observes, failed states are ‘equal opportunity entities’ and ‘depending on one's definition they can be found in any part of the world’.¹ Part of the problem is the inherent tautology present in state failure and the necessity of viewing it in negative conceptual terms, as Clapham remarks: ‘the failed state is one of those unsatisfactory categories that is named after what it isn't rather than what it is’.²

One is thus measuring ‘stateness’, or lack thereof, according to how one understands the state; and the state itself is ‘undeniably a messy concept’.³ The ‘main problem’, Mann argues, ‘is that most definitions of the state contain two different levels of analysis, the “institutional” and the “functional”’. In other words, ‘the state can be defined in terms of what it looks like, institutionally, or what it does, its functions’.⁴ This dichotomy, together with the further dichotomy of the compulsory or consensual nature of state power, underpins the two predominant understandings of the state.

The first understanding of the state rests on the largely institutional definition put forward by Weber, according to whom:

The primary formal characteristics of the state are as follows: it possesses an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation […] This system of order claims binding authority, not only over the members of the state, the citizens […] but also to a very large extent over all action taking place in the area of its jurisdiction. It is thus a compulsory organisation with a territorial basis. Furthermore, […] the use of force is regarded as legitimate only so far as it is permitted by the state or prescribed by it […] The claim of the modern state to monopolise the use of force is as essential to it as its character of compulsory jurisdiction and of continuous operation.⁵

Weber's definition thus comprises a centralised set of institutions, which have binding authority over a territorially demarcated area, backed up by a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force – and it is this last facet that is the ‘essence’ of Weber's state. Power in Weberian terms is a zero-sum game and individuals accept the authority of the state and its sole right to the use of force without question, thus making it a compulsory organisation.⁶

This is in contrast to the second understanding of the state which stems from social contract theory, whereby the state is empowered by the consent of the people. The social contract is a heuristic device, particularly associated with Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.⁷ The premise from which social contract theorists begin is the state of nature, the asocial or natural condition of mankind prior to or without political authority, of which Hobbes’ is the most harrowing and thus frequently cited to illustrate the situation in failed states:

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man […] In such condition, there is […] continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.⁸

In order to leave the state of nature, individuals form an allegiance to one another, creating a society, and thereafter transfer the enforcement of their agreed obligations to a sovereign. In so doing, individuals consent to give up their right of nature (self-preservation), the exercising of which makes the state of nature insecure, in pursuit of the primary law of nature (peace). Giving up this right is actually the best way of guaranteeing the same (i.e. lasting preservation), but is only rational so long as all individuals do likewise – there must therefore be a mutual transference of rights. On the other side of the coin, the sovereign must serve the interests of individuals (protection) in order to elicit their continued consent to the constraints imposed upon them.

Protection, from those within and without, is the fundamental role of the state in both the Weberian and social contractarian understandings. This is the only functional element in the otherwise institutional definition following Weber. Definitions following the social contract tradition, on the other hand, tend to be predominantly functional, paying less attention to the machinations of the state. It is these two levels of analysis that run through and are reflected in the various conceptions of state failure that have emerged over the last 20 years, providing (rarely systematically) the benchmark against which state failure is measured. As Williams has argued, the idea of ‘failure’ is usually invoked in two main senses, which he refers to as ‘the failure to control’ (the inability of state institutions to control actors and processes within a given territory) and ‘the failure to promote human flourishing’ (the lack of capacity or will to provide public goods to the entire population).⁹

In one of the most oft-quoted early definitions, Zartman holds that state failure ‘is a deeper phenomenon than mere rebellion, coup or riot. It refers to a situation where the structure, authority (legitimate power), law and political order have fallen apart and must be reconstituted in some form, old or new’. It means that ‘the basic functions of the state are no longer performed, as analysed in various theories of the state’. He continues that it is ‘not necessarily anarchy’ but that ‘for a period, the state itself, as a legitimate, functioning order, is gone’. In Zartman's analysis, state failure ‘involves the breakdown not only of the governmental superstructure but also that of the societal infrastructure’ and it is the ‘imbrication of the two components’ (state and society) that gives state failure its conceptual significance – ‘the degeneration of one necessarily entailing the debilitation of the other’. As the state implodes, ‘it saps the vital functions of society’ and the unique characteristic of state failure is that ‘the maimed pieces into which the contracting regime has cut society do not come back together’.¹⁰ Zartman's definition thus displays a meshing of the institutional and functional levels of analysis.

Other early definitions tended to home in on institutional definitions of the state. Boutros-Ghali, for example, defines state failure in the following terms: ‘the collapse of state institutions, especially the police and judiciary, with the resulting paralysis of governance, a breakdown of law and order, and general banditry and chaos’.¹¹ A similar position is taken by Yannis who defines state failure as ‘the implosion of effective central governmental authority […] a situation that signifies an extreme disruption of the political order of a state manifested by protracted violent conflict and fragmentation of authority in conjunction with a humanitarian disaster’.¹² Other definitions have employed the strict core of Weber's state. Ignatieff, for example, holds that all state failures share a single property: the state ‘no longer possesses a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence, thus no longer meeting the classic definition of the state that we associate with Max Weber’.¹³

All too often, though, Weberian understandings of state failure are conflated with civil war or civil violence more generically. For example, Bates concurs with Ignatieff that the loss of the monopoly over the means of coercion is a key characteristic of state failure and advises us to distinguish both revolution and civil war from state failure.¹⁴ He then proceeds to explain the latter through the former: noting a close correspondence of incidences of civil war and state failure in individual states, he justifies recourse to the data on civil war to study state failures. However, civil wars do not, as a matter of course, involve state failure – a challenge to the state is not necessarily the same as the state losing its monopoly of the legitimate means of violence.¹⁵ On the other side of the coin, state failures may occur with little or no violence. As Wallensteen reminds us, ‘for analytical as well as practical reasons’ it is important to separate state failure and civil war: ‘state failure can take place without civil war, and there can be civil war without state failure. […] It is possible that such a failure will lead to violence, but this does not necessarily mean civil war’.¹⁶ Similarly, Gros warns:

Periods of violence in some parts of a country by themselves do not point to state failure. The violence has to be of a (political) nature, intensity and scope that its purveyors present a real challenge to legitimate authority. In sum, violence is an insufficient indicator of state failure; likewise, its relative absence does not necessarily point to state success at maintaining internal order.¹⁷

Yet, insecurity is often seen as an indicator, if not the defining characteristic, of state failure and conflict-ridden states are frequently damned as failed states. There needs to be a clearer distinction between different types of conflict and violence, and those which are indicative of state failure and – on the contrary – those that are actually state-consolidating. At the same time, we need to be clear on whether violence associated with state failure is a consequence of or a contributor to that failure.¹⁸ In the final analysis, blurring Weberian understandings of state failure with conflict more widely conceived leads to an exponential increase in the number of identifiable failed states.

This congruence between conflict and state failure is evident in the position taken by the State Failure Task Force (SFTF) which, in their words, is ‘the most broadly conceived empirical effort […] to identify the correlates of political crises globally and across a long span of time’.¹⁹ To the collaborators of the project, state failure is merely ‘a new label for severe political crises’. They eschewed a narrower definition of state failure (taken to mean ‘instances in which central state authority collapses for several years’) for two reasons: firstly, fewer than 20 such episodes occurred globally since 1955 – too few for ‘meaningful statistical analysis’; and, secondly, events that fall beneath such a threshold often pose challenges to policy-makers. They thus ‘broadened the concept’ to include four distinct types of state failure events: revolutionary wars; ethnic wars; genocides and politicides; and adverse regime transitions.²⁰

These categories are defined by the SFTF in the following ways. Revolutionary wars are episodes of violent conflict between governments and politically organised challengers that seek to overthrow the central government, to replace its leaders or to seize power in one region. Ethnic wars are episodes of violent conflict in which national, ethnic, religious or other communal minorities challenge governments in order to bring about major changes in their status.²¹ Genocides and politicides involve sustained policies by governing elites or their agents that result in the death of a substantial portion of a communal or political group. Adverse regime changes are defined as adverse shifts in patterns of governance, including: major and abrupt shifts away from more open, electoral systems to more closed, authoritarian systems; revolutionary changes in political elites and the mode of governance; contested dissolution of federated states or secession of a substantial area of a state by extrajudicial means; or near-total collapse of central authority and the ability to govern.

This last (small) subcategory of adverse regime changes broadly corresponds to the narrower definitions of state failure outlined previously and is described by the SFTF in the following terms: ‘central authority may collapse, in whole or in part, due to some fatal combination of internal pressures, challenges, corruption, poverty, leadership failure, elite or capital flight, external influences, or other dynamics that erode or undermine institutions and authority structures’. A state is considered failed (and thus an adverse regime change) when the regime ‘lacks the strength of authority ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acronyms
• List of Maps
• Introduction Genealogies of State Failure
• 1. The Failings of the Failed State ‘Thesis’
• 2. The State and its Failure in Sub-Saharan Africa
• 3. Burundi: The Freezing of a Failed Kingdom
• 4. Uganda: A Foundational Failure and Post-Colonial Revival
• Concluding Reflections
• Notes
• Bibliography