Militants, Criminals, and Warlords

The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder

Vanda Felbab-Brown, Harold Trinkunas, Shadi Hamid

• Editore: Brookings Institution Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780815731900
• Argomento: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoria: Geopolítica

Conventional political theory holds that the sovereign state is the legitimate source of order and provider of public services in any society, whether democratic or not. But Hezbollah and ISIS in the Middle East, pirate clans in Africa, criminal gangs in South America, and militias in Southeast Asia are examples of nonstate actors that control local territory and render public services that the nation-state cannot or will not provide.

This fascinating book takes the reader around the world to areas where national governance has broken down—or never really existed. In these places, the vacuum has been filled by local gangs, militias, and warlords, some with ideological or political agendas and others focused primarily on economic gain. Many of these actors have substantial popularity and support among local populations and have developed their own enduring institutions, often undermining the legitimacy of the national state.

The authors show that the rest of the world has more than a passing interest in these situations, in part because transborder crime and terrorism often emerge but also because failed states threaten international interests from trade to security. This book also poses, and offers answers for, the question: How should the international community respond to local orders dominated by armed nonstate actors? In many cases outsiders have taken the short-term route—accepting unsavory local actors out of expediency—but at the price of long-term instability or damage to human rights and other considerations.

From Africa and the Middle East to Asia and Latin America, the local situations highlighted in this book are, and will remain, high on today's international agenda. The book makes a unique contribution to global understanding of how those situations developed and what can be done about them.

This title is part of the Geopolitics in the 21st Century series.

CHAPTER ONE

Local Orders in an Age of International Disorder

WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF DISORDER. Yet the strife and wars that we witness every day are not primarily the product of international conflict, as might have traditionally been the case in previous centuries, but rather in large part the product of a breakdown in domestic institutions in a number of important states. Long-term institutional weaknesses persist in a large number of developing countries, and even well-developed countries contain functional gaps and holes in their governance structures. Around the globe the politics of identity, ideology, and religion further contribute to disorder by producing highly polarized societies and deepening conflicts among nonstate actors as well as between nonstate actors and the state.

In the Middle East, the Arab Spring disrupted long calcified political systems in ways that are still producing unpredictable effects not just on the regional order, but also on great power politics, and even on the future of the European project. The collapse of political order in Libya has had wide-ranging consequences for governance across the Sahel, exacerbating Mali and Nigeria’s fragility. Meanwhile, Russia’s annexation of Crimea was facilitated by a breakdown of political order in Ukraine, and Russia’s aggressive external posture partially reflects and compensates for its internal weaknesses. In a growing number of countries, including long-established democracies, fear of refugees and migrants—themselves the product of disorder—is contributing to the resurgence of populist nationalism. Even emerging powers such as India and Brazil face profound and persistent governance problems, including those posed by criminal organizations that take advantage of gaps in public safety and the rule of law.

Of course, the impact of national disorder on the international system is not a new phenomenon. The collapse of parliamentary democracy in Japan in the 1920s and the militarization of its domestic politics that followed sparked an extended conflict across Asia that did not end until well after 1945 with decolonization and the constitution of stable political systems in China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Vietnam. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 set off a string of insurgencies and military coups across Latin America in addition to provoking some of the most serious confrontations between the superpowers during the Cold War. A stable new order only emerged following the re-democratization of the region in the 1980s. Whether it is a product of contagion or the emergence of revanchist local actors with international ambitions, disorder within states has repeatedly affected the shape of regional orders and accelerated international conflict. In short, what happens within states matters for what happens outside of them.

Nevertheless, order emerges in the most unlikely of places, even in territory where the state is absent or in disarray. Political orders can and do form around actors that are not recognized as legitimate by the international community. Nonstate actors such as Hezbollah and the Islamic State (popularly known by its old acronym ISIS) have exercised governance functions across large swathes of territory in the Middle East. Pirate clans in Somalia and Nigeria, militia along the Myanmar-Thailand and Myanmar-China borders, and terrorist organizations in Somalia control territory, benefit from licit and illicit economies, and deliver governance—often in ways that provide extensive public goods, including human security—to local populations. Even within relatively well-ordered states such as Brazil and Argentina, certain marginalized areas and communities, such as favelas or villas miseria, are de facto governed by violent criminal organizations that participate in transnational illicit economies, often with the acquiescence or complicity of state actors.

To the extent that governance is increasingly delivered in large parts of the world by nonstate or substate actors—such as slum lords or mayors, warlords, or criminals turned businessmen—the international community will have to grapple more and more with a profound dilemma: How should it respond to local orders dominated by armed nonstate actors? Should it treat all such orders as a threat? Should it engage in direct relations with unsavory or violent (but sometimes relatively legitimate) governance providers in the hope of promoting peace and security? Or should it respond, as it has done so far with mixed results, by strengthening the capacity and building up the legitimacy of the nominal sovereign, the central state?

The state is what we know, and the state is the basic building block of the global order as we have known it. Yet many of these central—and often overly bureaucratized and bloated—states are exclusivist, repressive, and intolerant of local culture and identity. To strengthen their capacity may be necessary, but this may sometimes be at odds with the goal of building the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of its own people. Meanwhile, local orders in opposition to the state may be perceived as more legitimate, but they are sometimes led by militants, extremists, or even terrorists who aim for nothing less than destroying the foundations of the post–World War II international order.¹ This gap between local legitimacy and the desires and expectations of the international community—and the seemingly intractable tensions that result—are a recurring theme of this book.

WHY LOCAL ORDERS MATTER

Not all local orders are equally threatening to international order, even if they may not be particularly democratic or respectful of human rights. For example, state presence has always been light in two cases we consider in this book, rural Colombia and rural Afghanistan. Customary forms of governance—wealthy landowners in the former and tribal leaders in the latter—operated in its place. The state intervened rarely, if at all, but this did not automatically translate into a threat to international order. But when armed nonstate actors are able to successfully challenge state dominance, particularly when they become predatory toward civilian populations, they draw more focused attention from the international community. These actors, such as the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia [Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia]) and the Taliban in the cases of Colombia and Afghanistan respectively, illustrate two important threats to the international community and to international security. The first threat is spillover effects in the form of flows of refugees, flows of illicit goods, and trafficking in human beings. The second is that predatory nonstate actors operating in areas of limited statehood can prolong conflict and provoke the proliferation of competing armed groups, as well as contribute to the kinds of disorder that shelter terrorist organizations. There is also a humanitarian risk, which revolves around how to protect civilian populations where the state is not strong enough or interested enough. And even where local orders are dominated by armed groups that are not predatory, their central role in the provision of governance places these populations in an international law limbo, beyond the effective protection of the norms, treaties, and conventions designed to protect human and other rights (which are after all commitments made by states, not nonstate actors).

The emergence of local orders led by successful armed actors creates a dilemma for the international community. It must decide when, how, or even whether to intervene. In an international system premised on the norm of sovereign equality among states, intervention, even on humanitarian grounds to protect civilians in conflict areas, is often viewed as a threat by the target state and frequently as suspect by its neighbors. As this book shows, armed nonstate actors operate within a larger political, social, and economic context—and on occasion with the complicity of state actors. This means that the nominal state, even where it is weak or absent, is able to influence the effectiveness of international community assistance and intervention for both better and worse.

It also creates a dilemma for policymakers in intervening states, particularly those that possess enough capabilities to make a difference. They must balance the requirement, under prevailing international norms, of working through the de jure government of the sovereign state experiencing the emergence of a problematic local order, with pressures to act unilaterally against a perceived threat to their own national interest. Sometimes this dilemma can be resolved successfully, for example when the United States was able to partner with the Colombian government during the 2000s to support an improvement in its military effectiveness against the FARC insurgents, as we discuss in chapter 5. On the other hand, the United States spent vastly larger sums on building new domestic orders in Afghanistan and Iraq, but owing in part to corrupt, feckless, or actively hostile local elites in control of the central government, the outcomes proved deeply unsatisfactory to the United States and local populations alike. This led to continuous policy debates during the course of the Bush and Obama administrations on whether the United States should abandon efforts to improve governance in these countries and instead focus more narrowly on U.S. interests in counterterrorism, leaving the task of state building mostly to local elites, as we discuss in chapters 3 and 4. With that in mind, understanding where the resources and energy of the international community can be invested most successfully is a critical question for policymakers.

State Weakness and the Emergence of Armed Nonstate Actor Governance

The number of states around the world with effective sovereignty is quite limited. As noted international relations scholar Thomas Risse argues, areas of limited statehood are common, and the classic Westphalian state able to deliver governance across the full range of national territory is more rare than we might like to admit.² Taken to the extreme, the gaps in governance that emerge have given rise to failed or failing states. This became a particularly urgent concern after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when many U.S. policymakers shared the conviction that gaps in governance could provide shelter for terrorists.

But as political scientist Charles Call points out, the label of failed or failing states is much too broad to be useful, aggregating as it does states with very diverse characteristics.³ The “failed state” label applies to everything from states experiencing civil conflict to those thought to be excessively corrupt. It is also clear that across large parts of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the state—often with the tacit support of the upper or middle classes—fails to provide governance to the poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. Doing so would be costly in terms of blood and treasure and offers little material reward, so elites choose not to, preferring to look away (or worse). In short, the particular configuration of gaps in security, legitimacy, and capacity that such states experience produces a complex variety of governance deficits.⁴

It should be no surprise that weak states suffer from chronic elite disinterest, that elites are self-serving and often rapacious, and that politicians are unwilling to commit resources to marginalized urban areas or far-flung rural districts that are not necessarily politically important. To complain about endemic corruption in such cases is like complaining about the weather. It also still raises the question of why? Why do some states, whether in Latin America, Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq, fall short, despite the widespread intellectual realization that state building is and will always be critical, particularly in postconflict contexts? In studies of governance and state building, questions of the role of religion, ideology, and ideas in guiding or motivating the provision of governance are often treated as peripheral, if they are taken seriously at all. There will always be collective action problems, particularly as individual elites, bureaucrats, and politicians are consumed by competing agendas and short-term self-interest. Formal states, would-be states such as the Islamic State’s “caliphate,” and nonstate actors all struggle with setting priorities. Writing on the motivations that drew insurgents to act together in El Salvador during the 1970s and 1980s, Elisabeth Jean Wood captures this dynamic, arguing that “they took pride, indeed pleasure, in the successful assertion of their interests and identity, what I term here the pleasure of agency.”⁵ Ideology, in its various forms, can close the gap between intent and action.

When the state is weak or absent, it is frequently nonstate actors that step in to solve the collective action problem associated with governance, filling the vacuum and doing what states cannot or will not. In this book we define governance as the ability of actors to develop and enforce binding decisions upon others within the social and territorial context in which they operate. These decisions, which are usually but not always carried out by states, may range from providing order (resolving social conflict or establishing rule of law) to defining property rights to providing the conditions for improved socioeconomic welfare (deciding who has access to economic opportunity).⁶

Under some circumstances it would be reasonable to expect that state weakness would be compensated for by a civil society or private sector that stepped in to provide security, employment, and economic development. But more realistically, it is armed nonstate actors, such as al-Shabaab in Somalia or Hezbollah in Lebanon, that come to dominate through a mix of coercion, the provision of public goods and, as we just discussed, appeals to ideology, religion, or customary forms of governance to justify their rule. In deciding how to rule and how much coercion and public goods delivery to employ, they make strategic choices, interacting dynamically with other local actors. Their preferences, however, are influenced by group beliefs (such as ideology and religion) and the local contexts in which they operate. Sometimes the group’s choices produce legitimacy through the establishment of a coherent and orderly state within a state, as in southern Lebanon. Sometimes the provision of public goods is accompanied by predation on the local population, as is the case with the Islamic State. This predation can displace public goods provision altogether, as often occurred with Boko Haram in Nigeria. Equally, criminal actors have to make similar choices on the right “mix” of provision and predation. For example, in Mexico the Sinaloa cartel invested in social services and handouts while the Zetas chose to rule through brutality and intimidation alone. In short, the extent to which nonstate actors rule through coercion or choose to gain legitimacy by delivering order and services varies greatly.

Many militant groups may be coercive, even brutal, but they may nevertheless be perceived as legitimate by many in the populations under their control. Thus, brutality and legitimacy are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and organizations choose different configurations of coercive and noncoercive methods for establishing control.⁷ For armed nonstate actors, legitimizing their rule is an important shortcut to reducing the cost of maintaining control. Authority is viewed as legitimate when it conforms to social conventions and is perceived by the ruled as more just and fair than the available alternatives. People comply with authorities they view as legitimate more or less voluntarily, which reduces the authorities’ need to devote resources to control of the population and allows them to instead focus on other organizational goals.

Risky Business: International Responses to State Weakness and Nonstate Actor Threats

Governments and international organizations crafting responses to weak states and armed nonstate actors face complex choices with highly uncertain payoffs. The recent track record of the international community and particularly the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria would not fill most observers with enthusiasm. Even relatively successful efforts—in Cambodia, East Timor, and Kosovo—remain deeply problematic on the local level, even if the international impact of these conflicts has diminished. The risks for the international community of responding to these threats have been compounded by the fact that violent nonstate actors are embedded in a complex web of relationships and institutions: with the incumbent sovereign, international and domestic civil society, the private sector, and traditional or informal authority systems.

One set of risks facing policymakers and intervening forces is associated with the tyranny of time. As we examine in chapter 2, the legitimacy and resilience of alternative local orders depends on the expectations of local populations, particularly the perception that the rule of armed nonstate actors will endure for some significant time period. This militates against quick-fix solutions by outside actors. Policymakers must calibrate the amount of assistance required to make a difference in local governance against the length of time such a level of effort can be sustained—politically, economically, and militarily. The ultimate goal is to shift the expectations of all involved that armed nonstate actors will continue to play a central role in local governance. All involved will also...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Local Orders in an Age of International Disorder
• 2. Public Goods and Public Bads: Governance and Local Order
• 3. Second Wind: Taliban Coercion and Governance in Afghanistan
• 4. The Islamic State and the Problem of Governance
• 5. A Long War: Competing to Govern Colombia’s Local Orders
• 6. Men with Guns: Criminal Governance in Latin America
• 7. Local Orders Reconsidered
• Notes
• Index