State Failure in Subsaharan Africa: The Crisis of Post-Colonial Order 9781784539658, 9781350988224, 9781786732101

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acronyms
List of Maps
Introduction: Genealogies of State Failure
A New World in the Mourning
Bringing History Back In
Analytically Inducting State Failure(s) in Africa
1. The Failings of the Failed State 'Thesis'
Introduction
An Elusive Concept
Failure and Collapse: Siblings or Synonyms
What's in a Name?
Square Pegs into Round Holes
Whither the Failed State?
Conclusion
2. The State and its Failure in Sub-Saharan Africa
Introduction
The Weak Basis of Quasi-Statehood
Cold War Adventurism and its End
Sins of Omission and Commission
The Violent Creation of (a New) Order
Conclusion
3. Burundi: The Freezing of a Failed Kingdom
Introduction
Tales of the Barundi and their Kingdom
The Scramble for the 'Sick Man' of Africa
Belgian Gerrymandering and the Fight for the Burundi State
The Anti-Revolutionist State
The Shadow of Genocide
A New Burundi or the Shadow Recast
Conclusion
4. Uganda: A Foundational Failure and Post-Colonial Revival
Introduction
From Buganda to Uganda
Colonial Contradictions and the (Non-)Making of Uganda 1
The Unravelling of the Post-Colony
The Post-Colony Brutalised
'It Was Better Under Amin'
'Fundamental Change' or 'No Change'
Conclusion
Concluding Reflections
Myths of State Failure
Histories of State Failure
New Beginnings and Alternative Futures
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Catherine Scott is a teaching fellow in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. She is Managing Editor of the journal Conflict, Security & Development and holds a PhD in International Politics and Security from King’s College London.

‘Catherine Scott has produced a subtle and sophisticated critique of the failed state thesis and its application in Africa. She substantiates her forensic interrogation of the ideas, arguments and assumptions that now form the mainstay of this concept in the contexts of Burundi and Uganda, painstakingly charting each country’s political development through European colonisation to the present day. She has much of importance to say, therefore, to scholars and students with interests in the state of the state in Africa and the political evolution of these countries. Her book deserves wide and careful reading.’ J.N.C. Hill, Reader in Postcolonialism and the Maghreb, King’s College London ‘Why do states fail – particularly, why do African states “fail”? Catherine Scott takes to task the casual diagnosis of Western commentators, and interrogates and problematises their assumptions in a superb work of investigative history and sympathetic analysis.’ Stephen Chan OBE, SOAS University of London ‘Catherine Scott’s study of state failure is a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on this topic. It combines impressive theoretical insight with a fine empirical analysis from two well-researched case studies. The result offers a significant challenge to conventional wisdom. It will provide a valuable source of intellectual stimulus for scholars and lay readers alike.’ J.E. Spence OBE FKC, King’s College London ‘At a time when it is too often – if incongruously – assumed both that Western states provide the model that all others should emulate and that state failure is a peculiarly modern phenomenon, this book provides an important corrective. In a compelling analysis of several African cases, the author reveals the importance of taking the historical context seriously and the dangers of a “one size fits all” approach to the political problems of contemporary international society.’ Professor James Mayall, Emeritus Fellow in International Relations, University of Cambridge

STATE FAILURE IN SUBSAHARAN AFRICA The Crisis of Post-Colonial Order

CATHERINE SCOTT

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2017 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Catherine Scott, 2017 Catherine Scott has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record of this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3965-8 PB: 978-0-7556-0108-0 ePDF: 978-1-7867-3210-1 eBook: 978-1-7845-3965-8 International Library of African Studies 55 Typeset in Garamond Three by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Reg and Annie In Memoriam

CONTENTS

Acronyms List of Maps

ix xiii

Introduction Genealogies of State Failure A New World in the Mourning Bringing History Back In Analytically Inducting State Failure(s) in Africa

1 1 8 22

1.

The Failings of the Failed State ‘Thesis’ Introduction An Elusive Concept Failure and Collapse: Siblings or Synonyms What’s in a Name? Square Pegs into Round Holes Whither the Failed State? Conclusion

27 27 28 38 44 52 59 62

2.

The State and its Failure in Sub-Saharan Africa Introduction The Weak Basis of Quasi-Statehood Cold War Adventurism and its End Sins of Omission and Commission The Violent Creation of (a New) Order Conclusion

67 67 68 78 90 100 105

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3.

Burundi: The Freezing of a Failed Kingdom Introduction Tales of the Barundi and their Kingdom The Scramble for the ‘Sick Man’ of Africa Belgian Gerrymandering and the Fight for the Burundi State The Anti-Revolutionist State The Shadow of Genocide A New Burundi or the Shadow Recast Conclusion

109 109 110 114 120 125 131 138 149

4.

Uganda: A Foundational Failure and Post-Colonial Revival Introduction From Buganda to Uganda Colonial Contradictions and the (Non-)Making of Uganda The Unravelling of the Post-Colony The Post-Colony Brutalised ‘It Was Better Under Amin’ ‘Fundamental Change’ or ‘No Change’ Conclusion

153 153 154 163 167 171 177 181 188

Concluding Reflections Myths of State Failure Histories of State Failure New Beginnings and Alternative Futures

191 191 194 202

Notes Bibliography Index

205 277 297

ACRONYMS

AMIB

African Union Mission in Burundi

BEA

British East Africa

BINUB

United Nations Integrated Office in Burundi

BNUB

United Nations Office in Burundi

CMS

Church Missionary Society

DDR

disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration

DfID

Department for International Development

DRC

Democratic Republic of the Congo

EU

European Union

FSI

Failed/Fragile States Index

HIPC

heavily indebted poor country

IBEAC

Imperial British East Africa Company

ICC

International Criminal Court

IMF

International Monetary Fund

KAR

King’s African Rifles

LICUS

low-income countries under stress

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

NGO

non-governmental organisation

OAU

Organisation of African Unity

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STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

OECD

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

ONUB

United Nations Operation in Burundi

PARMEHUTU Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement RPF

Rwandan Patriotic Front

SAPs

structural adjustment programmes

SAPSD

South Africa Protection Support Detachment

SF/PITF

State Failure/Political Instability Task Force

SPLA

Sudan People’s Liberation Army

UK

United Kingdom

UN

United Nations

US

United States (of America)

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Burundi ADC

Alliance of Democrats for Change in Burundi

CMSN

Military Committee for National Salvation

CNDD

National Council for the Defence of Democracy

CNDD-FDD

National Council for the Defence of Democracy Front for the Defence of Democracy

FAP

People’s Armed Forces

FDN

National Defence Force

FNL

National Liberation Force

FRODEBU

Burundi Democratic Front

FROLINA

Front for Democracy

GCA

Global Ceasefire Agreement

JRR

Jeunesses Re´volutionaires Rwagasore

MRC

Movement for the Rehabilitation of the Citizen

ACRONYMS

NRC

National Revolutionary Council

PALIPEHUTU Party for the Liberation of the Hutu People PARENA

Party for National Recovery

PDC

Christian Democratic Party

PP

People’s Party

RPB

Burundian People’s Rally

UPD

United for Peace and Development

UPRONA

Party of National Unity and Progress

Uganda ADF

Allied Democratic Forces

CP

Conservative Party

DP

Democratic Party

FEDEMU

Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda

FUNA

Former Uganda National Army

HSMF

Holy Spirit Mobile Forces

KY

Kabaka Yekka

LC

Local Council

LRA

Lord’s Resistance Army

NCC

National Consultative Council

NRA

National Resistance Army

NRC

National Resistance Council

NRM

National Resistance Movement

PSU

Public Safety Unit

RC

Resistance Council

SRB

State Research Bureau

UFA

Uganda Freedom Army

xi

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STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

UNLA/F

Uganda National Liberation Army/Front

UNRF

Uganda National Rescue Front

UPA

Uganda People’s Army

UPC

Ugandan People’s Congress

UPDA

Ugandan People’s Democratic Army

UPDF

Uganda People’s Defence Forces

UPM

Uganda People’s Movement

WNBF

West Nile Bank Front

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1 States of Contemporary Africa

66

Map 2 Burundi

108

Map 3 Kingdoms and Districts of Uganda at Independence

152

INTRODUCTION GENEALOGIES OF STATE FAILURE

A New World in the Mourning State failure, as a concept, was born out of the end of the Cold War and came as an adjunct to the myriad literature on the end of history and emergent new world order. The fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama proclaimed, heralded the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.1 To President Bush Senior and his adherents, it was the dawning of a ‘new world order’, signalled by the drawing together of nations to quell the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In many respects, the new order was simply the old order working, freed from the paralysis and obscuration of East– West rivalry. Certainly, one could hear echoes of Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, and even Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points, in George Bush Senior’s rhetoric of a new world order. So, as one proponent of this view argued, ‘[t]he world order created in the 1940s is still with us, and in many ways stronger than ever [. . .] The end of the Cold War was less the end of a world order than the collapse of the Communist world into an expanding Western order’.2 The only thing that was perhaps ‘new’ was the global reach and inclusiveness of the range of multilateral institutions and agreements that characterise the liberal democratic order and the increasing interconnectedness of and reciprocity between parties to them. To others, however, the integration of the post-Communist states into the Western liberal fold paled in comparison to the concomitant upsurge in nationalist conflicts in the former Eastern bloc and elsewhere.

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STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

The straitjacket of the Cold War appeared to have imposed a period of unparalleled, albeit uncomfortable, stability and its removal had led to a new world disorder rather than any kind of order (old or new). Neither was the increasing interdependence of the post-Cold War world an unequivocal force for good. As one critic argued, the sense of a global political identity remained feeble and rather than one ‘global village’ there were instead ‘villages around the globe more aware of each other’ and, as borders became increasingly permeable, there would be contention between the forces of transnationalism and nationalism (likely their malign sides).3 It seemed as if it was the Cold War itself rather than its culmination that had brought about the end of history.4 Fukuyama, in fact, trod more carefully than his early critics often gave him credit for and nuanced his bold claim of the end of history with certain caveats: the victory of liberalism had occurred primarily in the world of ideas and was, as yet, incomplete in the real or material world; much of the Third World remained mired in history; and nationalist conflicts would continue in the post-historical world but would remain localised.5 Old or new, there was little doubt that the international order was fundamentally changing – and failed states were an unexpected part of that (dis)order. Although the origins of the term are unclear, it was popularised by then United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and United States (US) Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright. It first appeared in academic discourse in the seminal article by Helman and Ratner published in Foreign Policy in the Spring of 1993. Their article opened with the following: From Haiti in the Western hemisphere to the remnants of Yugoslavia in Europe, from Somalia, Sudan and Liberia in Africa to Cambodia in Southeast Asia, a disturbing new phenomenon is emerging: the failed nation-state, utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community.6 A controversial article published in The Atlantic Monthly the following year roused popular attention to the notion of state failure – or what the author called ‘The Coming Anarchy’.7 Supplementing his own travel experiences with the findings of three other influential works on the shape of things to come,8 Kaplan warned his readers that the

INTRODUCTION

3

‘immense change’ the ‘political earth’ had undergone since 1989 was ‘minor compared with what is yet to come’. He forecast an ‘epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shantystates, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms’. In this stateless world of moving centres, the ‘future map – in a sense, the “last map” – will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos’.9 Owing to the hyperbolic alarmism in his predictions, Kaplan’s words were given little credence at the time but his neo-mediaeval inferences did strike a chord with sceptics and fed into a burgeoning literature on state failure, which seemingly made a mockery of any kind of order – new or old.10 In many respects, the emergence of the concept of state failure reflected the disappointment of Western ideologues that the fall of the Iron Curtain did not, in fact, lead to a global liberal democracy or globally to the development of liberal democracies. States neither able to enter into or abide by a range of international treaties and institutions nor cope with the impacts of globalisation (the scale of which accelerated in the aftermath of the Cold War) compromised the new order. Contrary to those who thought that the interdependence of states (brought about by the ascendency of transnational activity at sub-, supra- and non-state levels) was marginalising the state through the constraints imposed on (or accepted by) it in certain realms, failed states (conceivably the sine qua non of the withering of the state system) actually reinforced the continued relevance of the state. As Wolf has argued, globalisation is not the ‘nemesis of national government’ and ‘the proposition that globalisation makes states unnecessary is even less credible than the idea that it makes states impotent’ – rather, ‘international governance rests on the ability of individual states to provide and guarantee stability’ and ‘for people to be successful in exploiting the opportunities afforded by international integration, they need states at both ends of their transactions’.11 In short, as Woodward claims, ‘the consequences of their failure reveal clearly how crucial states remain. Globalisation requires states that function’.12 The previous trend of economic liberalisation which aimed at downsizing or rolling back the state had already started to take an aboutturn since the heyday of the Washington Consensus. Attention had begun to shift towards ‘bringing the state back in’ and this was hurried along – in practice as well as in theory – in the early 1990s.13 In an

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STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

increasingly interdependent world the preservation and consolidation of the state through the negation of the effects of failing states was seen as paramount not just for the functioning of the global marketplace and the promotion of development and social justice but for international peace and security. In this way, the new (old) world order went further than the post-1945 order for it brought about a sea change in how sovereignty – the hitherto bulwark of international order – was understood. This position was outlined by Boutros-Ghali in his groundbreaking report ‘An Agenda for Peace’ in 1992. While reaffirming that respect for the ‘fundamental sovereignty and integrity’ of the state ‘are crucial to any common international progress’, he argued that ‘[t]he time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty has passed’ and called on leaders of states today to ‘find a balance between good internal governance and the requirements of an ever more interdependent world’.14 Interpretations of what constituted a threat to international peace and security were significantly altered, becoming ‘elastic and applicable in a wide variety of circumstances, all of which challenged traditional views of sovereignty’.15 This new elasticity was reflected in a 1992 Security Council declaration: ‘The absence of war and military conflict amongst states does not itself ensure international peace and security. The non-military sources of instability in the economic, social, humanitarian and ecological fields have become threats to peace and security’.16 As a result, Chapter VII – rendered unusable in the delicate equilibrium of the Cold War – was invoked not in response to acts of external military aggression but for internal humanitarian reasons (for the protection of people rather than a state), and crucially its new use breached the formerly sacrosanct principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of states, as articulated in Article 2(7).17 In addition, various other principles of traditional peacekeeping became increasingly difficult to uphold in the new conflict environments,18 as mandates expanded along with delineations of Chapter VII situations. Peacekeeping often morphed into peace enforcement or peace-building and interventions came to include far more than ‘peace’ as the domestic configuration of states became associated with international security. In short, the restrained society of states based on equality and nonintervention gave way to a new liberal internationalism, affording international actors increasingly permissive rights of intervention principally for human rather than state security.

INTRODUCTION

5

Optimism about the UN’s re-found capabilities was, however, irrevocably dashed by the international community’s first encounter with a failed state in Somalia. The ‘mission creep’ there (from humanitarian relief to state-building) and the proverbial ‘crossing of the Mogadishu Line’ (where the use of force by peacekeepers made them party to the conflict) resulted in the largest death toll of US troops on foreign soil since Vietnam. The incident precipitated a new isolationism in the US, resulting in a reluctance to extend the UN mandate in Rwanda – the consequences of which led to accusations that the UN had been a bystander to genocide. The UN’s far-from-glowing record in the former Yugoslavia added further ammunition to these damning criticisms, raising the question of whether it had already outlived its usefulness.19 In early 1995, ‘chastened’ by the failures of these interventions, Boutros-Ghali ‘issued a conservative supplement to his more optimistic 1992 Agenda for Peace’,20 in which he noted that a ‘new breed of intra-state conflicts have certain characteristics that present United Nations peace-keepers with challenges not encountered since the Congo operation of the early 1960s’.21 In responding to this new breed of conflicts, ‘international intervention must extend beyond military and humanitarian tasks and must include the promotion of national reconciliation and the re-establishment of effective government’.22 The global trend in peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention had thus changed irreversibly by the mid-1990s and the new world order, the ‘promise of 1945 fulfilled’, had turned out to be ‘a chimera’.23 It seemed, as Hoffmann suggested, that the ‘spread of chaos in the state system might lead to a two-tier international milieu, produced by the dialectic of globalisation and fragmentation’ and that ‘the opportunities for successful mastery of chaos by the society of states will be few’.24 The humanitarian agenda of the early 1990s, chastised as turning ‘foreign policy into a branch of social work’,25 was swiftly eclipsed by more traditional pragmatism based on national interest and attention was deflected from injustices in peripheral states in the face of wider geopolitical concerns. State failure remained a sad humanitarian tragedy in far-off corners, although calls on the consciences of Western policy-makers and human rights activists continued as did murmurings about regional destabilisation. The need for good governance and effective statehood in an increasingly globalised world were also

6

STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

periodically reasserted. For example, prior to the Millennium Summit, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote: ‘At the national level we must govern better, and at the international level we must learn to govern better together. Effective states are essential for both tasks, and their capacity for both needs strengthening’.26 Failed and failing states, however, as Ignatieff argues, fell into an ‘optional’ category and ‘turned out to be less a focus for intervention’ than regimes which ‘simultaneously damage their own population and antagonize the vital interests of Washington and London’.27 Following the attack on the Twin Towers, however, failed states were readily associated with transnational terrorism and, owing to the new strategic significance bestowed upon them, remedying ‘the problem’ of such states became a critical component of homeland security agendas rather than any sort of ‘option’. The new world order sceptics were thus vindicated as, on the heels of the Cold War, the so-called ‘Long War’ began. This was accompanied by recourse to an impending ‘clash of civilisations’ along Huntington’s central axis (the West and the rest) and his vilification for having created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kaplan’s ‘last map’ similarly gained new resonance amidst a neo-mediaevalist revival and growing concern about so-called ‘ungoverned spaces’.28 We now faced ‘a combination of disorder similar to that of the Middle Ages, with modern technologies that allow the dangers to spread and even mutate in complex and unpredictable ways’.29 This intensifying juxtaposition of challenges to state authority from within and without had occasioned what one author termed a ‘durable disorder’, in which the international system ‘stumbles along with problems managed and contained rather than solved’30 – a depiction all too reminiscent of the Cold War ‘containment order’. And history, in case there was any doubt, had certainly not ended. The response to this turn of events in global politics was once again to prop up the state (and create liberal democratic ones) but with even more vigour. The interventionist trend that had begun in the aftermath of the Cold War gathered pace, precipitating a kind of benevolent imperialism. As presaged in Boutros-Ghali’s ‘Supplement to an Agenda for Peace’ (and reiterated by Kofi Annan), emphasis shifted from what Bernard Kouchner had termed the droit d’inge´rence (a ‘right to intervene’ for humanitarian reasons) in the early 1990s to a

INTRODUCTION

7

‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) in the early 2000s – gaining endorsement in a doctrine of that name.31 Just as peacekeeping had morphed into peace enforcement in the 1990s, state-building was soon morphing into regime change – and self-defence, seldom deemed necessary in the post-Cold War period thus far, re-emerged as a principal legitimation for international intervention. In the process, and especially on account of the perceived link between failed states and transnational terrorism, the ‘empirical line’ between intervention for the sake of others and intervention in self-defence began ‘to blur’.32 The structure or architecture of international politics had perhaps not changed quite so fundamentally after 9/11 as in the post-Cold War period but perceptions (even if based on erroneous foundations) had and so too, therefore, had behaviour and process in international relations.33 As far as failed states were concerned, everything had changed, and even to the casual observer there could be no mistaking that the phenomenon was fast becoming ‘the single-most important problem of international order’.34 In the decade after 9/11, state failures proliferated – or so it seemed from the ink spilled on the subject and the interventions called for in their name. However, although there appeared to have been an exponential increase in incidences of state failure, this was, in large part, because the scope of the phenomenon had been expanded (and securitised) to the point that it was analytically ambiguous, if not defunct. State failures were retrospectively recognised and other crises re-clothed in their guise but there was (and arguably is) no consensus on what precisely constitutes a failed state and the term continues to be used to denote a wide variety of disparate crises. Moreover, the term is a loaded one, in that it implies an ethical judgement and incorporates a call to action. Recognition of conceptual flaws of this ilk (which are discussed in detail in the next chapter) prompted an emergent critique of what had become known as the ‘failed state thesis’ and calls for the abandonment of the term altogether. But perhaps the real task at hand is to begin a dialogue that will bring greater understanding to the processes, conditions and trajectories that lead to state failure and, in so doing, move toward a more meaningful conceptualisation of the phenomenon. In short, that is what this book is about.

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Bringing History Back In The reaction to the emergent new world disorder of the post-Cold War and post-9/11 eras has been to uncritically ‘reassert the primacy of statehood’ at the levels of both ‘diplomatic practice and intellectual analysis’.35 However, while the state has been ‘brought back in’ – a trend that has gained ground in the failed state ‘thesis’36 – its history has been largely left behind,37 placing limitations on reaching a meaningful understanding of state failure. The failed state, as Gros reminds us, ‘has a much longer secular and complex history than what is normally construed in the literature’ and should most appropriately be analysed through a longue dure´e approach.38 With that in mind, this book is premised on three important and interrelated observations: firstly, state failure is not new and incidences long predate the coining of the term in the early 1990s; secondly, the state system is of recent origin and has always been a work in progress; and thirdly, contemporary failed states are in fact, and more precisely, failed post-colonies. These three observations, where acknowledged in studies of state failure, are seldom linked together to appropriately situate state failure in the wider perspective of the evolution of the international society of states. The present section attempts to do this. States have come to be ‘accepted as “normal” in a very basic sense’ and ‘[n]ormatively, once states had come into existence they were expected to last’.39 Such expectations owed much to the ‘extraordinary stability’ of most states during the Cold War era but the world has since begun ‘to return to the status quo ante, where a certain amount of state failure was normal and, to some degree, predictable’.40 Indeed, a cursory reading of history offers up no dearth of failed states, from the ancient city states of Greece, Sumer and Maya to the mediaeval states of Burgundy, Bohemia and Aragon to the empire states of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State failure is thus not an exception to the norm but part and parcel of state formation, where old orders die and new orders emerge. In this sense, preventing and resuscitating failed states might be a futile exercise and organic states will evolve in time with a better fit between political and social structures than what went before. Accordingly, as Doornbos remarks, ‘statelessness’ – the situation that may follow state failure for longer or shorter periods of time –

INTRODUCTION

9

‘represents a conceptual category that may deserve a good deal more attention than it is normally accorded’ and should not necessarily be perceived as problematic but may allow for a reappraisal of alternative structures and futures.41 In other words, state failure is likely to ‘inaugurate fresh or renewed processes of state formation’.42 However, as he continues, there exists a ‘sense of unease at the sight of blank spaces emerging on the world’s maps’ and the post-1945 idea of all global territory divided into states represents a ‘new, prescriptive normalcy’.43 At the same time, the prescribed normalcy of states has resulted in a system replete with inherent perversions and contradictions. Sovereignty is often side-lined as the UN or other agencies effectively become custodians of a state (Cambodia, East Timor), while that same de jure recognition is denied de facto states (Somaliland, Kosovo) and other claimants are refused statehood (the Basques, Palestine). Even where the right to statehood is not in question, the system is hardly rational or egalitarian, and numerous anomalies exist. Consider, for example, that large and powerful states such as China, France or Australia have the same status as the Republic of San Marino (perhaps Europe’s oldest state, dating to the fourth century) and the principality of Monaco (the smallest sovereign state apart from the Vatican – which itself is perhaps the strangest anomaly). Further, if colonialism is abhorrent how do we explain the British Virgin Islands (Crown colony) or Guam (an American dependency) and why is Andorra, for example, independent and Anguilla still a dependency, albeit self-governing. In all likelihood, as ¨ sterud points out, ‘the state system can never [. . .] be “completed” in O any meaningful way’.44 More fundamentally, although the state system has dominated modern history, the state itself should not necessarily be perceived as the inevitable endpoint or zenith of sociopolitical organisation, nor have states ever been exclusive, ubiquitous or static elements of international order.45 Thus, as Brooks suggests, ‘there is every reason to consider the apparent permanence and ubiquity of the nation-state to be a mirage [. . .] viewed historically the state (and particularly the nation-state) is a transient and contingent form of social organisation’ – and, as she further astutely observes, ‘the modern state system has not lasted even as long as the Roman Empire’.46 Indeed, while the origins of the modern state system may date back to the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648, it only

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reached any sort of maturity with the end of World War I. Its universality came even later, beginning after World War II, and remains contested.47 The following pages elaborate on this evolution and the place of state failures (old and new) within it. There is, in fact, no agreement on the origins and evolution of the system of constitutionally sovereign states, other than that it did not necessarily evolve in a historically synchronised way.48 However, the orthodox view is that the modern state arose out of a particular set of circumstances in sixteenth-century Europe and was codified at Westphalia with the collapse of papal authority over domestic sovereignty.49 States, as already indicated, have a long pre-history in Europe and elsewhere (as do their failures).What was significant about Westphalia was that it inaugurated a secular system of states based on mutual recognition between sovereigns, ‘for the first time providing a general and formal principle of law to govern relations between states and taking sovereignty into the international sphere, giving it an external character [. . .] in addition to its previous internal qualities’.50 The corollary to mutual recognition of states was, of course, the nonrecognition of other entities that were not deemed to possess the required preconditions for participation in the nascent system. These preconditions were set in Europe and broadly conceived in terms of effective and civil government. From the outset, therefore, a dual system developed, composed of a core of European states (the family of nations) and ‘an external arena where different rules of order prevailed’.51 This was reflected in early international law, as pioneered by Grotius in the seventeenth century, which defined the state system as an inner circle – the corpus of Christendom, bound by the law of Christ – in contradistinction to an outer circle – embracing all mankind under natural law. Until the nineteenth century, relations between the two circles were, in Jackson’s words, ‘pragmatic politically, uncertain morally, and untidy legally’ but they were nevertheless non-discriminatory in terms of race, creed or civilisation. Encounters between European emissaries and nonEuropean rulers principally concerned trade (and regulating rivalries in Europe) and were ‘conducted on a basis of rough equality’ and ‘expressed a fair measure of toleration’, not yet disclosing an international regime under common rules – the two circles were ‘simply different’.52

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The reciprocity and diversity which characterised the old regime gave way to a more uniform and hegemonic dual system with the development of positive international law and selective formal sovereign equality after the Congress of Vienna. The new positivist doctrine ‘expressed a presumption of superiority based not simply on ethnocentrism but also on demonstrated achievements of Europeans’ and accordingly postulated certain criteria before international personality could be recognised.53 Thus, during the nineteenth century a ‘standard of civilisation’ (rather than the mere civility required by natural law) came to be equated with effective statehood,54 which served both as a measure of determining eligibility for recognition and as a means of protecting Europeans in non-recognised countries. Whereas, in the past, foreign merchants had been exempted from local jurisdiction as a matter of courtesy, under the new regime it became an obligation and resulted in the imposition of extraterritoriality, enforced through capitulation treaties, where the standard of civilisation was deemed lacking.55 Recognition by the European family of nations was the sole means by which an entity could claim or exercise any rights and duties in international law – ‘a sort of juristic baptism’ – and entities which might otherwise be regarded as states remained in a legal vacuum, as objects rather than subjects of international law,56 until granted entitlement to participate in the now indubitably Eurocentric system. The Hague Conferences are generally considered to mark the formal extension of the club of sovereign states beyond Europe.57 While only European states were present at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, by the 1899 Hague Conference, the USA, Mexico, China, Japan, Persia, Siam and Turkey had been baptised as full or partial members of the club and they were accompanied by the South American states at the 1907 Hague Conference. There were also more anomalous entrants, such as Haiti, Liberia, Ethiopia and the Congo Free State, which ‘bore virtually no resemblance to the historic states of Western Europe’ and which set ‘precedents [. . .] that were at variance with current rules and practices of positive sovereignty’.58 In short, the criterion of effectiveness by which states were recognised remained ill-defined and largely based on ‘prescription and customary inclusion right up until the early twentieth century’.59 Relatedly, the number of states within the system, together with the territorial and political boundaries of those states, constantly shifted.

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The classical international system of Europe was ‘both a system of countervailing power and of developing statehood’ and ‘only effectively organised states [. . .] could survive in this system’.60 Indeed, the numbers speak for themselves: in 1648 there were over 200 states in Europe but by 1900 there were less than 50. Thus, as Tilly notes, the ‘enormous majority’ of states failed during the critical period of European state formation and: The substantial majority of the units which got so far as to acquire a recognisable existence as states during those centuries [1500– 1900] still disappeared. And of the handful which survived or emerged into the nineteenth century as autonomous states, only a few operated effectively – regardless of what criterion we employ. [. . .] The disproportionate distribution of success and failure puts us in the unpleasant situation of dealing with an experience in which most of the cases are negative, while only the positive cases are well-documented.61 Further, even those states that survived frequently changed their makeup, as Herbst explains: During the critical period of state formation (and disintegration) in Europe, there were both centrifugal and centripetal forces at work in terms of state design: states would fail and sometimes the subsequent unit would be larger (if a neighbour could take over) and sometimes a unit [. . .] would implode and its constituent parts would attempt to rule themselves.62 The consolidation of European states and the state system thus developed in tandem with the failure of other states – through conquest, annexation, accretion or cession – and the expansion of successful states, not just at the expense of their neighbours but also overseas. Indeed, it was largely dependent on the latter: European expansion overseas was an ‘expression of realpolitik’ and, simply put by Gros, ‘an attempt at avoiding state failure at home’.63 Moreover, it formalised and simplified the emergent hierarchical relationship between the European family of nations (and their offspring) and entities not so recognised in a new form of international dualism, which consisted of a ‘superior inner circle of

INTRODUCTION

13

sovereign states’ and an ‘inferior outer circle of their dependencies’.64 At the same time, it globalised the idea of the European state, spawning imitations in the form of colonies and possessions around the world, in turn, distorting, subordinating or destroying indigenous states and nonstate entities. European colonialism, as Clapham argues, fostered a particular kind of order based on the assumption that ‘states provided the only legitimate and acceptable form of rule, and that all of the world’s people, and all of its territory, therefore had to fall under the control of a designated state’.65 It followed that ‘where states did not exist already, in a form that corresponded to European conceptions of statehood, established states were entitled to incorporate [those] areas [. . .] into their own national territories’. Thus, in all of the Americas and Oceania, almost all of Africa and roughly half of Asia, European states ‘just assumed power’, resulting in ‘the creation of a kind of state radically different from any that had existed before [. . .] imposed and organised from outside’. Sometimes, ‘this process involved a superimposition of external authority on previously existing units’ and sometimes ‘the importing of a population, and the destruction or complete suppression of the old, meant that states could effectively be transplanted into a new environment’ and sometimes it resulted in the ‘creation of “new states”, covering areas [. . .] that had never previously been controlled by any form of state at all’. Only a relatively small number of existing states were ‘sufficiently strong or diplomatically agile’ to resist European hegemony and ‘secure their admission to the new universal state system’ – and those that did had to assert their right to statehood in terms of the aforementioned positivist criteria set (and presumed to exist) in Europe. A doctrine of ‘the sacred trust of civilisation’ was elaborated to justify European colonialism; and the ‘self-identification of European states as “civilised parents” and of many non-European societies as “backward children”’, who would benefit from European wardship, acquired moral and legal standing in the so-called ‘civilising mission’ or ‘white man’s burden’.66 The sacred trust of civilisation was ‘institutionalised’ after World War I in the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission which, in effect, constituted the ‘internationalisation of colonialism’.67 Referring to those territories ‘inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’ the Covenant of the League stated that there ‘should be applied the principle

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that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation’ and that ‘the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations [. . .] as Mandatories on behalf of the League’.68 With the end of World War I, the lines on the map of the world had been penned and its grids organised in terms of dualistic European positive international law. ‘The territory of the globe’, as Anderson explains, ‘was now formally encompassed by states and their possessions – at least from an international perspective [. . .] the interstate system had been established worldwide’.69 The gradual dismantling of the imperial system and the international legal norms adopted to enable it – which began in the New World as the scramble for overseas possessions was gaining pace in the Old World – created the conditions for contemporary failed states. State failure has been attendant, if not embedded, in all four waves of empire collapse and state creation since the Congress of Vienna. As Gros puts it: ‘The failed state is partly the debris of the process of state formation and transformation engendered by European expansion and contraction roughly from 1491 to 1991 (from Columbus to Gorbachev)’.70 The first wave of empire collapse occurred with the Spanish and Portuguese withdrawal from South America in the nineteenth century. The independence of the South American states is noteworthy because, although consistent with the positivist practice of granting recognition on the basis of effective statehood, it was here that the juxtaposition between self-determination and uti possidetis (as you possess, so may you possess) began. Prior to the American and French Revolutions, states were predominantly hereditary monarchies and legitimacy centred on dynastic rights; thereafter this gradually began to shift to encompass the notion of popular sovereignty (will of the majority). However, ‘dynastic legitimacy got its first sustained blow not in Europe, but in Latin America’ and it was with the selfdetermination of the South American states that the notion reached its apogee.71 In essence, Spain and Portugal lost their right to sovereignty over their overseas possessions once those possessions became new de facto entities, and the settled existence of the latter was taken as conclusive evidence of the will of their respective peoples to constitute them – and was thus the source of entitlement to admission into international society.72

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15

The second new departure in South America, again with reference to the American Revolution, was the inauguration of the international legal principle of uti possidetis as an auxiliary (and subordinate) to the de facto principle.73 Simply put, uti possidetis ‘provides that states emerging from decolonisation shall presumptively inherit the colonial administrative borders that they held at the time of independence’.74 Its adoption in South America served two purposes: to ensure no land remained terra nullius and thus open to appropriation by other states (indigenous or foreign); and, relatedly, to shield the new states from external force.75 However, while uti possidetis was accepted in principle, there was also acceptance that the final borders might differ from the uti possidetis line – which they variously did.76 What is often overlooked is that there were just as many failed states in this first phase of expansion and contraction in the New World as there are now (after the second phase in the Old World) but New World failed states were able to make the necessary adjustments (eventually).77 The second wave of empire collapse occurred after World War I with the fall of the German, Romanov, Habsburg and Ottoman empires and resulted in fundamental changes to the political map of Europe. This was facilitated by a new and explosive conception of selfdetermination, pioneered by Woodrow Wilson, in which the principle shifted from a negative to a positive right. The ill-fated intention was to protect national minorities through a plebiscitarian mechanism of determining sovereign statehood, including the movement of populations where necessary. In the event, the Wilsonian vision was impracticable: nationalities were intermingled and the wholesale redrawing of political boundaries in accordance with claims for selfdetermination could not be achieved. Wilson himself admitted that ‘when I uttered those words, I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day’.78 Ultimately, the implementation of self-determination was not that different from established practice and only political communities who had attained de facto statehood were recognised – some had sovereign ancestors but most were new creations and, crucially, many continued to have national minorities who found themselves in new states against their will. Encroaching Soviet imperialism only masked the problem and the disintegration of some of these states along ethno-national lines in the 1990s was directly related to the flawed post-War

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settlement, as Hobsbawm contemporaneously observed, ‘the chickens of World War I are coming home to roost’.79 Thus, while the League acknowledged the ‘virtue of small states’ and the ‘juridical equality of all states’, effective statehood still remained paramount. This commitment to effective statehood was further evident in the different prescription for the Middle Eastern part of the Ottoman Empire and the German overseas colonies (mandated territories). Another Wilsonian brainchild did however endure and brought forth crucial changes in the still evolving state system: in Article 10 of the League Covenant, wars of conquest were no longer permitted as a valid way of creating new states and members committed to respect the territorial integrity and existing political independence of other members. Territorial revision from within states – through secession in the name of self-determination – though discouraged, was not however at this time prohibited.80 In 1933 – partially in response to the ambiguities arising from Wilsonian self-determination – the ‘Rights and Duties of States’ were legally codified in Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention (a mere 27 years before they would be all but disregarded). Therein it was declared that there are four pre-requisites for a state to be recognised as a person of international law: a permanent population (a stable community); a defined territory; an effective government; and a capacity to enter into relations with other states.81 This formalised the practice of classical positive international law – with the notable absence of a (now morally controvertible) standard of civilisation. The third wave (the one we are principally concerned with here) occurred after World War II with the retraction of the Western European overseas empires from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. The formula adopted (which would subsequently be applied after the fourth wave of empire collapse in the post-Soviet space) involved a coalescence of the norms applied to the earlier waves of empire collapse and an uncomfortable meshing (and transformation) of uti possidetis and selfdetermination – ultimately turning the historical process of state recognition on its head. New states were recognised not because they constituted de facto states (and because the European powers had lost their right to sovereignty over them). Rather, independence was brought about because during and after World War II, there was a ‘sudden and widespread change in mind and mood about the

INTRODUCTION

17

international legitimacy of colonialism, which aimed at and resulted in its abolition as an international institution’.82 The UN was the principal facilitator of the transition from the era of empires to an era of universal sovereign statehood, and decolonisation dominated the UN’s early agenda.83 Several mechanisms were instituted to ensure a peaceful transition, which was originally envisaged as a lengthy process and couched in similar terms to the granting of statehood to dependencies in the interwar years – that is, recognition was contingent on the attainment of de facto statehood. Former League of Nations mandates were transformed into trust territories under the UN Trusteeship Council and Articles XI and XII of the UN Charter stressed that colonial administrations had a responsibility to endow their colonies and trust territories respectively with the requirements for self-government and prepare them for independence. In practice, though, such considerations were rushed through or pushed aside. For example, in 1954 a mission of the UN Trusteeship Council reported that Tanganyika (Tanzania) could be ready for independence in 20 years – it achieved this status in 1961 – and a Belgian administrator was considered progressive when he suggested in 1956 that the Congo could be independent in 30 years – it achieved independence in 1960.84 By the late 1950s, the paternalism of the UN (together with the requirement of de facto statehood) was being eclipsed by the growing moral (and financial) imperatives of decolonisation. Anti-colonial movements were also gaining momentum in a number of colonies and the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955 issued a statement that ‘colonialism in all its manifestations’ was ‘an evil’. Harold Macmillan’s famous speech in 1960 clearly illustrated the changing international perspective on decolonisation: ‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent [Africa]. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept this fact. Our national policies must take account of it’. The watershed for the end of empire (and positive international law) came with the passing of UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 in 1960, entitled ‘The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’. The oft-called ‘Second Charter’ was adopted by a vote of 89 to 0, with 9 abstentions.85 It stated that ‘all peoples have the right to self-determination’ and that ‘inadequacy of

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political, economic, social and educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence’. Self-determination, as Helman and Ratner argue, ‘in fact, was given more attention than longterm survivability [. . .] The idea, then, that states could fail [. . .] was anathema to the raison d’eˆtre of decolonisation and offensive to the notion of self-determination’.86 In more detail, Paragraph 5 outlined the UN position thus: Immediate steps shall be taken, in trust and non-self-governing territories or all other territories which have not yet attained independence, to transfer all powers to the peoples of those territories, without any conditions or reservations, in accordance with their freely expressed will and desire, without any distinction as to race, creed or color, in order to enable them to enjoy complete independence and freedom.87 Decolonisation thus represented ‘the triumph of Wilson’s conception of self-determination as a positive right’ over the nineteenth-century version.88 Yet, the scope of that triumph was limited. There was concern in the UN that ‘because these territories that were achieving selfdetermination were “multiple selves”, their governments might attempt to create a “whole personality” through territorial adjustment’.89 The experience of the Paris Peace Conference had shown all too clearly the difficulties and instability associated with redrawing boundaries in accordance with expressions of national self-determination, and it was generally thought that a return to the principle of uti possidetis was preferable. Prior agreement on the unit of self-determination eliminated that aspect of decolonisation which was most likely to delay the process and instigate conflict: as Ratner argues, uti possidetis was adopted to keep decolonisation ‘orderly’ and ‘prevented the perfect from being the enemy of the good’.90 Thus, while Paragraph 2 of Resolution 1514 stated that ‘all peoples have the right to self-determination’, Paragraph 6 stated that ‘any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations’. Self-determination could only be claimed once per colonial unit and, in stark contrast to the Wilsonian version, was silent on the protection of national minorities; it

INTRODUCTION

19

could not be claimed by ethno-national groups within or between those colonial units. Self-determination was no longer based on popular sovereignty but was constituted in UN Headquarters. It had, in effect, become a metaphor for decolonisation and synonymous with uti possidetis. At the same time, the exercise of uti possidetis went beyond the conception that steered the independence of the South American states. There it was employed as an instrument of external protection of territorial integrity. It was not designed to – and did not – shelter states either prior or subsequent to independence from internal acts of separation.91 Furthermore, in Latin America, uti possidetis ‘functioned as an auxiliary to the de facto principle; since the mid-1950s, it has served to keep this principle at bay’.92 The unrestricted self-determination of former colonies levelled the previous hierarchical relationships of international society and instituted a new negative sovereignty regime based on the principle of legal equality.93 Following Alexandrowicz, this was a revival ‘in a different shape within the framework of the United Nations’ of the ‘principles of the classic law of nations enshrining the requirement of universality of the law and its non-discriminatory application irrespective of civilisation, religion, race or colour’. These principles, held in abeyance during the nineteenth-century positivist interregnum, had now been reincorporated into international law ‘in the nature of peremptory rules from which no derogation is possible’.94 Sovereign statehood was now universal (and borders inviolable) but the new ex-colonial states possessed ‘juridical statehood derived from a right of self-determination – negative sovereignty – without yet possessing much in the way of empirical statehood, disclosed by a capacity for effective and civil government – positive sovereignty’.95 Indeed, in many of these states, only two of the criteria set in Montevideo could be applied with any certainty: a territorially demarcated area (although this was often contested) and the right to enter into relations with other states – both of which were international givens. They were juridical states: ‘creature[s] and component[s] of the international society of states, [whose] properties can only be defined in international terms’.96 For this reason, post-colonial states have been variously termed ‘faux’,97 ‘pseudo’,98 ‘nominal’99 or, as elaborated by Jackson, ‘quasi’ states to convey that they are states mainly by ‘international courtesy’.100

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Whereas historically empirical statehood had preceded juridical statehood and the latter was only granted on attainment of the former, all ex-colonies were granted the inalienable right to juridical statehood (or legal sovereignty) regardless of whether they possessed the previous established criteria of empirical statehood (or domestic sovereignty). Put another way, they had the same rights and responsibilities as all other states, were internationally recognised as states, had UN membership and the right to autonomy over affairs of state but, in the event, still faced the internal challenge of creating legitimate and effective states within the geographical, political, administrative and customary boundaries that they had inherited which, often, were at odds with indigenous ones. As one author eloquently puts it, ‘[w]hen the post-colonial rulers inherited the apparatus of the colonial state, they inherited the reins of power; few noticed, at first, that they were not attached to a bit’.101 In many respects, it would be more accurate to speak of post-colonies rather than post-colonial states, and state failure should be more appropriately understood as the failure of post-colonies (or quasi-states) in their post-colonial state creation endeavour. In this sense, we are not talking about state failure as it is commonly perceived at all but about state creation – or the failure thereof. One obvious point is worth reiterating. Colonies were never intended to be entities for themselves and were certainly never envisioned as proto-states at the time of colonisation. They served the various interests of the colonial powers – whether trade, civilising missions or, more fundamentally, securing territory to maintain or strengthen positions in the balance of power. The colonial ‘state’ was ‘not an actor in the international scene; at most, it was occasionally a stage hand’,102 and in many colonies ‘the state was never more than a semifictional overlay of institutions that masked the continuance or development of the more protean forms of social organisation’.103 At the same time, indigenous processes of polity formation were stalled, aborted or hybridised with colonial rule, and ‘the vast number of states and chieftainships [. . .] disappeared in the melting pot of colonial absorption’ such that at independence there were few indigenous polities to which sovereignty could revert.104 It was thus the ‘rough rudiments of the European state’ that became ‘hegemonic during the struggle for independence’, rather than the traditional authorities from whom power had been taken.105

INTRODUCTION

21

The subsequent ‘consecration’ of colonial boundaries ironically represented the ‘triumph of the European definition of the nonEuropean world’,106 as a new form of dualism emerged on the back of the egalitarianism of decolonisation. The outer circle now comprised former dependencies faced with the task of building states on shaky excolonial foundations within the confines of artificial colonial jurisdictions and modelled on the structures of erstwhile colonial metropoles. In closing, it is the condemnation of imperial forms of subjugation and the consequent universality of statehood (facilitated by the right of juridical statehood over the requirement for empirical statehood) that underscores the problematics of contemporary state failure. Jackson’s work on quasi-states is intuitive in this regard and has provided an important framework through which state failure is often (and arguably should be) understood. This excerpted passage from his only actual treatment of failed states (as opposed to quasi-states) sums up the foregoing discussion well. ‘Failed states are a consequence of the end of empire. They are a price of unrestricted self-determination of former – usually colonial dependencies’. Recognition of governments was ‘declaratory not constitutive’ and the ‘post-colonial international guarantee [. . .] brought into existence a significant number of insubstantial or even nominal states: what for want of a better term might be called “quasi-states” of which some have clearly failed, or collapsed, and cease to be “states” in any significant empirical meaning of the term’.107 Moreover, as Jackson argues elsewhere, ‘once sovereignty is acquired by virtue of independence from colonial rule, then extensive civil strife or breakdown of order or government immobility or any failures are not considered to detract from it’.108 And this is what makes contemporary failed states peculiar – they fail within their existing borders and continue to be recognised as something that they are not. In this sense, state failure is new. The failed states of the past were relegated to the dustbin of history as a result of conquest, annexation, accretion or cession. In each case, they disappeared from the map as independent and internationally recognised entities. Contemporary failed states, by contrast, remain on the map of the world even if it is only in name that they exist. To quote Jackson again: ‘[r]amshackle states today [. . .] are not allowed to disappear juridically – even if for

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all intents and purposes they have already fallen or been pulled down in fact [. . .] The juridical cart is now before the empirical horse’.109 In short, the international norms that brought about the decline of imperialism and birthed the universality of statehood have also prevented state death – and continue to do so. It is these norms rather than state failures per se that are new.

Analytically Inducting State Failure(s) in Africa Taking its lead from Jackson’s pioneering work on quasi-states, this study begins from the proposition outlined in the preceding section that state failure should be understood not as the failure of already existing states but as the failure of quasi-states in creating effective and legitimate national states within the bounds of inherited colonial jurisdictions. It moves on to examine why and how some quasi-states have failed in the state creation enterprise and, conversely, why others have not. As advocated by Gros, it adopts a longue dure´e approach and argues that history needs to be ‘brought back in’ not only in terms of the broader perspective of state failure in international society but also in terms of individual state failures. State failure is too often viewed as a snapshot of a particular moment in time but in order to reach a meaningful understanding of state failure that picture needs to be placed within the historical context from which it was taken. It follows that state failure should not be treated in the abstract and as a monolithic phenomenon as it so often is. As Doornbos critically observes: ‘there appears to be justification for the premise that instances of state [failure], even if superficially similar, represent the provisional end-result of different sets of dynamic processes’.110 Not all states fail in the same way and individual states have sometimes failed in different ways at different points in the course of their histories. Exploring and analysing the different variants and trajectories of failure between and within states is therefore, as Doornbos suggests, an important avenue of research – and one which has been largely neglected in the failed state literature thus far. Differences notwithstanding, not all state failures are necessarily unique and, as Milliken and Krause note, ‘scholars may now be able to discern recurrent patterns in processes [. . .] and acquire a better understanding of what makes some states more vulnerable than others to the

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dynamics leading to [state failure]’.111 This study represents a modest contribution towards these twin aims of exploring variances and patterns through historical analysis, from which a reinterpretation of the concept of state failure may be drawn. Methodologically, as previously alluded to, this study follows in the footsteps of Evans et al. in their re-examination of the state. In so doing, it adopts analytical induction as its approach.112 As they explain, this entails drawing research questions, concepts and causal hypotheses from existing theoretical debates and then exploring ideas through comparative and historical research. Like the investigations in their volume, this study arose from concerns with certain analytical problems and provides a testing ground for analytical orientations or causal hypotheses potentially generalisable to other contexts but, while being theoretically engaged, inverts the normal priorities of ‘grand theorising’ (all-encompassing deductive theoretical frameworks). Analytical induction was employed in the volume by Evans et al. because no pre-existing grand theory of the state seemed adequate (the same can be said of state failure). Their arguments that comparisons across countries and time periods, an emphasis on historical depth and the tracing out of processes over time are optimal strategies for research on states is especially applicable in researching state failure. As they continue, along with other macrosocial phenomena that do not repeat themselves (at the same time), states require cross-country or cross-time comparisons if they are to be studied analytically. Similarly, their assertion that without cross-national comparisons, investigations of states – even those with grand theoretical pretensions – become mere case descriptions seems particularly apt with reference to the state failure literature. Evans et al. go on to outline a further range of investigatory tactics open to scholars within the bounds of an analytically inductive and comparative-historical approach. This study sits between two of those. As a whole, it offers empirically illustrated explorations of the concept of state failure (as defined herein) referring to many possible historical instances in the course of discussing a theory that does not attempt to posit universal causes, while still highlighting analytical relationships. It also, through two case studies, offers holistic portraits that provide the point of departure for in-depth comparisons of historical instances to bring out contrasts (or otherwise) in trajectories of state failure,

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though it shies away from investigating causal connections as such. Rather than making ‘causal’ arguments about ‘determinants’ of state failure, it analyses the ways in which state failure comes to pass – or to reiterate, how quasi-states have (or have not) failed to create empirical statehood. The study takes Africa south of the Sahara as its area of analysis and, following the critique of the failed state ‘thesis’ in Chapter 1, the second chapter homes in on understandings of why and how states have failed on much of the continent. Although the results of the African state creation project are, in fact, more in the affirmative than often appreciated, it nevertheless remains the undisputed home of the failed state, with the overwhelming majority of cases identified on that continent. It thus seems the best place to start to understand the phenomenon but, perhaps more importantly, Africa also has much to teach us about state failure (and success) in other parts of the world. The following quotes provide a small sample of possible justifications for a focus on Africa. In quantitative terms, the collaborators of the State Failure Task Force note that ‘sub-Saharan Africa generated the most instability episodes during our period of observation with 49, or 34.8 per cent of the global total’,113 while the authors of the inaugural Failed States Index note that seven of the ten weakest states are in Africa and ask whether Africa is ‘doomed to remain the No. 1 manufacturer of failed states?’.114 In other analyses, Englebert and Tull argue that ‘the extent to which state failure is a broadly African phenomenon cannot be overstated’. They further contend that ‘[t]he damage from state failure in Africa dwarfs the human misery it provokes elsewhere’ and that ‘the consequences of state failure also reverberate more broadly in Africa’.115 In a similar vein, according to Williams, ‘[a]lthough state failure is not confined to Africa the problem is arguably more widespread, deeply rooted and pressing here than in any other continent’.116 And, as a final example, Zartman simply says that ‘the phenomenon is historic and worldwide, but nowhere are there more examples than in contemporary Africa’ and ‘it might be said that contemporary African history began in state [failure], in the famous events associated with the collapse of the colonial state in the Congo’.117 From the broad analysis of state failure in Africa in Chapter 2, the third and fourth chapters move on to provide detailed individual histories

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of state failures in two case studies. The cases have been selected from one of the few areas of contiguous pre-colonial ‘state’ formation in Africa, namely the Great Lakes region. The first, Burundi, is one such ‘state’ which has existed in its current borders from the seventeenth century to the present day (unchanged – territorially at least – by colonial gerrymandering). The second, Uganda, is an archetypal colonial contrivance, which brings together and divides multifarious peoples and polities (some of which comprised pre-colonial ‘states’ akin to Burundi). A further potentially interesting point of contrast between the two case studies is their differing colonial experiences – being the ‘pearls’ of German and British Africa respectively. Burundi was thus also a mandated territory (to Belgium) after World War I, whereas Uganda was a British protectorate throughout the colonial period. Finally, the colonial partition offers up a reason in itself to consider these two countries together, for it ‘divided scholarship as much as politics into French-speaking and English-speaking zones’ and the two strands of research ‘existed side by side, often ignoring each other, as if they concerned distant regions without mutual relationships, even though they treated the same region, the same peoples, and the same cultures’.118 In sum, this study offers an empirically informed reinterpretation of state failure drawing on readings of African history and beginning from the central premise that contemporary failed states are in fact, and more precisely, failed post-colonies. State failure thus understood is less the failure of existing states and more the failed rooting of imported and reified models of statehood – models which developed out of a particular set of circumstances in European societies and which should not necessarily be viewed as the zenith of sociopolitical organisation and appropriate everywhere. Undergirding the study is the contention that state failure is not anathema to international order but historically ‘normal’. The concept may have originated amidst mourning for the post-Cold War ‘new world order’ but the phenomenon has been attendant throughout (and even before) the development of the – still incomplete – Westphalian state system. International norms instituted in the heyday of decolonisation have however given contemporary failed states peculiar characteristics: unlike their historic counterparts, they cannot shapeshift or die.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 stateconsolidating. 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

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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 to effectively govern at least half its sovereign obligation (that is, provide essential services and maintain a reasonably effective security and authority presence)’.22 The SFTF notes that state failures are often complex cases involving more than one distinct event type (e.g. a revolutionary war and an adverse regime change). Where state failure events overlap or when five years or less separate the end of one event and the onset of the next, they are combined or ‘consolidated’ into one state failure event for analytical purposes. Using these criteria, 113 consolidated cases of state failure were identified in the first report in 1994. Following some refinements to the dataset, 127 were recorded in the second report in 1998. The number had risen to 136 in their third report in 2000 and the latest figure available puts the number of failed states at 159.23 The SFTF do, however, offer some important words of caution, particularly regarding the accuracy of its predictions – about 70 per cent of historical cases in 1998, rising to around 80 per cent by 2010 – and, as the models are

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based on historical analysis, their limitations in identifying prospective cases of state failure.24 While acknowledging the achievements of the SFTF, their critics have been quick to add to these cautionary words.25 The starting point of the project perhaps highlights its core limitation – at least in terms of understanding state failure. The concept was broadened to accommodate crises that the US government needed to be aware of and to provide more cases for statistical sampling. In many ways, the project started a trend towards broader conceptualisations of state failure and, in common with other Large-N studies, the SFTF has also met with criticism over the years for the way in which its forecasts rest on factors associated with state failure rather than cause and effect relationships, the way predictions rather than explanations drive the study and the way states are reduced to indicators and variables – all belying a certain arbitrariness. Similar criticism may be levelled at the Failed States Index (FSI), prepared annually by the Fund for Peace, which also employs a wider conception of state failure focused on conflict. In the first index in 2005 they identified 60 weak and failing states ranked in order of their vulnerability to conflict (critical, in danger, borderline), although their definition was broader still: ‘a government that has lost control of its territory or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force has earned the label. But there can be more subtle attributes of failure’. For example, they include in their definition regimes that ‘lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services’. To this they also add countries where ‘the populace [relies] entirely on the black market, fail[s] to pay taxes, or engage[s] in large-scale civil disobedience’.26 In subsequent indices, they have included further countries (from 2007, using UN membership as the basis for inclusion), broken down into in shades of four colour-coded zones: alert, warning, stable and sustainable.27 The FSI is based on the Fund for Peace’s Conflict Assessment Software Tool (CAST), through which content analysis software scans millions of electronic documents using Boolean phrases on 12 indicators of social, economic and political/military pressures.28 Using various algorithms this analysis is then converted into a score of between one and ten representing the significance of each of the pressures for a given country. Countries are then ranked according to the total scores of the 12 indicators – the total score is the sum of the 12 indicators and is on a scale of 0– 120.29

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The FSI is widely used by government and private sectors for a variety of early warning and risk assessment activities. However, for understanding state failure its utility is limited. The very name of the software tool highlights the problem therein: it is measuring susceptibility to conflict rather than state failure. So the question posed by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy upon the launch of the FSI is as pertinent today as it was then: ‘for all the newfound attention [. . .] there is still uncertainty about the definition and scope of the problem. How do you know a failed state when you see one?’.30 Whereas in earlier writings state failure was considered ‘a deeper phenomenon than mere rebellion, coup or riot’,31 it has come to include all of these and many more imprecise failures of effective government – broadly conceived in terms of social contract theories of the state.32 Patrick outlines the position well. To him, failing states have critical gaps in one or more of four areas of governance: first, the security realm, which includes a monopoly on the use of force, control over territory and public order; second, the political sphere, which includes effective administration, citizen participation, protection of basic rights, justice and accountable leadership; third, the economic arena, which includes fiscal policies, trade, resource management and foreign investment; and finally, the social domain, which includes health, education and social services.33 In like manner, Rotberg defines failed states as those which are ‘consumed by internal violence and cease delivering positive political goods to their inhabitants’.34 Primary among these positive political goods is security, especially human security, followed by the rule of law, political freedom, healthcare and education, physical infrastructures, a banking system and currency together with a fiscal context to allow for entrepreneurial pursuits, space for the flowering of civil society and, lastly, methods of regulating and sharing the environmental commons. It is these so-called positive political goods in Rotberg’s analysis that ‘give content to the social contract’.35 As Rotberg’s list of positive political goods demonstrates, the social contract has significantly grown from the maintenance of security within a recognised territory by an accepted authority. This is captured in Gros’ definition of failed states: Failed states may be identified as those in which public authorities are either unable or unwilling to carry out their end of what

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Hobbes long ago called the social contract, but which now includes more than maintaining the peace among society’s many factions and interests.36 States have gradually been expected to take on much more in the way of duties or responsibilities, ranging from cradle-to-grave social services and healthcare to rubbish collection and mail delivery to the provision of utilities, infrastructural development and the repair of transport networks (the so-called pots and gulley measure of state effectiveness). These sorts of activities are now implicit in the state’s side of the social contract. And as the list of responsibilities grows, so too does the number of failed states. In short, increasing incidences of state failure largely reflect the ever increasing demands placed on the state to elicit the continued consent of the populace. Ghani and Lockhart’s depiction of the evolving modern state serves to illustrate this point well. They contend that given both Hobbes and Weber committed their ideas on statehood to paper during eras of pervasive violence, ‘it is not surprising that the idea of the state was conceived of in relation to the use of force’ but since these initial ‘relatively circumscribed’ conceptions, state activity and responsibility have broadened and the state has gradually taken on a more central role in society. The role of the state should thus be seen as ‘multifunctional and dynamic’ and ‘in an era in which citizenship rights around the world have been consolidated and globalisation has fundamentally altered our relationship to the marketplace, states have adapted, bringing the balance among state, market and civil society into a new equilibrium’.37 Their examination of the expanding network of rights and obligations binding the governed and the government leads Ghani and Lockhart to conclude that there are ten functions that states in the world today should perform: rule of law; a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence; administrative control; sound management of public finances; investments in human capital; creation of citizenship rights through social policy; provision of infrastructure services; formation of a market; management of public assets; and effective public borrowing. When a state performs all ten simultaneously a ‘virtuous circle’ is created, producing a ‘sovereignty dividend’. Conversely, when one or several of the functions are not performed a ‘vicious circle’ begins, creating a ‘sovereignty gap’ – or failed state.38 They suggest that from an agreed

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list of functions that states must perform, a quantitative framework for measuring the sovereignty gap in a given state could be created – a socalled ‘sovereignty index’. Such an index would, they argue, objectively show a state’s improvement or decline in the performance of any combination of functions, which could be tracked over time and, once in place, the index would allow proposed interventions to be assessed on the extent to which they close or open the sovereignty gap.39 However, such an index is beset by the same problems that hinder this functional body of literature in general. There is no agreed time frame for failure: for how long does a state need to be dysfunctional before the designation of failure? The distinction between capacity and will is ill-defined: does it make a difference if the state is unable or unwilling to perform the functions expected of it? The exact nature (and requisite number) of the functions a state should perform differs from one study to the next, and there is little correlation between the various indicators used to measure them. Moreover, such indicators are at one and the same time causes, symptoms and consequences of state failure. They are also equally present in many so-called successful states – as is evident in the lower quintiles of the Failed States Index, for example.40 One is inclined to agree with Wolff when he argues that ‘defining state failure qua non-performance of certain functions [. . .] is not sufficient because it describes particular situations that can but need not result from a lack of empirical sovereignty’. To Wolff, the problem with prevailing definitions of state failure is that they focus on the state failing to function in terms of ends (or expected outputs), which ignores the fact that ‘in order to deliver on particular ends, the state requires specific means’.41 This is an important insight that stems from a nuanced reading of Weber: ‘[. . .] the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. [. . .] Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, [. . .] namely, the [. . .] monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force [. . .]’.42 And, indeed, the loss of the monopoly of the legitimate means of violence would seem to be the only facet of state failure upon which all are agreed. Wolff’s contribution to the ‘thesis’ focuses on minimal criteria of stateness and moves the debate in a potentially helpful direction. With the hitherto (and continuing) broadening of definitional criteria, state failure has become an increasingly commonplace occurrence. It is no longer ‘specific, narrow and identifiable, a political

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cause and effect with social and economic implications, and one that represents a significant anomaly’,43 as it was in the early literature. The use of the term has become arbitrary and, as Patrick notes, there is an evident ‘cavalier tendency to apply the single label to a heterogenous group of countries’.44 Yet, it is analytically unhelpful to use the same descriptor for Afghanistan, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Colombia, Pakistan, North Korea, Yemen, East Timor, Burma and Liberia – to cite just a few states to which the label has been variously applied over the last 20 years.45 As Call has argued, ‘the failed state concept now clouds, even misleads, clear analysis [. . .] the term is inadequate [. . .] for virtually every country it purports to describe’.46

Failure and Collapse: Siblings or Synonyms So far the discussion has solely used the term state failure for consistency, but this masks a further problem that has added to the defiance of adequate definitions – the distinction, or lack thereof, between state failure and state collapse. The phenomenon was first identified as state failure. State collapse appears to have entered the vernacular with Zartman’s work, although it is unclear why this term is used to describe the same phenomenon. Other authors endorsed the more ‘descriptive and dispassionate’ terms collapsed or imploded in preference to the more value-laden term failure, noting that the latter can mislead if understood to imply that there are certain standards of performance and success ‘to which all states should aspire’, rather than ‘minimum standards’ of effective and responsible government.47 But the terms state failure and state collapse continued to be used interchangeably. In subsequent analyses, state collapse came to be seen as an extreme and rare version of state failure. This idea has gained traction, particularly through Rotberg’s work, together with the inevitable (albeit as yet ill-defined) sliding scale of state weakness.48 Invoking the aforementioned broader conception of the social contract, Rotberg argues that strong states may be distinguished from weak states and weak states from failed or collapsed states according to how effectively they deliver positive political goods. Strong states perform well across all categories and with respect to each. Weak states, which Rotberg broadly terms ‘states in crisis’, include a broad spectrum of states that show a mixed profile – fulfilling expectations in some areas

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and performing poorly in others. This category also includes the seemingly strong state – the autocratic state – that rigidly controls dissent and is secure but provides few other political goods. The more poorly states perform, criterion by criterion, the more they edge towards the subcategory of weakness that is termed failing. Failed states, which he broadly terms ‘states in anarchy’ do not deliver many or most of these goods. They are ‘tense, deeply conflicted, dangerous and contested bitterly by warring factions’. It is not the absolute intensity of the violence that identifies a failed state, Rotberg contends, but rather the enduring character and consuming quality of that violence, the fact that much of it is directed against the government and that it stems from inter-communal enmity. There are various other indicators, in his analysis, that a failing state has failed: regimes prey on their constituents and lose control of peripheral regions; there is a growth in criminal violence and warlordism; institutions are flawed in that only the institution of the executive functions; infrastructures deteriorate or are destroyed; medical and educational systems are informally privatised; levels of venal corruption escalate and income disparities increase; GDP levels decline, inflation soars and local currency is lost to international currencies. In extremis, the failed state collapses. In these cases, he contends, political goods are obtained solely through private and ad hoc means and although a series of warlord fiefdoms may develop, there is still a prevalence of disorder: A collapsed state exhibits a vacuum of authority. It is a mere geographical expression, a black hole into which a failed polity has fallen. There is dark energy, but the forces of entropy have overwhelmed the radiance that hitherto provided some semblance of order and other vital political goods to the inhabitants (no longer citizens). Rotberg emphasises that ‘none of these designations is terminal [. . .] The quality of failed or collapsed is real but need not be static’. Rather, failure is a ‘fluid halting place’, with movement back and forth possible.49 A conceptually more precise way of plotting state failure along a continuum – which was prominent in the early state failure literature but has since lost prominence in favour of the sliding scale of functional performance – is provided by Wolff. He homes in on one aspect of

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Rotberg’s depiction and argues that state failure may occur gradually in two ways: first, the way a state loses its monopoly of violence in a spatial sense – it is increasingly less able to exercise a monopoly over its entire territory and becomes fragmented; and second, the degree to which a state is able to maintain its monopoly of force either permanently (e.g. after dark) or to which it chooses to claim its monopoly against some, but not all, of its potential challengers (e.g. surrendering to organised crime but fighting secessionists or insurgents).50 The SFTF also identify a sliding scale in terms of how far authority reaches over territory and populations and offer some quantification of tipping points in this type of continuum. In a weak state the central regime is unable to extend full authority to cover and control their entire sovereign obligation. A weak state fails when the regime cannot extend authority over more than half of its sovereign obligation. A collapsed state is where the institutions of state authority have collapsed and there are no alternative elites or authority structures that can or will replace the failed governance system.51 These latter continua provide a helpful illustration of how a particular state may fail over time, and how within a state there may be different degrees of failure in different geographic regions at a given time – until the state collapses. However, rather than being synonyms or degrees of the same phenomenon, state failure and state collapse should be seen as siblings that represent different – albeit related – phenomena. In an early contribution to the literature, Widner makes this point: ‘state collapse and state failure may have related origins, but they are not the same’. She suggests (in common with those favouring a continuum) that state failure does not necessarily lead to state collapse but, perhaps more importantly, she suggests that ‘comparatively better state performance [. . .] appears to be no protection against disintegration’.52 In other words, a weak – or even strong – state could collapse without passing through the ‘halting place’ of state failure. In Widner’s terms, state failure refers to ineffective government, which has two components: (in) efficiency and (un)responsiveness. State collapse refers to the collapse of political order, where the authority of the government is under siege or has disintegrated completely into civil war. In common with Zartman, the idea of social disintegration seems to be important to her notion of state collapse.53

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A further step forward in differentiating failure and collapse has been made by Milliken and Krause in their distinction between the institutional dimension of state collapse and the functional dimension of state failure. ‘Every claim that a state has collapsed, is failing or is going to fail’ they contend ‘contains two usually implicit definitions or benchmarks’. The first concerns ‘stateness’ against which ‘any given state should be measured as having succeeded or failed’ (the institutional dimension of state collapse). The second concerns the ‘normative and practical implications of such a failure’ (the functional dimension of state failure).54 Cle´ment has also drawn this distinction, describing a failed state as one ‘where all core functions have ceased to be performed (on a continuous base and over the entire territory), but where some institutional structures may still exist. It is a case of functional failure without institutional failure’. A collapsed state, on the other hand, involves ‘both a functional failure (inability to perform core functions) and an institutional failure (the political superstructure has ceased to exist on a continuous base and as part of an overarching integrative framework)’.55 State collapse, the focus of their study, is defined by Milliken and Krause as the ‘extreme disintegration of public authority and the metamorphosis of societies into a battlefield of all against all’. It is a rare but conceptually specific occurrence of which, they contend, only four unequivocal cases (Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and a possible fifth (Albania) can be identified.56 State failure, however, is more widespread and conceptually opaque, conceived as a failure to perform three core functions of statehood – security and public order, legitimate representation and wealth and welfare.57 Moreover, an unresolved tension exists between the institutional and functional understandings of state failure: ‘state institutions can persist even while the state fails to fulfil what we understand as its key attributes’.58 Clapham, in the same volume, poignantly highlights this tension with reference to Rwanda – which has frequently been termed a collapsed state, and provides the case in point for Widner’s aforementioned distinction. However, the genocidal war in 1994 was not enabled or produced by the collapse of the state – on the contrary, ‘highly disciplined agents of the state pursued the task of murdering many of its people with hideous efficiency’ and equally there was only ‘the briefest hiatus’ when Habyarimana’s successors were defeated and replaced by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Thus, the

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Rwandan state had certainly not collapsed institutionally but it may convincingly be regarded as having failed functionally – or, in Williams’ terms, it (very effectively) maintained ‘control’ but failed to ‘promote human flourishing’.59 While a shared understanding of state collapse as institutional implosion has now become clear in the literature – reminiscent of the way failed/collapsed states were originally defined – state failure remains ambiguous and is arguably observable (to a greater or lesser extent) in many parts of the world, including the West. State collapse is essentially an objective phenomenon, referring to those states where the state apparatus has disintegrated and no longer meets the minimum requirements of government. State failure, however, is a more subjective phenomenon, broadly understood as the non-performance of core functions either through acts of commission or omission. But these functions are neither clearly defined nor agreed upon and while there may be an increasing consensus that state failure is one step in a gradual process from weak statehood towards state collapse, the categories and tipping points remain open to interpretation and it is far from clear at what point a state passes from weak to failing, from failing to failed or from failed to collapsed. Moreover, this sliding scale reinforces the sense that there are standards of statehood to which all states should aspire and obscures the aforementioned differences in kind between state failure and state collapse. The Rwandan example above strikingly highlights the need to distinguish conceptually state failure and state collapse – the failure to do so, ‘blurs the different processes that lead to functional failure or to institutional collapse’.60 More than this though is the need to develop the idea of differences in kind rather than degree not only between state collapse and state failure but also between different forms of state failure. A helpful analysis in this regard is the taxonomy offered by Gros. He contends that although state failure ‘may be traced to a common origin: an overall breakdown of the corpus of formal and informal rules governing society, accompanied by the disappearance of formal authority or its emaciation’, not all state failures are alike and ‘rather than gathering all failed states into one pile it makes sense to situate them along a continuum’.61 Contrary to Rotberg and his adherents, however, Gros suggests that we should consider a non-linear progression. He proffers a spectrum of scenarios that can be plotted along an imaginary continuum and emphasises that

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these are not ‘stages’ through which states must pass ‘before descending into the abyss’. In his continuum, states may skip categories, straddle them at particular points in their history or exhibit attributes of more than one category at any one time.62 In all, Gros identifies five types of state failure.63 First is the rare category of anarchic states (broadly analogous to collapsed states), which have no centralised authority whatsoever (Liberia and Somalia). Second, and ‘a close cousin’ of the anarchic state, is the phantom or mirage state, which has ‘a semblance of authority that exhibits its efficacy in certain limited areas’, such as the protection of the presidential despot, but in all other areas authority is ‘utterly invisible’ (Zaire in 1995). Third are anaemic states, which are able to fulfil some of their functions, albeit often only locally and sporadically. There are two subcategories of anaemic states: first, those where the ‘energy’ of the state has been ‘sapped by counter-insurgency groups’, who may control large ‘liberated zones’ which are forbidden territories for government officials (Cambodia, Sri Lanka); and, second, those where the ‘engines of modernity were never put in place’, such that as population growth puts increasing demands on ‘archaic state structures’, state agents are unable to assert effective control (Haiti). In this latter type of anaemic state, there is usually ‘a modicum of centralised authority, but one that is so emaciated that state agents outside the capital city are left entirely to fend for themselves’, effectively becoming ‘local bosses loosely affiliated with authority figures at the centre’. Fourth are captured states, which have strong centralised authority but that authority is captured by insecure elites to frustrate rival elites (Rwanda). The state only embraces members that the hegemonic elite thinks it should and politics is ‘unabashedly a zero-sum activity’ leading in the extreme to intermittent genocidal conflicts or violent clashes between government troops and irredentist groups. Fifth, and finally, are aborted states, which experienced failure before the process of state formation was consolidated (Bosnia, Georgia and possibly Angola and Mozambique). 64 More recently, Gros has provided a new taxonomy of state failure – in his words, correcting oversights in the original, though he saw ‘no need to fundamentally alter the original analysis’.65 This new taxonomy which is grounded in the central role of the state – protection – categorises state failure in terms of risks of internal

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disorder (RID) and risks of external aggression (REA). In Type I the state does not protect against either. This category is analogous to anarchic states in the previous taxonomy and there is only one such state (Somalia). In Type II the state does not protect against RID but protects against REA, a scenario that is also rare (e.g. Ethiopia under Mengistru Haile Mariam and possibly North Korea). Type III is the opposite of Type II, whereby there may be a standing army but its raison d’eˆtre is repression of the population (protecting against RID) rather than protecting against REA. Examples include Haiti pre-1986 and Uganda under Idi Amin. The final category – Type IV – is the ‘most common and mildest’. In Type IV states do not protect against RID and REA but ‘this defect is neither complete nor permanent’ – rather, it ‘ebbs and flows’. There is a fluctuating loss of control in parts of the territory (most often the periphery) and maintenance of it in others (the capital or home region of the ruler – i.e. the centre). Gros likens this category to Rotberg’s ‘fluid halting place’ since when faced with risks to their power or when the projection of state power throughout the realm, even haltingly, is not possible, states may forgo capacity in REA in favour of RID (Type III) or the converse (Type II). Most failed states fall into Type IV, performing certain functions of statecraft, albeit in tentative, intermittent or suboptimal fashion and, from a spatial standpoint, selectively (e.g. Congo and Coˆte d’Ivoire). While oft-quoted, Gros’ taxonomies remain an isolated development in the failed states ‘thesis’ – though some have certainly stressed that taking up the mantle of further research in this area would be a worthwhile exercise, not just for analytical purposes but to foster more effective and appropriate responses to state failure. 66 Indeed, this latter objective was the driving force behind Gros’ efforts to distinguish different types of state failure, as he explains: ‘failure to appreciate the specificities of failed states may lead to the adoption by the international community of Procrustean policies, which are likely to fail’.67 He reiterated this point in his recent book.68

What’s in a Name? From its inception, state failure (in theory and practice) has been tied to notions of international intervention. At least partly owing to the new

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possibilities of humanitarian intervention afforded by the end of the Cold War, early studies were overwhelmingly concerned with ‘saving failed states’, as indicated in the succinct title of Helman and Ratner’s inaugural article, and this proclivity has been mirrored in the majority of studies since. The link with intervention has not only led to a focus on solutions (at the expense of understandings) but also to the increasing securitisation of state failure. As Bøa˚s and Jennings have claimed, ‘the critical genesis and development of the concept has been largely overshadowed by its political and rhetorical uses’.69 In the early post-Cold War years, failed states were largely viewed through a regional prism: they were humanitarian tragedies that imperilled their own citizens and threatened neighbouring countries – as refugee flows, environmental stresses, conflict goods and random warfare spilled over (or through) their increasingly porous borders.70 So while they may have tugged at the heart strings of outside observers, they were considered unusual and distant occurrences in far-off corners of the globe. Notwithstanding some early warnings about the potential global ramifications of failed states, it was the events of 9/11 that transformed state failures into grave threats not only to regional but also, and more predominantly, to international peace and security.71 After 9/11, failed states increasingly became feared as epicentres of international organised crime, weapons proliferation, global pandemics and, more acutely, as likely safe havens for transnational terrorists – and Kaplan’s neoMalthusian predictions appeared more than the apocalyptic vision they had been deemed in the mid-1990s, as the very real spillovers of that ‘coming anarchy’ reached much closer to home.72 Failed states had, in the words of the authors of the first Failed States Index, ‘made a remarkable odyssey from the periphery to the very centre of global politics’.73 This journey was clearly portrayed in a speech by the then British Secretary for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Jack Straw, in September 2002: We cannot but be concerned at the implications for the human rights and freedoms of those who are forced to live in such anarchic and chaotic conditions. Yet the events of September 11 devastatingly illustrated a more particular and direct reason for our concern. For it dramatically showed how a state’s disintegration can impact on the lives of people many thousands of miles away,

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even at the heart of the most powerful democracy in the world. In these circumstances turning a blind eye to the breakdown of order in any part of the world, however distant, invites direct threats to our national security and wellbeing. I believe therefore that preventing states from failing and resuscitating those that fail is one of the strategic imperatives of our times.74 On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States National Security Strategy of the same year categorically stated that ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’.75 Similarly, the 2006 Security Strategy warned that ‘[. . .] ungoverned areas are not only a threat to their people and a burden on regional economies, but are also susceptible to exploitation by terrorists, tyrants, and international criminals’.76 This message was again repeated in the 2010 Security Strategy: ‘failing states breed conflict and endanger regional and global security’; and in the latest Security Strategy, the ‘significant security consequences associated with weak or failing states’ remained a ‘top strategic risk’ to be prioritised.77 The perceived scale and threat of the problems manifest in failed states has been made clear in numerous other official statements since 9/11. The European Union (EU) Security Strategy of 2003, for example, stated that ‘state failure is an alarming phenomenon that undermines global governance’, which ‘can be associated with obvious threats, such as organised crime or terrorism’.78 In a similar vein, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned in 2005 that ‘ignoring failed states creates problems that sometimes come back and bite us’79 – a sentiment he reiterated in his final speech, when he stressed the need for collective security in a ‘world where failed states in the heart of Asia or Africa can become havens for terrorists’.80 Connections between failed states and terrorism have also been drawn by the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Canadian and Australian governments among others.81 As the ‘problem’ of failed states gained new strategic significance, the need to ‘do something’ took on a new urgency. Identifying and anticipating state failure became a popular pastime, birthing countless risk assessment and early warning systems, as well as renewed vigour to finding ways to repair or rebuild failed states. If terrorists thrived in failed states then it followed that counter-terrorism strategies should

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focus on strengthening vulnerable states and preventing states from failing, and that state-building should become a key objective in homeland security agendas. The argument that failed states provide an environment conducive to the emergence of terrorists, fertile ground for the infiltration of terrorists and, especially, an ideal launching pad for international operations appeared logical and compelling. Failed states seemingly allowed terrorists unimpeded freedom of action but also had the veneer of state sovereignty that prevents other states from taking effective countermeasures.82 By providing a sanctuary beyond the rule of law failed states offered various benefits to terrorists wishing to operate within their bounds, including: de facto control over territory; low operational and security costs; pools of potential recruits from disaffected and radicalised local populations; training and conflict experience; access to weapons (either through insecure armouries or deliberate transfer); avenues to raise funds for operations, such as smuggling and drug trafficking, and the means to bypass international banking systems and financial scrutiny; the issuance of legitimate or credible forged passports and other documents to enable free movement and false aliases – and they could do all of these things without interference, detection or interdiction. Terrorists could, in short, exploit both the vacuum of power in failed states and utilise the downside of globalisation. However, the argument linking state failure and transnational terrorism has proven less compelling than it at first sight appeared. Subsequent research has revealed that terrorists have found failed states to be relatively inhospitable territories out of which to operate, as Menkhaus argues: the ‘anarchy and insecurity’ of failed states ‘makes terrorist cells vulnerable to extortion and betrayal [by local competitors]; the paucity of Western targets makes them uninteresting; and the dearth of foreigners in these areas exposes foreign terrorists, reducing their ability to go unnoticed’.83 It thus appears that ‘lawlessness of one type can inhibit, rather than facilitate, lawlessness of another’.84 Failed states are more likely to serve a niche role as transit zones, if anything, as opposed to launching pads for international operations and are, in fact, more plagued by domestic rather than transnational terrorism. Terrorism in failed states is predominantly self-contained, motivated by local grievances and, thus, ‘only tangentially related to the global war

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on terrorism’.85 As Menkhaus and Schapiro argue: ‘Somali hard-line movements have demonstrated a much greater commitment to a Somali nationalist platform and much less commitment to al-Qaeda’s global jihadist agenda’.86 This statement is corroborated by Mills, who argues that ‘al-Qaeda’s African activities have [. . .] paled in comparison to the continent’s homegrown, domestic sources of insecurity and violence’.87 Terrorism generally, Newman asserts, is still largely a ‘local’ phenomenon – directed at particular local institutions by local groups – and terrorists still challenge state structures, rather than exploit an absence of state authority. As such, contested states rather than failed states are generally the sites of terrorism.88 Menkhaus concurs, suggesting that ‘terrorist networks tend to flourish where states are governed badly, rather than not at all’.89 In such states, terrorist cells may benefit from: the financial and logistical infrastructural attributes necessary for their effective operation; corrupt security and law enforcement agencies, who allow terrorists to circumvent the law while enjoying a level of protection from it; less exposure to international counter-terrorist action; and a large foreign community which allows terrorists to dissolve into the crowd, while providing a range of ‘soft’ Western targets – as evidenced by the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, for example.90 Moreover, terrorism is not the preserve of contested states any more than it is of failing states. Terrorists have equally emerged, operated in and used as safe havens stable, functioning states, as Patrick reminds us (and as the events of November 2015 bear tragic testimony to): ‘the “safe havens” in the global war on terrorism are as likely to be the banlieues of Paris as the wastes of the Sahara or the slums of Karachi’.91 Hehir, for example, demonstrates that there is little correlation between a state’s level of failure (as measured by the FSI) and either the presence of foreign terrorist organisations or incidences of terrorism.92 Terrorists have a long history of operating in a wide variety of different environments and it would seem that state failure does not in and of itself explain the presence of terrorism, as Newman’s findings confirm. He demonstrates that while terrorists do operate in (some though by no means all) failed states, it is not necessarily the ‘situation of failed or weak statehood which is the overriding explanatory variable for the presence of terrorist organisations in such a state’. Rather, other variables may be more important. He particularly highlights the ‘hospitality – or support, or

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acquiescence’ of local actors – something (as Menkaus’s research attests) that was sorely lacking in Somalia, for example.93 This leads Newman to suggest that ‘[w]hilst there are many good reasons for strengthening vulnerable states and preventing state collapse, it may not be the most efficient way of addressing terrorism unless a specific and known terrorist threat is associated with such a state’. He therefore advocates targeting those ‘additional variables which catalyse an enabling environment into a genuine terrorist sanctuary, rather than targeting the broad phenomenon of weak or failed states’.94 Overall, threat perception seems to have been disproportionate to analysis, as Patrick elaborates: ‘Scholars and policymakers have advanced blanket associations between these two sets of phenomena [state failure and transnational security threats], often on the basis of anecdotes or single examples [. . .] rather than through sober analysis’.95 While this ‘anecdotal evidence [. . .] is intuitively quite persuasive’, it does not, as Newman argues, ‘result in a satisfactory proposition – with general explanatory relevance – about the relationship between weak or failed states and terrorism’.96 If the link between terrorism and failed states is tenuous, it rather poses the question of why failed states have continued to be viewed in these terms. In short, the widening of the state failure net serves a political purpose: to delegitimise states that pose a perceived threat to Western interests or values – and justify a response to them, as Bøa˚s and Jennings explain: Reframing existing conflicts, humanitarian crises, or pockets of instability according to a failed states framework – building on a presumed link between failed states and terrorism – has provided a basis for Western policymakers, analysts, and advocates to assess, re-channel, or increase military and financial resources. This observation leads Bøa˚s and Jennings to suggest that in order to bring meaning to the failed state concept, one needs to ask ‘for whom is the state failing, and how?’.97 At least part of the answer to this pertinent (and overdue) question would seem to be that states are failing for Western analysts and policymakers because they do not meet their expectations of statecraft – which are predicated on a particular conception of statehood rooted in the

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aforementioned Weberian and social contractarian formulations. Milliken and Krause, for example, critically observe that: Concern about the possibility of state failure [. . .] often has as much to do with dashed expectations about the achievement of modern statehood, or the functions that modern states should fulfil, as it does with the empirically-observed decomposition or collapse of the institutions of governance in different parts of the world. [. . .] what has collapsed is more the vision (or dream) of the progressive developmental state that sustained generations of academics and policy-makers, than any real existing state.98 Halvorson has similarly argued that the constitution of state failure is based on a subjective political judgement defined by the ‘great powers’ as much as it is on the objective dimension of the disintegration of statehood – and that the latter is not necessarily sufficient for the designation of state failure.99 Indeed, Bøa˚s and Jennings illustrate that other states that share some or all of the features of so-called failed states are not ‘branded’ as such when they serve Western interests and are ‘good for business’.100 The meaning of state failure in any historical period, according to Halvorson, is judged against the principles of appropriate statehood promoted and legitimised by the great powers in accordance with the prevailing order of international society which, once established, is path dependent and will be threatened by states that are unable to meet its normative requirements or are unwilling to conform to it. In order to enjoy genuine international legitimacy, domestic political institutions must approximate prevailing norms of appropriate statehood. In this sense, failed states are a socially constructed category and the norms of international order are constitutive of state failure in a given period. Specifically, he argues that the contemporary state failure phenomenon is a product of the ‘unipolar moment’, which assumes a universal convergence towards a global liberal democratic order as normative and displays acute domestic sensitivity in Western states to transnational threats (especially since 9/11 and the dissemination of a civilisational rather than state-centric discourse). In this way, failed states can be seen not only in the context of, and necessary to, a concerted attempt to homogenise a global liberal democratic order but also as an integral part

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of an assertive drive by the sovereign state system to reproduce itself in the wake of perceived challenges to its ontological primacy. In short, the failed state has been ideationally constituted in relation to a redefinition of appropriate statehood in the post-Cold War era, whereby hegemonic actors hold that an idealised version of their own form of governance is universal.101 Failed states are thus pitted against this ideal form of liberal democracy and, to Call among others, ‘the most self-evident deficiency of the concept of state failure is the value-based notion of what a state is, and a patronising approach to scoring states based on those values’. He continues that, akin to the teleology of modernisation theory, the concept of state failure assumes that there is a ‘good’ endpoint towards which states should move and that there is an evident ‘schoolmarm tone’ to the concept: ‘states are “bad” because they have failed some externally defined test’.102 The pass mark in this test is the static Weberian standard which derives from and is represented by Western statehood. States which fall short in achieving this universal standard of success are ‘cast in the role of the deviant Other’, a deviancy which is further emphasised by the language, imagery and analogies used to describe them: ‘failed states are not simply different they are abnormal in the pejorative sense’.103 Such states have maladies or dark energies, have fallen into a black hole or the abyss, are suffering from a degenerative disease, contagious infection and numerous other afflictions that require resuscitation, medicines and so on and so forth. The failed state ‘thesis’, thus, invokes an understanding of statehood that ‘revolves around the binary opposition of failed versus successful states’, resulting in a ‘not-so-democratic overtone of control and subordination’.104 So-called failed states are not graded on the basis of their own merits in terms of past, present and potential future development but on their performance relative to ‘successful’ states. Such a binary categorisation is ‘reductive, non-contextual and ahistorical’, stemming from an erroneous assumption that all states can and should function in essentially the same way – when, in fact, every state is ‘a culmination of unique historical processes’.105 As Milliken and Krause argue, ‘attempts to pin down the essential nature of the state (the ideal criteria and functions assigned to it) end up reifying or idealising it, stripping what is after all a human construct of its historicity’.106

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‘Normative hackles’ are further raised because ‘the failed state epithet lays the culpability for state weakness and its attendant spillovers squarely at the feet of dysfunctional governments and societies’ – a framing which ‘ignores that the sources of state weakness are often in part a function of sins of omission or commission in the global North’.107 To the question ‘for whom is the state failing and how’, following Bilgin and Morton, we should add another of equal import: ‘who’s failed the “failed state”?’ – a question which, as they point out, is almost never asked.108 The political labelling of failed states thus tends to be self-serving: by placing the responsibility for state failure within those states that are deemed to have failed, it creates a moral justification for the successful states to help the unsuccessful states. And given that a state has failed because it has not met the benchmark of Western statehood, the solution is to (re)create a replica of the Western model.

Square Pegs into Round Holes The tendency to homogenise failed states through the application of a common label and to view them through ahistorical lenses has led to the predominance of a one-size-fits-all approach to state-building. Furthermore, the tendency to conflate state failure with vulnerability to conflict and threats to international peace and security has meant that state-building is often undertaken in concert with peace-building – even though, as Menkhaus has observed in relation to Somalia, these are ‘two separate and, in some respects, mutually antagonistic enterprises’.109 In general, the restoration of stateness is seen as being dependent on the reaffirmation of the pre-failed state.110 State-building mantras tend to assume that the pre-failure state was functioning and legitimate and has been derailed or dismantled by internal actors or circumstances. It follows that reconstruction should focus on the conservation of the territorial integrity of the state and the reviving and strengthening of the institutional status quo ante – and that this can only be achieved with outside help. As Ellis puts it: the conventional view on state-building suffers from historical imprecision and ‘relies on a misleading mechanical metaphor, which leads policymakers to suppose that, like broken machines, failed [states] can be repaired by good mechanics’.111

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The state-builder’s toolbox typically consists of: re-establishing security and reforming the security sector as a priority, including demobilising, disarming and reintegrating ex-combatants; followed by rebuilding and professionalising the institutions of law and order (including the retraining of local officials by interveners); introducing democratic governance, often through power-sharing agreements (including election monitoring); economic recovery and the rebuilding of financial institutions; rebuilding social infrastructure (including health and education systems); and the promotion of human rights. The scope of the tools used and the level of outside intervention have varied from smaller monitoring missions (e.g. Namibia, El Salvador) to transitional administrations (e.g. Cambodia, East Timor) but the overriding goal in each instance is to empower local authorities and restore the state. The record of remaking failed states is mixed at best, as Gros explains: Foreign intervention has been more effective at slowing down states in their slide toward the abyss than actually reversing their trajectory. A strong case can be made that contemporary failed states are not being rebuilt; instead, their worse effects are being managed.112 Indeed, often state-building efforts reconstruct the very institutions that contributed to the failure of the state and sometimes the institutions were simply not there and rather than restoring or resuscitating, more accurate adjectives might be constructing or creating. The paltry results of (re)constructing failed states have led a growing number of authors to bemoan the inadequacy of existing tools and suggest formalising emergent experiments in a more intrusive form of state-building. Such approaches propose infringing upon, or suspending, the domestic (and possibly legal) sovereignty of failed states in varying ways and to varying extents for longer periods of time. Building on Helman and Ratner’s early work, which reintroduced the idea of UN guardianship,113 the notion of neo-trusteeship has gained some currency in the literature – which in certain more extensive transitional administrations (e.g. Bosnia) ‘has become a reality in all but name’.114 Formalising de facto practice, where executive authority would lie entirely with external actors poses practical and normative

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challenges – not least that it uncomfortably brings to mind the possible extension of the inherent neo- or post-modern imperialism of recent state-building situations. Proponents of neo-trusteeship arrangements are quick to defend current trends and point out the differences between classical and post-modern imperialism. While they involve similar degrees of control over domestic authority, in the latter, subjects are governed by a ‘complex hodgepodge’ of foreign powers and organisations (rather than a ‘single imperial or trust power asserting monopoly rights within its domain’) and those parties ‘typically seek an international legal mandate for their rule’ and want to exit as quickly as possible.115 Thus, contemporary state-building exercises, Ignatieff contends: represent attempts to invent, for a post-imperial, post-colonial era, a form of temporary rule that reproduces the best effects of empire [. . .] without reproducing the worst features [. . .] Unlike the empires of the past, these UN administrations are designed to serve and enhance the ideal of self-determination, rather than suppress it.116 However, aside from the fact that neo-trusteeship might ‘smell if not look too much like colonialism’ to target states, codifying a set of principles for a new trusteeship system has garnered little support from those who would implement it.117 Such barriers have led other authors to take a side-step with a new type of proposal. Krasner, who is particularly concerned with the deprivation of legal sovereignty associated with formal neo-trusteeships, argues that ‘shared sovereignty’ would be a useful addition to the policy repertoire. This would involve arrangements under which external actors would share authority with nationals over some aspects of domestic sovereignty for an indefinite period of time. Such arrangements – which, for policy purposes, he suggests should be called ‘partnerships’ – would be legitimated by a contract between national actors exercising the target state’s international legal sovereignty and external agents. These contracts, which are not without historical precedent, would create joint authority structures (shared sovereignty) in specific areas and would not, therefore, involve a direct assault on sovereignty norms.118

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Keohane similarly advocates ‘unbundling sovereignty’ and jettisoning self-determination as the goal of intervention, together with the ‘Westphalian fetish of total autonomy from external authority’ – even as an aspiration – to enable the restoration of stable domestic authority and peaceful relations among countries. Rather than treating sovereignty as an ‘all or nothing proposition’, he suggests ‘constructing different categories of qualified sovereignty’ or ‘gradations of sovereignty’ that could ‘provide procedures to help regularise movement towards [. . .] limited independence’ for troubled states.119 He begins with unbundled (or denied) sovereignty – as in trusteeship arrangements – from whence nominal sovereignty could be reintroduced (the state regains legal sovereignty but not domestic authority – broadly a transitional administration). As the troubled state ‘begins to recover, it will make sense to grant its new state institutions a little bit of sovereignty at a time’. The next step is limited sovereignty, in which ‘domestic governance is for the most part controlled by local people’ but the external authority ‘can override its decisions’ as it sees fit (small-scale state-building). The final stage ‘could be’ integrated sovereignty (analogous to Krasner’s shared sovereignty),120 whereby domestic authority is in the hands of nationals but with ‘constitutional restrictions, adjudicated by a supranational court and potentially enforceable by the country’s neighbours’ through regional institutions.121 These proposed alternatives to state-building would give permanence to certain aspects of transitional administrations and are even more paternalistic or imperialistic than conventional approaches – even if in the post-modern sense. They also still aim to conserve – or engineer a return to – the institutional and territorial status quo ante from outside and, if formalised, would likely be beset by the same problems as the existing approaches they seek to improve on. This is largely because, as Englebert and Tull convincingly argue, reconstruction efforts are based on a number of flawed ideas about failed states: that Western state institutions can be transferred to failed states; that the elites of the states in question view state failure and reconstruction in the same way as donors; and that donors will be able to harness the resources necessary to achieve the end goal.122 The latter of these flaws is well documented and features not only in the above critiques of conventional state-building and ad hoc trusteeship arrangements but was also the focus of the Brahimi Report.123

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State-building is an expensive enterprise and, given the sheer size of some of the countries concerned, the international presence is often only superficial. It is also temporally limited since reconstruction efforts tend to be conceived in terms of policy cycles of three to five years but this is rarely long enough. Further problems relate to vague mandates and disunity of command structures, as well as to the lack of co-ordination between myriad actors in planning and deployment. Donors do not necessarily have the same priorities or understandings of the situation on the ground and are often divided on reconstruction agendas. Indeed, the very notion of an ‘international community’ is a fiction, as Brooks critically observes: ‘from the perspective of an alien observer from another planet, the “international community” of the planet Earth must surely appear like a failed state writ large’.124 In short, state-building efforts have been compromised by what the Brahimi Report terms ‘commitment gaps’ – expectations have been incongruent with the means at the disposal of interveners. If neo-trusteeship is to be given credence as a viable solution, current levels of resources and political will would have to be significantly up-scaled – a hurdle that presently seems insurmountable. The bigger hurdle, however, arguably comes from the mistaken ‘logic of co-operation’ between donors and local elites, which presumes their altruism and a shared understanding of state failure and reconstruction – whereas, in fact, a ‘cognitive dissonance’ exists between local elites and donors regarding the ‘nature of state failure and the kind of reconstruction efforts that are needed to address it’.125 So-called state failure (or suboptimal performance in various aspects of statecraft) might actually be a governing strategy – rather than a lack of capacity or will. Rulers are ‘discriminating monopolists’ and may decide to trade failure in some areas for success in others or even settle entirely for failure for political ends.126 By the same token, reconstruction may be viewed not as a new beginning after the crisis of failure but as a different means for competing elites to maximise political and economic fortunes – facilitated by the opportunities afforded by power-sharing agreements, increases in foreign aid and lax international oversight.127 Local elites may, therefore, benefit from stalling or dragging out the state-building process rather than engage in ‘genuine’ and expedient (re)construction. On the other side of the coin, ‘often, ordinary citizens are seen as passive victims of state failure when in fact they are experts in the art of

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survival and adaptation’.128 Using the example of Mogadishu in the late 1990s, von Hippel has argued that so-called failed states are actually more accountable than ‘intact’ states since many segments of society continue to function albeit in a more fluid form and individuals are willing to pay for services that directly affect their lives but not to some nebulous central authority.129 More broadly, Williams has argued that Africans have been ‘adept at forming accommodation strategies in a variety of different arenas to fulfil their needs when their state has failed them’, and that while some may support Western state-building projects, others are indifferent, suspicious or even hostile to them.130 Outside attempts to revive the state apparatus may, therefore, ‘run up against institutional resilience’ in two ways: firstly, transitional institutions created by external actors ‘may compete with the remnants of public authority and never achieve legitimacy’; secondly, the ‘centralising desire to reconstruct the formal sovereign state may neglect or even undermine the local institutional initiatives that facilitated the survival and organisation of social life’ when the state failed.131 Indeed, as Bradbury points out, ‘centralised government is the very thing that many Somalis have been fighting against’.132 This brings back to mind Bøa˚s and Jennings’ question ‘for whom is the state failing?’ and illustrates the ‘significant limits’ of statebuilding efforts which are isolated from the ‘needs and perceptions of the local population’ and do not seek to bridge the gap between external and local sources of legitimacy.133 The success of a statebuilding intervention, Lemay-He´bert argues, lies in the ‘internationallocal nexus’ – that is, in ‘the internationals being able to fully understand the local context so as to better adjust their policies to affect it’, thereby generating support and ownership of more appropriate locally determined structures (which may well be at variance with the orthodox Western liberal model).134 However, as Englebert and Tull argue, the ‘state reconstruction outsider bias tends to neglect local agency and indigenous capacities for institution building’ or ‘regard them as obstacles’, assuming that the more intrusive and extensive the assistance, the better the results will be. On the contrary, as they continue, the ‘prevailing high level of outsiders’ intrusiveness may produce a crowding-out effect, stifling the rise of indigenous state builders rather than filling a hypothetical institutional vacuum’.135

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Viewed in this way, there seems merit in the simplicity of Herbst’s oft-quoted solution to the problem of failed states: ‘let them fail’. He argues that ‘the ghostly presence of the old, failed state has reinforced a tendency to try to put the old political arrangement back together again despite seemingly decisive evidence that the national order cannot work’.136 This leads him to suggest that the ‘dogmatic devotion’ to current state boundaries should be discarded and that ‘the overarching goal of developing alternatives to failed states should be to increase the congruence between the way power is actually exercised and the design of units’.137 He offers two concrete and complementary policy proposals in line with his suggestion. Firstly, the decertification of states – that is, to officially recognise that states are not exercising control over their country and should no longer have sovereign rights. This should be a rare step and a last resort and need not be irreversible but it could also be a way of recognising that a state has died (if it ever lived) and that something else should take its place. Secondly, recognising new nation states, which would require clear criteria resting on the question of whether the secessionist area is providing more political order on its own than is provided by the central government. This reaches to the core of state consolidation because the test would centre on whether the broadcasting of power and boundaries could be made coincidental. Indeed, ‘the current practice of equating control of the capital with control of the state is part of the failed state pathology’.138 This is aptly demonstrated by the derisory but accurate title – the Mayor of Mogadishu – bestowed on President Siad Barre of Somalia during the final months of his incumbency.139 Although Herbst stresses that the inevitable disruption caused by state creation (and decertification) would need to be balanced against the profound harm that existing states are doing to their populations, perhaps inevitably, his ‘return to history’ approach has not found a place in the policy repertoire for two obvious reasons. Firstly, it represents an even greater affront to current international norms than neo-trusteeship; and, secondly, it might open the proverbial Pandora’s Box of claims to statehood and the long-avoided emergence of countless statelets. A less radical approach which provides a hybrid of Herbst’s ideas and those of Krasner and Keohane – but from the bottom-up – is offered by Collier, who suggests ‘pooling sovereignty’ at the regional level as a way of strengthening failing states.140 He

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argues that governments of failing states have been distinctive in their reluctance to follow global trends and pool their sovereignty with neighbours in political and economic regional groups. Further support for Collier’s proposal is provided by Ignatieff, who similarly observes that domestic governance tends to be stronger and more efficient where states have pooled sovereignty compared to where self-reliant autarchy has prevailed.141 This latter approach draws attention to one of the main limitations of current state-building prescriptions. They are state-centric and premised on the idea that states can and should be ‘restored’, which is, in turn, based on the often erroneous assumptions that the pre-failed state was functioning and legitimate, that it has been internally derailed and that its inhabitants are hapless victims. Further, in committing to a ‘topdown’ approach, current state-building mantras take for granted the applicability of the Western blueprint, overlook or misunderstand the way in which legitimate political authority often manifests itself in other forms emanating from ‘within and beyond the state’,142 and display a certain reticence about formally engaging with such ‘unorthodox’ sources of authority.143 This is not to suggest that all state-building projects are ill-conceived or unwanted but in some cases uniform attempts to restore failed states (often with inadequate resources) will do more harm than good. Rather than formalising international trusteeships or instituting internationally imposed gradations of, or shares in, sovereignty, perhaps existing authority architectures – which, ‘regardless of formal designation, enjoy greater or lesser degrees of statehood’144 – should not only be acknowledged but also appreciated as alternative paths to ‘success’ that need not necessarily represent a threat to Western interests. Hagmann and Hoehne similarly conclude that ‘[b]efore proposing solutions, prevailing political orders and variegated degrees of statehood have to be understood as they are, and not as they are wished to be’ not least because these types of non-Western statehood ‘may well in the end endure and even become models for future political orders’.145

Whither the Failed State? The numerous failings of the failed state ‘thesis’ have led some scholars to suggest abandoning the term altogether. Drawing on insights from post-

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colonial studies, Hill convincingly argues that the failed state terminology encompasses ethnocentric assumptions, positioning failed states as the ‘deviant Other’ to Western societies and using that ‘alleged deviancy’ to ‘promote and justify their political and economic domination by Western states and other international actors’, in a way reminiscent of European colonisers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hill contends that only by rejecting the failed state terminology can representations of failed states as ‘imperfect copies’ of Western states be countered.146 While it might be hard to disagree with Hill’s post-colonial critique, he offers no conceptual (or practical) way forward. Other scholars, notably Call, have suggested that alternate terms be adopted in place of state failure. In addition to reiterating Hill’s concerns, Call’s critique is particularly directed at the ‘superaggregation’ of diverse states and the ‘universalising impulse’ that has ‘seized the study of failed states’, leading him to suggest that ‘less universal concepts are necessary to approach the panorama of states and societies in the contemporary world’.147 In a ‘modest initial attempt’, Call offered the following list of categories as ‘yielding a much more nuanced analytic tool than “failed states”’: collapsed states, weak formal institutional capacity states, war-torn states and authoritarian states/ regimes.148 In a subsequent analysis he elaborated on these categories (omitting collapsed states) in terms of ‘capacity gaps’, ‘security gaps’ and ‘legitimacy gaps’ respectively.149 Again, it is hard to disagree with Call’s critique and some of his ‘conceptual alternatives’ highlight concerns raised earlier in this chapter, particularly the need to disaggregate conflict and state failure. It is similarly hard to disagree with his remark that ‘imprecise concepts make for poor scholarship and bad policy’ and that ‘renewed effort’ should be put into ‘devising categories of analysis that will be denotatively and connotatively clear, useful and discriminating’.150 However, such effort should perhaps be put into making the failed state conceptually relevant rather than attempting to move beyond it, for adopting ‘conceptual alternatives’ would not only leave the failed state as the idiomatic ‘elephant in the room’ but also potentially begin a third parallel discourse. In tandem with the failed state ‘thesis’ in political and security circles, a second discourse has emerged in the development community – comprising terms which Call argues are little better.151 The development community has long been tackling issues facing and

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emanating from failed states but their focus has shifted in recent years from traditional poverty reduction to what might be termed ‘diplomatic development’.152 Donors have increasingly begun to see governance as part of development, prompting calls for more joined-up or whole-ofgovernment approaches (WGA) to foreign assistance,153 and the emergent new paradigm represents a broader state-building strategy which is taking centre stage in place of the previous aid effectiveness paradigm. Whereas during the 1980s and 1990s aid was directed towards ‘good performers’, in accordance with the ‘good governance agenda’, since 9/11 priorities have changed and donors are now diverting aid toward ‘poorer performers’, in accordance with a new ‘weak governance agenda’. The alignment of the so-called 3Ds – defence, diplomacy and development – in foreign assistance has led to a gradual merging of security and development. While this merger remains ‘contested and incomplete’, an ‘unusual consensus has evolved on a common agenda of promoting democracy, governance and human rights in pursuit of “their development” and “our security”’.154 Moreover, ‘their security’ has become recognised as a necessary prerequisite for ‘their development’. According to the OECD, for example, ‘[d]evelopment actors have come to realise that successful long-term development in impoverished nations is impossible when incapacitated states cannot deliver the collective goods of basic security and effective governance’.155 As a result of this shift in development thinking, development terms and indices have been adopted in the failed state ‘thesis’ and vice versa. So, in addition to the failed states identified by the SF/PITF and FSI, we have had, for example, around 50 weak states according to the Center for Global Development,156 46 fragile states according to the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID),157 and 25 low-income countries under stress (LICUS) according to the World Bank158 – a term subsequently replaced with fragile states and then more recently with fragile and conflict-affected states (FCS), of which the Bank has identified 33.159 These latter moves were made in an attempt to align the Bank’s assistance with other development partners – reflecting the need for a more joined-up approach across countries as well as within them. It also reflects the increasing consensus among development actors that breaking the conflict trap is

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necessary for poverty reduction – thus further cementing the merging of security and development. The development community now appears to have converged on the term fragile state to describe a range of phenomena associated with state weakness and failure.160 However, as in the failed state discourse, there remains no commonly agreed definition of state fragility and no joint list of fragile states among donor agencies – a shortcoming acknowledged by all of the aforementioned organisations and others besides. This has not only hindered the development of WGA approaches to fragile states,161 but presents the risk of misdirected aid and policies that aggravate rather than reduce situations of fragility. ‘Operating with a faulty definition of state fragility’, Putzel argues, ‘is not merely bad practice, but can actually lead international actors to miss the signs of fragility [. . .] it is high time a more rigorous definition of state fragility is adopted by international actors’.162 In many respects, the ‘fragile state thesis’ mirrors the failed state ‘thesis’, with a growing orientation towards defining these states in terms of vulnerability to conflict and non-delivery of core functions of statehood. The reflection is further evident in the way in which statebuilding is seen as a panacea for ‘their development’ as much as it is for ‘their security’ and ‘our security’. The result is not only a merging of development and security in policy practice but also a crossover of the two theses – and of the various spectra and continua of faltering states, with little clarity regarding what exactly a fragile or failed state is and if or how they differ from one another or their innumerable cousins (weak, troubled, stressed, at risk and so on).

Conclusion Despite some convincing critiques to the contrary, the failed state is still with us in theory as much as it is in practice – and with an everexpanding lexicon. Yet, there is no disputing the thrust of these critiques: the failed state ‘thesis’ is inherently flawed. Over the last 20 years, the field of state failure has become much more complex but agreement on what constitutes a failed state – precisely – has remained elusive. Definitions have broadened (from institutional implosions to functional deficits) and narrowed again (from ends to means), fragmented (into ill-defined degrees and tentative types),

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become obscured (through indicators, indices and variables) and shifted sideways (across to parallel discourses). Along the way, only the concept of collapsed states appears to have accrued a common understanding – or state, since most agree there is only one unequivocal case (Somalia). The failed state has remained conceptually opaque, becoming increasingly embroiled in political and securitising rhetoric, alongside normative battles and controvertible policy prescriptions. The failed state ‘thesis’ is ‘confronted by empirical, analytical, normative and practical shortcomings of considerable proportion’, as Hagmann and Hoehne neatly summarise: empirically, discursive labels gloss over important differences between states rather than accounting for those differences and assume that the driving forces of state failure are to be found within a given state or society; analytically, because the absence of central government is equated with anarchy, false conclusions are drawn once a state has been classified as failed or collapsed; practically, reflections on state failure and collapse frequently culminate in recommendations on how to strengthen or repair those states, utilising methodologically questionable indices for measuring state instability and promoting top-down state-building scenarios which often do not bring about the desired results; and normatively, the state convergence thesis leads to the biased notion that the modern state as it has developed in Europe and North America is accomplished, mature and stable as opposed to failed states which are cast as pre-modern aberrations.163 There is undeniably a need to move away from pejorative representations of so-called failed states but it is suggested here that the remedy to this and other flaws of the ‘thesis’ lies not in abandoning or substituting the term but in engagement with existing discourses to move toward a clearer and more precise conceptualisation. This is crucial to reducing long lists of ‘basket cases’ and closing the ever-widening gap between threat perception and analysis. It would, further, lower normative hackles and create a pathway for more nuanced analyses of other phenomena so often conflated with and subsumed under the ‘monolithic cloak’ of state failure but which (like failed states) require their own ‘tailored solutions’.164 Such a conceptualisation needs to begin with a different set of assumptions and pose a different set of questions to those in the existing literature.

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The vast majority of studies thus far have been concerned with consequential definitions of state failure. As such they do not advance understanding of ‘why’ states ‘are experiencing the various problems that have resulted in them being described as failed’ – rather, as Hill elaborates: the literature concentrates on determining whether [a] state conforms to its understanding of what a state is. This preoccupation with categorising states means that the literature’s analysis of crisis begins and ends with a description of the supposed capabilities and inabilities of states. This analysis furnishes little explanation of why certain states are unable to guarantee the security of their citizens or provide them with positive political goods.165 In like manner, Bilgin and Morton note that ‘little reference is commonly made to the processes through which these states have come to “fail”’ or ‘the conditions that allow for state failure’.166 Yet, investigating these processes and conditions is, as they suggest, an important avenue for research – indeed, it should be the first step in conceptualising state failure. The second step is to place state failure in historical perspective and acknowledge the oft-overlooked fact (outlined in the introductory chapter) that contemporary failed states are, more precisely, failed postcolonies. Contrary to most studies which seem to assume the existence of a state that has subsequently failed, it is suggested here that a more appropriate way to view failed states is, in Anderson’s words, as ‘states that fail before they form’.167 Part of the problem with many analyses is the association of statehood with the ready-made templates that constituted post-colonies upon their independence. However, as Jackson argues, ‘[w]e come close to committing the historical fallacy of retrospective determinism if we conceive of [colonies] as emergent or prospective national states’.168 It therefore follows that it is also a fallacy to speak of post-colonial ‘states’. In many cases, there simply was not a state there and ultimately something that was not there cannot be deemed to have failed in the way that current conceptions hold. The question that needs to be posed is more to do with a failure in state creation and this raises a different set of issues than many of those raised in the literature. Perhaps, as Bilgin and Morton suggest, ‘rather

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than focus on “failed states”, increased attention should be granted to the “failed universalisation” of the “imported state” within the postcolonial world’.169 Contemporary state failure derives from the extraordinary legal origins of post-colonial ‘states’ (within predetermined borders and institutional frameworks imposed from outside) and is concerned with state creation. From such a starting point we can begin to narrow our conceptualisation of state failure and broaden our understanding. In order to bring meaning to the concept, though, we need to consider, in historical perspective, how and why some states have failed before they formed – and conversely why others have not. It is to this which the following chapters turn – through an African prism.

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CHAPTER 2 THE STATE AND ITS FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Introduction At the close of World War II, there were only three sovereign states in sub-Saharan Africa: South Africa, which gained independence from British rule in 1931; Liberia, which was founded by the American Colonisation Society in 1822 as a haven for liberated slaves and declared its independence in 1847 (with a constitution modelled on that of the US); and Ethiopia, which was the only indigenous (empire) state able to resist colonialism (apart from the short-lived Italian occupation in 1936). Independent statehood came to the rest of the continent in the wake of the retraction of the European empires and was forged on the basis of colonial jurisdictions – beginning in 1957 with the independence of Ghana and ostensibly ending with the independence of Namibia in 1990. Many, if not most, of these nascent ‘states’ were far removed from the sovereign entities envisioned by Weber or social contractarians and their attributes of statehood were difficult to entirely reconcile with the prerequisites for recognition codified at Montevideo. Their recognition was declaratory, their sovereignty legal (or negative) and their statehood juridical, which overrode the hitherto requirement to constitute empirical states and possess domestic (or positive) sovereignty. These were post-colonies or quasi-states,1 and the story of state failure in Africa is, as outlined in the introductory chapter, one of failed post-colonial state creation. The present chapter seeks to understand why this has been the case on much of the continent.

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The first two sections offer system-dominant structural explanations. In this reading, state failure is to do with the grafting (and maintenance) of the European model of statehood onto pre-state societies. While this process can be said to have worked in some cases, in many others it did not. State failure is thus a systemic problem emanating from the legacy of colonialism and consistent with an unreadiness for self-government. A related set of ideas focuses on changing patterns of assistance afforded by the international system and Africa’s changing geopolitical and economic position within that system. It focuses particularly on superpower patronage during the Cold War, and the abrupt ending of the proxy war played out on the continent, combined with externally imposed economic and political reform thereafter. The third section offers rational choice or contingent explanations. In this reading, state failure is more to do with the institutions or personalities of the state. The section first looks broadly at institutional shortcomings, before considering the paradox of power in African states associated with neopatrimonial politics. The fourth section offers a more historically deterministic view of state failure. In this reading, state failure is a function of the violent historical juncture at which African states find themselves – the early stages of primitive power accumulation. An alternate reading questions whether post-colonial Africa is redolent of early modern Europe and suggests instead that state failure might herald the end of the post-colonial system and the birth of a new and more ‘organic’ order. The final section concludes.

The Weak Basis of Quasi-Statehood Indigenous state formation in pre-colonial Africa was discontinuous, with only the Ethiopian Highlands, Great Lakes, Southern Highlands (Tanzania) and parts of West Africa providing any significant zones of statehood over substantial periods of time.2 Pre-colonial Africa was, as described by Jackson, a ‘continental archipelago of loosely defined political systems’.3 Historically, the physical geography of Africa has posed a peculiar set of challenges to would-be state-makers, in particular, how to broadcast power over inhospitable and sparsely settled lands; in only a few places are there ecological conditions that support relatively high densities of people – and it is these areas that have the longest traditions of relatively centralised state structures.4

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States in pre-colonial Africa did not develop in relation to neighbouring states, as in Europe, and boundaries were not defined by the reach of other states or confrontation with them. On the contrary, power radiated from a centre and diminished with distance, often stopping short of other states’ power. There were thus large tracts of land that were neither populated nor physically controlled and boundaries shifted as the power of states waxed and waned. Provinces in outlying areas would often break away and form another political centre or other polities would control areas where there was a void of power. The abundance of land led to the prevalence of flight over fight: protest migrations were common as were migrations of people or polities when land became exhausted or lost spiritual virtue.5 The abundance of land also negated the need to demarcate ownership and control so that land might belong to one authority while the people residing on that land would belong to another.6 In short, sociopolitical order was fragmented, overlapping and fluid. It was also based on tribute rather than taxes, cowries rather than coinage and societies were, for the most part, pre-literate. On the whole, the threats associated with the close proximity of other states did not exist in the way they did in Europe and elsewhere; neither, therefore, did the need for public administration. In state and stateless societies alike, kinship was the prevalent source of authority but associations and identities were multiple and dynamic. Thus, pre-colonial sovereignty differed from contemporary conceptions of sovereignty in two distinct ways: firstly, control tended to be exercised over people rather than land; and secondly, sovereignty tended to be shared and it was not unusual for a community to have nominal obligations and allegiances to more than one political centre.7 The first political map of traditional Africa was drawn only during the colonial era and it revealed, in Jackson’s words, a ‘complicated lacework of more than a thousand variously defined political societies – some isolated and some interdependent, some free and others slave, some entangled in imperial relations, others in feudal ties’.8 Mazrui similarly notes that ‘from a political point of view the African continent was a miracle of diversity – ranging from empires to stateless societies, from elaborate thrones to hunting bands, from complex civilisations to rustic village communities’.9 Thus, the notion of a territorially defined state as the sole source of political authority, neighboured by other such states,

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was an alien construct to the majority of Africans. The state so-defined was a European import and derives only from the imposition of colonial rule in the closing years of the nineteenth century. So, for Clapham, the ‘problem’ of state failure is most basically about whether the ‘grafting’ of colonial states onto ‘unpromising rootstock’ could be made to take: it is not that the ‘project did not work anywhere but that it did not, and could not be expected to, work everywhere’. This is, in part at least, because the grafting process was ‘thoroughly inadequate both spatially and temporally’.10 Temporally, European colonialism was, in fact, very brief (little more than 60 years in many cases) so that the ‘level of penetration of external “governmentalities” into domestic society was necessarily shallow’.11 Furthermore, colonial governments were never particularly large or imposing and it is ‘something of a misnomer to speak of them as colonial “states”. They were comparable not to states but, rather, to small provincial, county or municipal governments in European countries’.12 Colonial governments could not and, in the main, did not seek to fundamentally alter the societies over which they ruled, thus indigenous sociopolitical cultures were left largely intact and continued to shape the understanding and behaviour of most Africans.13 While colonial policies varied from the French policy of assimilation (France d’outre-mer) to the British policy of indirect rule (the Dual Mandate), it was the latter (based on Burkean gradualism) that came to predominate.14 Indirect rule was ‘mediated rule’, meaning that colonial rule was ‘never experienced by the vast majority of the colonised as rule directly by others’ but instead as rule mediated through their own.15 The colonial ‘state’ was, to use Mamdani’s apt term, a ‘bifurcated state’, in that it was institutionally and racially segregated between a minoritywhite urban civil society who were citizens ruled directly (according to ‘modern’ law) and a majority-rural African peasantry who were subjects ruled indirectly (according to ‘customary’ law) through ‘native authorities’ (which, far from being ‘native’, were reconstituted or created for the purposes of extending colonial rule).16 Colonial powers sought ‘familiar’ institutions or ‘superior tribes’ through which to rule, often without appreciation of their relation to the surrounding (more unfamiliar) organs of authority. In so doing, they favoured or protected certain peoples or polities over others, reinforcing existing divisions and hierarchies or creating new ones.17

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The spatial inadequacy of the grafting process presented a separate, although related, set of issues. The continent was variously divided between colonial territories that broadly corresponded to pre-colonial states (e.g. Burundi, Lesotho), territories in which a ‘core’ state or group of states was incorporated into a much larger area (e.g. Ghana, Uganda), and territories in which pre-colonial state traditions were either subordinated or non-existent.18 The colonial partition of Africa, as Jackson notes, ‘amounted to an international enclosure movement’, expanding the political scale by reducing the many traditional political systems into 50 or so new and ‘usually arbitrary jurisdictions’.19 However, as Jackson notes elsewhere, ‘what was gained in scale was of course lost in unity’.20 Griffiths, for example, makes a powerful case that many of the ills of contemporary Africa can be traced to the European balkanisation of the continent.21 The colonial powers succeeded in imposing an artificial and largely arbitrary grid of ‘national’ boundaries, which replaced traditional borderlands. The new political map paid scant attention to physical geography and even less to cultural, historical or ethnic realities: it was drawn by Europeans for Europeans. In essence, ‘most of the boundary lines in Africa are diplomatic in origin and, in very many instances, they are that abomination of the scientific geographers, the straight line’.22 Many African countries are long, narrow and roughly rectangular in shape, usually with one narrow end as coastline. This configuration originated from the rules of partition outlined at the Berlin Conference in 1884–5, which defined spheres of influence in terms of miles of coastline from which European powers could claim 250 miles of territory inland. This pattern is typified by West African states, such as Gambia, Togo and Benin.23 While some borders were strategically located for commercial or military advantage, 46 per cent of borders follow landforms such as river basins and mountain ranges (often imprecisely) and 48 per cent are simply geometric lines (corresponding to lines of latitude and longitude or other straight lines and arcs of circles).24 The latter is especially true of the Saharan borders, which were the last to be drawn in 1914.25 One of the effects, according to Griffiths, was the ‘dehumanisation’ of African boundaries.26 Groups with little in common or that were openly hostile to each other were brought together in the same colony, while other more homogenous groups were divided between colonies.

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Griffiths notes that 191 ‘culture group areas’ are dissected by colonial boundaries, some by more than one boundary. For example, 13 culture groups straddle the Cameroon – Nigeria border, ten the Kenya – Uganda border and the borders of Burkino Faso cut across 21 groups. Only rarely, he argues, do ‘modern international boundary alignments in Africa coincide, for any great distance, with the edge of a culture group or ethno-linguistic area’.27 Almost all African countries are ethnically heterogenous. Zambia, for example, is home to 72 different culture groups, while Nigeria has 395.28 As Lewis notes: It is a remarkable irony that the European powers who partitioned Africa in the late 19th century when the idea of the nation state was paramount, should have created in Africa a series of Hapsburgstyle states, comprising a medley of peoples and ethnic groups lumped together within frontiers which paid no respect to traditional cultural contours.29 At the same time, as Touval reminds us, indigenous polities were not necessarily ethnically homogenous but could contain ‘segments of larger ethnic groups devoid of an effective common political authority’ (such as the Bakongo and Somalis) or ‘people of different stock’ (such as Buganda and the Barotse Kingdom). This leads him to wonder ‘whether criticism of the division of the ethnic groups by borders had any basis in indigenous political ideas and practice, or whether it was induced by concepts which were wholly European in origin’.30 Touval further suggests the need to qualify the common assumption that the borders were in toto arbitrarily drawn (in complete disregard of African realities and local circumstances) and that Africans were passive objects in the process. He does not dispute the fact that the ultimate decisions on how to divide the continent and delimit the borders were made by Europeans nor that these decisions were not necessarily good ones, might have been misapplied or based on erroneous information. But he provides a convincing account of how the treaties drawn up between representatives of European powers and African rulers, on occasion, influenced the shape of the partition, and therefore how Africans indirectly helped to influence the disposition of their territories. He is careful to clarify that treaties were only taken into consideration when a European power decided to do so but also points out that sometimes such a decision

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might have been prompted by an appeal from the Africans concerned.31 In addition, some territorial agreements included provision for subsequent modification to take account of local conditions and were adjusted ex post facto.32 These qualifications notwithstanding, colonial rule still imposed fledgling state institutions upon African societies and the colonial partition did not just work against sociopolitical (or ethnic) cohesion. It also resulted in a number of colonies that would prove geopolitically and economically unsustainable as states. On the one hand, some states were too small for any prospect of independent development.33 On the other hand, some states were so large that it was inconceivable that a new government would be able to extend its writ throughout the whole territory34 – a predicament made more acute by the elongated shape of many countries and the geographical marginality of capital cities. Most capital cities are located just within a state – an appropriate location in a colony (at the point giving best access to the metropole) but a location that in a state serves neither national unity nor economic development.35 In addition, 15 African states are landlocked – more than any other region of the world – and, at the micro-level, some boundaries separated towns form their hinterlands or villages from their fields.36 Nevertheless, it was these alien, artificially demarcated and underdeveloped entities that Africans would inherit and ironically claim in the rush for independence: as Herbst notes, ‘even as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and Sekou Toure´ were proclaiming a break with Europe and the West, they uniformly seized upon that most Western of political organisations – the nation state – to rule’.37 Clapham similarly observes that anti-colonial nationalism ‘neatly combined opposition to the existing colonial rulers with adoption of the principles of governance derived from those rulers’.38 In the vast majority of cases the colony simply became the state with its name and territorial boundaries unchanged. Furthermore, decolonisation typically involved the adoption of an independence constitution, and this was ‘almost always modelled, often faithfully and sometimes slavishly, on the constitution of the metropolitan power’ but, in most cases, was abandoned within the first decade of independence, having failed to be institutionalised.39 The initial nationalist sentiments that arose in support of the state following decolonisation proved temporary and superficial, forming what Buzan terms a negative group unity or bond of

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xenophobia.40 This bond subsided as quickly as the euphoria of independence, exposing the temporal and spatial inadequacies of the colonial graft. So long as the empires lasted, the ‘cartographical carelessness’ of the colonial powers ‘did not seriously affect the way people lived their lives’.41 It was not so much the colonial partition per se but its wholesale adoption as a basis for independent statehood which contrived against the potential for post-colonial state creation. After all, as Geertz explains: The transfer of sovereignty from a colonial regime to an independent one is more than mere shift of power from foreign hands to native ones; it is a transformation of the whole pattern of political life, a metamorphosis of subjects into citizens. Colonial governments [. . .] are aloof and unresponsive; they stand outside the societies they rule, and act upon them arbitrarily, unevenly and unsystematically. But the governments of the new states [. . .] are located in the midst of the societies they rule.42 In many respects, as Mazrui has argued, pre-colonial ‘statehood’ has militated against post-colonial statehood.43 This conflict was accentuated by the contradictions of colonial indirect rule for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, through the preservation of pre-colonial sociopolitical structures, indirect rule aggravated the problems of creating a modern nation state and consolidating national institutions after independence. In other words, the new state was less legitimate than competing sources of pre-colonial authority, amidst which the state struggled to take root. There was no positive bond, common identity or nation-building myth to underpin the post-colonial state, and it remained irrelevant to, and detached from, the lives of many Africans. In essence, Africans did not have a stake in the state, undermining it as an institution from the outset. Secondly, contrary to pre-colonial sociopolitical culture, the local apparatus of the colonial state was organised on ethno-religious grounds which, as Mamdani argues, defined the parameters of the native authority (control) and would define the revolt against it (emancipation) – indirect rule ‘reinforced ethnically bound institutions of control and exploded them from within’. The anti-colonial

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struggle, thus, was primarily a struggle against the hierarchy of the local state – the tribally organised native authority.44 Independence deracialised the state through the policy of ‘Africanisation’ but this proved simultaneously unifying and fragmenting because independence did not detribalise the state – if anything it accentuated tribalism as leaders used patrimonialism to bridge the bifurcated state and, in so doing, absorbed civil society into political society.45 Geertz similarly argues that tribalism, in its political dimension, is ‘not so much the heritage of colonial divide-and-rule policies as [. . .] the product of the replacement of a colonial regime by an independent, domestically anchored, purposeful unitary state’. It is ‘part and parcel of the very process of the creation of a new polity and a new citizenship’.46 The ‘structures and practices’ of colonial rule ‘contained African political processes within the categories of “tribe” and encouraged Africans to think ethnically’.47 In the drive for independence ethnicity became politicised and politics, in turn, became ethnicised, creating what Geertz describes as ‘a sort of parapolitics of clashing public identities and quickening ethnocratic aspirations’.48 He further explains: ‘where the tradition of civil politics is weak [. . .] primordial attachments tend [. . .] to be repeatedly, in some cases almost continually, proposed and widely acclaimed as preferred bases for the demarcation of autonomous political units’.49 And it is the ‘crystalisation of a direct conflict between primordial and civil sentiments [. . .] that gives to the problem variously called tribalism, parochialism, communalism [. . .] a more ominous and deeply threatening quality than most of the other [. . .] problems the new states face’.50 Ethnicity is thus a function of political development – it becomes salient when borders become hard or when certain groups are privileged over others – and arises from the illegitimacy of the state. ‘Ethnic nationalism, in short, is a pathology of the state’.51 The ‘primordial discontent’ arising from the colonial partition manifests itself in two ways: ‘political suffocation’, where the group is smaller than the civil state; and ‘political dismemberment’, where the group is larger or transcends its borders.52 The former is associated with secessionism and the latter with irredentism. With some notable exceptions (e.g. Katanga, Biafra, Eritrea and South Sudan), secessionist attempts have been fewer than might have been expected given the mix of inimical groups and the unequal distribution of resources combined with centrist politics. Irredentist attempts have been even rarer –

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perhaps because irredentism presupposes an ethnically homogenous state, of which there are only three (Swaziland, Lesotho and Somalia) and although all three have brethren outside their borders, only Somalia has pursued repatriation. Of the two types of discontent, suffocation has, by far, been the most potent and while secessionist claims have been few, it has nevertheless worked against the consolidation of domestic statehood and run counter to national unity. In only six cases was there a rough correlation between the parameters of the pre- and post-colonial polity and, interestingly, these include Africa’s greatest success story (Botswana) and its antithesis (Somalia). They also include the only ethnically homogenous states in Africa (Swaziland, Lesotho and Somalia), together with two dualistic states that were the sites of one of the worst and one of the most forgotten genocides of the twentieth century (Rwanda and Burundi respectively).53 Only in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, however, does the contemporary state approximate the contours and political culture of the pre-colonial ‘state’ – all three are ‘modernised “traditional” African kingdoms, relatively unique examples of successful institutional syncretism south of the Sahara’.54 On the rest of the continent, ‘hundreds of indigenous political systems remain submerged beneath ex-colonial state jurisdictions either resigned to their subordinate fate, indifferent to it, or frustrated by it’.55 On the other hand, given a ratio of approximately 2000:50 ethnolinguistic groups to colonial units,56 and a ratio of approximately 1000:50 indigenous political systems to colonial units,57 ‘the alternative would have a been a continent of pygmy jurisdictions and statelets which could not have succeeded in fitting into the world of territorial sovereign states’.58 Furthermore, the ‘creation of ministates’ to allow for political and cultural congruity would likely ‘spawn the demand for the creation of microstates from the same ostensibly pure ethnic ministates and lead to virulent ethnic cleansing’.59 At the other end of the spectrum, the pan-African movement was as short-lived as the presidency of its founding father, Kwame Nkrumah. The ‘institutional and physical infrastructure to support such a vast jurisdiction did not exist in 1960 and still does not exist’ and even on a smaller scale there was, and still remains, little integration between African states, which are somewhat isolated from one another – oriented outwards (toward the former metropole) rather than toward one another.60 Pre-independence support for panAfricanism waned as the common enemy of colonialism was removed and

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divisions emerged between Anglophone and Francophone states as well as between radical and moderate states. The sub-regional groupings (the Casablanca, Monrovia and Brazzaville groups) which formed in 1961–2 similarly gave way as, rather than a United States of Africa, a looser association of states was established in the Organisation for African Unity (OAU).61 Thus, despite contestation,62 the sanctity of colonial borders has been preserved and was endorsed in the founding Charter of the OAU in 1963, Article III of which states that members pledge their ‘respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of each State and for its inalienable right to independent existence’. This was reiterated the following year in a resolution adopted by the First Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government held in Cairo, which states: ‘considering border problems constitute a grave and permanent factor of dissension’ and ‘considering further the borders of African states, on the day of their independence, constitute a tangible reality’, the OAU ‘solemnly declares that all member states pledge themselves to respect the borders existing on their achievement of national independence’. African governments have maintained a united stance on border preservation, including the condemnation of the only two states to defy the pledge (Somalia and Morocco).63 With the exception of the secession of Eritrea in 1993 and South Sudan in 2012, the colonial map has been maintained and there have not been any significant boundary changes since 1957. Even the secession of Eritrea – especially from the perspective of Eritreans – was ‘to a significant degree a question of decolonisation rather than secession’.64 In the final analysis, many African countries were ‘catapulted by the rush of events into the state system [. . .] with very limited preparation for large-scale self-government and still attached to indigenous practices and institutions [. . .] that were contrary to the obligations and other requirements of modern sovereign statehood’.65 State failure, in this reading, is to do with attempts to impose on societies a level of state control that they were ultimately unable to bear.66 The fundamental problem arises from the disconnect between the imported state and indigenous political culture and the consequent ‘legitimacy deficit’ of the African state. While the state may have been adopted, adapted and endogenised to an extent since independence, its origins remain exogenous and set up against African societies rather than having

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evolved out of them – in short, as Englebert puts it, ‘the African state is a failed state because it is not African’.67 This is an important corollary to Jackson’s view of state failure arising from the peculiarities of quasistatehood and the negative sovereignty regime. It thus places the ‘problem’ of failed states firmly in the lap of international society, as Jackson explains, they are: creatures of changes in the rules of membership and modes of operation in international society which were deliberately made to replace the institutions of European overseas colonialism. The correct level of analysis for understanding these problematical entities consequently is not the state as such but the state-system and particularly its new accommodating norms.68

Cold War Adventurism and its End In the same way that new international norms allowed for the granting of de jure statehood, irrespective of de facto statehood, they have supported the maintenance of it – or, at least, they did while the Cold War lasted. The negative sovereignty regime, as Clapham argues, ‘rested on the contradiction that states could retain their independence of the international system while remaining dependent on the international system’.69 This was captured well by Kwame Nkrumah when he stated that it was the responsibility of the rich countries to ‘enable his country and all other poor ex-colonies to develop by providing foreign aid. Sovereignty was a right not only to political independence but also to development assistance afterwards’.70 During the Cold War, African states were still agents of foreign powers in a form of neo-colonialism (or, perhaps more accurately, autocolonialism, since the relationship was one of consensual reciprocity),71 which served to mask the (in)viability of these nascent states and ensure their survival. As Clapham remarks: ‘sustaining African regimes became an internationalised equivalent of colonial indirect rule; indigenous rulers remained in power, as part of a pact which served the interest alike of themselves and of their external protectors’.72 During the period of the ‘neo-colonial peace’, from 1950 to the early 1990s,73 international backing (in the form of military assistance and hefty infusions of aid) from erstwhile colonial powers, international financial institutions (IFIs)

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and, increasingly, the two superpowers played an important role in buttressing African states and maintaining stability on the continent. At the same time, aid became inextricably intertwined with Cold War politics with deleterious consequences for African state creation in the longer term. The opening of Africa to superpower engagement began with the Bandung Conference in 1955, at which the Third World ‘asserted its existence as a unit separate from the Western and Communist worlds, and proclaimed the limited and quite formal ideology of non-alignment’. In the same year, a decision was made to grant admission to the UN to a ‘long waiting list of applicants’, which ‘opened the way to a numerical reorganisation of the UN’ and ‘led to a Third World majority’. This ‘symbolised the willingness of the US and USSR to court the Third World’s favour’.74 In 1961 the Non-Aligned Movement was founded, and the policy of non-alignment was affirmed in Article III of the Charter of the OAU in 1963. The Third World thus became a ‘grey area not covered by alliance commitments and nuclear weapons’ and as such the ‘zone where East-West competition could be waged with minimal apparent danger of escalation’.75 The superpowers used aid as a diplomatic tool to gain votes in the UN and nurture friendships in the Cold War (with frequent disregard for local conditions in the states concerned). Consequently, Africa became embroiled in balance-of-power politics and the continent was rapidly transformed into a theatre of war by proxy – especially where the superpowers vied for the support of the same state. This was the case in Angola and Mozambique, for example, where superpower competition abetted civil wars. On the whole, though, the assistance of the superpowers and their allies served to help African states counter domestic or external threats. A secret 1963 US document argued that an important US interest, right after keeping Africa free of Communists, was to ‘restrain violence in general and preserve the present territorial order as the most feasible alternative to chaos’.76 For example, Zaire received crucial aid from the US to turn back the Shaba rebellions; the governments of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania were rescued from the army mutinies of 1964 by British military intervention; Nigeria was only able to defeat the attempted Biafran secession in the civil war of 1967–70 with support from the Soviet Union; Chad relied on France to retain its territorial integrity in the face of Libyan aggression; and

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Ethiopia received critical military support from the Soviet Union to resist Somalia’s irredentist claims.77 One of the most prominent legacies of Cold War competition is the trade in arms. Increasingly, arms transfers were the preferred carrot to court the favour of African states, especially for the Soviet Union, in return for at least a rhetorical ideological orientation or pragmatic allegiance. Arms sales became, in Pierre’s words, ‘major strands in the warp and woof of world politics’ and more than being ‘an economic occurrence, a military relationship, or an arms control challenge’, they became ‘foreign policy writ large’.78 Measured in constant price, military expenditure to the Third World rose by 80 per cent between 1960 and 1980, compared to 48 per cent to other developed countries.79 By the end of the 1970s, over three quarters of the global arms trade was directed towards the Third World, with sub-Saharan Africa being the largest recipient.80 Moreover, as Pierre further notes, changes in the qualitative dimension of the arms trade were as significant as its quantitative expansion. Prior to the 1970s, most arms transferred to less-developed countries were obsolete weapons (World War II or early post-war vintage), which major powers wished to eliminate from their inventories; thereafter, many of the arms sold were among the most sophisticated in the inventories of supplier countries, especially small arms, and these were accompanied by a growth in transfers through co-production agreements.81 African states spent a disproportionate amount on ‘defence’ compared to other ministries and ironically much of the financial aid supplied by Western powers was used to purchase weaponry from over-extended defence budgets. While superpower patronage was critical in sustaining a number of African states, it also led to their militarisation – which ultimately helped to undermine rather than sustain them. Weaponry readily escaped from the control of the governments to which it had been supplied and was used against states rather than for them, and governments were encouraged by the availability of externally supplied armaments to assume that opposition could be dealt with by force, rather than political compromise.82 As Clark notes with regard to Somalia: ‘the prevalence of modern weapons, Somalia’s most significant legacy of superpower involvement during the Cold War, has undermined the very foundation for order in Somalia’s society’.83 Gros similarly identifies a correlation between militarisation and state failure: ‘it would appear that the more militarised a country, the greater the intensity of its failure’ and

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notes that ‘at the time of their descent into complete anarchy Somalia and Liberia were two of the most heavily militarised states in Africa, ranking consistently among the top recipients of US military aid during the Cold War’.84 In this respect, the withdrawal of superpower patronage as the Cold War thawed might be viewed as a positive development. But rather than abating, the diffusion of small arms throughout society has, if anything, become more widespread and the militarisation of states has become entrenched. Musah, for example, argues that ‘society has developed a militarised psyche that makes violence the means of choice in settling disputes’, and that ‘trends within African conflict zones increasingly undermine the notion that the end of the Cold War has put paid to proxy wars’.85 Klare similarly argues that the Cold War’s end was as significant as its duration in terms of arms transfers. Factories that once produced large quantities of arms for NATO and Warsaw Pact forces have since sought customers in the developing world (often placing lucrative contracts ahead of consideration of the political environment in recipient countries). For example, factories in Bulgaria have been accused of supplying weapons to outlaw regimes and rebel forces in Africa. In addition, surplus stocks (once in the possession of Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces) are widely believed to constitute the main source of arms for conflict in Central Africa.86 Global private arms sales were reported to have risen from around US$ 3 billion per annum during the Cold War to a figure in excess of US$ 25 billion in 1996.87 The downsizing of armies after the Cold War not only left surplus weapons that have found their way into conflict zones but also a ‘huge labour pool of potential mercenaries’.88 In a ‘throwback to the Cold War’, foreign powers have ‘thrown their weight behind warring factions in conflict zones’, in the process, providing burgeoning private military companies (PMCs) ‘a legitimising cover to wade into conflict to prop up factions that enjoy “international credibility”’.89 These new foreign private partnerships ‘offer both the hand of war and the hand of trade’ to their African hosts.90 Moreover, PMCs, Musah contends, are increasingly becoming ‘launch pads for the rebirth of primordial mercenary activities’ (spawning mercenaries who, after serving out their PMC contracts, go on to offer their services as ‘lone wolves’ to local warlords). PMCs have also have transferred ‘deadly expertise in

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weapon handling’ to unaccountable local militias and have been shown to be at the centre of small arms diffusion.91 In addition, small arms are increasingly being produced in Africa for domestic consumption. As Muggah and Sang argue, ‘small arms and light weapons are no longer uniquely produced and transferred from Western and Eastern countries to the global south’; rather, since the early 1990s, the manufacturing and diffusion of weapons has become ‘a genuinely global phenomenon and Africa is increasingly a player at all points in the trade’.92 African manufacturing capacities are ‘a product of many fathers’, one of which is financial and technical support from foreign powers (during and since the Cold War); there are also growing local industries in ‘craft’ or ‘homemade’ weapons in most countries across the continent.93 Whether internationally sourced or locally produced, small arms continue to make their way into civilian hands and are recirculated in order to ‘pursue warfare, predation and self-protection’ often in a ‘quasi-authorised fashion through [. . .] the burgeoning private security industry’.94 In short, small arms continued to circulate after the Cold War and with more ease – a concern voiced by Boutros-Ghali in the mid-1990s: Small arms [. . .] are probably responsible for most of the deaths in current conflicts. The world is awash with them and traffic in them is very difficult to monitor, let alone intercept. The causes are many: the earlier supply of weapons to client states by the parties to the Cold War, internal conflicts, competition for commercial markets, criminal activity and the collapse of governmental law and order functions.95 More recently, an observation by Muggah and Sang suggests that the situation has not changed significantly: ‘with notable exceptions, most of the world’s remaining 30-odd armed conflicts are in sub-Saharan Africa, most of them fought with old technology: small arms and light weapons’.96 Owing to their ready availability (together with relative affordability and ease of both operation and concealment), small arms have been the weapon of choice for a variety of non-state armed and criminal groups as well as enforcement arms of state militaries or ruling elites – and ordinary civilians or vigilante groups who feel the need to protect themselves from any or all of these. Overall, the presence of small

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arms ‘appears to hasten the resort to violence as a coping strategy’,97 and certainly makes any conflict or act of criminal violence more destructive. They further facilitate the rise of paramilitary bands which, in turn, feeds local arms races, fuels the black market (trafficking of illicit commerce in exchange for arms) and leads to the diversion of government resources to finance expanding (though often insecure) arsenals. Moreover, ‘development is debilitated by a climate of fear and insecurity’98 – a climate which stems, at least in part, from the diffusion of small arms across the continent. In the final analysis, the military legacies of the Cold War (and its end) have been, and continue to be, a major source of instability in African states. As Woodward explains: There is a powerful association between internal disintegration, fragmentation, massive civil violence, and the rise of warlordism, on the one hand, and states’ lack of strategic significance for major powers and the uncontrolled proliferation of conventional arms since the end of the Cold War, on the other.99 Furthermore, the declining strategic significance of Africa, and the withdrawal of the superpowers, took place against the backdrop of economic crisis, in which African states saw a decline in commercial investment and marginalisation or exclusion from the international economy. Most African economies rely on the export of a small number of primary commodities for foreign exchange, with only a few countries producing manufactured goods for the domestic market or export.100 As Julius Nyerere once said, ‘Africans produce what they do not consume and consume what they do not produce’.101 The lack of diversification resulted in a slower growth in exports compared to other developing countries and left African economies extremely vulnerable to the volatility in commodity prices.102 Thus, the oil price shocks in the 1970s followed by a fall in the price for key commodities such as coffee and cocoa in the early 1980s hit African economies hard and, combined with poor management of the agricultural sector, led to a decline in trade.103 Between 1970 and 1990, the continent’s share of developing-country agricultural primary product and food exports declined from 17 per cent to 8 per cent;104 and Africa’s overall share of world trade dropped from 5 per cent at independence to 2 per cent by the 1990s.105 At the same time, high rates of inflation in the West

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during the 1970s and 1980s led to increased prices of imported manufactured goods. The foreign exchange crisis of the 1980s fed into and was compounded by a fall in the already meagre levels of foreign investment in African economies. Deteriorating infrastructure, an inefficient public service sector and physical insecurity, combined with economic uncertainties associated with overvalued exchange rates, excessive state regulation and weak financial institutions, all raised the cost and risk of doing business in Africa and dissuaded investors. Indeed, disinvestment emerged as a trend in the 1980s, as Callaghy notes: ‘for most external businesspeople, Africa had become a voracious sinkhole that swallowed their money with little or no longer-run return’.106 Moreover, there was a significant increase in capital flight: in 1990 as a percentage of GDP it was 80.3.107 As a result, many African states became dependent on external financial support. Foreign aid and commercial lending, which had begun with modest levels during the 1960s, increased throughout the 1970s in response to the economic crises and mounting debt burden but bilateral lending levelled off in the early 1980s with recession in the West. Africans thus had little choice but to turn to multilateral lending agencies, giving the latter a virtual monopoly over African economies and leverage to attach more stringent conditions to continued financial support. Overall levels of foreign aid increased significantly in the 1980s and by the end of the decade foreign aid averaged 10–15 per cent of GDP – an amount that is historically unprecedented.108 However, the worsening economic crisis and exponential increases in aid led to a shift in donor thinking about development. The purpose of development aid had previously shifted from a focus on promoting growth (by relieving budgetary constraints on growth, especially through funding the expansion of infrastructure and social services) in the 1960s to addressing ‘basic human needs’ (by funding projects that benefitted the poor directly, such as health care and rural development) in the 1970s; it now shifted to funding economic reforms regarded as essential for growth.109 In essence, the previous practice, associated with the Keynesian period of the 1960s and 1970s, of supporting the African state as the engine for growth was replaced by the Washington Consensus and the view that state-centric development was at the heart of the continent’s ills. Accordingly, aid became tied to externally

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imposed reform programmes aimed at rolling back the state. The logic of the so-called structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) introduced by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) was simple enough – to reduce the need for financial support by (re)integrating African economies into the world economy. In practice, this meant removing state control over the economy in return for aid and the rescheduling of debt. Virtually all sub-Saharan states outside of the Southern African Customs Union were subject to SAPs, which included devaluation of currency, lowering of tariff structures, removal of subsidies, the elimination of marketing boards and privatisation of the parastatal sector. SAPs have had profoundly contradictory effects. Aside from the severe economic shocks such reforms entailed (e.g. loss of public sector jobs, sudden rises in food prices and the cost of imports), as Herbst argues, they had important political consequences that ‘risked imperilling the programmes at birth’. State intervention in the economy had provided a certain amount of political stability by enabling leaders to reward constituencies important to their continued tenure in office. Ceding control over the economy curtails the state’s ability to provide patronage, making the state much less flexible in dealing with political crises. Without recourse to patronage, leaders have fewer means of buying off restive groups but are still vulnerable to violent confrontation from those who have been consciously discriminated against for years. Leaders may, therefore, have to procure future stability by repressing former clients – with the attendant risk that significant segments of the population will become even more alienated. In sum, Herbst argues, structural adjustment makes the political climate much riskier for leaders while weakening the central apparatus of the state on which rulers have long relied to stay in power.110 Mayall similarly argues that SAPs have ‘weakened the hold of quasistate authorities further’. Specifically, he points to the fact that SAPs, despite improvements over the years, are based on economic analyses (largely conducted in Washington) that do not sufficiently take into account local sociopolitical conditions. This weakness of the IFIs is ‘particularly problematic where the state has failed to strike deep roots’ and in such cases ‘rolling back the state may threaten to roll it out of existence’. Akin to Herbst, he emphasises the importance of patronage networks in societies that are still largely organised along kinship lines

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and argues that ‘where political offices can no longer be farmed out, the political class may simply choose to do without the state and to profit from a war economy instead’.111 Musah provides some evidence for the scenarios painted by Herbst and Mayall, which also highlights how SAPs have compounded the militarisation brought about by Cold War politics. He argues that ‘cureall structural adjustment programmes [. . .] have put excessive pressure on the already anorexic state to further slim down by selling off state assets, and cutting down on military expenditures [. . .]’. In some cases, he contends, this has led elites to cut military strength and starve the army out of pay, while setting up ‘informal parallel security groups outside of the purview of aid agreements, whose main preoccupation is to guarantee personal and regime security, crush civil society dissent and eliminate threats from rival strongmen’. Such apparatuses (e.g. Interahamwe of Rwanda; Cobras and Cocoye of Congo-Brazzaville) are often trained by international mercenaries and their primary allegiance is to sectional interests. At the same time, Musah argues, the ‘paralysis within the formal armies has thrown up freelancers all too eager to engage in mercenary and terrorist activities’.112 Van de Walle casts some doubt on these arguments and, indeed, whether SAPs have imposed hardships on the governments and people of Africa. At the same time, he casts even more doubt on the notion that structural adjustment has had a positive effect on state strength and political stability.113 He centres his argument on the fact that many SAPs were never implemented. Indeed, as documented elsewhere, between 1980 and 1990, half of the IMF programmes and two thirds of the World Bank programmes broke down and both institutions conceded that in those programmes that continued the results of reform efforts were modest at best and often poor.114 Many African governments were unconvinced about the painful reform process and government leaders’ commitment has also often been ‘sapped by bureaucratic inertia’, which has ‘constituted a very considerable obstacle to the effective implementation of SAPs’.115 Contrary to the arguments of Herbst, Mayall and Musah, Van de Walle argues that ‘the average size of the state apparatus relative to the economy has not declined appreciably’,116 and rather than threaten patron-client relationships, SAPs may have actually strengthened them. He argues that ever-increasing donor support

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since independence has ‘sheltered African governments from their inability to attract foreign capital’ and ‘lessened the likelihood of economic reform’ as it ‘helped governments sustain the policy status quo’. He further contends that ‘despite its harsh rhetoric, donor conditionality [. . .] has proven toothless’ with donors continuing to lend regardless of whether reforms were being implemented.117 In other words, ‘the deficiencies of donor conditionality have allowed weak and incompetent regimes to remain in power’ and ‘avoid the kind of reform that might have led to economic growth’. They ‘strengthened the hands of rent-seeking politicians within governments and weakened the position of technocrats who might have pushed for the rationalization of decision-making’. In fact, aid allocation patterns may actually have rewarded the countries that least followed donor dictates.118 SAPs have therefore promoted political stability for the very reasons that Herbst thought they would not – by ‘comfort[ing] neopatrimonial rulers’ and ‘funnelling large amounts of financial resources to tottering governments’.119 For different reasons, Van de Walle corroborates the general view that SAPs have ‘unwittingly often undermined the very interests within the state that they sought to promote’ and made states ‘more vulnerable to failure’.120 With some notable exceptions, such as Ghana and Uganda, they have rarely brought about the economic reforms that they were conditional upon. Aid has been misdirected or misappropriated, in some cases fuelling patrimonial regimes, in others parallel economies, in others both. In most, SAPs increased the scope and degree of the role of external actors in macroeconomic decision-making, which served to side-line state institutions. SAPs have also increased reliance on aid, which constituted the equivalent of more than 75 per cent of African government revenues by the early 1990s.121 And they have exacerbated the debt burden. By 1992 total African debt was US$ 150 billion (compared to US$ 14.8 billion in 1974) which equated to more than 100 per cent of Africa’s total GNP – and much of this rise came from borrowing associated with SAPs, which could not be rescheduled.122 As a consequence, countries were spending more on debt service than on health and education combined.123 To the economic conditionalities associated with the SAPS of the 1980s (and because of their limited success), the fall of the Berlin Wall (and the triumph of Western liberalism) brought forth political conditionalities in

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the form of multiparty democratic elections, protection of human rights and good governance. For example, the World Bank warned that foreign aid would not be forthcoming ‘unless governance in Africa improves’.124 Again the logic was simple enough – a more conducive political context, or enabling environment, was needed for economic reform to bear fruit. Donors began to see an effective state as necessary for development, promoting capacity-building and upsizing the previously downsized state in what might be termed neo-Keynesianism. However, democracy promotion may run counter to the developmental objectives of SAPs. Jeffries, for example, questions the identification of ‘developmental good government’ with multiparty democracy and the faith being placed in democracy as a panacea for economic non-development, arguing that, in the absence of relatively autonomous government institutions committed to a national public interest, democratic politics is likely to ‘exacerbate rather than reduce problems of corruption, wastefulness and short-sighted economic policy formation’.125 On the basis of past experience across sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, he argues that it is not tenable to suggest that ‘governments in multiparty systems have been consistently more economically responsible and developmentally efficacious than authoritarian governments’.126 Widening his analysis, he argues that from historical, transnational evidence, ‘there are very few recent examples of rapid early capitalist development having taken place under liberal-democratic regimes’ and that liberal democracy would have been, developmentally, a ‘considerable handicap’.127 Moreover, it is now widely accepted that the transition to democracy is inherently destabilising and fraught with the potential for conflict – particularly nationalist conflict in post-colonial environments.128 In requiring rule ‘by the people’, democratic transitions raise the question of ‘who the people are’ and, as Jackson and Rosberg claim, ‘in the postcolonial multi-ethnic African state it is not always clear who constitutes “the people”’.129 On the other side of the coin, regimes that had hitherto received international support may find their tenure threatened as that support is extended to opposing parties or insurgent movements in externally sponsored power-sharing agreements or electoral processes. For this reason, the third wave of democratisation has, to some authors, created a heightened vulnerability to state failure. Dorff, for example, argues that the ‘current situation in which the number of failed and faltering states is

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increasing may itself be partly a result of the “democratic moment”’ and that ‘attempts to expand democracies may have the unintended deleterious consequence of expanding the community of failed or failing states’.130 Furthermore, while donors have begun to see an effective state as necessary for development rather than an obstacle to it, ‘their attitude toward the state has remained ambiguous, competing with an infatuation for the non-state sector, which has at times hampered the strengthening of state institutions’.131 The good governance agenda was accompanied by external attempts to strengthen civil society in African states which involved support for groups that were ‘independent of, and implicitly hostile to, incumbent regimes’.132 Clapham particularly highlights the role of Western NGOs in the further displacement of the African state, arguing that ‘falling outside the realm of statehood in their own societies, [they] had little commitment to sovereignty in the African states in which they conducted their external activities’. He continues: In a continent which had virtually dropped out of sight as a source of substantial Western economic interests, and which had lost most of such ‘strategic’ significance as it had once possessed with the end of the Cold War, essentially moral or civil society issues attained a disproportionate influence on Western policy. Africa came to be regarded, from the viewpoint of the outside world, as a source of ‘problems’, and consequently as an appropriate focus for charitable concern. [. . .] Where previously these ‘problems’ had legitimised the activities of the Christian missionary [. . .], they now [. . .] empowered those NGOs which had formed to promote these issues in Western societies.133 NGOs often needed to work with rather than against the state, but instead saw it as a source of the issues at hand or irrelevant to resolving them. In short, the international environment became more hostile to the African state, as Woodward explains: ‘There has been a radical shift in international resource allocation, from buying friends in an ideological and strategic contest to conditioning domestic reform in return for credits in a globalising economy’.134 With the Cold War no longer a motivating force in aid programmes, donors became more selective about the countries they

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aided and there has been a downward trend in aid since 1993.135 The effect on the state and its failure is summarised well by Herbst: The decline in aid represents a fundamental break with practice of the last one hundred years, which saw international actors offer support to the African state system, first through the creation of colonies, then by the enshrinement of sovereignty, and finally by the provision of financial resources without regard to domestic economic or political performance. It is thus hardly surprising that so many African states have failed since the Berlin Wall fell, nor that those that collapsed include a notable number of states that had been richly rewarded by international patrons because of their strategic position during the Cold War but were subsequently cut off when aid donors became more concerned with economic and political performance.136 Since independence, African states have been the recipients of a heady mixture of aid and arms supplied with changing and often contradictory motives, together with ambiguous views on development and the place of the African state within it. As a consequence, external actors have unwittingly exacerbated Africa’s under-development and precipitated an intensifying trend of militarisation. While external support has been critical in supporting the African state system, it has also played a role in undermining states – helped in some cases by the ‘comforted’ neopatrimonial rulers and institutional shortfalls of those states.

Sins of Omission and Commission A second level of analysis, accordingly, places the ‘problem’ of state failure firmly within African states. In so doing, it largely dismisses changing patterns of international assistance and the inadequacies of the colonial graft as having bearing on incidences of state failure. Zartman, for example, argues that states have not failed because the state is the ‘wrong institution’ or because the state was ‘not appropriately African’.137 To him, state failure in Africa is ‘not a post-colonial phenomenon, but a condition of nationalist, second- or later-generation regimes ruling over established (i.e. functioning) states’, and has occurred in two waves.138

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The first wave occurred towards the end of the second decade of independence when the military regimes, that had replaced the original poorly functioning nationalist regimes, were overthrown. Those military regimes had concentrated power but were unable to exercise it effectively or legitimately. As a result, states, such as Chad in 1980–2, Ghana in 1979–81 and Uganda in the same years, contracted and imploded. The second wave occurred a decade later and when Zartman completed his work in 1995 was continuing. In a not-dissimilar fashion to the first wave, authoritarian successors of the first generation of nationalist regimes were overthrown by a new successor regime. While the new regime could destroy its predecessor, it could not replace it and government functioning and legitimacy receded as in Somalia and Liberia after 1990.139 It is worth dwelling on Zartman’s theory a little more here, since it is one of the few accounts to delineate a clear sequence of events detailing precisely how the process of state failure might unfold.140 A regime, often ruled by the independence generation of civilians, after being in power a long time, can no longer satisfy the demands of various groups in society. Resources dry up either for exogenous reasons or through internal waste. Certain social or ethnic groups feel alienated or neglected, and the resulting atmosphere of dissatisfaction and opposition draws increased repression and the use of the police and military to keep order. With nobody to watch the watchmen, the military move in and take over.141 Military regimes are often no more able to generate resources, stabilise allocations and productively channel opposition than their predecessors and thus rely even more on coercion.142 The regime ultimately brings down the power it has concentrated in its hands and falls into the vacuum it has created by repressing the demand-bearing groups of civil society. Zartman maintains that this situation is distinguished from other changes in government because of the inability of society to rebound and come back together in support of the successor. Instead, components of society oppose the centre and authority falls to the local level and into the hands of warlords, who often use the ethnic principle as a source of identity and control. Zartman notes variations on this scenario. For example, the military takeover may come from an armed rebellion rather than the army or the military rebellion may be unable to achieve full takeover: they often

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become subject to internal divisions and fail on arrival in the capital where the government’s control is strongest. The government, therefore, hangs on but its authority is gone and its power is limited to the capital. In either case, in the final stages, power devolves to the peripheries because of government infighting and the diversion of allocations from the social bases of support. In turn, dwindling support from wider social bases results in the withering of power at the centre. Government malfunctions and decisional avoidance sparks a governing crisis. The incumbents practice only defensive politics, fending off challengers and reducing threats, concentrating on procedural rather than substantive measures. Repression of (and concession to) the opposition take the place of a political agenda for broader participation. Eventually the centre loses control over its own agents, who begin to operate on their own account. Law and order are broken by those very agents of law and order. State failure, he contends, is marked by the loss of control over political and economic space. Political space becomes broader than the boundaries of the state as neighbouring countries encroach on the state’s sovereignty by involving themselves directly or hosting dissident movements. Economic space retracts as the informal economy takes over and parts of the state’s territory are lost to neighbouring economies, using a neighbour’s currency and tying into their trade. Zartman’s analysis is institutionalist in tone: governments are no longer willing or able to carry out the functions of the state. Failure does not result from the ‘basic maleficence of the state’ but from the ‘effectiveness of the state [. . .], through repression or neglect, in destroying the regulative and regenerative capacities of society’. In the end, ‘hard or soft, evil or merely incapable’, the state ‘contracts, isolates itself, retreats’.143 This has been expressed by other authors as the problem of either too much or too little government, where the state is respectively over-extended or under-consolidated. Wallensteen, for example, defines state failure in terms of the demise of the practical operation of governmental functions, which can occur as a result of two different and extreme dimensions of state performance. On the one hand, state failure occurs if the state is not effective enough, where the state is ‘under-consolidated’. On the other hand, state failure can occur when the state is too intrusive and becomes a threat to the inhabitants it is supposed to protect, where the state is ‘over-extended’.144 The state,

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then, is ‘located in a strange in-between position’: it should be strong enough to protect its citizens and their collective assets, but not too strong, so as to threaten them; and it should be weak, so as not to interfere in personal affairs, but not too weak, so as to yield to criminal activity or oppression of citizens by citizens.145 In a similar vein, Mazrui has argued that: Every African regime has continued to walk the tightrope between too much and too little government. At some stage, an excess of government becomes tyranny; at some stage, too little government becomes anarchy. Either trend can lead to the failed state.146 Mazrui suggests that there are two unresolved dilemmas in this regard for African states. Firstly, military rule often, almost by definition, leads to too much government, whereas civilian rule, with ‘politicians squabbling among themselves’, has sometimes meant too little government. Secondly, one-party states tend towards too much government and this has been the case in most of Africa according to Mazrui. In some cases, this has led to stability; in others rebellion. Multiparty systems, however, have often degenerated into ethnic and sectarian rivalries resulting in too little control. Diarchy (as proposed in post-independence Nigeria), he suggests, might provide a solution to the former dilemma, and a system of no-party government (as in the first 20 years of Museveni’s Uganda) may pave the way for solving the latter – though experience of both is limited and the results unconvincing.147 Other accounts of state failure are more instrumentalist in tone: state failure is ‘largely man-made’, Rotberg argues, ‘it is leadership errors across history that have destroyed states for personal gain’.148 The emphasis is thus on the over-extended state and too much government or tyranny: responsibility lies in the hands of ruling cadres, who are considered ‘pariahs of the population or ineffective figureheads or both’.149 In particular, instrumental arguments focus on the paradox of power in African states. Drawing on the categories of power identified by Mann, Holsti and Zolberg argue that African states are at once strong in the category of despotic power but weak in infrastructural power.150 So, on the surface they may appear authoritarian but they actually lack authority as accountability and reciprocity are low or absent at the national level. The state looms large but it has limited capacity and there

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is no fostering of civil society.151 This paradox of power has led Callaghy to ascribe the oft-quoted epithet of ‘lame leviathan’ to the African state.152 From the two dimensions of power, Mann identifies four ideal types, which are very revealing for a discussion of the state in Africa – in part, precisely because he does not discuss Africa. High despotic power and low infrastructural power in Mann’s typology is the imperial state (and also corresponds to Weber’s term ‘patrimonial’).153 This highlights two important points discussed below: namely the neo-patrimonial character of the African state and the fact that for all intents and purposes, the African state is the colony-cum-state. A further point Mann’s analysis highlights is that the ‘history of despotism has been one of oscillation, not development’.154 A final point of interest is the two phases in the development of despotism: the first is the growth of territorial centralisation and the second is the loss of control over it.155 In Africa, the two went hand in hand. As noted in the first section of this chapter, and here neatly summarised by Wallerstein, most African states at independence were fragile owing to ‘unformed national communities, the weakness of national political structures and the consequent absence of widespread loyalty to the existing political system’ and the ‘most common means of overcoming this weakness has been the installation of a one-party regime’.156 Encouraged by prevailing Keynesian economic policies of the time, most regimes (civilian and military alike) relied on statecentric and corporatist strategies of rule both to anchor their hold on the state apparatus and to control ethnic (or other local) particularisms. In so doing, they ‘“recreated” centralising administrative states with organicstatist orientations very similar to the colonial ones and patrimonialised them’.157 The emergence of the so-called neo-patrimonial state in Africa was thus the ‘equilibrium outcome of illegitimate post-colonial statehood’, according to Englebert,158 and certainly a response to political and ethnic heterogeneity.159 The term ‘neo-patrimonial’ derives from Weber’s concept of patrimonial authority and has been used to characterise those ‘hybrid political systems in which the customs and patterns of patrimonialism co-exist with, and suffuse, rational-legal institutions’.160 As in a classic patrimonial system an individual rules by ‘dint of personal prestige and power’, despite a written constitution, and authority is ‘entirely

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personalised [and] shaped by the ruler’s preferences’. Where bureaucratic institutions did not exist in patrimonial systems, in the neo-patrimonial system, the so-called ‘big man’ dominates the state apparatus and stands above its laws. The neo-patrimonial ruler has further promoted a ‘cult of personality’ and cultivated the image of ‘pater familias’. Akin to classic patrimonialism where ‘ordinary folk are treated as extensions of the big man’s household, with no rights or privileges other than those bestowed by the ruler’, in a neo-patrimonial system the monopolisation of political space is accompanied by a process of ‘departicipation’.161 Thus, as Young ironically notes, the ‘citizen became once again merely subject’ but with one importance difference: ‘whereas the colonial state asked only obedience, the post-colonial polity demanded affection. Mere submission did not suffice; active participation in rituals of loyalty [. . .] were mandatory’.162 Berman similarly argues: The facade of state power is expressed in an obsession with pomp and theatrical ritual even greater than in its colonial predecessor and in an opaque and arbitrary decision-making process that masks the vulgar, even obscene reality of power from its subjects.163 The hegemony of the neo-patrimonial state (like its patrimonial counterpart) is sustained through a web of reciprocal favours and protection resting on ties of kith and kin. Important positions in the state apparatus are filled with loyal supporters of the ruler (loyalty being the main criteria for appointment rather than competence). Those elites, in turn, control complex networks of patron-client relationships – retaining the allegiance of their subordinates through a system of rewards and sanctions, who in return ensure their patron’s political survival.164 In what Bayart termed the ‘rhizome state’,165 this elaborate system of networks stretches from the farmstead on the edge of a village to the president’s office, springing up new shoots at all levels in between, including in the new state and parastatal departments created to meet clientele need. Since the legitimacy of elites ‘derives from their ability to nourish the clientele on which their power rests’ it is ‘imperative for them to exploit governmental resources for patrimonial purposes’.166 This is captured well in Ekeh’s notion of the two publics: most Africans in public positions, he argues, are citizens of two publics in the same society (the civic and the

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primordial) and the unwritten rule is that it is legitimate to rob the civic public in order to strengthen the primordial public.167 In short, the state has neither been emancipated from society nor institutionalised – and the elite do not have any interest in pursuing such a path; on the contrary, the state’s ‘usefulness is greatest when it is least institutionalised’ for both the elite and the communities they serve.168 State bureaucratic institutions are thus ‘rarely more than empty shells’ or a ‘shadow’ of a state.169 So, while it may be possible to distinguish between two publics, following Ekeh, the same is not true of the public and private spheres. The public sector is ‘in reality appropriated by private interests’ and public employment is ‘exploited as a private resource’ such that employees are inclined to treat their posts as ‘possessions rather than positions’.170 State offices are not occupied to produce public or collective goods but to bring personal wealth, status and acclaim to their holders. The minimal provision of public goods also serves a further political purpose, in that it encourages subjects (outside of the patron-client system) to seek the ruler’s personal favour to guarantee their physical and economic security.171 In some cases, like Tilly’s racketeers, rulers may even create violence or threats of violence to elicit compliance and reassert their indispensability to doubters.172 Corruption is ‘integral rather than incidental to politics’ and many public organisations are ‘privatised in the unusual sense that they are riddled with nepotism, patronage, bribery and extortion’.173 In addition to salaries, state employees can expect supplementary income from various illicit activities related to holding state office, as Bayart notes: ‘any official decision affords an opportunity for gain [. . .] civil service departments and public enterprises constitute virtually bottomless reservoirs for those who manage them, and for the political authorities which head them’.174 The dimensions of personal enrichment and public theft in what Holsti terms kleptocracies are ‘truly monumental’: indeed, he claims that ‘the total amount of stolen money that African elites have parked in foreign banks may conceivably be close to the total debt burden in the sub-continent’.175 The post-colonial elite’s project, as aptly summarised by Frederick Cooper, is ‘self-aggrandisement combined with enough redistribution to maintain its tenuous and vital hold on the state’.176

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Thus, neo-patrimonial states, as Bratton and de Walle surmise, have demonstrated limited development capacity and often failed to exercise complete control over the polity.177 The neo-patrimonial political system ‘functions in the here and now, not for the sake of a hypothetical tomorrow’ and there is no scope for deferring to the ‘greater good of the country’ – in other words, where elites’ political obligations are understood to be to their clients rather than to the state, ‘clients will not readily accept sacrifices for more ambitious national goals’.178 This leads Chabal and Daloz to the same conclusion as Bratton and de Walle: There prevails in Africa a system of politics inimical to development as it is usually understood in the West [. . .] where disorder has become a resource, there is no incentive to work for a more institutionalised ordering of society [and] in the absence of any other viable way of obtaining the means needed to sustain neopatrimonialism, there is inevitably a tendency to link politics to the realms of increased disorder, be it war or crime.179 In sum, ‘the instrumentalisation of the prevailing political (dis)order is [. . .] a discentive to the establishment of a more properly institutionalised state on the Weberian model’.180 This line of argument leads to the conclusion drawn by Rotberg that human agency is almost invariably at the root of state failure: ‘a series of fateful [. . .] decisions by rulers and ruling cadres eviscerated the capabilities of the state, separated [the] government from its subjects, created opposition movements and civil war, and ultimately ended the Potemkin-like pretence of international stature’.181 He acknowledges that ‘the colonial errors were many’ but maintains that it is ‘not the accidental quality of borders that is the flaw’; rather it is ‘what has been made of the challenges and opportunities of a given configuration’. Put differently, ‘impoverished, arbitrary, absent-minded creations predisposed to failure need not fail’.182 He continues: ‘cultural clues are relevant, but insufficient to explain persistent leadership flaws. Likewise, institutional fragilities and structural flaws contribute to failure, [. . .] but those deficiencies usually hark back to decisions or actions of men’.183 Rotberg supports his argument with ample examples. He contends that Mobutu Sese Seko’s ‘kleptocratic rule extracted the marrow out of Zaire’; Siaka Stevens ‘decapitated the Sierra Leonean state’ in order to strengthen his own

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power; Siad Barre ‘gutted [the Somali state] wilfully’; and it was the ‘slashing neglect and unabashed greed’ of Samuel Doe, Prince Johnson and Charles Taylor that led to the demise of the Liberian state.184 While these cases provide strong evidence for his argument, it is not as conclusive as it might at first appear, as Clapham explains: Even though the failure of particular states can often be ascribed to specific instances of bad government, at the hands of a Samuel Doe or Idi Amin, it is plausible to regard these as no more than precipitants that trigger the deeper underlying causes.185 In his view, personal rule and corruption are systemic problems that arise from the societies in which they occur rather than mere incidences of individual cupidity or wrongdoing.186 Chabal similarly argues that ‘the failure of the state is a systemic, rather than conjunctural, problem’, which can only be understood by a ‘focus on the ways in which power is exercised in Africa’, the dynamics of which ‘derive from historical factors going back to the pre-colonial period and to cultural constraints that continue to guide the behaviours of individuals and communities in Africa today’. ‘These historical and cultural factors’, he continues, have ‘combined to produce an understanding of politics and, in particular, the role of the state that is deleterious to the functioning of its institutions’.187 By way of explanation, Jackson and Rosberg argue that personal rule in Africa is a throwback to pre-colonial Africa where tribute (rather than tax) was the norm and that these indigenous political practices lived through colonialism and have expanded thereafter – manifesting themselves, in the framework of the sovereign state, as patronage, nepotism and corruption.188 If patron-client relationships hark back to pre-colonial times, it was the colonial era that entrenched them and added a further dimension – the state as the ‘avatar of prestige as well as principal source of wealth and power’.189 Berman explains that the most important political relationship in the colonial state was the alliance between European district administrators and the chiefs of administrative sub-divisions and the village headmen beneath them – and that this relationship typically took on a patron-client form.190 Fiscally constrained administrators used patronage to buy stability and reward chiefs and headmen for their compliance, thus ‘access to state power translated into private benefit’.191 Patron-client relations became ‘not

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only the fundamental mode of access to the state and its resources’ but also ‘as in pre-colonial society, the fundamental relationship between ordinary people and those with wealth and power’.192 As the principal clients of the colonial state, chiefs and headmen became the most powerful patrons in local society and clientalistic patronage networks developed around them – networks that were both ‘linked to and reproduced the relations of clientelism and dependence of pre-colonial societies’ and ‘tended to be ethnically defined within the “tribal” context of local administration’.193 The ‘colonial power structure of bureaucratic authoritarianism and clientalism’, Berman argues, ‘has continued essentially unchanged’ and independence regimes ‘chose not only to rely upon the existing apparatus [. . .] but also to extend and intensify colonial modes of domination and surplus appropriation’.194 However, elites would have been unable to personalise states to the extent that they have without an international system premised on the preservation of the status quo, as Sorensen explains: ‘the realist logic of states having to successfully compete for survival in an anarchic international system [. . .] is replaced by a new logic according to which predatory elites can go to any extreme [. . .] without paying the ultimate price: termination of the state’.195 Reno similarly notes that ‘these rulers benefit from the fact that no intermediate status for weak states exists in international law; no colonial or mandate status awaits the realm of a ruler who strays from globally recognised norms’.196 Taking this a step further, as Zolberg powerfully argues, it is the ‘emergence of a sinister syndrome’ that explains state failure: ‘a coincidence of tyranny with external military patronage’.197 The ‘callous adventurism’ of the superpowers made it possible for tyrants to expand their power well beyond what they might do on their own with catastrophic results: ‘weak predatory states with a large supply of firepower, which they tend to misuse but cannot monopolise, are subject to [. . .] deterioration. In the face of shrinking resources and an absence of institutional restraints, desperate authoritarian rulers degenerate into kleptocratic tyrants’.198 Moving beyond the Cold War, he observed that ‘now that the winds of democracy are sweeping the continent, it looks as if tyranny might give way to anarchy’.199 In some cases, Zolberg’s prediction has been borne out but in most cases where states were touched by the third wave of democratisation, it has waned leaving in its wake limited, dysfunctional or illiberal democracies. Neither externally driven economic nor domestic reform

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programmes have dislodged patrimonial practice – as argued in the previous section, it may have become even more entrenched as a result. However, as Young argues, the ‘partially reformed state proved to be substantially weakened, a condition which new forms of violence and disorder in the 1990s illuminated’.200

The Violent Creation of (a New) Order It is hard to dispute Holsti’s observation that ‘the overwhelming majority of conflicts since 1945 have been a ubiquitous corollary of the birth, formation and fracturing of states’.201 This section focuses on this inter-relationship and presents a more historically deterministic view of state failure, grounded in Tilly’s claim that ‘war makes states’.202 Thus understood, state failure in Africa is part of the violent creation of order, mirroring that which led to the formation of states in early modern Europe. Ayoob, for example, suggests that the ‘instabilities and insecurities in the Third World are largely a function of the historical juncture at which most Third World states find themselves’.203 The juncture he refers to is primitive central power accumulation – the early stages of state formation – which is documented to have been extraordinarily violent in Europe, owing to contestation and resistance from neighbouring states and peripheral populations.204 Ayoob argues that it is ‘this phenomenon of simultaneous state building by contiguous and proximate states’ that lies at the heart of Africa’s post-colonial conflicts.205 In the European experience, at least, there is a strong, positive correlation between war and state-making: ‘war was the great stimulus to state building’.206 In his overview of European state formation, Tilly observed that major mobilisations for war provided the main occasions when states expanded, consolidated and created new forms of political organisation. In pursuing war, power-holders became involved in activities which inadvertently led to the creation and consolidation of states: namely, the extraction of resources from populations over which they had control and the promotion of capital accumulation. Thus, war making, extraction and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state formation.207 Ayoob’s view that the conditions in early modern Europe bear an ‘uncanny resemblance’ to the current situation in the Africa is

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corroborated by the empirical evidence provided by Cohen et al. in their seminal article.208 They show that: [I]nstead of indicating political decay, violence in [Africa] is an integral part of the process of the accumulation of power by the national state apparatus. To the degree that this power accumulation is necessary for the imposition or maintenance of order, collective violence is also indicative of movement towards political order on a new scale.209 More recently, Cramer has similarly argued that, ‘war is not simply development in reverse’ or a ‘function of backwardness’ as it is often seen.210 Rather, ‘violent conflict of very diverse types is an extremely common, basically typical, feature of development experiences’.211 Specifically, he argues that coercion and conflict attend primitive accumulation, which is a necessary precondition for a transition to capitalist development.212 Despite the inherent similarity in the logic of the state-making processes, the picture is not quite as clear as it may at first seem. Ayoob identifies two important dimensions where the African experience diverges from that of early modern Europe: In order to replicate the process by which modern national states are created, [African] state-makers need above all two things – lots of time and a relatively free hand to persuade, cajole and coerce the disparate populations under their nominal rule to accept the legitimacy of state boundaries and institutions, to accept the right of the state to extract resources from them, and to let the state regulate the more important aspects of their lives. Unfortunately for [African] state elites, neither of the[se] two commodities [. . .] is available to them in adequate measure.213 Ayoob notes that in Western Europe, it took three or four hundred years for the end products of the state-making process to evolve, and that telescoping sequential phases into one mammoth state-making enterprise threatens political systems with the disequilibrium that is at the root of instability and state failure. In addition, the norms of civilised state behaviour, which African states are under pressure to abide

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by and which are often in contradiction with the imperatives of statemaking, were in embryonic form in Europe.214 However, doubts have been cast on the validity of the argument that Africa is replicating the violent creation of order witnessed in Europe. Indeed, Tilly himself stated that twentieth-century Africa ‘does not greatly resemble Europe of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. In no simple sense can we read the future of [Africa] from the pasts of European countries’.215 Sorensen shares Tilly’s scepticism. He, however, disputes the impediments to the process highlighted by Ayoob and offers the following two counter-arguments: firstly, he argues that if African state-makers ‘are lacking a relatively free hand to persuade and coerce, they are certainly not showing any signs in practice of being constrained in this respect’; and secondly, he argues that in many cases the European process of state formation was much shorter than four hundred years and even in the case of ex-colonies successful state-making can take place in less than five decades, as it has done in the so-called ‘warfare states’ of South Korea and Taiwan.216 Rather, Sorensen argues, the reason that war does not make states in contemporary Africa is because the war is of the wrong type. The statemaking wars analysed by Tilly in Europe were largely territorial, aimed at protecting existing states against invasion by neighbours or extending state control over other areas; external competition was a basic driving force. The armed forces faced outwards. However, in Africa, territoriality is a given and power-holders face no external threat. The armed forces thus face inwards.217 Yannis also emphasises this point. He argues that the source of state failure is associated with a struggle over control of government not territory, which distinguishes it from international war and foreign occupation.218 Sorensen does provide a caveat to his analysis and acknowledges that European power-holders were also involved in eliminating or neutralising rivals within the state as they attempted to consolidate their rule. However, he disregards the importance of this in light of the fact that in Europe domestic conflict always took place in the context of an external threat, whereas domestic conflict in post-colonial states takes place in the context of having ‘a certified life insurance’.219 Indeed, Tilly states quite clearly, that ‘external competition generates internal state making’.220

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Herbst concurs with Sorensen and takes the argument to its logical conclusion: it is the absence of inter-state war in Africa that has impeded state-making and, therefore, has led to state failure: ‘fundamental changes in economic structures and societal beliefs are difficult, if not impossible, to bring about when countries are not being disrupted or under severe external threat’.221 Like Sorensen, Herbst argues that African states gained independence without having to resort to combat and very few African states have fought inter-state wars of the type that effected the evolution of European states. As a result of the boundary maintenance system, African states have been deterred from initiating wars of conquest and most of the conflicts in Africa that have occurred were not wars that threatened the existence of other states. Such wars, rather than making states and birthing national coherence, have resulted in fragmentation and hostility.222 Herbst’s argument is summed up well by Joesph: Post-colonial Africa has [. . .] been denied the positive effects of the Darwinian process of survival of the fittest by which European states became consolidated through the defeat of frailer enemies, and from the concurrent enhancement of their military, administrative, revenue-collecting, and other capacities. Although Herbst treads carefully, his message is unambiguous: no inter-state war, no state building; no state building, no development.223 In contrast to Europe, where the Darwinian process acted as a filter whereby weak states were eliminated and political arrangements that were not viable were either reformed or disappeared, Africa has been left with states ‘that will not disappear, but simply cannot develop’.224 It is perhaps, therefore, dubious to compare the European and African state-making experiences. Tilly certainly thought so. However, while the type of war in Africa may not be conducive to state-making, perhaps it is part of the violent creation of a different order. Clapham, for example, has concurred that ‘political violence in Africa has rarely achieved the state-creating goals of a Henry VIII or a Louis XIV; much more often it has been state-destroying’. However, he goes on to muse that it might signify ‘the historically inevitable crumbling of a postcolonial system, the destruction of which forms a necessary prelude to the creation of new political structures on an indigenous base’.225 This is

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echoed by Ellis, who remarks that ‘one of the hopeful developments to come out of Africa’s many dysfunctional states is the way power vacuums have been spontaneously filled by new structures with deep roots in Africa’s history’.226 The integration of traditional polities with the modern state could, as Englebert points out, stand to reconcile the ‘two publics’ brought about by colonisation, which Ekeh identified as lying at the core of African neo-patrimonial corruption.227 Pre-colonial structures have proved resilient – sometimes remarkably so, given post-independence attempts to marginalise and eradicate them – and since the 1990s they have been resurgent. The nature and scope of this resurgence varies from constitutional revision and the restoration of kingdoms to the invocation of traditional norms by grassroots associations.228 The reasons for this resurgence appear more uniform. Recent research has shown that traditional authorities have widespread popular legitimacy and it is this – rather than simply state sanction or state weakness – that undergirds their resilience and resurgence: they are valued for who they are at least as much as for what they do and for the symbolic role they play in ‘community identity, unity, continuity and stability’.229 It is too early to assess if and how revived traditional authorities will affect the configuration of power and it is certainly true that ‘the pre-colonial past is not recoverable’ and that there can be ‘no universal blueprint for building a new Africa on the restored ruins of an ancestral one’.230 Nevertheless, as the time elapsed since independence now begins to approximate the length of colonial rule, the colonial past is beginning to be obscured by ‘deeper continuities with pre-colonial social and political patterns’ (as well as ‘novel experiences of coping with the realities of state decline’), leading Young to suggest ‘closing the historical parenthesis around the African post-colonial state’.231 Mazrui similarly asks whether real decolonisation was not liberation from colonial rule but the disintegration of the colonial state itself: Are Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Angola and Burundi experiencing the death throes of the old order? Is the colonial order being washed away with buckets of blood? Or are we witnessing the agonising birth pangs of a genuinely post-colonial order? Is the blood in fact spilling in the maternity ward of history as a new Africa is trying to breathe?232

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Conclusion This last discussion has, in many respects, brought us full circle – back to the problems manifest in the universality of a Western model of statehood. Even if one accepts the argument that state failure is part of the violent creation of order, the outcome of state failure today is dramatically different from that in early modern Europe. The question is what kind of ‘new Africa’ can be born in the current international system. And this underscores the problematics of state failure. The change in international norms following World War II has removed the existential dilemma of such states and the liberty to change the shape of them. Juridical statehood has, in many respects, impeded the attainment of empirical statehood: its unintended consequence has been to obstruct state creation through the preservation of colonial jurisdictions regardless of their potential for development and by guaranteeing the rights of sovereign rulers often at the expense of human rights.233 African states are caught between a rock and a hard place. They are expected to build democratic nation states on the shallow and uncertain foundations of colonial ‘states’ and, in so doing, approximate state effectiveness and human rights standards as measured by the performance yardstick of the industrialised national democracies. This is the obverse of the evolutionary process of European state-making, which was not an enterprise undertaken with any premeditation or with a set of predetermined goals: power-holders did not undertake warmaking, extraction and capital accumulation with the intention of creating national states, nor did they foresee that national states would emerge from these three activities.234 The process by which sub-Saharan states ‘were launched into independence’, as Clapham observes, ‘must rank as one of the twentieth century’s more startling examples of political presumption’.235 The present chapter sought to offer insights into the why some states have failed in the state creation endeavour. International ‘support’ to the African state system, firstly through the negative sovereignty regime and secondly through financial and military assistance, sustained and undermined states. The withdrawal or diminishing levels of aid (and the conditions attached to it) had adverse outcomes but did not affect all states in the same sorts of ways. Institutional flaws and plain bad leadership cannot be denied but is hard to argue that, in and of

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themselves, they have caused states to fail. Similarly, the relationship between conflict and state failure is much more complex than often documented and cannot be seen, simplistically, in terms of cause and effect. If anything, it is symptomatic rather than precipitatory of state failure. Undergirding these explanations is an elemental and unresolved problem: a mismatch between the state and its peoples – a lack of legitimacy and national unity. As Englebert reminds us, ‘state legitimacy breeds state capacity’ and the more endogenous states are to societies and the more historically embedded they are in domestic social relations, the more legitimate – and therefore effective – they will be.236 More specifically, colonialism subordinated but did (or could) not destroy traditional political culture. Personal rule and tribute, together with multiple centres of authority, remained and would come into conflict with one another in the post-colony. At the same time, colonial rule provided a new honey pot from which patron-client networks could feed – which would serve post-colonial elites well and breed a resilient form of political (dis)order. Furthermore, colonial borders balkanised Africa but, unlike the new institutions, the new borders were concrete and their permanence incontrovertible. While this mattered little under the provincial governance of colonial rule, again it would be the harbinger of conflict in the post-colony – accentuated by the fixed identities and invented traditions of the colonial era. Traditional patrimonial politics took on a new ethnic dimension in the post-colony and the discontent arising from this has proved intractable especially when combined with Cold War legacies of sociopolitical militarisation. Together, these various facets of the mismatch have proved interminably difficult to create a national state out of – let alone a developmental one, a feat made more difficult by the continued outward economic and infrastructural orientation of the post-colony. In much of the continent, the colonial period was neither long enough nor deep enough to bring about fundamental sociopolitical change. In the rush to decolonise Africa, prior pre-requisites for independence were pushed to one side and with the memories of Eastern Europe still too fresh Africans were denied the right to ‘true’ self-determination. Decolonisation was ‘one of the most momentous international upheavals of the twentieth century whose consequences – material and moral, intended and unintended – continue to reverberate and will for decades to come’.237

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AFRICA

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State failure in Africa needs to be seen in the light of the importation of a particular model of statehood, the inadequacies of the decolonisation process and the maintenance of the status quo since. Against this uniform background, state failures have unfolded in different ways across the continent. In the margins of the foregoing analysis, an attempt has been made to tease out the variances. The following two chapters offer a complement to this by providing holistic portraits of state failure in two countries. From these individual histories, the validity (or otherwise) of the suppositions made thus far can be examined and we can begin to draw out different trajectories (or commonalities) of state failure. This is attempted in the concluding chapter.

Lac Kivu

RWANDA

Kirundo Ntega Marangara

Cibitoke r ive iR ziz Ru

Uvira

Ngozi Kayanza

Muyinga Karuzi

Bubanza

Cankuzo

Muramvya

Gatumba

BUJUMBURA

DEM. REP. OF THE CONGO

Gitega Ruyigi

Mwaro

TANZANIA

Rutana Bururi Rumonge

Provincial capital

Makamba

Lake Tanganyika

Nyanza-Lac 0 0

20

40 km 20

Map 2 Burundi Note: Each province takes the name of its respective capital

40 mi

CHAPTER 3 BURUNDI:THE FREEZING OF A FAILED KINGDOM

Introduction Burundi seemingly represents a paradox on the African continent.1 On the one hand, it is one of the few states that is not entirely a colonial import. Although it was ruled as part of a larger conglomeration during the colonial era – first as part of German East Africa and then as part of the mandated Belgian territory of Ruanda-Urundi – it was administered as a distinct entity on the basis the traditional kingdom. The core of the Burundi Kingdom has existed since at the least the seventeenth century. It expanded to approximate its current shape in the middle of the nineteenth century and has remained virtually unchanged since. On the other hand, since independence Burundi has been more unstable than many of its imported counterparts. It bore witness to genocide in 1972 and has endured episodic violence of genocidal proportions throughout its post-colonial history in addition to countless coup attempts (four of which were unequivocally successful), the end of the monarchy, various guises of military and single-party rule (latterly through due democratic process), a civil war lasting more than a decade and perennial insurgencies and refugee crises. However, a closer inspection of Burundi history suggests that rather than a paradox, it is the exception that proves the rule. The traditional Burundi Kingdom, at the time of colonisation, was fragmented and arguably failing. Colonial rule led to the exacerbation of existing (princely) tensions and the creation of new (ethno-racial) ones, which

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became entrenched and fixed within colonial, and subsequently state, boundaries. It is probable that, without the colonial intrusion, the Burundi Kingdom would have contracted and smaller principalities would have emerged on the edge of it together with more acephalous societies. In other words, the traditional ‘state’ would have failed and a new order formed. Instead, through the colonial and independence eras the ‘state’ has been preserved and continued to fragment from within amidst tussles for power that have their roots in nineteenth-century princely rivalries – but have become more complex. Over the last 60 years, politics in Burundi have become ethnicised, militarised and internationalised – increasingly mirroring and intertwining with its ‘false’ twin, Rwanda.2 In short, the failed Burundi Kingdom was frozen in the colony and post-colony, resulting in the perpetuation and institutionalisation of that failure, making the task of post-colonial state creation peculiarly difficult. In Burundi, therefore, ‘the roots of political unrest [. . .] extend further back than the process of decolonisation [. . .] which means that a long historical perspective is needed in order to understand the actual political relations and structures in Burundi’.3 Accordingly, the present chapter begins its analysis with the pre-colonial Burundi Kingdom and the sociopolitical practices therein. It then traces the history of Burundi through the colonial era, which profoundly altered the way in which power was exercised. The chapter moves on to discuss the Burundi postcolony, illustrating how the possibility of national unity was swiftly eclipsed and sub-national identities became radicalised. While latterly effaced to an extent, fundamental divisions centring on access to limited (political and economic) resources remain and continue to hinder the establishment of effective and legitimate statehood.

Tales of the Barundi and their Kingdom The history of Burundi is, as Newbury puts it, ‘particularly contested, contorted and misconstrued’ and ‘debates over history have been a central feature of the recent cataclysms that have wracked the region’.4 It turns on a version which pits two ‘ethnic’ groups (Hutu and Tutsi) against one another, effectively projecting recent history back into the distant and not-so-distant past through the ascription of atavistic hatreds. The standard narrative, rooted in the now academically

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discredited Hamitic Hypothesis,5 depicts the Hutu (Bantu agriculturalists) as autochthonous to Burundi – together with the minority Twa (pygmy forest dwellers and potters) – and the Tutsi (Galla pastoralists) as fifteenth-century ‘invaders’, who brought kingship and conquered/ assimilated the Hutus. However, more recent research finds no evidence of such an ‘invasion’ and instead suggests that a series of small Bantu immigrations occurred, beginning over 2,000 years ago; as these fanned out and people adopted new habitats and associated agricultural/pastoral activities in response to ecological crises, dependency relationships developed.6 Thus, Hutu/Tutsi identities were not primordial or racial but contextually created and defined; the two groups are neither internally homogenous nor externally distinct and identities altered over time and evolved differently in different places.7 It is even questionable that they carried an ethnic connotation at all in pre-colonial Burundi.8 Rather, they were fluid socio-economic categories (with various permutations), and the Barundi identified themselves not just by these markers but by multiple, overlapping familial, local and regional identities. In short, Burundi society comprised a complex web of relations reaching upward in pyramidal fashion and held together by clientelism and monarchical legitimacy. The king (mwami) – who was ‘revered as an embodiment of God (Imana)’9 – stood atop the pyramid. Each mwami took one of four dynastic names: Ntare, Mwezi, Mutaga and Mwambutsa. Their descendants were so-called ‘princes of the blood’ (ganwa) for the kingship cycle – that is, until the accession of a mwami who received the same name as their ancestor. The ganwa constituted a distinct social group above all others.10 Although many see the origin of the dynasty (and hence ganwa) as Hutu, socially and politically the ganwa were associated with the Tutsi.11 When ganwa were demoted from aristocratic status at the end of kingship a cycle (a process known as gutahira), they became Tutsi-Banyaruguru – who were distinguished from, and stood above, the Tutsi-Hima (as well as the Hutu and Twa). These groups were further ‘divided and united by lineage and clan and by the changing vagaries of closeness to the court’.12 Clan was the primary social identity in Burundi, while the kin group was the most important unit of co-operation in day-to-day life (the term imiryango refers to both clan and kin group – its exact meaning depending on the context).13 In contrast to kin groups, clans (of which

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there are over two hundred in Burundi) ‘do not consist of lineages that bear a true genealogical imprint nor is there any residential unity’ but although ‘concrete ties are very loose’, clans combine kinship, exogamy, rules of solidarity and shared symbols (often including a totemic marker described as a prohibition).14 Clan membership transcended Hutu/Tutsi identities,15 and entailed its own spectrum of social rankings: the Barundi distinguished between those clans that were very good (imiryango myiza), those that were rather good (imiryango myiza cane), those that were neither good nor bad (imiryango si myiza si mibi) and those that were bad (imiryango mibi) – accordingly, a Hutu from a prestigious clan could, for example, ‘claim more honour for himself than many Tutsi of a more humble social background’.16 The literal translation of imiryango (door) ‘nicely conveys the significance of [these] structures for gaining entry into the political system’.17 Hutus tended to be more closely allied to the Court than Tutsi-Hima, occupying important roles such as guardians of the royal tombs, court ritualists (banyamabanga), diviners (bwasafumu) and presiders over the annual harvest ceremony (umuganuro). Bashingantahe (community arbitrators) were also commonly Hutu – a highly respected sociopolitical position. The roles of chiefs and sub-chiefs were occupied by both Hutu and Tutsi – delegated by the Court on the basis of clan and individual merit.18 The obligations arising from the ties of clientship also ‘fell evenly upon Hutu and Tutsi’ and, since political office was rooted in hereditary claims, the ‘pattern of reciprocity showed little or no coincidence with the political hierarchy’.19 There was a clear distinction between chiefs and subjects on the one hand and patrons and clients on the other – the two did not necessarily correlate and clientship had little effect on the authority of a chief. Clientship thus operated within a fairly limited framework of expectations that delineated economic from political spheres. At the core of the relationship was the ‘cattle contract’ (bugabire), whereby the client (usually agriculturalists but also poor herdsmen) would be entrusted with cattle and given usufruct rights and protection in return for labour or tribute. The networks thence reached out and upwards in a seamless web of mutual dependence as patrons could have numerous clients and be clients themselves and so on and so forth. Though based on inequality, the patron-client relationship was highly personalised, involving reciprocal bonds of loyalty and contained at least as large a measure of affection as it did subjugation. The nature of the

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relationship is again well conveyed by the terms used: the root of the word ubugabire is kugaba, meaning both ‘to rule’ and ‘to give’; from the client side of the relationship, the verb is ukusaba meaning ‘to solicit’, ‘to implore’ and ‘to submit’.20 Further complicating the stratification of Burundi society was the mutability of categories – in other words, upward mobility was possible (usually through clientage ties or the acquisition of cattle) and a Hutu could become a Tutsi – a process known as kihutura.21 This would imply that the key distinction between the two categories was social standing based on wealth – which was associated with cattle ownership – and indeed, the only distinction which can be deciphered with any certainty is occupational: the Tutsi (save the unproductive banyaruguru royal clans) were pastoralists and the Hutu were agriculturalists. Burundi society was far from egalitarian but neither was it polarised along Tutsi/Hutu lines – politically or ethnically – and, contrary to Rwanda, there is no evidence of Tutsi hegemony. Rather, the ‘degrees of social distance within the Tutsi stratum [. . .] were at times far more perceptible and socially significant than [. . .] differences between Hutu and Tutsi’.22 The Barundi had multiple identities and forms of status differentiation, which were not static or defined by hard boundaries. Yet, while there were various potential sources of conflict within society, there was also ‘a high degree of functional integration’ and while there was ‘no pan-territorial ethnic identity’ as such, the monarchy provided ‘a symbol of national unity with the Crown acting as a nexus for the various collectives’.23 The consolidation of the Burundi dynasty probably dates to the late seventeenth century under the reign of Ntare Rushatsi (c.1675– 1705). During the reign of Ntare Rugamba (c.1795– 1852), who inaugurated the second cycle of kingship, the kingdom expanded to include the southern part of the old Kingdom of Bugesera in the north (the other half being incorporated into Rwanda), Bugufi and Bushubi in the northeast, Buyogoma in the south-east and the Imbo region (stretching along Lake Tanganyika northwards through the Ruzizi River plain) in the west – becoming nearly twice its original size (roughly the borders of presentday Burundi). Unable to incorporate these new regions under the central control of the kingdom, Ntare installed his sons as governors or, in the case of the western reaches, families allied to the monarchy. The ‘administrative legacy of Ntare’s rule was’, as Newbury notes, ‘at least as important to Burundi political history as were his military exploits’.24

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It led to regional autonomy and, following the accession to the throne of Ntare’s younger son (Kisabo, who assumed the dynastical name of Mwezi), fostered conflict between the two descent lines – the sons of Ntare (Batare) and the sons of Mwezi (Bezi) – as Mwezi attempted to replace his Batare brothers and nephews with his own sons. From the beginning of Mwezi’s reign (c.1852– 1908), ‘conflict and fragmentation became part of a remarkably repetitive rhythm in Burundi history, with the mwami relegated to the status of primus inter pares among the princes of the blood’, who strove to become ‘kinglets’ of their own local dynasties.25 On the eve of colonial rule, Mwezi could only claim effective control over half of his kingdom.26 In the other half, some areas acknowledged nominal Court authority, while other areas were in open rebellion – notably the newly conquered western regions, which were to become the main seat of what Lemarchand terms the ‘anti-roi’ phenomenon.27 Burundi was, in effect, a conglomerate of territories divided between four regional spheres of influence: (1) a central area around Muramvya (the royal capital) under the control of the mwami; (2) an area around Muramvya to the north, south and east under the control of Bezi princes; (3) a broad area covering the eastern and north-eastern marches of the kingdom controlled by Batare princes; and (4) western and north-western areas administered by non-ganwa in various semiautonomous chiefdoms. Mwezi was, in short, ‘a potentate of limited power’,28 whose authority was further challenged as the nineteenth century drew to a close by a series of epidemiological calamities, new forms of political intrusion by east-coast traders and direct European intervention. As Botte notes, for Burundi, ‘the nineteenth century ended in distress and affliction: epizootics, epidemics, famines and colonial conquest’ – all foreboded, according to local tradition, by the ‘second night’ (solar eclipse) on 22 December 1889.29

The Scramble for the ‘Sick Man’ of Africa Ruanda-Urundi was a final – and crucial – piece of the imperial jigsaw in Central-East Africa. Standing at the ‘strategic junction of three empires’, it became the subject of a 25-year ‘diplomatic tournament’ between Germany, Britain and the Congo Free State.30 The area was coveted by King Leopold II as a stepping stone to Lake Victoria and the

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Indian Ocean, by Britain to facilitate the construction of the Cape-toCairo route (linking its possessions in the north and south of the continent) and by Germany as a key part of its ambition for a central African empire (stretching from east to west). Through a combination of natural barriers which ‘discouraged the exit of the inhabitants and entry of travellers – as well as a reputation for hostility – Ruanda-Urundi had remained isolated’.31 It escaped both the Arab trade route and the incursions of the early European explorers and, in Burundi particularly, all contact with the ‘white’ world was refused.32 The region was ‘not opened up until comparatively late’ and then ‘its exploration followed, rather than preceded, the political scramble’.33 In short, Burundi was under colonial rule before it had been colonised and its borders drawn before anyone knew where it was. The Western boundary of Ruanda-Urundi was determined by the delimitation of the Congo Free State when it was founded in 1884–5. In the Congolese–German Agreement of 1884, the boundary ran from the east side of Lake Tanganyika in an arc westwards around Lake Kivu. In the Congolese–French Agreement of 1885, the boundary followed the hypothetical course of the unexplored Ruzizi River and crept east of Lake Kivu. In the Congolese Declaration of Neutrality in 1885, previous boundaries were substituted for a straight line further east still – from the northern point of Lake Tanganyika to the intersection point of 20 degrees southern latitude and 30 degrees eastern longitude extending northward along this line – meaning that the Congo had grown by 490,000 square kilometres. Not unaware of the discrepancy with the earlier agreement, the Germans ratified the boundary in the Declaration of Neutrality – the area was unexplored and there was no way of knowing which arbitrary line was better than another, and the boundary at that time did not directly affect German claims.34 The northern boundary was the result of the delimitation of German and British spheres of interest in East Africa following the Berlin Conference of 1884– 5 and the Hinterland Doctrine of 1887, which stipulated that where one power occupied the coast, the other could not occupy unclaimed regions in its rear. This meant that the Germans were free to colonise the area to the south of Lake Victoria and the British the area to the north but rights to the area west of the Lake up to the Congo border were disputed and neither had concluded any treaties in the area to claim ‘effective occupation’. Both had explored Uganda but the

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furthest south (west of Lake Victoria) that any treaties had been signed were those by Henry Morton Stanley in Mfumbiro (northern Rwanda) – although at this time no one was sure what or where Mfumbiro was. The boundary was ultimately determined in the 1890 Anglo-German Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, which resolved various colonial disputes between the two powers – and curtailed German ambitions in Africa leading Carl Peters (of the German East Africa Company) to infamously remark ‘we have exchanged three kingdoms [in Africa] for a bath tub [in the North Sea]’, however, Ludwig Bamberger’s remark ‘the less Africa, the better’ chimed with general opinion in the Reich.35 In East Africa, Germany relinquished any claims over Ugandan territory; in return, Britain ceded to German concerns about a wedge of British territory between German East Africa and the Congo.36 The northern boundary of German East Africa was drawn along the first parallel southern latitude, swinging around Mfumbiro (if it was later found to be in the German sphere) thus enclosing it in British territory. The Germans were now free to colonise Burundi and (most of) Rwanda. It was another four years before the first explorer travelled through Rwanda (in 1894), at which point it became apparent that Lake Kivu lay further to the west than indicated on the early maps and that the area under the control of the Rwanda mwami had been split in half. The Germans accordingly requested a boundary adjustment with the Congo in 1895, the denial of which led to their occupation of the area to the east of Lake Kivu in 1898, and in 1899 they refused to recognise the Declaration of Neutrality line as the legal frontier. A joint BritishGerman expedition in 1900 discovered that Mfumbiro and part of western Uganda was actually in the Congo rather than in British territory. Both Germany and Britain supported the adoption of the old maps (i.e. where the 30th meridian was further west) and natural frontiers as boundaries. Germany also said that the southern slopes of Mfumbiro belonged politically to Rwanda and since both Britain and Germany agreed it was undesirable to break up existing political units, these should be in German territory. Leopold was adamantly against relinquishing his claims in the region. However, his death two months before the Conference Respecting Frontiers between Uganda, German East Africa and the Belgian Congo in 1910 meant a settlement could be reached and the borders of Ruanda-Urundi were finally agreed. Boundary commissions

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were appointed and the frontiers demarcated. The arbitrary astronomical boundaries drawn 25 years earlier (with no geographical knowledge) were substituted for natural and, to an extent, cultural boundaries. The western boundary followed the Ruzizi River and divided Lake Kivu between German and Belgian territory. The northern frontier ran through Mfumbiro with the southern (Rwanda) slopes in German territory. The traditional kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi were preserved but other smaller entities were divided as the powers bartered portions of Mpororo, Mfumbiro and Kagera to facilitate agreement. In the midst of the diplomatic tournament, the ‘Milita¨rstation Usumbura’ (contemporary Bujumbura) was founded in 1896 but was little more than an outpost until German occupation in 1899 and only became the headquarters of the new district of Ruanda-Urundi in 1901. Upon their arrival in Burundi, the Germans found a kingdom in disarray: ‘viewed from the perspective of royal centralisation, so great was the disarray [. . .] that Europeans themselves doubted Mwezi’s existence until the turn of the century’.37 When the Germans first established relations with Mwezi in 1899, they found him conciliatory but this turned out to be a ruse. It seems he assured the Germans of his co-operation in order to avoid a direct confrontation with them, allowing him to concentrate on ameliorating domestic opposition (without outside interference) – but he saw more defeats than victories in the wars at the turn of the century and his authority diminished further. German rule was thwarted from the outset not only by the internecine struggle between Mwezi and his recalcitrant chiefs but also by disagreement between Go¨tzen (the governor of German East Africa) and Beringe (the officer at Usumbura). The former advocated a policy of non-intervention and the establishment of German authority through diplomatic relations with Mwezi. The latter thought Burundi would be best governed by recognition of the most important (Batare) chiefs (who had allied themselves with the Germans) and pushed for a military expedition to pacify Mwezi (who he described as ‘a sworn enemy of the Europeans’).38 In the event, Beringe launched the expedition on his own account in 1903 and, in direct contravention of Go¨tzen’s orders, granted Mwezi’s two most formidable rivals – Kilima and Maconco (both Batare) – independence. They, in turn, forcibly enlarged their fiefdoms and sparked separatist claims in a number of smaller ones. So, Beringe may have gained Mwezi’s submission to German authority but he

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undermined the delicate political system and Burundi quickly fragmented into several independent fiefdoms. In 1904 Go¨tzen set about reversing the situation. Beringe was replaced by Grawert and Usumbura was ordered to regard all chiefs as subordinate to Mwezi, who was thenceforth formally recognised as the ‘sultan of Burundi’ with the assurance that, as long as he met the German’s wishes, they ‘would regard his enemies as their enemies’.39 As a consequence, the chiefs to whom Beringe had granted independence renewed hostilities against both Mwezi and the Germans. However, with the death of Maconco in 1905 (in an attempt on Grawert’s life) and the capture of Kilima the following year, ‘Beringe’s divide and rule policy had been corrected to Go¨tzen’s original policy of indirect rule’.40 This was in keeping with wider changes in German colonial policy. A series of rebellions throughout the Empire had signalled a crisis and prompted the development of a programme of ‘rational’ or ‘scientific’ colonialism and a transition from the ‘heroic’ era (military occupation) to a ‘commercial’ era (colonial administration) in 1906.41 In Burundi, the Germans adopted the Dutch East Indies model of appointing a Resident who was ‘merely meant to guide the local ruler with advice without interfering with administration or justice’ and as such colonial rule ‘was largely limited to an assertion of sovereignty and maintenance of the status quo’.42 The period from the founding of the Residency (under Grawert) in 1906 to 1908 saw the ‘triumph of indirect rule in Urundi’.43 Grawert maintained good relations with Mwezi and, with the assistance of German forces, Mwezi brought the remaining refractory chiefs under his control. Thus, Mwezi had ‘traded Rundi sovereignty for German support in consolidating the power of the central court throughout Burundi, ceding external integrity for increased local power’.44 However, two events conspired to return Burundi to chaos in 1908. The first was a transition in German administration: Go¨tzen was replaced by Rechenberg as Governor of German East Africa; and Grawert returned to Germany on leave. He was succeeded by no fewer than six different Residents between 1908 and 1914, none of whom served long enough to become acquainted with Burundi. The second was the death of Mwezi and the accession to the throne of his 15-year-old son Mutaga Mbikije (1908– 15), who was ‘unable to check the centrifugal forces suddenly unleashed by Kisabo’s death’ and whose regents ‘wasted few

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opportunities to increase their power at the expense of the Crown’.45 In all but central Burundi, chiefly struggles for independence were renewed – with more success than before. Rechenberg ‘tried to adapt indirect rule to the new circumstances’, essentially by combining it with the ‘old maxim of divide and rule’.46 In short, the mwami’s authority would continue to be recognised but so too would that of the separatist chiefs, who were divided into three categories: first, those who were de facto independent would no longer be required to recognise the mwami as overlord (although they would have to continue to recognise German authority); second, those who had recognised the authority of Mwezi and would presumably continue to recognise the authority of Mutaga; and third, those who in the past were more or less independent who might with the Resident’s guidance be brought under Mutaga (to be considered on a case-by-case basis). This static arrangement was, however, at odds with the traditional Burundi political system, where the ‘chiefs resembled satellites’, with their separatist tendencies waxing and waning in accordance with the power of the mwami, and where other societal divisions were of equal import – not least those within the royal family.47 Furthermore, in their endeavour to keep the peace between rival fiefdoms, the various Residents who succeeded Grawert tried to ‘play one chief off against the other’ and they did not share Rechenberg’s sympathy for the mwami – as evidenced by the release of Kilima in 1910, who was now regarded as ‘salutary counterweight to the disruptive influences of Mutaga’.48 Aided by the transfer of the Residency inland to Gitega in 1912, the Germans were able to maintain order in much of Burundi, had the tacit co-operation of the majority of chiefs and closer collaboration with the mwami. But as the chiefs became entrenched in their new positions of independence, the authority of the mwami diminished further and the kingdom continued to splinter. In 1913, the new governor (Schnee) favoured formalising the break (begun by Rechenberg) and instructed the Resident to only support the authority of Mutaga in the territories where he really possessed it. By the end of 1915, in the twilight of German rule, the situation in Burundi was ‘perhaps worse than at any time during the German era’.49 Mutaga had died suddenly in November 1915 and in ‘what seemed a perfect re-enactment of the events following Kisabo’s death’ was succeeded on the throne by his infant son, Mwambutsa

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Bangiricenge (1915 – 66).50 In the final analysis, German rule foundered, in the words of Belgium’s first Resident, Pierre Ryckmans: because it had worked toward the disintegration of a kingdom whose traditions, mores and religion were unknown or ignored; because in tolerating successful revolts, it had encouraged intrigues instead of supressing them; because each blow against the prestige of the monarchy had rendered the white man more odious to the masses, attached above all to the traditions of their divine monarchy.51

Belgian Gerrymandering and the Fight for the Burundi State Ruanda-Urundi fell to Anglo-Belgian troops in April– May 1916 and remained under Belgian occupation until the end of the war.52 The territory was mandated to Belgium in August 1919, minus a section of eastern Rwanda to allow for the building of the Cape-to-Cairo route through the Kagera valley. In the event, the route was never built and that portion of Rwanda was handed over to Belgium in 1923. From 1916 until 1925, when the administrative status of Ruanda-Urundi was settled by its incorporation into the Belgian Congo, Belgian rule resembled the early years of German military rule – premised simply on the maintenance of order. Thereafter, the Belgians continued the German policy of indirect rule, though ultimately ‘their version of it was less indirect’, involving more interference in local affairs, taking little account of the League of Nations and resembling colonial rather than mandated rule.53 As Lemarchand explains, the Belgian conception of indirect rule necessitated only the ‘outward prestige’ or ‘window dressing’ of kingship with the chiefs forming a ‘corps of native functionaries under the immediate and permanent supervision’ of the Belgian administration – that is, they had no personal responsibility or authority outside that sanctioned by the administration.54 Initially, the Belgians went much further than the Germans in their emphatic recognition of the mwami’s authority. A 1925 report stated that the ‘co-operation of the kings constitutes an indispensable element of progress and civilisation [. . .] Without them the problem of government would remain insoluble [. . .] chieftaincy crises are everywhere the great stumbling block of native policies’.55 Less than a year after this report,

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however, a number of Batare chiefs (who had openly flouted the authority of the Crown a few years earlier) were officially recognised by the Belgian administration and granted a status of legitimacy similar to the chiefs of the Bezi branch.56 Ryckmans further sought to reconcile the conflicting claims among the princes through a compromise at the centre – to achieve this he ‘resorted to a device rooted in tradition but modified to suit the purposes of his policy’, namely a Regency Council which (after the death of Regent Ntarugera in 1921) included representatives of both the Bezi and Batare dynasties, including Baranyanka.57 Baranyanka, a prominent Mutare and Belgian prote´ge´, was given Kilima’s fiefdom in 1923 and came to be seen by many Barundi as the ‘quisling prince par excellence’.58 Like the Germans before them, the Belgians thus combined indirect rule with divide-and-rule policies, and the schism between Bezi and Batare became more acute as a result. However, guided by Walloon/ Fleming factionalism in Belgium and the salience of the Hamitic Hypothesis in colonial thinking, they demarcated a further fault line – between Hutu and Tutsi. As Daley explains: ‘[c]olonial social and administrative policies created and supported a new racial and ethnic hierarchy through the introduction of racist ideology and its application to pre-existing patterns of social differentiation’.59 The instrumentally or contextually constructed fluid and porous identities of the precolonial era gradually gave way to a ‘rigidification of identity narrowly conceived of in terms of ethnic primoridalism’.60 Whereas ‘the socialracial order’ had been ‘woven into the de´cor’ during German rule, ‘under the Belgians it was in the foreground’,61 and the privileging of a single identity over multiple identities profoundly altered the nature of the political structure. This was especially true after the administrative reforms which began in 1930. The aim of the reforms, in Vice Governor Voisin’s words, was to ‘regroup chiefdoms in such a way as to suppress the dispersion of fiefs and make the administration easier and more efficient’.62 In practice, this meant the parcelling of smaller chiefdoms into larger administrative units and the concomitant dismissal of chiefs judged incapable by the Residency. Between 1929 and 1933, the number of chiefdoms dropped from 133 to 46; the number further dropped to 35 in 1945.63 More significant, though, was the realignment of power that resulted from the implementation of Voisin’s directive. In 1929, 20 per cent of incumbent

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chiefs were Hutu but they represented only 7 per cent in 1933 and by 1945 there were no Hutu chiefs; in the same period, the Tutsi share rose from 23 per cent to 29 per cent; and the ganwa’s from 57 per cent to 71 per cent.64 Of those ganwa posts, the Bezi’s representation increased in relation to the Batare: in 1929 the Bezi held 35 chiefdoms compared to 41 held by the Batare; in 1933 the figure was 20 Bezi and 16 Batare; and by 1945 17 Bezi and eight Batare (the remaining ten being Tutsi).65 A similar pattern became apparent in education and in access to bureaucratic appointments. During the course of Belgian rule, the princely group was assimilated to the Tutsi, with the word muganwa coming to mean chief, and ‘the Tutsi-Hutu antagonism [. . .] gained practical priority and intellectual primacy’.66 For Ryckmans, the Tutsi resembled Ramses II: they were, in his words, ‘destined to rule, their demeanour lends them considerable prestige over the inferior races that surround them’.67 The Hutu, accordingly, were written out of historical reconstructions which ‘turned the region into a second Ethiopia by transforming mythical heroes [. . .] into standard-bearers of a great “Hamitic” invasion’.68 Through colonial and missionary schools, this distorted depiction of Burundi gained adherents among the Barundi and although Burundi remained far less racialised than Rwanda until the late colonial period, both countries ‘found themselves trapped in alleged tradition, remodelled according to what colonial science declared to be immemorial’.69 The physical and moral ascriptions inscribed into colonial accounts ‘served not only to describe Burundi’s social configuration but also to construct it’ and these constructions would ‘continue to shape the imaginative landscape’ of many Barundi (long after being discredited in academic circles).70 What Chre´tien aptly terms the ‘primordial conquest’ established ‘colonial-style feudalisation’ with Tutsi overlords and Hutu serfs.71 At the same time, and of equal import, the traditional pyramidal structure was overturned by the gradual usurpation of the mwami’s authority and by the dislocation of the clientage ties that had hitherto held it together. As Rubin explains, by identifying the monarchy with the European doctrine of unitary sovereignty, the colonial powers erased the flexible political character of identities and ‘hardened’ the (previously layered and shared) ruling authority structure, thus, ‘intensifying and concentrating sources of conflict while reducing the multiplicity of institutions to manage them’.72

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As Mwambutsa came of age in the early 1930s, his authority was recognised by the Residency. However, colonial policies had already undermined the foundations of the Court, primarily through a ‘campaign waged against umuganuro and other royal rituals of legitimacy – a campaign carried out with strong support of the Catholic missionary community’.73 In 1928 the annual umuganuro festival was ‘purified’ of its ‘immoral elements’ and by 1930 it had been replaced by a seed blessing at Christmas; between 1922 and 1935, 16 missions were founded which gradually replaced the sacred woods as ceremonial sites; ritualists were baptised or expelled; and cult objects seized or hidden.74 With the dissolution of the influence of the ritualist community – whose members often served as representatives of local integrity and whose authority implicitly set limits on central control – more power was invested in newly appointed (often mission-educated) administrative elites and second-tier chiefs, whose rule (from above) impinged directly on the population.75 Thus, the rational-legal basis of colonial bureaucratic rule ‘eroded much of the ethos which underpinned Burundi’s traditional sociopolitical structures and the sources of traditional legitimation’.76 At the local level, people were ‘suddenly confronted with a fully fledged apparatus of administration’,77 in which formal, territorial dependence (tax) replaced personalised, clientage ties (tribute) – and the pre-existing security guarantees they afforded. As the responsibilities of the local administration multiplied, their coercive character was reinforced and the function of customary authorities receded; the bashingantahe ‘saw their traditional competencies fading away’ as they were integrated into the system of political administration which, at the same time, sought to limit their role by creating new, alternative agents – such as the bahamagazi (heralds) and barongozi (guides) – who took over tasks hitherto held by the bashingantahe.78 The Inamujandi revolt in Ndora in the north-west (a predominantly Hutu area recently incorporated into Baranyanka’s chiefdom) in September 1934 was ‘testament to the popular discontent with this bureaucratisation of power and its growing coercion’ – it was directed primarily against ‘foreign’ ganwa and Tutsi sub-chiefs who had been appointed by Baranyanka (from his home province of Gitega), leading to his assignation as the ‘upside-down governor’.79 Like the RunyotaKanyarufunzo revolt of 1920 in the northern region of Mwakiro (also

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in a Batare chiefdom), it stemmed from resentment toward chiefly alliances with the coloniser, which were intensified by natural calamities at a time when colonial economic policy was making intolerable demands on the masses.80 In both cases, the revolts were led by sorcerers and legitimised by belief in the coming of the new (and rightful) mwami. A further revolt in the 1940s in southern Burundi followed a similar pattern. On 13 December 1946 Burundi was placed under the UN Trusteeship Council. The pace of constitutional reform was slow and the oft-criticised Belgian position cautious (and later improvisatory). Only in 1952 was limited self-government initiated in the form of advisory councils at each administrative level, followed by a period of accelerated decolonisation from 1958.81 The first political party – the Party of National Unity and Progress (UPRONA) – was founded in 1957 by Leopold Bihumugani (‘Biha’), a leading Bezi personality. In 1958, the mantle of leadership passed to Prince Louis Rwagasore, the mwami’s eldest son and heir apparent. Besides the legitimacy conferred on him by his birth, Rwagasore was a charismatic leader who had an affinity with the masses and was responsive to the requirements of sociopolitical modernisation. As such he was able not only to bridge the rift between the newly emergent younger generation of Bezi elites and the old guard but also unite Hutu and Tutsi. However, his anti-colonial nationalist rhetoric and ‘populist leanings’ earned him the reputation of a ‘dangerous crypto-Communist’ among Belgian administrators.82 The rival Christian Democratic Party (PDC) was formed in the same year, with Belgian connivance, by Jean-Baptiste Ntidendereza and Joseph Birori (both sons of Baranyanka). Contrary to UPRONA, the PDC favoured delayed independence and represented the Batare lineages. The pro-Hutu People’s Party (PP) followed in 1960 and by the summer of 1961, 25 parties had appeared but they ‘federated into three cartels’: a nationalist and royalist bloc centred on UPRONA; the Common Front centred on the PDC; and the Union of Popular Parties centred on the PP.83 With the two main parties primarily (although not exclusively) associated with the Bezi and Batare, the years preceding independence might ‘best be seen as a continuation of pre-colonial rivalries in the guise of nominally modern politics’.84 In the communal elections of September 1960 (held while Rwagasore was under house arrest) the Common Front won a majority and formed a

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provisional government in January 1961, which excluded UPRONA. The flawed elections, combined with administrative reforms in late 1960 (whereby chiefdoms were replaced by provinces and sub-chiefdoms by communes), contributed to the increasing popularity of both UPRONA and the mwamiship. In the September 1961 UN-supervised legislative elections (after Rwagasore’s release) UPRONA won 58 of the 64 seats. Of those elected, 25 were Tutsi, 22 Hutu, seven ganwa and four of mixed parentage – reflecting the multi-ethnic, neo-traditional ethos of the Party. However, the prime minister designate was assassinated by agents of the PDC (with probable Belgian complicity) on 13 October 1961 and, with him, the Party namesakes went too – especially national unity.85 As Uvin states, the ‘historical significance of Rwagasore’s murder is enormous: it is truly a day on which doors were closed for Burundi’ and, as he goes on to remind us, ‘all of this took place against the backdrop of Rwanda’s “social revolution”’.86

The Anti-Revolutionist State To a not-inconsiderable degree, Burundi’s post-independence history began in Rwanda and the revolution there between 1959 and 1962, which overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and resulted in the establishment of the Hutu Republic. The ‘habit of ethnicity’ inculcated among Burundi’s elites during Belgian rule was compounded by the ‘demonstration effect’ of the ethnic conflict which convulsed Rwanda,87 generating what Lemarchand has termed the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.88 The achievability of majority rule entered Hutu elite consciousness and the ‘Hutu peril’ that of the Tutsi, which combined with – and was exacerbated by – the increased saliency of the more longstanding intra-Tutsi rivalries, such that by the mid-1960s, the ruling (but historically lower caste) Tutsi-Hima elite seemingly feared Hutu and Tutsi-Banyaruguru in almost equal measure. In short, in the early independence period, princely factionalism was displaced by the crystallisation and politicisation of ethnic identities as the whole sociopolitical field became polarised along ethnic lines. The result was the formation of an inherently unstable military ethnocracy, where violence became discourse and genocide an anti-revolutionist strategy.89 The Kingdom of Burundi (re)gained independence on 1 July 1962, as a poorly institutionalised variant of the Belgian constitutional

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monarchy. The first signs of conflict came just before independence in January 1962 when the Jeunesses Re´volutionaires Rwagasore (JRR) – the youth wing of UPRONA – launched a series of armed raids against Hutu trade unionists and members of the PP. The so-called Kamenge riots were symptomatic of a deepening crisis within the Party, and by August 1962 the struggle for power within UPRONA had brought the party apparatus to the verge of collapse and ethnic stalemate permeated the entire governmental machinery.90 Before 1962 drew to a close, the National Assembly had split into two factions: the Monrovia and Casablanca Groups – broadly (but not exclusively) representing Hutu and Tutsi parliamentarians respectively – metaphors that served to accentuate and formalise the distinctiveness of the two groups.91 Ethnic appeals also pervaded the civil service owing to disparities in appointments which were, in turn, attributable to the colonial legacy of educational discrimination.92 The army, which was emerging as an influential political force in its own right, had also been bedevilled by ethnic antagonisms from its inception in 1961.93 As a result of the mounting ethnic tension at all levels, politics gravitated towards the mwami from 1963 onwards; UPRONA was rapidly converted into ‘an appendage of the Court’ and the constitutional monarchy mutated into an oligarchy and ultimately an ‘absolute rulership’.94 Mwambutsa attempted to neutralise opposition and achieve ethnic parity through a vastly expanded civil service and in each of the five consecutive governments he appointed, he alternated the position of prime minister between Hutu and Tutsi. However, this did little to abate the stridency of ethnic recriminations, especially at the lower levels of the bureaucracy where Tutsis continued to predominate. The stability he temporarily achieved stemmed more from further emasculating the power of the government (by placing the army and key ministries under the direct jurisdiction of the Court and entrusting key posts to ganwa of Bezi origins) and, with the new-old intermediaries in situ, recourse to the clientelism of yore (adapted to the exigencies of the postindependent state). The combined effect was to create a far greater centralisation of monarchical authority than had existed in the past and to set politics on a neo-patrimonial course – which ultimately proved self-defeating. As the tentacles of clientelism spread, official sinecures became scarce and the public coffers were insufficient to meet prebendary requirements, let alone the development goals to which the younger

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generation of elites generally aspired. Furthermore, patron-client ties (which had provided cohesion and an element of flexibility to the precolonial sociopolitical pyramid) once ‘recast in the social field of ethnically homogenous nets [. . .] served only to accelerate the process of ethnic polarisation’.95 The delicate hierarchy Mwambutsa presided over was irreparably shaken by the assassination of the Hutu Prime Minister, Pierre Ngendandumwe, on 18 January 1965 by a Rwandan Tutsi refugee in the employ of the US Embassy (just days after Mwambutsa withdrew his confidence from the previous Tutsi incumbent). Opting for a policy of ‘ethnic disengagement’,96 on 3 March 1965, he dissolved the National Assembly and called the first post-independence legislative elections, which were held on 10 May 1965. Despite a Hutu majority in the National Assembly, Mwambutsa appointed his personal secretary, a trusted ganwa (Leopold Biha), as prime minister on 13 September 1965 – prompting an abortive coup, led by Hutu army and gendarmerie officers, on 19 October 1965. Although the mutineers surrendered before achieving a takeover of the Palace, their actions – in effect if not in fact – abolished the monarchy: Mwambutsa immediately fled to Europe and Biha, injured during the coup, was hospitalised in Belgium. However, their actions also resulted in a repression by loyal troops (under the command of Captain Michel Micombero), in which upwards of one hundred Hutu soldiers, gendarmes and politicians were executed – decapitating the Hutu leadership and creating a void, which was predominantly filled by Tutsi elements.97 Although Mwambutsa tried to rule from abroad, the state was to all intents and purposes without a head until March 1966 when he issued a royal decree entrusting control of the government to his son and heir apparent Prince Charles Ndizeye.98 On 8 July 1966 Ndizeye formally acceded to the throne under the dynastic name Ntare III and called upon Micombero to form a government (who combined the roles of prime minister and minister for defence). The momentary convergence of interests between the new king and his makers soon dissipated and Ntare III’s was to prove the shortest and last mwamiship in Burundi history. On 28 November, while in the Congo (ironically celebrating Mobutu’s military takeover), he heard on the radio that he had been deposed by the army and that Micombero had declared the First Republic, with himself as president. Thus began almost three decades

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of Tutsi-Hima military rule – built on existing and unchanging authoritarian and directive (colonial and monarchical) public and parastatal institutions, which gradually resulted in more and more hypertrophic infrastructures, and in state powers strongly reliant on repressive means to accomplish their ends.99 The newly formed National Revolutionary Council (NRC) – composed of 17 army officers – replaced the National Assembly and Burundi was transformed into one-party state. Both the Party and the NRC were headed by Micombero (as was the Ministry of Defence). Micombero’s first government did however represent an attempt to balance the various ethnic factions, with Hutu being appointed to five ministries and the remaining eight shared between Tutsi-Hima and Tusi-Banyaruguru, but the government soon fell under the influence of a small clique of Tutsi-Hima politicians100 – who proceeded to transform the army into a ‘court of ultimate appeal to enforce their hegemony upon both Hutu and Banyaruguru’.101 In July 1968, eight Belgian technical assistants to the armed forces were sent home, clearing the way for purges of 30 Hutu army officers and senior government officials in September 1969 (in response to a questionable discovery of a planned coup). Twenty of those arrested (on charges of conspiring against the security of the state) were executed together with many more rank-andfile Hutu soldiers. Others were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. New recruitment policies excluded most Hutus from the army, the NRC was overwhelmingly composed of Tutsi and at the provincial level all governors bar one were Tutsi. As the immediate Hutu threat receded and co-operation was established with Rwanda, Tutsi solidarity began to break down. IntraTutsi cleavages resurfaced, with an additional regional dimension – the province of Muramvya in the north-central region and the province of Bururi in the south provided the geographical frames of reference for distinguishing between the supporters of Micombero (Bururi – his home province) and his opponents (Muramvya – the traditional seat of the monarchy).102 In 1971 a number of Tutsi-Banyaruguru were found guilty of conspiracy (an alleged plot to restore the monarchy). A lengthy and controversial trial followed, which lasted into 1972 – its intended purpose ‘to clothe a political purge with the semblance of legitimate justice’.103 This it failed to do, largely owing to the pressure of public opinion: the nine death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment and five of the

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seven previously sentenced to prison terms were set free. The legal proceedings were, ominously as Kay points out, given extensive media coverage by the government, raising political tensions in the country.104 The episodic violence throughout the 1960s culminated in the massacres of 1972 which, like the events that preceded them, remain cloaked in what Weinstein has aptly termed a ‘plot theory of history’.105 The basic facts of the crisis are now clear but the motivations behind, and sequencing of, events are still opaque. On 20 March 1972, former King Ntare III (Charles Ndizeye) returned to Burundi (under protest or with the intention of monarchical restoration aided by European mercenaries?). Seen as a defender of both Hutu and Banyaruguru causes, as soon as he landed in Bujumbura, he was taken to Gitega under military escort and placed under house arrest (although rumours circulated that he had been killed). On 29 April, Micombero dismissed his entire cabinet (to regain control of wayward ministers or to remove obstacles to retributive violence in the wake of a foreknown uprising?). A few hours later, Hutu revolted in three areas remote from one another: Rumonge and Nyanza-Lac in southern Burundi; Cankuzo in eastern Burundi; and in Bujumbura (on their own account, as part of a master plot led by highranking Hutu officials or goaded by the Tutsi-Hima clique?). That Congolese ‘Mulelists’ were involved in the revolt is almost certain but the possible alliance with Tutsi-Muramvya and/or Rwandan Tutsis is less certain and likely a ‘plot theory’.106 The revolt was, in many respects, an ‘attack by the countryside against the town’ aimed at halting the encroachment of alien forms of authority – reminiscent of the revolts during the colonial era.107 This was especially the case in southern Burundi, where the establishment of a so-called ‘popular republic’ at Martyazo near the provincial capital of Bururi ‘was perhaps the symbolic act of declaring Burundi’s second independence’ – the first had been that of the ‘managerial elite’ and the second was that of ‘the peasants’.108 The ruling regime was only weakly legitimised and the growing and unchecked pervasiveness of the state and its hierarchically integrated functionaries (together with the associated usurpation of intermediary administration) served to accentuate rather than reduce the existing lack of legitimacy.109 As the state penetrated the ‘narrow micro-sphere of the neighbourhood’, the gap between ruled and rulers widened and peasants became atomised and alienated from the state, as Laely explains:

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The ruling regime after independence came to occupy the entire field of mediation between the state and its citizens, and the functions of negotiators were, so to speak ‘nationalised’ and brought under public ownership, not least in the communes where all potential brokers were subsumed in the so-called consultative municipal councils.110 At the same time, public services were distributed inefficiently, arbitrarily or randomly. The state was (and is) ‘only in its pretensions omnipresent and by no means omnipotent’ and the ‘divergence between the efficacy and claims of the institutions of the state’ discredited it in the eyes of the people – whose reaction varied from ‘indifference and silence to avoidance and evasion’ and sometimes, as in 1972, ‘open resistance’.111 An estimated 2,000 Tutsi were killed during the revolt. The repression which followed, justified by the authorities as self-defence and the restoration of peace and order, was nothing short of genocide – albeit a selective one.112 Ex-King Ntare was its first victim, executed on the evening of 29 April. The ‘popular republic’ was overcome by government troops a week after its birth. Martial law was declared throughout the country and a curfew imposed. Military assistance was secured from Mobutu, at Micombero’s request, which arrived on 3 May to defend the airport, enabling the army to move en masse into the countryside – beyond the original sites of the revolt. In the course of the next few months, anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 educated Hutu perished (down to secondary school students), with many more seeking exile in neighbouring countries (estimates vary from 75,000 to over 100,000). Like the revolt to which it was a response, the repression quickly degenerated into indiscriminate violence, affording opportunities for the settling of old scores (regional, intra-Tutsi or personal) and material gain. The repression was conducted by government troops and the JRR who, since the Kamenge riots, had metamorphosed from a loosely organised group of misfits into a ‘praetorian guard in the service of the Tutsi ethnocracy’.113 Micombero’s policy of ‘prophylactic elimination’ had four key objectives: to liquidate not only all Hutu elites but all potential elites; to transform the instruments of force into a Tutsi monopoly; to rule out the possibility of a return to monarchism; and to create a new basis of

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legitimacy for the Hima-dominated state.114 In short, he aimed ‘to assure a slowed-down, if not stopped, social change and development pattern among the country’s Hutu majority in order to maintain dominance’.115 This he achieved with some success, aided by the international veil of silence at the time and since.116 The scale of the repression was such that it discouraged further protest and there were insufficient educated Hutu remaining to form a counter-elite. Moreover, surviving Hutu declined positions of responsibility and parents did not enrol their children in primary school for fear of making them future targets.117 However, Greenland’s words in 1975 turned out to be more prophetic than the mere ‘indulge[nce] in an arithmetic crudity’ he professed at the time: ‘If you kill upwards of 100,000 people in a country of 4 million, you create a situation where there are enough bitter refugees, widows, and fatherless children to plot an endless succession of coups’.118 In another self-fulfilling prophecy, those children would grow up to become genocidaires themselves.

The Shadow of Genocide The genocide of 1972 was ignored by the international community and forgotten by the Burundi government, fostering what would prove to be an enduring culture of impunity. Micombero repeatedly denied the existence of ethnic difference, publicly proclaiming ‘we are all one nation’ – a line which would become a well-rehearsed mantra of successive Tutsi authorities. As Daley reminds us, ‘[t]o deny ethnicity protects the well-positioned Tutsi minority while to assert ethnicity is to promote the impoverished, powerless Hutu majority’.119 Although there were certain changes in the immediate aftermath which seemed to ‘reflect a desire to efface the confrontation of 1972’ – such as increased power given to UPRONA (which had always recruited from both ethnic groups) and the demotion of those Tutsi considered to be most active in organising the repression – other evidence pointed to a preoccupation with the maintenance of Tutsi supremacy: Prime Minister Nyamoya was dismissed in June 1973, allegedly because he favoured more conciliatory policies towards the Hutu; save a few positions in the cabinet (arguably retained for cosmetic reasons), Hutus were conspicuous by their absence in all spheres of public life; the vast majority of Hutu were still classed as

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rebels and those exiles who returned home (often as a result of government inducement campaigns) were arrested or killed; and government spending on ‘national security’ rose significantly after 1972, becoming the largest single item in the budget with its tactical priority being quashing retaliatory attacks by Hutu refugees on the Tanzanian border.120 During 1973, socially and politically Burundi moved ‘more and more in the direction of becoming a garrison state’ or ‘nation-in-arms’, prompting Belgium to withdraw military aid in protest – only for the gap to be filled by China, the USSR, Libya, Algeria and Egypt, with an associated shift towards Arab positions in foreign policy and socialist ones in domestic policy.121 A new constitution was adopted in 1974 which ensured Micombero’s continuance as (an increasingly ineffective) head of state. Micombero was replaced by Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza (also a Tutsi-Hima from Rutovu commune in Bururi) in a bloodless coup on 1 November 1976. Bagaza was able to distance himself personally from the events of 1972 and ‘make political capital of a real or supposed new beginning’ – a break from the colonial and Micombero eras which, according to official discourse, represented ‘one long age of darkness’.122 In pursuance of his primary goal of national unity (and to disguise discrimination), Bagaza took ethnic denial a step further than Micombero: all references to ethnic affiliation (public or private) were banned – a breach of which was grounds for charges of incitement to racial hatred. Next to a reorganisation of the ‘ramshackle’ state apparatus left by Micombero, the rhetoric of national unity pivoted on the need to restore the ‘secular cohesion’ of Burundi society and to embrace the ‘ancestral unity’ of the Barundi through their common language and the ‘social solidarity of the peasant masses’.123 This translated into the three hallmarks of the Second Republic – a campaign to remove the Catholic Church as an alternate voice to the state; discriminatory educational policies; and a land reform programme comprising co-operativisation and ‘villagisation’124 – all of which ultimately served to increase the size and role of the state, curtail personal liberties and maintain a TutsiHima ethnocracy. Despite a new constitution, adopted by national referendum in 1981, heralding a partially elected National Assembly and Central Committee of UPRONA (which was strengthened and confirmed as the only recognised party), Hutus remained markedly under-represented in all

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spheres of public life. By the mid-1980s Hutus held only four ministries out of 20, seven seats out of 65 in the National assembly, two places out of 65 in the Central Committee and one provincial governorship out of 15.125 In addition, 89 per cent of public corporation managers were Tutsi and all 37 of the highest command positions in the army (which continued to play a prominent role) were held by Tutsis (of which 27 were from Bururi).126 While the Bagaza regime was responsible for some notable economic and infrastructural developments, corruption and nepotism within the upper echelons of the state apparatus reached new heights – as did the suppression of perceived disloyalty, dissent and, indeed, any freedom of expression. Micombero’s garrison state had, in ten years, been transformed into a ‘ruthless police state’.127 The deteriorating human rights record and increasing levels of corruption not only drew consternation from external donors (where Burundi’s form of apartheid had hitherto not) but also discredited the regime from within.128 On 3 September 1987 (while Bagaza was attending a summit meeting of Francophone countries in Quebec), Major Pierre Buyoya seized power in an army-led coup.129 The 1981 constitution was suspended, the National Assembly and Central Committee of UPRONA were dissolved and a Military Committee for National Salvation (CMSN) was formed, composed of 31 army officers (mainly from Bururi). Buyoya, like his predecessors, was from Rutovu commune in Bururi but, significantly, he was of the Bashingo Clan (also Micombero’s clan), whereas Bagaza belonged to the Bayanzi clan. Despite an immediate rapprochement with the Church and the release of many political prisoners, the Third Republic appeared no more than a mere changing of the guard. The reins of power were still firmly in the grasp of a Tutsi-Hima elite who continued to deny ethnic difference – indeed, in a newspaper interview in the wake of his accession to power, Buyoya claimed that ‘the deep sociological reality of Burundi ignores this type of ethnic cliche´’ and that ‘the theme of national reconciliation is not on the agenda’.130 However, ‘[d]espite official injunctions to forget’, the genocide of 1972 remained ‘deeply woven in the collective memory’ of the Hutu masses and, less than a year after Buyoya’s seizure of power, ‘anticipated violence inexorably led to pre-emptive violence’.131 Conflicting interpretations of the, albeit timid, signs of liberalisation in the Third Republic had nurtured hopes among Hutu and anxieties

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among Tutsi hard-liners, contributing to a notable rise in ‘ethnic incidents’ throughout 1988.132 These culminated, in August, in a scale of violence unparalleled since 1972 in the northern communes of Ntega and Marangara in Kirundo and Ngozi provinces respectively. Unlike 1972, however, the violence in 1988 was localised and spontaneous, sparked by an ominous speech in which the Tutsi administrator of Marangara (Emmanuel Kajambere) seemingly foreboded another 1972; and the military reinforcements sent in to curb growing tensions in Ntega (accompanied by Re´verien Harushingoro, who was known to have played an active role in 1972) all but confirmed the impending genocide. That Buyoya was of the same clan as Micombero had also not gone unnoticed. The uprising was brutal and indiscriminate (claiming up to 3,000 Tutsi lives), in turn, provoking an even harsher ‘restoration of peace and order’. The estimated number of casualties ranges from the official figure of 5,000 to a more likely figure of 20,000 (mostly Hutu), with up to a further 60,000 fleeing to Rwanda. It is noteworthy that the violence occurred in these provinces – an area described by Lemarchand as a ‘regional powder keg’,133 largely on account of its close proximity to Rwanda and the destabilising effect of refugee communities on both sides of the border (1959 Tutsi refugees from Rwanda heightening fears and 1972 Hutu refugees in Rwanda fuelling extremism). The ‘authoritarian drift of the Bagaza years’ had, as Reyntjens notes, ‘offered the context for the first structuring of the refugee movement’, notably the radical political movement – Party for the Liberation of the Hutu People (PALIPEHUTU) – in Mishamo camp in Tanzania.134 The camp, as Malkki has documented, served as a ‘melting pot’ for Hutu from all different regions of Burundi and as a ‘leveller of differences which may have been important before exile’ for it was here that people apprehended the full extent and scale of events in 1972 and, as the refugees put it, ‘discovered all the secrets of the Tutsi’.135 Moreover, by grouping Hutu together into an ‘immense collectivity’ and enclosing them in a place set apart especially for them (a place which systematically excluded others), the camp ‘fixed and objectified them as “the Hutu”’, while the hierarchy of the camp set up a ‘multitude of analogies with the asymmetry of Burundi society’, such that the exigencies of life in the camp were interpreted by evoking a collective past.136 Thus, the camp ‘enabled and nurtured an elaborate and selfconscious historiocity’, producing a historical narrative that:

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represented not only a description of the past, nor even merely an evaluation of the past, but a subversive recasting and reinterpretation of it in fundamentally moral terms. In this sense, it cannot accurately be described as either history or myth. It was what can be called a mythico-history.137 Malkki characterises the mythico-history as a form of ‘collective discursive practice’ concerned with the history of the Hutu as ‘a people’ and with the ordering and reordering of sociopolitical categories – it ‘heroised and revalued the categorical protagonist’ (by setting the collective self in opposition and enmity against an ‘other’) and constructed an ‘imagined moral community’.138 The mythico-history charted how the aboriginal Bantu peoples living in the ‘autochthonous nation’ were transformed into Hutu (servants) by Tutsi ‘imposters from the north’, who stole power through trickery and the bait of cattle. In this way, the Hamitic Hypothesis took on a life of its own.139 The parasitical status ascribed to the Tutsi made them unworthy of inclusion in the moral community and the cataclysm of 1972 ‘canonised the inhumanity and evil of the “other”, thereby fundamentally purging [them] from the moral community’.140 At the same time, 1972 was seen as an awakening for the Hutu and exile was constituted, not as a liminal state but a necessary process of purification and empowerment to enable the realisation of a millennial return to the homeland and the transformation of Burundi into a true nation (which was being prepared in exile).141 The homeland was thus located in the ‘abstract future’ and the ‘remote past’142 – not in contemporary Burundi. That the Tutsi interlopers still ruled Burundi meant in mythico-historical terms that contemporary Burundi was ‘a mere state, a false and corrupt entity, and not a true nation’.143 The continued government position of ‘we are all Barundi’ (together with the implicit claim of simultaneous arrival and common ancestry) was perceived as a deceitful ploy to hide the ‘real’ origins of Tutsis and annul the importance of the historical precedence in Burundi of the Hutu.144 Buyoya’s initial reaction to the violence in 1988 mirrored that of his kinsmen (feeding into the mythico-history) in both the designation of the cause of the problem (external agents) and the concomitant denial of an internal ethnic confrontation. However, in October a remarkable volte-face occurred, dubbed ‘ethnic glasnost’,145 as Buyoya was

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‘encouraged’ by international pressure to embark on a programme of reforms aimed at ‘breaking the cycle of violence’.146 A National Commission to study the question of national unity (consisting of 12 Hutu and 12 Tutsi) was established; and the first Hutu prime minister since 1965 was appointed (Adrien Sibomana), as well as a cabinet which addressed at least some of the previous ethnic and regional disparities. In April 1989 the National Commission published its report which, with the State Security Bureau in abeyance, provoked unimpeded public debate leading to the drafting of a Charter of National Unity in April 1990 – approved by referendum in February 1991.147 A Constitutional Commission was established the following month with a mandate to analyse the meaning of democracy and explore the democratisation of existing institutions and political life. Besides symbols such as a unity flag and anthem, together with unity squares built in many towns, there were tangible signs of a sea change within the public realm.148 A Government of National Unity was established and both education and the civil service became more transparent and inclusive. However, as argued by Ndikumana, the dialogue initiated with the Commission was a ‘dialogue of the deaf’, which also missed an opportunity to bring closure to the events of 1965, 1969, 1972 and 1988 – just as before, the victims were expected to forget.149 Continuing the Soviet analogy, Uvin has astutely observed, that ‘Buyoya may be compared to Gorbachev, reforming the worst aspects of the system that produced him, while seeking to keep its functioning intact’.150 In his version of perestroika, Buyoya continued to combine the roles of president of the Republic and UPRONA as well as minister of defence, and the key ministries of justice, interior, police and the army remained under Tutsi control. A National Commission for the repatriation of refugees was established in January 1991 but calls for their return were viewed sceptically by refugees in light of the continued mono-ethnicity of the army.151 The army’s resistance to change was evidenced by two successive coup attempts and their involvement in civil unrest during this period. On 10 March 1989, a group of army officers from the Bayanzi clan (with purported Libyan support) unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the regime.152 A further abortive coup attempt by officers and soldiers occurred in March 1992. Notwithstanding the role played by clan politics and the reawakening of intra-Tutsi divisions as the Hutu-Tutsi

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conflict depolarised (reminiscent of 1969), the two coups were illustrative of an emerging divisory trend between reformists (those that accepted the compromise represented in the Charter of National Unity) and extremists (those who rejected it) in both the Tutsi and Hutu camps – who saw it respectively as too much and not enough of a compromise. For the former, it was a recipe for ethnic (rather than democratic) majority rule and inevitable victimisation. For the latter, the external impetus for liberalisation combined with the all-too-recent repressive measures taken in the wake of the 1988 uprisings raised questions about the sincerity of the reform programme, which in any case only spelled parity, not representation. This reformist/extremist split was further evident in the revolts that occurred in November 1991 – on two levels. Unrest and isolated acts of dissidence had occurred in the northern provinces over the summer of 1991 and then on 23– 24 November 1991 there were a series of coordinated attacks by PALIPEHUTU activists against military and police installations in Bujumbura and in the provinces of Bubanza and Cibitoke.153 In a repression reminiscent of 1988, albeit on a smaller scale, anyone suspected of being a PALIPEHUTU sympathiser was killed, leading to the death of between 1,000 and 3,000 civilians – mostly Hutu. On one level, the uprising was organised by a radical faction of PALIPEHUTU (with moderates denying responsibility) and, on a second level, there were indications that the uprising received support from some Tutsi military elements (likely Bagaza supporters) – ‘Hutu and Tutsi extremism meeting each other as objective allies’ in opposition to Buyoya’s reforms.154 Intra-Hutu discord became more apparent as the democratic wave swept across the continent and Buyoya was obliged to move towards multipartyism. The pro-regime UPRONA was Tutsi-dominated but also appealed to those Hutu who accepted the compromise of the Charter of National Unity. The Burundi Democratic Front (FRODEBU, which had been in existence underground since the mid-1980s) took the middle ground between UPRONA and the exclusivist PALIPEHUTU (which was never officially recognised), adopting a stance of ‘constructive contestation’ that sought to enlarge the scope of the reforms initiated by Buyoya and pave the way for multiparty democracy.155 The move to multipartyism, in effect, ‘heralded the institutionalisation of ethnicity in the political arena’,156 despite the fact that the new constitution,

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approved by referendum in March 1992, underscored the promotion of a ‘spirit of national unity’ and representation of the ‘diverse component parts of the Burundian population’ in the government and political parties. In June 1993, the first multiparty democratic elections were held. In the presidential elections, held on 1 June, FRODEBU leader Melchoir Ndadaye won 64.75 per cent of the votes cast against Buyoya’s 32.39 per cent; and in the legislative elections, which followed on 29 June, FRODEBU won 65 of the 81 seats in the National Assembly, with UPRONA gaining the balance. Ethnically, the National Assembly was composed of 69 Hutu and 12 Tutsi – close to the assumed demographic weight of the two groups.157 The elections took place in an atmosphere of calm, monitored by 100 foreign and 1,000 national observers, and were deemed free and fair. However, Tutsi fears of the coincidence of a demographic and political majority had been realised and, on 2 – 3 July, Tutsi troops tried unsuccessfully to seize power by force. The attempt was condemned by both the outgoing president and army command, who affirmed loyalty to the president-elect. Ndadaye was formally invested as president on 10 July. Ultimately, as Reyntjens notes, ‘the successful conclusion of the policy initiated by [Buyoya] in 1988 carried with it the logic of the displacement of the old order, including that of the architect of the transition. In that sense, Buyoya [. . .] paid the highest political prize for his success’.158

A New Burundi or the Shadow Recast Ndadaye’s stated aim of building a new Burundi on the basis of national unity was reflected in his first government (in which no member of the outgoing cabinet was reappointed). Despite their parliamentary majority, FRODEBU only held 13 cabinet positions out of 23, with six going to UPRONA and one each to the PP and the Burundian People’s Rally (RPB), and the posts of minister of defence and minister of internal security going to ‘independent’ (close to UPRONA) army officers. This translated ethnically into nine Tutsi posts, including the Prime Minister, Sylvie Kinigi; and regionally five ministers were chosen from Bururi (more than any other province). Elsewhere, however, a policy of ‘Frodebisation’ threatened the political (and, with few salaried jobs available, economic) interests of the incumbent elite.159 Of the 16

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newly appointed provincial governors, 14 were FRODEBU, as were the chiefs of staff of the army and gendarmerie as well as most ambassadors, and many lower positions in the civil service were handed to FRODEBU members. Thus, while at the top the policy of ‘power-sharing’ was continued, FRODEBU dominated the ‘less visible bottom of the pyramid’.160 For Ndadaye, as for Buoyoya, limited power-sharing was born of pragmatism – a politically necessary ‘tool of control, not a break from neo-patrimonial logics’.161 During the course the three republics, the state had degenerated into a private institution – through clientelism, patronage and rent-seeking, the ruling elite and their acolytes used state institutions to accumulate wealth and to serve and protect the monopolistic interests of privileged individuals and ethno-regional entities.162 Power-sharing was thus a mechanism to appease the old elite and reward the new. For the army, in particular, it leaned too far towards the latter. After barely 100 days in office, Ndadaye was assassinated together with his constitutional successors in a coup, on 20– 21 October 1993, led by junior officers (with at least the passive support of the higher ranks). The coup was, simply put, a ‘counter-reaction’ to rapid Frodebisation and fear of the same in the army,163 which as one Tutsi journalist explained, was not an army per se but a ‘Tutsi-extermination deterrent force’.164 Immediately following news of Ndadaye’s death, violence erupted against Tutsi (and pro-UPRONA Hutu) throughout the country. In some places the violence was a spontaneous popular reaction and in others it was orchestrated by local authorities. The revolt was met with the familiar restoration of peace and order. As in the past, the coup, the revolt and the repression can be interpreted as attempts to forestall anticipated genocide – except that, in this instance, the result was mutual genocide, with an estimated 50,000 casualties (Hutu and Tutsi in almost equal proportion). A further 700,000 (mainly Hutu) fled to neighbouring countries. In addition, two types of internal population movement affected hundreds of thousands – ‘displacement’ of Tutsi (who retreated to urban agglomerations sheltered by the army) and ‘dispersement’ of Hutu (who hid in the countryside) – resulting in a de facto segregation such that, in many places, Burundi ‘resembled a leopard skin, with patches of concentrated Tutsi “surrounded” by dispersed Hutu’.165

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The coup was rejected both internationally and at home, formally collapsing within two days. It would, in time, prove to be one of the ‘most successful failed coups in history’, marking the beginning of what Reyntjens has termed the ‘creeping coup’.166 With FRODEBU decapitated, the coup left a power vacuum which was only filled by political stalemate and a constitutional impasse. Two ministers attempted to create a ‘free government’ in Kigali (with Habyarimana’s consent). The remainder took refuge in the French Embassy in Bujumbura, regrouping at a hotel on the shores of Lake Tanganyika under French protection on 8 November. Many politicians subsequently went into exile in Uvira (and commuted to Bujumbura). The army rebuffed Hutu appeals for international military intervention which, despite Boutros-Ghali’s acquiescence, hardened the resolve of reluctant donors still reeling from the Somalia debacle. In late November, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah was appointed as UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General to facilitate dialogue and restore democratic institutions – a mandate he fulfilled but with paltry results.167 The constitution was amended to elect a president by indirect ballot and, following the Kigobe Accord of 19 January 1994 and the Kajaga Accord of 4 February 1994, Cyprien Ntaryamira (Hutu, FRODEBU moderate) was elected as president of the Republic. He was sworn in on 5 February and a new consensus-based government was installed on 11 February with Anatole Kanyenkiko (Tutsi, UPRONA moderate) as prime minister. However, the Accords were implemented in the midst of (and seemingly rewarded) increasing political violence. Militias and vigilante groups – such as Sans Echec (the infallible), Sans Defaite (the undefeated) – associated with Tutsi satellite parties launched a ville morte (dead city) campaign which, through a series of violent strikes, paralysed Bujumbura. Representatives of those parties were then accommodated in the new government. The ethnic cleansing of Hutu in Bujumbura which began with the dead city days was continued by the army (under the guise of disarmament or pacification operations) from March onwards. Ntaryamira was killed with Habyarimana in the plane crash which precipitated the Rwandan genocide in April 1994. As in 1959, the violence in Rwanda produced a ‘distorted mirror’, in which people saw ‘their worst nightmare’ and through which radicals interpreted events to ‘confirm their worst suspicions and fears’ at home.168 Tutsi objections to any form of majority rule became entrenched and the concessions made

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during the Kigobe and Kajaga Accords caused a rift within FRODEBU. In June 1994 FRODEBU split between moderates (who still sought a political solution) and the more radical National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD). CNDD, formed by Interior Minister Le´onard Nyangoma, and its military wing, the Front for the Defence of Democracy (FDD),169 allied with the older rebel groups PALIPEHUTU and FROLINA which also had their own military wings: FNL (National Liberation Force) and FAP (People’s Armed Forces) respectively. Each had its own area of operation against the army (and a ‘corporate’ base in South Kivu). As a result of a compromise negotiated under the auspices of OuldAbdallah, through the Rohero Agreement of July 1994 and the Convention of Government of 10 September 1994, a multiparty coalition was established, with Sylvestre Ntibantunganya (FRODEBU) as president. The Convention stipulated that the prime minister (who had to counter-sign all presidential decisions), ten cabinet posts (of 23) and 45 per cent (up from the 40 per cent in the Kajaga Accord) of ministerial, local administrative and civil service posts should go to opposition parties (predominantly Tutsi, led by UPRONA). But, significantly, the Agreement did not include military reform – a ‘sine qua non for the de-politicisation of the military’ and a ‘pre-requisite for long-run political stability’.170 The Convention aimed to ‘combine the elected power of the FRODEBU [. . .] majority with security for the (Tutsi) minority’,171 but it was in fact ‘the institutional translation of the October 1993 coup’ in that the ‘1992 constitution was effectively suspended and replaced by mechanisms which annihilated FRODEBU’s victory’.172 The new government was plagued by infighting and unable to control the army, which operated on its own account. There was also widespread resistance to power-sharing from without, together with an increase in generalised violence perpetrated by a rising number of militias. The Convention was not signed by a number of smaller Tutsi parties – including PARENA (Party for National Recovery), led by former President Bagaza – who rejected the idea of sharing power with those they considered responsible for genocide. There were also significant non-signatories among Hutu parties, notably CNDD, who considered the Agreement anti-democratic. In short, ‘political violence rather than political dialogue prevailed’,173 and the ‘radicalisation and fragmentation of the political landscape led to a total breakdown’ of government

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institutions, with the army ‘effectively controlling what little state power remained’.174 By the end of 1994, Burundi was ‘bogged down in an impasse born of a dormant civil war [. . .] ethnic apartheid reigned in Bujumbura, where militias laid down the law’ and, from 1995, ‘observers spoke of a “genocide in dribs and drabs” or a “genocide in the making”, without specifying by whom and against whom’.175 An army coup on 25 July 1996 (in reaction to regional peace enforcement proposals) placed Buyoya back in power – thus completing the military takeover (or creeping coup) which began three years earlier. In the first African ‘coercive action against one of their own number’ in an internal matter, regional states with ‘political cover from the OAU Conflict Resolution Mechanism’ imposed economic sanctions on Burundi in an attempt to force the restoration of democratic institutions.176 This was followed in August by United Nations Security Council (UNSC) condemnation of the coup, an international embargo and the cessation of aid programmes. During the 1990s the already fragile economy contracted by 25 per cent and there was an 80 per cent increase in rural poverty and a 50 per cent increase in urban poverty.177 Buyoya, who did not have a hand in the instigation of the coup, justified it (and his reinstatement) in terms of restoring security and rescuing the people of Burundi from the failing regime imposed by the Convention. While he was able to discipline the army and rein in the militias (largely by incorporating them into the army), he could not control the escalating rebellion in the countryside. In addition to an expansion of the armed forces from 20,000 to 40,000, the government began training and equipping a civilian defence force in 1997 – the Gardie´ns de la Paix (guardians of the peace) – which co-opted Hutus into patrols, as a way of keeping them under surveillance. The government further sought to isolate rebels from their support base in rural areas through the forced displacement of Hutu into regroupment camps – ostensibly for their own protection (both from rebels and from being mistaken as such by the army). The regroupment programme was initiated by the military governor of Karuzi province in early 1996 and was extended to virtually all regions by Buyoya. By mid-1997, between 300,000 and 600,000 people had been forcibly regrouped into camps (up to 10 per cent of the population).178 The segregation which began in 1993 was thus further accentuated and, by 1997, Burundi was characterised by ‘a torn-apart patchwork of Batutsi and Bahutu colonies

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[. . .] divided territorially into almost isolated enclaves [. . .] interspersed with stretches of what might be described as “no-man’s land”’.179 In 1998 Buyoya agreed to come to the negotiating table and in June of that year the regionally brokered Arusha peace process began, facilitated by elder statesman Julius Nyerere.180 The embargo was lifted in January 1999 and aid flows resumed. However, violence also escalated during 1999 (at least in part owing to Nyerere’s partisanship and perceived partiality towards Hutus), reaching its height at the end of the year.181 The negotiations in Arusha had numerous shortcomings. As a result of the ‘unrestrictive application of power sharing’, there was a ‘phenomenal proliferation of parties’,182 and the negotiations conferred a semblance of legitimacy on individuals and micro-parties which otherwise had no popular support.183 No fewer than 17 parties participated in the Arusha negotiations, split between the so-named G-7 (predominantly Hutu) and G-10 (predominantly Tutsi). The negotiations also reflected a ‘very Burundian way of doing business, characterised by the “unsaid” and the “almost said”’ and were marred by ‘constant strategic repositioning and further fragmentation of the internal and external political landscape, the impression increasingly being that of a process in which the Burundians pretended to talk, with the international community pretending to believe they did’.184 This was exacerbated by the sheer number of international mediators involved and the lack of coherence between them in terms of their perceptions of the crisis, their agendas and, indeed, the very nature of the peace they were negotiating.185 Burundian actors, as Curtis explains, were able to play mediators off against one another, and ‘reshape, reinscribe and sometimes subvert’ the diverse and amorphous peace-building ideas and strategies such that power-sharing provisions became akin to ‘elite office-trading’. Furthermore, as the civil war continued throughout the negotiations, when interests were not met through political negotiation, individuals threatened to (and often did) pursue their interests through violent means instead. In sum, ‘the very indeterminacy of the peacebuilding agenda [. . .] ended up serving narrow interests and agendas’.186 Upon Nyerere’s death in October 1999, Nelson Mandela (reluctantly) took the helm.187 His more direct, even impatient, approach was pivotal in concluding the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi on 28 August 2000. After no fewer than ten rounds of negotiations since June 1998, 19 delegations signed the Agreement

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(17 from political parties plus the Government and the National Assembly). On 23 July 2001, a 36-month transition period, to take effect from 1 November, was agreed with Buyoya remaining as president for 18 months, to be succeeded by Domitien Ndayizeye (Hutu, FRODEBU) for the second half – a succession which occurred peacefully. The South Africa Protection Support Detachment (SAPSD) was deployed in October 2001 to provide protection for politicians returning from exile to participate in the transitional government, and was subsequently replaced by the African Union Mission in Burundi (AMIB) in April 2003. The Agreement has been dubbed a ‘non-accord’,188 not least because it did not count the two main rebel groups (CNDD-FDD and PALIPEHUTU-FNL) among its signatories and as such neither did it secure an end to the civil war. Negotiations facilitated by Jacob Zuma began in January 2001, ultimately leading to the Global Ceasefire Agreement (GCA) of 16 November 2003 between Ndayizeye’s transitional government and CNDD-FDD.189 Under the GCA, the CNDD-FDD were allocated four ministries in government, 15 seats in the National Assembly, three provincial governorships, 30 communal administrations, two ambassadorships and 20 per cent of state-owned companies. In addition, and crucially, the new (downsized) National Defence Force (FDN) comprised 40 per cent CNDD-FDD and the police and intelligence services 35 per cent.190 The integration of rebel forces into the army and resultant ethnic parity was the cornerstone upon which the end to Burundi’s civil war pivoted (which, in the course of ten years took an estimated 300,000 lives and displaced over a million people – with an estimated 52 per cent of the population fleeing their homes at least once during the war191). The UN Operation in Burundi (ONUB) replaced AMIB in June 2004 with a (Chapter VII) mandate to monitor the ceasefire, contribute to disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) and assist with the organisation of elections. Talks between Ndayizeye and PALIPEHUTU-FNL began in January 2004 but were suspended after the Gatumba massacre in August 2004, for which the FNL claimed responsibility.192 The Pretoria Power-Sharing Agreement of 6 August 2004 paved the way for a draft constitution which was adopted by legislature in October 2004 and approved by referendum in February 2005. Despite the shortcomings of Arusha, it laid the foundations for the posttransition constitution and the complex multi-layered and multi-faceted

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power-sharing arrangement contained therein, such that Burundi came to approximate (more than any other African country) Lijphart’s consociational formula.193 The constitution states that the president of the Republic shall be assisted by two vice presidents, who must belong to different ethnic groups and different political parties (with the further requirement that the Hutu vice president is of a predominantly Hutu party and the Tutsi of a predominantly Tutsi party). Political parties, in turn, must not be ethnically exclusive and on electoral lists, of every three candidates proposed one after the other, only two can belong to the same ethnic group and at least one out of every four must be a woman. All parties that receive 5 per cent of votes cast are entitled to participate in government (with the number of ministerial positions proportional to their seats in the National Assembly). The government must be composed of 60 per cent Hutu and 40 per cent Tutsi. The same proportions hold in the National Assembly (and at least 30 per cent must be women), whereas the Senate must have an equal number of Hutu and Tutsi, and include two delegates from each province of different ethnic groups. Three places in each are reserved for Twa. Similarly, the FDN cannot include more than 50 per cent from any one ethnic group and the ministers of national defence and national police must be of different ethnic groups. At the communal level, not more than 67 per cent of administrators should belong to the same ethnic group. If these requirements are not met through elections, additional members are to be co-opted into government to redress imbalances. After a six-month extension of the transitional period, elections were held in the summer of 2005. Unlike the 1993 elections which took place in a polarised political field (opposing FRODEBU against UPRONA and Hutu against Tutsi) with the army ever present, the 2005 elections took place in a pluralistic field (of numerous ethnically diverse political parties) in the presence of ONUB with the FDN remaining aloof from politics.194 In the communal elections held on 3 June, CNDD-FDD won 62.6 per cent of the votes against 20.9 per cent for its nearest competitor (FRODEBU). UPRONA gained 5.2 per cent. CNDD-FDD gained legitimacy from its years of armed struggle (through which it forced military reform), its connection to the rural masses, its rejection of ethnic discourse used by its main competitors and its absence from the inept FRODEBU–UPRONA partnership of the previous ten years; its success also reflected the fear that peace might be jeopardised if the party failed to win. In the legislative elections held on 4 July, CNDD-FDD

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won 59 seats in the National Assembly against 25 for FRODEBU, ten for UPRONA, four for CNDD and two for MRC (Movement for the Rehabilitation of the Citizen). Of those elected, 65 were Hutu and 35 Tutsi. Following co-optation of an additional 18 MPs to meet the constitutionally required ethnic ratio, the number of CNDD-FDD seats increased to 64, FRODEBU to 30 and UPRONA to 15. Indirect elections for the Senate were held on 29 July, where CNDD-FDD won 30 of 34 seats. The constitution provides that the first post-transition president is indirectly elected by the National Assembly and Senate. Only CNDD-FDD proposed a candidate – its chairman, Pierre Nkurunziza – who was elected with 94 per cent of votes cast on 19 August. He took the oath of office on 26 August and appointed Martin Nduwimana (Tutsi, UPRONA) as first and Alice Nzomukunda (Hutu, CNDD-FDD) as second vice president. The remaining political appointments were not entirely within constitutional bounds, owing to the difficulties of combining ‘political realism with a complex constitution’ but, in the main, the constitution was respected.195 Local elections completed the electoral marathon on 23 September. Despite protestations about irregularities and scattered violence (mainly by FRODEBU), the elections were considered free and fair by observers – earning Burundi the accolade of a ‘beacon’ or ‘beachhead of stability and freedom’ in Central Africa (albeit with measured caution).196 Early policy pronouncements were conciliatory and augured well but within a year the government was facing a crisis of confidence, leading Lemarchand to argue, in 2006, that ‘state and party are two faces of the same coin’ and ‘structurally, it seems that little has changed since the days of Tutsi hegemony in the 1970s and 1980s, except that ethnic and regional identities as a criterion for power and privilege are not nearly as significant as they used to be [. . .]’.197 Furthermore, CNDDFDD responded to criticism that it was not honouring its promise of good governance with large-scale repression and human rights violations rather than dialogue, leading Van Ecke to conclude, in 2007, that ‘the seriously destabilising situation inside Burundi since the elections has dashed Burundian hopes of entering a new era’.198 The government did however keep to another of its post-election pledges and engaged the last remaining rebel group, PALIPEHUTUFNL, in talks (though not before further clashes between the FDN and FNL in early 2006). Following the Dar es Salaam Agreement of

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Principles towards Lasting Peace, Security and Stability of 18 June 2006, a Comprehensive Ceasefire Agreement was signed between the government and PALIPEHUTU-FNL on 7 September 2006. ONUB was replaced by the United Nations Integrated Office in Burundi (BINUB) with a more limited mandate to support stable and democratic governance. PALIPEHUTU-FNL finally laid down arms in 2009 – ostensibly hoping to mirror CNDD-FDD’s 2005 electoral victory in the upcoming elections. It had by then also lost much of its raison d’eˆtre, since ethnicity was no longer the defining feature around which politics revolved in the post-Arusha sociopolitical space. In accordance with constitutional requirements, it changed its name to FNL (leaving aside the ethnically charged original name), was registered as a political party and integrated into the defence and security forces. In 2010, communal, legislative and (unlike 2005) presidential elections were held. In the communal elections, held on 24 May, CNDD-FDD won with 64 per cent of the votes, followed by FNL with 14.15 per cent, UPRONA with 6.25 per cent and FRODEBU with 5.43 per cent.199 The elections were denounced as fraudulent by a group of 12 opposition parties, including FNL and FRODEBU (but not UPRONA) – who formed the Alliance of Democrats for Change in Burundi (ADC-Ikibiri) – citing pre-election corruption and voter intimidation on the part of CNDD-FDD. However, their requests for an annulment of the results and the appointment of a new electoral commission were turned down by international partners, and the UN called on all stakeholders to continue participating in the electoral process. Avoiding the derailment of the elections was seen as the best safeguard against both a further institutional imbroglio and a repeat of electoral violence recently witnessed in Kenya and Zimbabwe. The boycott meant that the only remaining candidate for the presidential election on 28 June was incumbent President Pierre Nkurunziza, who gained 91.6 of the votes cast (UPRONA also withdrew its candidate) with a voter turnout of 76.98 per cent (down only 13.62 per cent from the communal elections). While deploring the lack of political pluralism, international observers positively evaluated the presidential ‘referendum’. A few opposition parties rescinded on their boycott to participate in the legislative elections on 23 July but voter turnout was down to 66.68 per cent and only three parties achieved the 5 per cent threshold for seats in the government. CNDD-FDD logically

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improved on its score in the communal elections with 81.19 per cent of the votes, UPRONA received 11.06 per cent and FRODEBU NYAKURI (a satellite party of CNDD-FDD) 5.88 per cent. Overall, the elections were judged by electoral observers to have been conducted in conformity with international standards and the outcome ‘sufficiently successful’ – not least because such a stance allowed for progressive international disengagement, as evidenced on 16 December 2010, when the UN scaled down its presence, replacing BINUB with BNUB (UN Office in Burundi).200 The constitutional requirements concerning ethnic parity and corrected proportionality with minority over-representation were rigorously adhered to in the 2010 elections as they were in the 2005 elections. However, Burundi was deemed to be regressing – with a noticeable authoritarian drift and de facto or quasi single-party rule replacing the Arusha Agreement.201 Following the 2010 elections, as Vandeginste argues, Burundi moved from competitive to hegemonic electoral authoritarianism – only just stopping short of a democratically legitimated one-party system owing to the constitutional power-sharing arrangements.202 The elections procedurally satisfied donors, enhancing external legitimacy without threatening the interests of the ruling elite; as such, they were ‘logically perceived by Burundi’s elite as rewarding (and therefore encouraging) a governance system based on strong presidentialism and big man clientelism’ and power remained strongly personalised around the president.203 In short, as Curtis observes, despite careful ethnic inclusion, ‘the nature of the state remains the same, including the central position of violence and control within it’.204 There was a resumption of political violence following the elections and, in the face of oppression and intimidation, many ADC leaders left the country. In addition, a number of opposition parties were weakened by internal dissidence (encouraged by CNDD-FDD). The absence of a genuine opposition, combined with the control of institutions (and instrumentalisation of the security services) by the ruling party, made the power-sharing system defined by the Arusha Agreement all but irrelevant.205 Thus, Ndikumana’s words before Arusha still held true: ‘violence is created and maintained in a vicious circle of frustration [. . .] and repression as the rulers try to hold onto power’ and carefully crafted ‘institutional failure [has] resulted in a divorce between state institutions and the population’.206

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The shrinking political space in the aftermath of the 2010 elections (clearly echoing trends noted five years earlier) has since shrunk further still. In the run-up to the 2015 elections, Nkurunziza sought the longanticipated constitutional amendment and, on 23 April, announced his intention to run for a third term as president (arguing that it was in effect a second term as his first election was indirect). The validation of his candidacy by the Constitutional Court was greeted by popular protest in the form of the ‘Stop the Third Mandate’ street movement – and ‘ethnically charged rhetoric framing [it] as a Tutsi construction’.207 An attempted military coup (while Nkurunziza was attending an East African Community Heads of State Summit in Dar es Salaam) on 13 May was followed by the government’s ‘radicalisation’, as evidenced by repression of the security forces’ old guard and the assassination, on 23 May, of Zedi Feruzi (leader of opposition party United for Peace and Development – UPD).208 The opposition again boycotted the elections, deemed neither free nor fair by international observers, and on 24 August Nkurunziza achieved his third term. Since then, political violence has become routinised with repression continuing to take the place of dialogue in dealing with discontent.209 Clashes between the government – especially the youth wing of CNDDFDD, the Imbonerakure (meaning ‘those who see from afar’) – and protesters have intensified and spread to the provinces. A media blackout has been imposed and many opposition and civil society figures have gone underground (or been assassinated). Over 300,000 Barundi have fled to neighbouring countries, a further 100,000 have been internally displaced and an estimated 4.6 million of the 11 million population are in need of food aid.210 The co-ordinated armed attack on three military installations on 11 December 2015, in which 87 people were killed, was ‘a powerful symbol of the fragile line separating the current crisis from civil war’.211 Amidst reports of the discovery of mass graves around Bujumbura, holding mostly Tutsi victims of the reprisal attacks, and rumours of opposition militias being backed by Rwanda, there are signs that the crisis is prompting a resurrection of ethnic antagonisms.

Conclusion Burundi history is told through the prism of conflict between Hutu and Tutsi – a conflict which, since the self-fulfilling prophecy generated by

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the Rwanda Revolution, has been born of a collective ‘fear of the future lived through the past’.212 The intricacies of that past remain a matter of conjecture but have, through the colonial and independence eras, been mythically reinterpreted. Historically malleable identities were, during colonial rule, displaced by primordialised ethnicity, as ‘political hierarchies and social differentiations were assimilated into a schema opposing “true Negroes” to “false Negroes”, to “Semito-Hamites” lost “in the heart of darkness” that was Central Africa’.213 From the 1960s until 1993, the denial of ethnic difference served to justify Tutsi monopolisation of power and the accentuation of that difference Hutu protest against exclusionary policies. Mutually anticipated violence prompted a spiral of alternating preventive or pre-emptive violence and that violence in turn became woven into and strengthened the very identity of both communities. As Rubin explains, ‘with time, the identities themselves were largely constructed and defined through the history of conflict and violence, becoming a product of the conflicts as much as a cause’.214 The radicalisation of group consciousness brought forth traditional beliefs and practices associated with since displaced lineage networks, which were transferred to and merged with the exigencies of the post-colonial environment – proffering an answer to the oft-asked question of why neighbours kill.215 However, while conflict focalised along ethnic lines for more than 40 years, this is just one mutation of sociopolitical cleavage in Burundi, which previously manifested itself as dynastic rivalry, regionalism, intraethnic discord and, latterly, as political factionalism. Conflict is more fundamentally about elite capture of the state (as the main avenue for resource appropriation) and popular alienation from (and distrust of) it. It is this that lay at the heart of popular discontent during the colonial era, the drift to military rule and the revolts against it since independence, as well as the post-Arusha regression. Ethnicity appears to have been ‘a tool which has been instrumented for rent-seeking’ and it is ‘the impact of the predation policies on the preyed and not [ethnic] imbalances per se’ that has fuelled conflict – and repression in defence of the system of predation.216 Again, traditional political practice (in this case clientelism) has been adapted and taken on obverse (neopatrimonial) forms. Whereas pre-colonial patron-client relationships bound people together in seamless webs of mutual reciprocity, in the acculturated post-independence environment they proved divisive and

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corrupting. As Daley explains: ‘Burundi’s pre-colonial rulers recognised the need for a policy of inclusion in order to enhance productivity and security, while colonial and post-colonial rulers, in contrast, used racial and ethnic exclusivism to facilitate accumulation through extraction’.217 Colonial rule not only promoted ethnic exclusivity, it also encouraged the princely rivalries and separatism that characterised the kingdom on the eve of colonial rule – and fixed them within new territorial forms of dependency. Without the colonial intrusion, it is possible that the Burundi Kingdom would have contracted and smaller principalities emerged in peripheral areas. Instead, the kingdom was frozen at a particularly unstable point in its history and continued to fragment from within colonial and ‘state’ boundaries. Colonial rulers perpetuated that failure by undermining the ideological foundations of the monarchy and imposing an intrusive (but institutionally weak) administrative apparatus – which essentially remained in place and hypertrophied throughout the three republics, such that the gulf between rulers and ruled continued to widen. In the absence of national unity (a prospect eclipsed with Rwagasore’s assassination), the regime in Burundi has lacked legitimacy since the overthrow of the monarchy and democracy no longer seems a panacea for either the flailing ruling party or the impoverished majority – if indeed it ever was. As Lemarchand argues, the ‘collapse of [the] state system can best be seen as the ineluctable outcome of a head-on collision between the “premise of inequality” inherent in [. . .] traditional value orientation and the egalitarian message of liberal democracy’.218 More fundamentally, as Uvin powerfully demonstrates, in contrast to their Western sponsors, the Barundi have an epistemological framework which approaches governance and justice through a lens of social relations and personal attributes rather than institutions and structures. Burundi society was traditionally individualistic, amorphous and shaped by personal dependencies – characteristics which are still prevalent together with flexibility in social relations (as evidenced by a general preference for moving beyond ethnicity and forgetting rather than truthtelling). Furthermore, despite its erosion as an institution, the values associated with the bashingantahe (honesty, wisdom, justness and nondiscrimination) are still deeply anchored and remain a reference point for most Barundi – defining the attributes they admire in others and desire in leaders. In short, ordinary Barundi ‘do not seek better institutions but better people’ and not democracy but safety and livelihoods.219

SOUTH SUDAN

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CHAPTER 4 UGANDA:A FOUNDATIONAL FAILURE AND POST-COLONIAL REVIVAL

Introduction The misdeeds of Idi Amin are well known to scholars of state failure. However, to endorse a commonly held view that it was him and him alone that precipitated the failure or collapse of the Ugandan state is to bestow upon him an undue ‘honour’. Depending on one’s interpretation, Amin was a brutal tyrant or an incompetent buffoon (or both) but he was no revolutionary and in many respects merely continued on an already established path. His ruination of the state thus needs to be viewed through the sets of circumstances that led to his rise. In this respect, there are two trends that Amin furthered – the politicisation of ethnicity and the militarisation of politics – which were subsequently perpetuated, ameliorated and reinvented but which have their roots in the early independence and colonial eras (in the making – or otherwise – of Uganda). Unlike Burundi, Uganda is entirely a colonial contrivance and its history (as a distinct entity) begins with colonial rule. Sitting astride the Nile and home to the conjectured source of the majestic river rising from the ‘mountains of the moon’ in the ‘dark continent’, a particularly acute European interest befell what was to become ‘Uganda’ in the nineteenth century. The first section of the present chapter charts how this translated into the seemingly reluctant, arguably unintentional and

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certainly unsystematic establishment of British administration over a sphere of interest which was gradually delimited into the bounded territory of ‘Uganda’. This territory encompassed portions of two markedly different cultural-linguistic groups, northern Bantu and southern Nilote, which broadly comprised kingdoms and segmentary societies respectively (but a wide variety of sociopolitcal forms existed within each). Colonial policies were reactive to events and the peoples they encountered which, as discussed in the second section, resulted in the creation of a fragmentary protectorate when the British intended the obverse. From auspicious beginnings, which had the potential to remedy the contradictions of the colonial era, Uganda’s post-independence history is one of undoing and redoing the colonial ‘state’, of making and unmaking a Ugandan ‘nation’ and attempting to find a ‘traditional’ source of legitimacy for modern political ends. These general patterns have taken a variety of forms, which have seen Uganda pass through (semi)federalism, one-partyism, a socialist turn, military dictatorship, the legendary noparty system and multiparty democracy – replete with insurgencies, military coups, unconstitutional regime changes and experiments in genocide – all undergirded by continued sectarianism and a general lack of state legitimacy (popular or otherwise) and wanting measures of effectiveness. Uganda’s post-colonial state creation trajectory is the subject of subsequent sections of the chapter, traced through four periods broadly corresponding to the premierships of Obote I, Amin, Obote II and Museveni.

From Buganda to Uganda The shape Uganda was to take was determined by the extent of preexisting colonial boundaries (rather than those of natural or traditional origin) and that shape shifted (largely contracting) according to colonial interests well into the twentieth century. Two of those boundaries were within the British Empire (the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of the Sudan to the north and British East Africa (BEA) – later to become the Kenya colony – to the east), while the western boundary was defined by the Congo Free State and the southern by German East Africa.1 The process by which Uganda took shape – territorially and politically – is self-evident: in the words of Roberts, ‘the very name “Uganda”

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epitomises, in the form of synecdoche, the expansion of the protectorate from the Kingdom of Buganda to dimensions approximating to those of the present day’.2 For, in Buganda, the British were greeted with a recognisable form of ‘statehood’ that they had not hitherto encountered in their African adventures.3 Since its consolidation in circa the fifteenth century, Buganda had developed into a centralised, hierarchical kingdom. The kabaka (king) presided over the lukiiko (council) comprised of the key bakungu (chiefs), including the katikiro (prime minister), mujasi (head of the armed forces) and gabunga (admiral of the Lake Victoria navy). Below these was a hierarchy of territorial chiefs: saza (county), gombolola (sub-county) and miruka (parish) which, as the kingdom expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, replaced the original hereditary clan heads (bataka), with the kabaka assuming social as well as political primacy as sabataka (head of all clans). Solidary groupings did not however follow the territorial organisation of the kingdom. Chiefs held their positions at the kabaka’s pleasure (from whom all authority flowed) and were appointed on the basis of achievement (especially in war) and loyalty rather than traditional claims and, unlike the neighbouring kingdoms of Bunyoro and Ankole, there was no ruling caste. The kabaka was the personification of Buganda and the Baganda,4 and the fact that chiefs were his personal appointees provided direct contact between the kabaka and the people (from the village ‘representative’ up through the hierarchy). The ‘presence’ of the kabaka was further enhanced by his estates being scattered throughout the counties and the custom of periodically moving the kabaka’s residence to different locations around the kingdom (which, in turn, further diminished the relevance of territorial boundaries).5 Reports of the ‘orderliness’ and ‘quiescent beauty’ of the kingdom, combined with the favourable reception extended to its first European visitors in 1862 – John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant – were in stark contrast to those from explorers pursuing the source of the Nile from the north.6 Speke so admired Buganda that he recommended it to the Church Missionary Society (CMS), and ultimately of the three ‘potent weapons’ pithily identified by Karugire as ‘the gun, the bible and the “anthropologist”’ – which the Europeans had, in his words, ‘developed, almost to perfection’ and against which ‘African societies and their way of life could not possibly muster any defence’7 – it was the second that was to have a profound influence and constituted the primary

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means by which Uganda came into existence (amply aided by the other two). The CMS was initially reticent about expanding its activities inland and, with Speke’s untimely death in 1864, plans were held in abeyance – until Henry Morton Stanley arrived in Buganda 11 years later. At that time, Kabaka Mutesa I (1857– 84) actively courted the Christian missionaries (in a letter via Stanley published in the Daily Telegraph on 15 November 1875) – though not as bearers of a new faith but as a counterweight to the threat of Egyptian expansion to the north. CMS (Protestant) missionaries arrived in Buganda in 1877, followed by the French (Catholic) White Fathers two years later. The missionaries were confined to the capital (if not the Court) and closely supervised by the kabaka. This meant that the pages, not the peasants – and the bakungu rather than the bataka – were the first converts, securing a place for religion in politics and changing the notion of the kabakaship in the process. This was especially so after ‘Mutesa’s shrewd if brutal despotism yielded to the irresponsible and vacillating tyranny of Mwanga (1884– 1897)’.8 Mwanga’s attempts to curb the missionaries’ influence (through the persecution of their followers) failed and power passed to those he had antagonised, with the converted bakungu forming a new (but denominationally divided) political class. In 1888, they united to overthrow Mwanga but he was returned to the throne in October 1899 by – and as a puppet of – the Catholics. Thus, the monotheistic religions, as Ingham notes, had a revolutionary effect on the loose paganism of the Baganda: the kabaka was no longer ‘the autocratic symbol of his whole people’ but ‘the leader of a faction’.9 In the midst of the civil war, Mwanga appealed to the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC), which had been granted a charter in 1888 to administer the area between Mombasa and Lake Victoria on behalf of the government. Upon Frederick Lugard’s arrival in Kampala in December 1890 a treaty was signed between IBEAC and Mwanga (protection in return for free trade and missionary teaching). After the Battle of Mengo in which, with the help of IBEAC, the Protestants defeated the Catholics (and Mwanga became nominally Protestant), a second treaty was signed in March 1892. This treaty was significant for it not only recognised the Company’s authority but was signed by both Mwanga and prominent bakungu. Under the new treaty, the offices of the kingdom and upper levels of the bakungu hierarchy were dominated by Protestants and their leader Apolo Kagwa was appointed senior katikiro

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(a post he held until 1927) but a second katikiro, Catholic Stanislas Mugwanya, was also appointed. Within a year, IBEAC fell into financial difficulty and ceased operations in Buganda. The government’s decision to take over IBEAC’s area of control was heavily influenced by British public opinion which stressed the moral obligation of Britain to protect the war-stricken Baganda (and the missionaries). A treaty establishing a provisional protectorate was signed with Mwanga on 29 May 1893 and the formal declaration of a protectorate over (and limited, at this time, to) Buganda followed on 27 August 1894, which was conceived in terms of a protected native state.10 Throughout this tumultuous period the political organisation of Buganda had been maintained but (with the kabakaship eclipsed by a Protestant junta) the alignments therein had been revolutionised. As a result, the British were presented with ‘both personnel and a form of government easily adaptable to the limited purposes of British overrule’11 – and, as the protectorate expanded, imitations of the Buganda system were created in newly administered areas with the assistance of Baganda ‘agents’. The effect was to positively accentuate the pattern of Buganda’s pre-colonial history not only in terms of continuity in internal political development but also in the ‘perpetuation of Buganda’s imperialist past’.12 This sub-imperialistic policy was first employed in Britain’s nine-year endeavour to pacify the neighbouring Kingdom of Bunyoro – a historical rival of Buganda. Bunyoro is the core of the once-extensive Kitara Empire which, at its peak in circa the sixteenth century, is said to have encompassed most of modern Uganda, Rwanda, eastern Congo, western Kenya, western Tanzania and parts of Ethiopia.13 Its fundamental weakness lay in the very wideness of the Empire coupled with the ‘natural instability’ of a system which had ‘never solved the problem of how to unite the component parts of the kingdom, nor that of how to inspire loyalty in [its] subjects’.14 Unlike Buganda, Bunyoro, as described by Beattie, was ‘a loose association of semi-independent polities, connected with the centre through acknowledgement of fealty and sporadic payment of tribute’. He continues, it was not ‘a question of simple inclusion or exclusion, but rather of the degree of suzerainty acknowledged. We are concerned with expanding and contracting spheres of influence, not with sharply bounded, unitary states’.15 Between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, Bunyoro contracted as a result of the

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expansion of the kingdoms of Ankole and, particularly, Buganda; it also lost the territory of Toro after Prince Kaboyo (who was frustrated by Kitara succession – or lack thereof) carved out an independent kingdom. Since the accession of Mukama (King) Kabarega in 1869, and Buganda’s engulfment in civil war, the trend had been reversing but a resurgent Bunyoro conflicted with British interests.16 Kabarega’s attempt to reconquer Toro (his main preoccupation) was thwarted in 1891 when the mukama of Toro (who had taken refuge in Buganda) was reinstalled by IBEAC to provide a bulwark against Bunyoro as Lugard marched westward to secure revenue and enlist the Sudanese (Nubi) soldiers left behind by Emin Pasha.17 In late 1893, following the provisional protectorate declaration, Colonel Henry Colvile was appointed to take control of the Nile basin north of Buganda, where Kabarega’s raids were gaining pace and Congolese incursions were suspected. By early 1894, he had driven Kabarega’s forces back north of the Kafu and Nkusi rivers and annexed the territories to the south of the rivers to Buganda (dividing them between Catholics and Protestants). It is commonly perceived that the territories were gifted to Buganda as a reward for loyal assistance but the decision was a strategic one – to protect British interests from further potential attacks by Kabarega.18 Nevertheless, the transfer of the so-called ‘lost counties’ (Buruli, Bugerere, Buwekula, Buyaga and Bugangaizi) was an issue that became a thorn in the side of the colonial administration.19 Of the lost counties, three were frontier counties, both ‘geographically and symbolically peripheral to Bunyoro’ but Buyaga and Bugangaizi lay at the heart of the historic kingdom and contained sacred sites, including the tombs of former bakama.20 As the war in Bunyoro continued, treaties of ‘protection’ were requested by and signed with Mukama Kasagama of Toro (3 March 1894) and Mugabe (King) Ntare of Ankole (29 August 1894). The two treaties were regularised in 1896 when the Uganda protectorate was formally extended westward over the kingdoms of Bunyoro, Toro and Ankole, as well as eastward over Busoga and the white highlands.21 Kabarega continued to offer resistance from a base in Lango until his eventual capture in 1899 (together with Mwanga, who had revolted against British overrule in 1897). Both were deported to the Seychelles and, with Mwanga exiled, his infant son (Daudi Chwa) was placed on the throne and three regents appointed (two Protestant and one Catholic).22

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In September 1899 Sir Harry Johnston was despatched to Uganda to place the administration of the protectorate on a firmer footing. His intentions of establishing a unitary protectorate under British overrule were frustrated by Buganda expectations of autonomy. The 1900 Buganda Agreement was a compromise between the two positions, amounting to the creation of a Bugandan ‘state’ within the Ugandan protectorate.23 Buganda’s boundaries were defined so as to include the lost counties, but tributary claims over neighbouring principalities reverted to the British Crown. However, while the scale of the kabaka’s authority was expanded (from ten to 20 sazas), in other ways it was circumscribed and furthered the outcome of the civil war, maintaining the indigenous system but with some alterations. He no longer had absolute control over chiefs (appointments being subject to British approval) and the positions of mujasi and gabunga were abolished.24 The lukiiko (which had been informal and advisory in pre-colonial times) was institutionalised as a provincial parliament. All land (which the kabaka had hitherto held in trust for his people) was granted in freehold and divided between the kabaka, chiefs, missionaries and the British Crown. Thus the kabaka was no longer able to bestow rewards by the grant of land or the produce of land – batongole tenure – to chiefs who, in precolonial times, never owned land but merely exercised jurisdiction at the kabaka’s pleasure over those who chose to live on it under them. Instead, the Christian chiefly oligarchy was firmly established and transformed into a landed aristocracy, while ordinary Baganda found themselves ‘demoted from the status of free peasants to something tantamount to twentieth-century colonial serfs’; and the bataka lost further authority and influence by the removal of their quasi-hereditary tenure over land held in perpetuity for the clan.25 Agreements similar (but simpler) to that made with Buganda were signed with Toro on 26 June 1900 and Ankole on 7 August 1901 – the latter with reservations owing to the disunity of the kingdom (which, like Bunyoro, was tributary in nature). As in Buganda, hut and gun taxes were instituted and uncultivated land secured for the Crown but (with a few limited exceptions) no allotments of land in freehold were made. In both cases, the Agreements not only secured the continued existence of the monarchies and their independence from Buganda and Bunyoro but also extended the reach of the kingdoms. A ‘greater Ankole’ was formally created, bringing neighbouring chieftaincies under Ankole

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overlordship; and the Toro Confederacy created under previous treaties was confirmed, incorporating the previously independent Kingdom of Kitagwenda and several areas which were formerly part of Bunyoro.26 Considered a conquered territory, Bunyoro was ruled more directly by the British through Baganda agents (principally Jemusi Miti), although the monarchy was restored in 1902 (under Kabarega’s son, Duhaga) and Baganda agents were gradually replaced with Banyoro (completed in the main by 1914). The eventual Agreement with Bunyoro in 1933 was a ‘watered-down version of the Buganda Agreement’ but ‘more elaborate and more significant’ than those of Toro and Ankole.27 The Agreement afforded official recognition of the fact that Bunyoro had been more extensive in the past and left open the possibility that it might be extended in the future while, at the same time, carefully avoiding the issue of the lost counties. It also conferred more authority on the mukama than he (or his predecessors) had hitherto possessed – except with regard to land grants (where the provision was less than in the other Agreements). The final piece of western Uganda – Kigezi district – was incorporated after the Anglo-German-Belgian Boundary Commission completed its work in 1911 (see previous chapter). The district comprised Mufumbiro, Ruzumbura,28 and an area occupied by the socalled Bakiga (literally translated as highlanders) – a disparate group of clans whose alliances rarely extended beyond the family or descent group. Again, the British fell back on Baganda agents (many of whom had worked for the Boundary Commission) to establish administration. A similar story holds for the eastern marches (Bukedi, Teso and Bugiso), which were largely brought under British control by Muganda army commander Semei Kakunguru. In each area, Kakunguru encountered largely acephalous societies and within three years had carved out his own ‘empire’ such that Johnston dubbed him ‘Kabaka of Bukedi’.29 Thereafter, the British purloined his ‘empire’ and Kakunguru was limited to the role of saza chief of Mbale before being transferred to Busoga in 1906 (as chairman of the lukiiko) to fuse the various principalities and implement more effective tribal administration there – a need indicative of the growing demands of colonialism.30 The extension of British control into northern Uganda was, in contrast, ‘a hesitant and timid piece of colonisation’ and, while the area

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was within the British sphere of influence by international agreement, at the turn of the century it remained ‘completely unadministered and largely unexplored’.31 Although expeditions had been launched to confirm British interests in the face of Ethiopian expansion and French claims on the Nile (the latter culminating in the Fashoda Incident of 1898), the new Nile Province amounted to little more than a few military posts along the river. The remote post in north-east Uganda was subsequently withdrawn and the eastern highlands (inhabited by the Suk and southern Turkana) were transferred to BEA in 1902 (with two thirds of the Turkana remaining in Uganda). In 1907 British responsibilities were confined to within a 20-mile radius of the banks of the Nile, troops were withdrawn from the Nile stations and the administrative status lowered from a province to a district. To then Governor Henry Bell, the northern reaches had no perceptible commercial value and their tribes were considered primitive with customs completely at odds with the Bantu kingdoms that formed the core of the protectorate, and as such they represented neither potential threats to British interests nor allies in British administration.32 The policy of the administration, according to a 1904– 5 report, was ‘to avoid conflict with the wilder tribes [. . .] until such time as the permanent occupation of their territory becomes a necessity’.33 Such necessity arose in 1910 for two reasons: firstly, the increasingly violent raids (facilitated by illicit gun-running from Ethiopia) associated with the ivory trade out of Karamoja reached untenable proportions (not least the near extinction of elephant populations but also loss of revenue from smuggling and insecurity on the border with newly administered areas of BEA); secondly, reports were received of the circulation of firearms among large warring parties in the central-northern (Acholi) area. Trade was suspended in the north-east and King’s African Rifles (KAR) troops (the Northern Garrison) were despatched to pacify the area in preparation for administration. More positive reports, in the same year, from officers of the Nile stations in Lango – stating that, contrary to Bell’s previous assessment, the area did have potential for economic development – prompted administrative expansion over that district (largely by punitive means and with the assistance of Baganda agents). At the same time, civil administration was extended (again with the aid of the Baganda, albeit more sporadically than elsewhere) eastwards from the Nile to ‘embrace a block of territory’ bounded by the river, the 4th

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degree northern latitude and the 34th degree eastern longitude – the very depiction of the administered area reflecting the different attitude taken to the northern areas (administration was over a territorial block rather than a people – the Acholi).34 Gulu district was fashioned in 1910, west of the Aswa River, and Chua district in 1914, to the east. They were amalgamated to form Acholi district in 1937 – the stated aim: ‘to bring the clans together and to make the Acholi conscious of their unity as a single people’.35 Despite the speed at which centralnorthern Uganda was brought under British control, the problems foreseen by Bell and earlier colonial governors were borne out. Pre-colonial Acholi society has aptly been described by Amone and Muura as ‘polycephalous’, consisting of over 60 small chiefdoms on the eve of colonial rule.36 Each chiefdom comprised a group of village lineages or clans (kaka) headed by a rwot (hereditary ruler) who, like all clan leaders, was of aristocratic descent (kal) and surrounded by various commoner lineages (labong).37 While the rwot was the central figure of the chiefdom – he was owner of the land, received (and redistributed) tribute and was responsible for rainmaking – his authority was not absolute but shared with heads and elders of the constituent clans and all decisions were reached by consensus. As Atkinson summarises: ‘Shared authority and a large degree of sub-group autonomy and social worth were merged in the Acholi polities with limited forms of centralisation and stratification’.38 The Acholi were thus more organised than the completely acephalous societies of the Langi and presented particular challenges to the establishment of colonial overrule. For example, gaining peaceable acceptance from one chiefdom was no guarantee that the next would not offer resistance – and resistance was common (notably the Lamogi rebellion of 1911 – 12); moreover, the model of native administration developed in the kingdom areas was not easily implanted in northern Uganda and, contrary to the ‘civil service’ chiefs found in Buganda, the majority of northern chiefs proved ‘far from the ideal tool for British imperialism’, lacking will, allegiance and influence in varying measure.39 As colonial authority became more established, less ‘competent’ chiefs were deposed and, in alliance with the British, a new (more compliant) caste of chiefs emerged – who invariably lacked local legitimacy (frequently being appointed from among the labong).40

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The same situation faced in Acholi also pertained when the southern portion of the Lado Enclave (comprising the Alur, Kakwa, Lugbara and Madi peoples) was incorporated into the protectorate in 1914 as West Nile district.41 The Lado Enclave on the west bank of the Nile had been leased by Britain to the Congo Free State in 1894 and upon King Leopold II’s death in 1909 was given to Sudan. The area which ‘faced Uganda’ was thence transferred to Uganda in return for a swathe of northern Uganda (Gondokoro and Nimule districts) at the beginning of 1914 – the new Uganda– Sudan boundary being a compromise between geographical features, tribal limits and administrative convenience. Only a small part of the Enclave had been administered by Leopold and this was not continued by Sudan. Thus, as in Acholi, the inhabitants viewed the British officers as temporary administrators or a ‘glorified band of elephant poachers who would pass on very shortly’.42 The advent of World War I halted the extension of civilian administration in the north-east. The Northern Garrison was withdrawn and control of Karamoja and Turkana passed to a small police force, allowing for an increase in raids (with suspected German backing). The issue of administering this region was raised again after the war and agreement reached in 1919 that the whole of the Turkana should be incorporated into BEA and Karamoja should remain in Uganda. With this settlement, the outline of northern Uganda was more or less completed.43 The subsequent replacement of military with civilian administration in Karamoja in 1921 – albeit merely on a ‘maintenance basis’ – marked the end of the ‘formative phase’ of the protectorate.44 Uganda was thenceforth divided into districts which corresponded as far as possible to (and took the name of) ‘tribes’ as the British conceived them, described by Vincent in colonial terminology as: five ‘kingdom districts’ (Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, Kigezi and Ankole); five ‘one-tribe districts’ (Acholi, Lango, Teso, Karamoja and Busoga); and three ‘composite districts’ made up of ‘several tribes’ (West Nile, Bugisu and Bukedi).45

Colonial Contradictions and the (Non-)Making of Uganda It was through, and according to, these tribally defined districts (which in turn were split between four provinces – North, West, East and Buganda) that Uganda was divided and indirectly ruled, with a British District

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Commissioner presiding over a hierarchy of ‘native’ authorities – moulded to, and concretised in, the Buganda model. As highlighted by Pratt, the existence of the kingdoms and their Agreements led many to see in Uganda a paradigmatic example of indirect rule but, in some important respects, Uganda diverged from the normal pattern of indirect rule. In the kingdoms, traditional rulers were not operative heads of their administrations (that role passed to subordinate non-hereditary chiefs) – though the detachment was welcomed by those rulers wishing to shield themselves from criticisms of being submissive to British rule – and in Buganda, while the kabaka remained outside his own administration, the kingdom had a far more independent status than a native authority under indirect rule. Outside of the kingdoms, the ‘native’ administrations were British-organised copies of the Buganda system – in essence, direct rule by the British through appointed chiefs (who were subordinates of the District Commissioner and derived their authority from their appointment alone) – and neither the chiefs nor the system had traditional foundations.46 Colonial administration, in short, resulted in the ‘disorganisation of the existing social order’.47 With the exception of Bunyoro, the political scale of the districts was larger than pre-existing sociopolitical units: for example, both the Toro and Ankole kingdoms expanded as a result of colonial overrule; the Sogo principalities were fused into one district; and in excess of 60 chiefdoms were brought under the administration of what became Acholi district. At the same time, districts (and their component units) were everywhere smaller (and less fluid) than pre-existing sociopolitical identities, of which the clan was the primary one. As Buchanan explains, clan membership was ‘intrinsic to belonging to the social order’ but it was an order that was ‘not socially self-contained’ – it crossed political units and linked people in geographically remote areas to ‘brothers they never knew they had’.48 Crucially, the clan not only ‘represented an important feature of ethnic identification’ but ‘operated as an essential mechanism in interethnic identification’ such that it ‘situated the individual in a larger context [. . .] that extends beyond the confines of one’s contemporaneity as well as ethnicity’.49 Citing Colson, Buchanan goes onto remark that the new tribal identity associated with districts was ‘invented to carry out the same function performed by clanship at an earlier period’ but ‘the new set of categories did not carry the stipulation of exogamy’. In other words, customs of marrying outside the clan – which historically had

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contributed to social integration – did not carry over into the new social order.50 On the contrary, the new tribal identities were sociopolitically fixed and geographically bounded. In the pre-colonial period, no group (however defined) had clearly demarcated territorial holdings, populations were not static and the migrations noted above would likely not have been permanent had colonialism not enclosed peoples within hardened borders. Indeed, the comings and goings of peoples seemed frenetic to the British and frustrated their attempts to examine patterns of ethnic interaction, since ‘everyone ultimately claimed to have come from somewhere else’.51 Karugire provides a clear exposition of the problem: The fact of the matter is that nowhere in pre-colonial Ugandan societies, whether in kingdoms or segmentary societies, would one find the ruled tied to a specific piece of land or obliged to stay under a political system that was inimical to him and to his family interests. Their relationships were not conceived in terms of mechanical abstractions but in personal relationships. This is why there is no word in Uganda languages which meant government in a European sense.52 Ethnic ascriptions may not have been colonial creations entirely but even where people did draw distinctions and identify with the tribal groups codified by the colonisers, they were latent identities and did not hold any political significance. However, as Chabal and Daloz note, the ‘colonial politicisation of invented ethnicities’ – some of which were more creatively invented than others – had unintended consequences.53 In the course of the colonial period, people found meaning in these new ethnic or tribal identities, which were promoted by the colonial government’s continued emphasis on district governance and nurtured from within. For example, in the 1940s the Acholi pushed for a paramount chief of the whole district – a rwot of Acholi akin to the kabaka of Buganda – and Busoga petitioned for a tribal constitution. The corollary of the new ethnicities was a growing separation of (and competition between) districts (aided by colonial discouragement of cooperation). Thus, rather than widening the base for identity formation, and forging a sense of common purpose and loyalty in a unified Uganda,

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the colonial administrative structure (especially after the 1949 Local Government Ordinance) effectively fostered parochialism and the creation of ‘native states’ – and the associated self-identification, autonomy and possibility of self-government on that (local) scale – in spite of the British Government’s constant position on the need for a unitary protectorate.54 From the beginning, as Roberts articulates, the peculiarly Ugandan ‘evolution from a native state protectorate to a colonial protectorate’ and the ‘hesitant, piecemeal way in which the protectorate was enlarged, contingent on tergiversations in Whitehall, made for a series of situations, beginning with Buganda, highly favourable to the survival of local politics, and hence loyalties later castigated as “particularism”’. Drawing attention to the 1900 Buganda Agreement, he notes that the entrenchment of particularism in the original component of the protectorate ‘served to stimulate the growth of new particularisms in eager competition’.55 Throughout the colonial period, the south (especially Buganda) developed at a faster rate, with greater educational and vocational opportunities. The colonial headquarters and main commercial centres were in Buganda, as were the coffee plantations and urban industries. While a cash crop export economy was introduced in the Eastern and Western Provinces, the Northern Province served as a reservoir for labourers and military recruits to the KAR. The rationale for this latter policy was that northern Ugandans were naturally martial; as one colonial administrator explained, they ‘took to soldiering like ducks to water’.56 However, as Mamdani argues, this view was ‘simply racial hogwash; the simple truth was that northern peasants were put in uniform to crush the resistance of the southern peasantry’.57 From the compromise reached in the 1900 Agreement onward, Buganda had gained strength from its anomalous position as a native state within the colonial protectorate. The British had sought to curtail Buganda aspirations from around 1911 – by disarming the indigenous army, withdrawing Baganda agents from other areas of the protectorate and creating a counter-balance in the KAR – but with limited success. Far from being held in check, Buganda claims for autonomy continued unabated which, combined with popular disenchantment with colonial rule (and the chiefly oligarchy), led to the Buganda riots in 1945 and 1949. In 1953, largely in response to confused and ill-reported

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suggestions of an East African federation from London, Kabaka Mutesa II (who gained his majority in 1942) requested Buganda’s separation from the rest of the protectorate. This precipitated the Kabaka Crisis – Mutesa’s arrest and deportation to England and the declaration of a state of emergency in Buganda – which, in turn, ‘provoked the most intense and insular nationalism among the Baganda [. . .] as never before’.58 The crisis was resolved (at least temporarily) with the signing of the 1955 Buganda Agreement, which allowed for greater internal autonomy and the reinstatement of Mutesa – as a constitutional monarch – but in 1959 Mutesa renewed the demand for separate Buganda independence. The kabaka Crisis ‘quickened political consciousness throughout the protectorate’.59 Resistance to colonial rule, however, was directed inwards, partly toward the Asians – on account of the vertical threetiered racial hierarchy (Europeans, Asians and Africans) that the colonial economy had contributed to the horizontal ethnic cleavages60 – but mainly toward the Baganda with whom people had direct contact in the stead of the coloniser and whose kingdom had been accorded especial status and privileges vis-a`-vis the rest of the protectorate. This was evident in the development of political parties in the 1950s, together with the religious denominational divisions that had been the ‘handmaiden’ of Baganda influence.61 The three main parties were: the Democratic Party (DP) formed in 1954–6 (Baganda and Catholic), led by Benedicto Kiwanuka; the Ugandan People’s Congress (UPC) formed in 1960 (non-Baganda and Protestant), led by Milton Obote; and the neo-traditionalist Kabaka Yekka (KY – The King Alone) formed in 1961 (Baganda and Protestant), led, as the name suggests, by Edward Mutesa II. Moreover, party membership and participation was focalised in individual districts, and political agendas on parochial objectives. In the final analysis, the colonial government trumpeted and strived to create a unitary protectorate but, on various levels, ‘divided, Uganda was ruled; and before Ugandans were made, Uganda was granted political sovereignty’.62

The Unravelling of the Post-Colony Milton Obote led Uganda to independence on 9 October 1962 as prime minister of a coalition government, formed by the unlikely alliance of the UPC and KY.63 The alliance, together with the part-federal,

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part-unitary construction of the independence constitution, prospected a reconciliation of the various antagonisms and demands that emerged in the late colonial era. Buganda was granted full federal status, while the kingdoms of Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole and the territory of Busoga were granted semi-federal status. The districts of Acholi, Bugisu, Bukedi, Karamoja, Kigezi, Lango, Teso and West Nile, together with the two newly created districts of Madi and Sebei, were to retain unitary relationships with the central government.64 Provincial jurisdictions ceased to exist. In some ways, as Barongo argues, the constitution could be considered ‘an ingenious act of social engineering’, which had the potential to mitigate conflict at the national level by ‘dispersing power among the various ethnic units and broadening areas of mass political participation’.65 The National Assembly Bill providing for the election of ‘quasi-monarchical’ constitutional heads by district councils further decentralised the political structure and ‘expanded the areas of political participation at the local level’ but concomitantly ‘gave expression to parochialism at a time when it needed to be fought’.66 On the first anniversary of independence, the enactment of the Constitution of Uganda (First Amendment) Act severed links with the British Crown and established the (largely ceremonial) offices of president and vice president – to be elected by the National Assembly from among the traditional rulers of the federal kingdoms and the constitutional heads of districts.67 Edward Mutesa, kabaka of Buganda, was elected president and William Nadiope, kyabazinga (ruler) of Busoga, was elected vice president. The government thus also reflected the balance in the constitution and UPC-KY alliance – with Obote (a northerner from Lango) as prime minister and Mutesa (a southerner and the kabaka of Buganda) as president. However, this delicate balance (and Uganda) was unravelled with remarkable speed during the first four years of independence. Two events would prove of particular significance to Uganda’s state creation trajectory (or failure thereof). The first event was the East African army mutiny in 1964.68 By itself, the mutiny was not very remarkable, had no political implications and was put down quickly and effortlessly (in Uganda with the help of the British Army’s Staffordshire Regiment). However, Obote’s response to it was to bring about a critical change in the nature of civil-military relations in Uganda. While the mutinies in Tanzania and Kenya were followed by harsh punishments and dismissals, Obote met the demands

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of the mutineers: their pay and the tempo of the Africanisation programme for the officer corps were increased.69 As a consequence, soldiers were ‘quick to appreciate that, far from being the isolated and sometimes despised out-group of the colonial period’, they now had the power to influence the political leadership.70 At the same time, no political mechanisms were instituted to ensure that civilian supremacy would prevail over the military.71 The second event was the 1966 crisis, described by Mutibwa as a ‘definite watershed’ in the history of post-independence Uganda – ‘when things started to fall apart’.72 The crisis itself was a crisis of two halves. The first emerged from a struggle of power between the UPC and KY, particularly with regard to the extent of Buganda’s autonomy and the issue of the ‘lost counties’ (due to be settled by referendum after two years of independence). As the UPC gained the upper hand, after numerous (mainly DP) ministers crossed the floor, Obote dissolved the alliance in 1964 and then pressed ahead with the referendum, in which residents of Buyaga and Bugangaizi overwhelmingly voted in favour of reunion with Bunyoro. As president of Uganda, Mutesa should have ratified the transfer but as kabaka of Buganda he could not do so – in accordance with the constitution, Obote did so in his stead.73 The second half stemmed from emergent factional cleavages within the UPC. These reached their apogee in February 1966 when Daudi Ochieng (a leading KY minister) – in collaboration with the DP and opponents of Obote within the UPC (predominantly Bantu, led by UPC SecretaryGeneral Grace Ibingira) – tabled allegations of impropriety against the prime minister, three of his close ministers and Deputy Army Commander, Idi Amin.74 On 22 February 1966 Obote assumed full powers of government and ordered the detention of five ministers (Ibingira included) and the army commander (who was replaced by Amin). Two days later, he suspended the constitution.75 An interim constitution was adopted on 15 April 1966, which made Obote president and head of state, effectively dismissing Mutesa and Nadiope from office. Dissent from Buganda (which called for the removal of the seat of government from Buganda soil) was interpreted by Obote as high treason and afforded him the necessary justification to storm the kabaka’s Lubiri Palace (under Amin’s command) on 24 May 1966, forcing Mutesa into exile (he died in England three years later). A state of emergency was declared in Buganda (which lasted until 1971). The defeat of the kabaka

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and the 1966 crisis in general were dramatised as a struggle for power between Bantu and Nilote, and henceforth the struggle for participation and power in Uganda came to be interpreted in ethnic terms.76 Thereafter, the 1967 constitution was adopted, Uganda was declared a republic and the kingdoms (and constitutional district heads) were abolished. The removal of all other centres of power (though not the parochialism they engendered) was followed towards the end of 1969 by a ‘move to the left’ and the introduction of the Common Man’s Charter – a palpable attempt to undergird the regime (and Obote’s presidency) with a measure of legitimacy. The crisis of 1966 was reappraised and rewritten as a ‘revolution of the masses against the forces of feudalism and tribalism whose design was to divide Uganda into personal domains with the aid of imperialist forces outside Uganda’.77 The Charter (or second revolution) represented not just a statement of equality (one country, one people – the common man) but also rejected all forms of foreign exploitation (European and Asian).78 Moreover, it was implicitly anti-pluralist and served as an ideological vehicle to further the drive towards a unitary and integrated state and, as such, firmly establish Obote’s power base. The Charter did not, however, as Glentworth and Hancock argue, amount to a blueprint for socialism but, on the contrary, ‘might be suspected of deviationist tendencies’ and Obote ‘quickly demonstrated that he was a pragmatist before he was a socialist’.79 Or, as Adams puts it, he was ‘a private capitalist and a public socialist’ – and nationalised funds were diverted to individual interests.80 An attempt on Obote’s life on 19 December 1969, a day after the Common Man’s Charter was approved by the UPC, prompted Obote to extend the state of emergency to the whole of Uganda. The declaration of a one-party state swiftly followed – all but completing the centralisation of power which had begun with the 1966 crisis. At the same time, the effects of the 1964 mutiny came into clear view. As Mudoola explains, from 1966 onwards, when Obote ‘unleashed the army’ against Mutesa, it became a ‘critical factor in Uganda politics’ and increasingly an ‘instrument of domestic policy’ which, in turn, fostered ‘a sense of psychological self-importance and politico-functional indispensability’ within its ranks.81 The army grew from 700 in 1962 to nearly 7,000 by 1969 and a ‘predatory class’ emerged, among whom political loyalty rather than military competence was key, turning the army into an

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oppressive and ill-disciplined social force.82 Obote was, however, beginning to lose sway over his agents of repression (and ministers) who, not altogether erroneously, interpreted the ‘move to the left’ as a strategy to shift the locus of power (and the wealth associated with it) and facilitate a realignment of factions.83 After the assassination attempt, Obote became increasingly mistrustful of, and estranged from, those who had previously been guarantors of his power – notably Amin, who, in 1968, had been promoted to major general and appointed Chief of the Defence Staff. Obote increasingly fell back on kith and kin within the army (fellow Langi and, to a lesser extent, Acholi received rapid promotions) and began building a countervailing force to the army (both the intelligence service – the General Service Unit – and the paramilitary – the Special Force – were expanded with Langi). In his turn, Amin had begun a ‘quasi-secret recruitment drive’ among his fellow West Nilers and transferred troops loyal to him to units directly under his control.84 These two moves ultimately created the conditions for the coup on 25 January 1971 (or pre-emptive mutiny, as stressed by Amin and his followers), while Obote was away in Singapore.

The Post-Colony Brutalised The change from ‘civilian “normality” to military hegemony’ brought about by Amin’s assumption of power ‘altered the existing social and political structure in a significant way’ – it was, in Rothchild and Harbeson’s words, ‘less a transformation of post-colonial state than its brutalisation’.85 However, his personal unpredictability notwithstanding, in many respects, Amin merely pushed the existing system to its extreme limit.86 As Mudoola explains, by the time Amin assumed power, civilian political institutions ‘were so fragile that it needed only a simple announcement to have them banned’ and the use of terror as an instrument of domestic policy took to ‘a logical conclusion a precedent set by Obote, when he used the army’ for the same.87 Amin was a contradictory figure – affable buffoon and dictatorial tyrant – or, in Mazrui’s words, a man ‘fused into the paradox of heroic evil – at once a hero and a villain’.88 In the early years he had broad popular support and, as Mutibwa suggests, the excessive praise and adulation he received after the coup gave him the confidence and a sense of destiny to rule that he probably did not have at the time of the coup.89 Apart from profound

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relief at Obote’s decline, especially among the Baganda, there were other tangible reasons for Amin’s early popularity. Firstly, upon seizing power, Amin declared himself to be a Kakwa and a Ugandan, possibly to conceal his more significant Nubi identity (which was to gain prominence later at the expense of his Ugandan identity).90 This initial self-characterisation enabled him to identify with ‘the common man’, distance himself from the hitherto powerful groups and soften the polarisation along old lines. Moreover, he made himself accessible to all people by touring the country and incessantly encouraging people to go to him personally with their problems – and populist propaganda in the media reinforced the image of the approachable president and of his mass support.91 Secondly, he appeased the Baganda by releasing detainees (and installing some of them in government) and returning the kabaka for a state burial. Thirdly, his ‘economic war’, which again took to a logical conclusion a precedent set by Obote, struck a chord with many who resented the fact that the Asians controlled 80 per cent of commerce and trade.92 Fourthly, and linked to the last point, Amin became a champion of anti-imperialism on the African continent and helped to foster a cultural self-discovery among Africans: as Mazrui puts it, ‘the domestic tyrant in Uganda was a voice of equity in world affairs’.93 This gained him support – or at least acquiescence – from other African leaders, leading ultimately to his Chairmanship of the OAU in 1975–6. Within Uganda, however, early optimism quickly started to wane. Despite his early proclamations of a return to multiparty democracy, parliament was dissolved, party political activities were suspended and power was invested in the new army-led State Supreme Council. The cabinet was similarly militarised after the majority of the first postcoup civilian cabinet were ‘sent on non-specified holidays’ and replaced by army personnel.94 In 1973 Amin reintroduced provinces, carving out ten such units, within which he redrew district boundaries, effectively dividing the 17 previously coherent units into 37 smaller ones. Again, administrative posts – provincial governors, district commissioners and chiefs – were predominantly filled by army personnel. Together with the stationing of army detachments in every village ‘for the purpose of rural development’, this served to strengthen the military structure of the regime ‘by integrating civil and military administration and by making the military the main link between

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centre and periphery’.95 Thus, as Decalo notes, the ‘writ of the civil service probably did not extend more than 50 miles from the KampalaEntebbe corridor, except when personally enforced by Amin and especially when accompanied by military force’, and conceptually Uganda came to resemble a splintered network of regional warlords who had absolute power over their domains, with Amin ‘only very loosely, and only in certain fields, controlling his minions’.96 In Kampala, at least, government organs and ministries did continue to function (albeit in a diminished way) but they did so ‘in a kind of shadow land’ such that ministerial initiatives and procedures ‘were not channelled into policy-making’.97 Rather, policy diktats derived from Amin and, when not adopted on the spur of the moment, deliberation occurred outside of formal structures (unrecorded, often forgotten, without measures to ensure implementation) and ‘much that passed as “policy” in Kampala was contradictory and unattainable’.98 The cabinet met regularly (though Amin attended infrequently) but its decisions could be overruled, and its ministers replaced, by the Supreme Council – and they frequently were.99 Indeed, reshuffling people and positions became a characteristic feature of the regime. In short, Amin ruled by decree and that rule became increasingly arbitrary and personalised. Already in 1973, Glentworth and Hancock noted that ‘the ordinary business of government has become incidental’ to the competition for office and its spoils, converting what was a ‘dominant theme’ under Obote into an ‘exclusive preoccupation’ – although, as they further noted, economic and administrative mismanagement may ‘stem more from incompetence than a wilful misuse of power’.100 By the time Amin elevated himself to the position of ‘life president’ in 1975, the criticality of the economic situation was becoming ever more apparent. The expulsion of over 49,000 Asian merchants, manufacturers and civil servants in the ‘economic war’ of 1972 (the impetus for which, like many of Amin’s policies, was a message from God in a dream), followed by an exodus of skilled Africans, left Uganda without a business class.101 The vast majority of the assets from the Asian expulsion were redistributed among Amin’s supporters. The mafuta mingi (literally, ‘those with much fat’), as they became known, virtually destroyed the small but once productive Ugandan manufacturing and commercial base through inexperience, inefficiency and an emergent economy of quick returns. As foreign exchange declined and

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inflation soared, domestically produced basic commodities were out of reach to all but those in well-placed relationships of privilege and clientage. Consequently, a black market – magendo – flourished. Imports also declined and were only available to the army and elite, so remarkably trade surpluses were noted in 1976 and 1977 – although a vast majority of this was ‘unaccountably lost’.102 To mitigate the effects of inflation, Amin introduced price controls on certain commodities and cash crops. As a result, in Kampala, for example, lower income office workers were faced with a rise in the cost of living in real terms from 100 in 1970– 1 to 785 in 1978, while in rural areas farmers saw the real price of coffee drop from 100 in 1970–1 to 37 in 1978 and turned to food crops and near subsistence cultivation.103 Coffee sold to the state fell by 40 per cent between 1970 and 1978, and that which remained either piled up through disrupted export routes or was smuggled into Rwanda and Kenya.104 For example, in 1977, 12,600 tons of the more valuable Arabica coffee was produced but only 2,600 tons officially exported.105 Cotton production declined by 82 per cent between 1971 and 1976 (and a similar story holds for other cash crops), industrial production fell by over half and tourism disappeared altogether so that the economy relied almost entirely on a diminishing amount of officially marketed coffee.106 Southall notes that Amin’s regime may well have fallen in 1976 had it not been rescued by the coffee boom.107 However, the final breakdown of the East African Community in 1977 offset the windfall, as much of the increased coffee revenue had to be allocated to replace services formerly provided by the Community.108 Furthermore, Uganda was deprived of one third of its coffee market in 1978 by the US embargo – an almost isolated international attempt to censure Amin for the excesses of his regime.109 Violent purges had in fact started as early as 1972 but had been concealed from the wider public by diversions such as the ‘economic war’, publicised coup attempts and other exaggerated or fabricated internal or external threats. The first victims of Amin’s rule were the Acholi and Langi, particularly those in the armed forces, such that by 1978 there were only four Acholi left in the army.110 Purges of the Alur, Madi, Lugbara and the trained officer corps followed. New appointments were made from among Amin’s fellow tribesmen – Kakwa at first but as he became increasingly suspicious of them, the army (and administration) were composed mainly of Nubi – not necessarily Ugandans and

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not necessarily trained soldiers. Thus, while the army increased from 7,680 at time of the coup to an unwieldy 20,000 by end of 1974 (more than twice the size of other East African armies), by 1977 Amin’s ethnic streamlining had cut the effective size of the army to 15,000.111 Like Obote before him, Amin secured the personal loyalty of soldiers through indulgence and patronage made possible by the redistribution of resources from the civilian sector. Thus, the loyalty of the soldiers was to their own or Amin’s security and not to the security of the Ugandan state. Thomas outlines the problem well: The heart of the matter appears to be that efforts towards integrating a single nation had simply not developed to a point where soldiers realised what their true function was as defenders of Uganda’s territorial integrity. They had no conception of themselves as members – and servants – of a national state. They had no conception of the rights and duties of citizens and of the limits of their role as soldiers. Hence they abused their power.112 Soldiers and members of the new state security services – Public Safety Unit (PSU), State Research Bureau (SRB), Military Police and Presidential Bodyguard – were given unlimited powers of arrest without warrant and impunity to use force indiscriminately in the maintenance of order. The police force was emaciated, declining from an estimated 14,000 before 1971 to 2,000 in 1979,113 and civil law had virtually collapsed – symbolised by the disembowelment of the Chief Justice (former Prime Minister, Benedicto Kiwanuka). Apart from the persecution of Obote supporters and other specific sectors of society, such as religious organisations (especially Christian denominations) and the intelligentsia (many of whom fled before fate became them),114 the number of arbitrary ‘disappearances’ or ‘car accidents’ increased throughout the 1970s.115 Matthew Kakambe of the Kampala mortuary provided a chilling illustration when he stated that of the bodies (up to 15) dumped at the mortuary each night by unknown parties, employees assumed that those with smashed skulls or gunshot wounds died at the hands of the PSU and those with smashed chests or strangulation marks died at the hands of the SRB.116 However, as Jorgensen reminds us, to focus on personal violence masks the underlying escalation of structural violence – for example, shortage of

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doctors, absence of medicines, disrepair of rural bore-hole wells – and that, in addition to both structural and personal violence perpetrated by state agents, the Amin regime provided a perfect cover for the settlement of private scores.117 By 1979, Uganda was, according to Thomas, ‘a material and spiritual wasteland [. . .] ruled by fear of the gun, by which a perverse order was entrenched with impunity’.118 It was said that the ‘moral fibre of Ugandans’ had been torn apart, as the Minister of Rehabilitation explained in 1982: the Amin years ‘changed mental attitudes, made people callous. Take someone who is 16 years old now. He hardly knew any decent living. He knew death and he knew guns – and we have a lot of guns in this country’.119 Mutibwa further explains that as life came to mean so little and violence became normalised, there followed lack of respect or general decency; the devaluation of education meant that, rather than previously aspired to qualifications, violence, theft or influential allies became the tickets to progress; and professional ethics became secondary to the acquisition of material wealth, however obtained.120 In Mazrui’s words, ‘the problem was not just Amin but a general normative collapse [. . .] in Uganda under Amin the light went out and norms and values cultivated over generations came abruptly to an end’.121 The ’pattern of terror’ holding Amin’s regime together – which kept the majority of the population quiescent and rivals forcefully subservient – owed much of its effectiveness to the internal coherence accorded by the Nubi nexus.122 However, that soldiers had no conception of being servants of a national state was borne out when Amin occupied the Kagera Salient in October 1978 – the controversial Tanzanian invasion it prompted met with surprisingly little resistance.123 As Rothchild and Harbeson note: ‘It was one thing to keep real or potential opposition elements at bay by means of terror tactics; it was an entirely different matter to mobilise nationwide support for a defence of the regime’.124 The regime collapsed swiftly and Amin fled, leaving the country to the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) – the military arm of which (the UNLA) had been party to the invasion. The UNLF – formed at a conference in Moshi (northern Tanzania) under the auspices of the Tanzanian Government in March 1979 – comprised various anti-Amin groups in exile who were divided in all but their desire to see Amin removed from power. Together

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with an 11-member Executive Council, chaired by Yusuf Lule (former vice chancellor of Makerere), it elected a National Consultative Council (NCC) – an embryo government representative of those present – tasked with ruling Uganda after the liberation until elections could be held.

‘It Was Better Under Amin’ Amin ‘bequeathed a grim legacy’,125 such that some Ugandans were heard to say that ‘it was better under Amin’ – a charge which, ‘though blasphemous, had this objective truth, that after the immediate thrill of liberation, violence seemed to erupt and prices certainly rocketed. It was as if terror had imposed a kind of bastard order which had been removed’.126 In a way it had, for the main instruments of terror – the army, military police, PSU and SRB – vanished, together with many of the military governors and chiefs Amin had installed, dismantling any remnants of institutional bridges between the centre and periphery. Amin’s demise was followed by a quick succession of presidents. Yusuf Lule took office on 13 April 1979 (three days after Kampala fell) but was replaced after only 68 days with Godfrey Binaisa who, in turn, was deposed less than a year later, on 11 May 1980, by the Military Commission.127 None were able to establish the supremacy of civil political institutions, restore order and security, revive the economy or acquire any measure of popular legitimacy.128 Furthermore, new political divisions appeared – between those who had fled during Amin’s rule and those who had remained, with each accusing the other of abandoning ship and collaboration respectively – and ethnic factionalism, which had been ‘submerged by Amin’s despotism, reemerged with a vengeance’.129 In many respects, as Gertzel argues, the fundamental obstacle to the restoration of civil order arose from the same political divisions that had confronted Uganda in the past, in circumstances where neither legitimacy nor the means of coercion were sufficient to permit the regulation of social conflict.130 Moreover, Obote’s position became a central issue of political debate and ‘demonstrated the extent to which [he] still personalised the old political conflict focused on old ethnic, regional and ideological cleavages’.131 Obote’s reinstatement in the first elections in independent Ugandan history, held in December 1980, thus alienated a large proportion of

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Ugandans. The elections – contested by two old parties (the UPC, led by Obote, and the DP, led by Paul Ssemogerere) and two new ones (the Conservative Party (CP), led by Jehoash Mayanja-Nkangi, and the Uganda People’s Movement (UPM), led by Yoweri Museveni) – were marred by procedural irregularities, intimidation (of non-UPC supporters) and Paulo Muwanga’s decree (upon early signs of a DP victory) that all results had to be cleared by him (in his capacity as Chairman of the Military Commission) before their release. The UPC allegedly won 74 seats to the DP’s 51, with the UPM attaining one seat. The elections were commonly held to be illegitimate but the Commonwealth Observer Group supported their validity and Obote maintained he was fairly elected (the decision of DP members to join parliament confirmed this in his mind). Obote presented himself as a changed man – more moderate, more cautious and more circumspect – with the aim of reconciliation rather than revenge.132 He had abandoned his earlier socialist policies and advocated a more broadly acceptable programme to revive the economy, which was his first priority. There were some creditable improvements in the economy in the early 1980s and a reinstatement of foreign aid. GDP rose by an average five percentile points, the annual inflation rate was reduced from 104 per cent in 1980 to 30 per cent in 1983 (although it rose again thereafter), price controls on most commodities were removed and the price of cash crops was raised.133 Increased producer prices decreased the incentives for smuggling and exports increased, even diversifying slightly (coffee provided more than 97 per cent of exports in 1981 but only about 78 per cent in 1983).134 However, while the export economy of the 1960s was rehabilitated to an extent and quotas under the International Coffee Agreement were being met (even exceeded), other industries, such as sugar, were slow to recover and still others, such as copper and tourism, remained non-existent.135 Salaries remained low and the weakening of the shilling – which was floated on IMF advice and traded at Sh80 to the US$ 1 in 1981 (and was expected to stabilise at 50) rose to Sh350 to the US$ 1 in 1984 – led to a fall in Ugandan purchasing power of imported consumer goods.136 Overall, there was a partial recovery of the economy between 1981 and 1983, followed by a further decline in 1984–5.137 In addition to his economic policies, there was an ostensibly free press (although the publication of adverse reports came with penalties) and opposition parties were allowed to function (although they often faced

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harassment).138 However, contrary to the promises made during the election campaign, the government was monopolised by the UPC and the military (now again dominated by Acholi and Langi) remained of paramount importance in domestic policy. In essence, Obote continued on the path he had been pursuing when he was interrupted by Amin and failed to recognise that the Uganda of the 1980s was not the Uganda of the 1960s. Mutibwa characterises Obote well: ‘he was a fighter at a time that demanded conciliation, a short-sighted politician at a time that demanded statesmanship’.139 Thus, despite some positive signs, public morale remained low and people lived by the day and by their wits.140 The human rights record was actually worse than under Amin. As noted by Kanyeihamba, ‘Amin may have used spectacular methods to kill his prominent opponents, but the peasants and non-political members of the elite were by and large left alone’ – under the second UPC government (or, more precisely, army) this was not the case, as evidenced by the reported increase in refugees from 25,000 in Amin’s Uganda to 280,000 after Obote resumed power.141 Whereas Amin could control the army – when he chose to – Obote could not control the UNLA or the newly formed National Security Agency, both of which were characterised by poor organisation and the ill-discipline of soldiers who were inadequately trained, intermittently paid and often self-recruited. There were no records of personnel or restrictions on access to weapons, and looting, arbitrary arrests and violence were commonplace. However, such individual acts ‘paled into insignificance beside the more systematic acts of tribal victimisation perpetrated by the UNLA’, the three most notable of which involved the peoples of West Nile, the Rwandese in Ankole and the Baganda in the Luwero Triangle – the latter ostensibly as part of the campaign to combat guerrillas.142 Obote’s second term was compounded from the outset by guerrilla movements operating in different parts of Uganda. The rigged election was the mainspring of each, of which Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) was to prove the strongest.143 The NRA insurgency started in early 1981, based in the Luwero Triangle, and by 1983 controlled much of south-western Uganda. Obote’s response was militaristic, as Mutibwa explains: the ‘bandits’ (as Obote referred to the NRA) were to be routed and those living in the area of their operations, who happened to be Baganda, were to be wiped out too (and many were in Operation Bonanza

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in 1983), turning the Luwero Triangle into a ‘laboratory for [. . .] experiments of genocide’.144 The ongoing campaigns against the various insurgencies, especially the NRA’s ‘second front’ in western Uganda, fomented unrest within the army. Not only was Obote accused of favouring Langi in terms of appointments and promotions but also for keeping them away from war zones: it was the Acholi who were on the front-line.145 On 26 July 1985 Obote was once again removed from power by military coup, this time by Acholi soldiers, led by (the unrelated) Army Commander Tito Okello and Brigadier-General Basilio Okello. Tito Okello was sworn in as head of state and a Military Council installed, with Basilio Okello as Chief of the Defence Forces. The other key political players (DP, CP and UPM) accepted seats in the new government, together with four of the dissident groups – the Uganda Freedom Army (UFA), the Uganda National Rescue Front (UNRF), the Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda (FEDEMU) and the Former Uganda National Army (FUNA). The NRA, however, failed to reach agreement with the Military Council (especially on equal NRA/ UNLA representation on the Council and the integration of the two armies) and continued its struggle in the bush (setting up an interim government in Toro in October). The Nairobi Peace Agreement (mediated by Daniel arap Moi and signed by Museveni and Tito Okello on 17 December 1985) collapsed amidst rifts within the Military Council, which were exacerbated by the continued gross indiscipline of the UNLA and heightened levels of general violence.146 In January 1986, the NRA renewed its insurgency, seizing power in Kampala at the end of the month. UNLA soldiers retreated northwards into Sudan and within a few months many had regrouped as the Ugandan People’s Democratic Army (UPDA) – and numbers swelled following a directive from the NRA Command for all former UNLA soldiers to report to barracks (reminiscent of Amin’s 1971 order which resulted in a massacre).147 The UPDA rebellion officially ended with the 1988 Gulu Peace Accord, under which 2,000 UPDA officers and soldiers were integrated into the NRA, but not before a more unusual and enduring force emerged in Acholi. It first took form in the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (HSMF) led by medium Alice Auma (known as Alice ‘Lakwena’ after the spirit that possessed her – to raise an army against the evil overtaking Uganda and restore moral order).148 Blending missionary Christianity with indigenous cosmology, she offered

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deliverance and a means of purification (through rituals and war) for returning UNLA soldiers (who had been rejected as ‘internal strangers’ in their communities because of the atrocities they had committed in the Luwero Triangle).149 The HSMF lasted only a year – but with some remarkable achievements – before being defeated in its march southwards to topple Museveni in October 1987 (just 50 miles from Kampala).150 Alice had a wide following, the like of which was never achieved by her ‘radical heir’ Joseph Kony.151 Kony, a distant cousin of Alice (but with whom she had rejected an alliance), was also a traditional healer and had been a ‘spiritual advisor’ in the UPDA before forming the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Like Alice, he merged a vague (antiMuseveni) political agenda with a spiritual mission to cleanse Acholi society – and undermined National Resistance Movement (NRM) rule in northern Uganda for more than 20 years.

‘Fundamental Change’ or ‘No Change’ Contrary to previous coups, Museveni’s aim was not just to remove the incumbent regime but also the system that had created it and its predecessors. In his presidential inauguration speech in January 1986, Museveni proclaimed that he was ushering in more than ‘a mere change of guard’ – rather, it was ‘a fundamental change’. His charismatic leadership, combined with the disciplined, restrained – almost puritanical – character of the NRA during the war, bestowed on the NRM the popular support to which it was ideologically convicted and provided the foundational stones for legitimising the military means by which it had assumed power – and hope among Ugandans that this time it was liberation. During his fight in the bush, Museveni (the so-called ‘intellectual who picked up a gun’) had crafted a ten-point programme as a guiding philosophy – to which each member of government was required to swear allegiance.152 It comprised: (1) true democracy, which must contain three elements – parliamentary democracy (‘clean’ and regular elections), economic democracy (a good standard of living for all Ugandans) and, seemingly of first priority, grassroots or popular democracy; (2) security and an end to both state-inspired and criminal violence; (3) national unity and the elimination of all forms of sectarianism; (4) the defence of national independence; (5) a wider, integrated and self-sustaining national economy, which reverses

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parasitism; (6) rehabilitation of social services; (7) an end to corruption, particularly misuse of office; (8) redress of past errors which have adversely affected particular groups of Ugandans; (9) co-operation with other African countries in the defence of human and democratic rights; and (10) the accommodation of the aspirations of many groups (a mixed economy). In the first ten years, progress was made in most of these areas. With the exception of parts of northern Uganda, security, law and order had been restored. The army was removed from being a ‘direct player in setting the political agenda’, a strong code of conduct was introduced in 1987 and in 1992 the first demobilisation programme in Africa began – the pattern of which (like recruitment) was designed to minimise ethnic partisanship and allay fears that the NRA would become an ‘instrument of Bantu domination’.153 After initial reticence, Museveni embraced structural adjustment and the Economic Recovery Programme was launched in 1987, largely funded by the IMF and World Bank. It included a push for foreign investment, privatisation of parastatals, reform and downsizing of the civil service, the return of Asian property and diversification of cash crops. Inflation decreased from 240 per cent in 1986 to -0.6 per cent by 1993 and an annual economic growth rate of 5.7 per cent was registered between 1987 and 1995, making Uganda the third fastest growing economy in Africa (after Mauritius and Botswana).154 In addition, infrastructural repairs were underway, there was freedom of expression in the press, an active civil society, an independent judiciary and a Commission of Inquiry into violations of human rights between 1962 and 1986 had been established. In the political realm, Museveni established a broad-based government, and cabinet appointments were given to political rivals, including representatives from the DP, UPC and CP, and two former guerrilla movements, the UFA and FEDEMU. He declared that the constitutions of 1962 and 1967 were flawed and that a new ‘people’s constitution’ was needed. Accordingly, a constitutional consultative process began under the auspices of the Odoki Commission in 1989 which, over four years, toured Uganda to seek the views of ordinary citizens through public meetings, debates and seminars on what their new constitution should contain.155 Buganda’s support during the war was duly rewarded (and the NRM’s position consolidated there) when in 1986 Mutebi II was recognised as sabataka in Buganda and in 1993 the

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traditional kingdoms were restored (with the exception of Ankole), together with customary leaders, in the Traditional Rulers Statute. Although the kingdoms were only granted cultural autonomy, following his coronation, Kabaka Ronald Mutebi not only recovered rituals and symbols but reinstated the lukiiko, katikiro and bakungu, leading to the emergence of a parallel government (of volunteer but professional ministers of ‘state’) which ‘proceeded to develop policies on a range of issues it was constitutionally prohibited from legislating on’.156 It extended beyond Kampala after 1995 when the traditional sazas were re-established, followed by the gombololas and mirukas in 1997. In so doing, the kabaka created and staffed an administrative structure which (although largely honorary) has significant local influence and ’shadows, overlaps and sections the official local state structure’.157 Museveni restricted federalism and party politics in an attempt to mitigate potential conflicts. He maintained that the polarisation of political parties in Uganda had always been vertical (based on – and exacerbating – tribal or sectarian issues) rather than horizontal (policies or ideologies); and in contrast to Western democracies, where political parties have developed on the basis of class, Uganda has overwhelmingly one class – the peasant class.158 Therefore, political parties were seen as ‘divisive, sectarian and unsuited for pre-industrial societies such as Uganda’, and although not banned, organising party congresses, holding rallies and openly campaigning on a party ticket were outlawed.159 Against the tide of the third wave of democratisation, Museveni was able to hold off (international and domestic) opposition to the no-party system because it allowed room for democratic consultation, and both local and national elections, while held under the umbrella of the NRM, were competitive (on the basis of personal merit rather than party political affiliation). He refuted claims that the NRM itself was a political party or that Uganda was a one-party state on the basis that every adult is a member of the multi-ideological and all-embracing Movement and can stand for election on a meritocratic basis.160 The bedrock of the NRM’s claim to popular democracy (and justification for the no-party system) was the form of local governance it established in the Resistance Council (RC) pyramid. RCs at the lowest level were first established in liberated areas during the guerrilla struggle and comprised nine-person deliberative assemblies of directly elected individuals.161 They, therefore, gave people the power to

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participate in decisions affecting their daily lives and, constructed from the bottom up, were a reaction to the hegemonic and autocratic system of chieftaincy, which began in colonial times and continued in one form or another in all successive post-colonial governments.162 In 1987, for example, Deputy Minister Jack Sabiiti claimed that the RCs are ‘a source of unity’ and ‘fulfil the ideals and wishes of our ancestors’.163 RCs begin at village level and extend upwards through parish, subcounty, county and district levels to the National Resistance Council (NRC). All Ugandans are, by definition, members of an RCI and the elected representatives of the assemblies constitute the membership of the RCIIs, who elect representatives from among their number for the RCIII and so on through to RCV (the NRC is not an elected body). The RC system, therefore, embodies direct participation at the village level and ever more indirect representation (of the villagers) higher up the pyramid (chosen by ever smaller electorates) – thus, above RCI level there is diminishing accountability and the case for popular democracy is more difficult to defend.164 Elections were held at the village level in 1989 and 1992, each followed by indirect elections for the higher councils. Elections at the national level (postponed until after the Constitutional Commission had completed its work) were held in 1996. The presidential electoral victory (Museveni gained more than 70 per cent of votes) followed by parliamentary elections (both on a no-party basis) ‘marked the last stage of the NRM’s metamorphosis from guerrilla-praetorians to civilian ruling elites’.165 The NRA was renamed the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), Resistance Councils became Local Councils (LCs) and, in an arguably symbolic shift in rhetoric, Museveni’s slogan was adjusted to ‘no change’. The new constitution, adopted in 1995, upheld both the no-party system (for a further five years) and a unitary (but decentralised) state.166 The tenth anniversary of NRM rule seemed to mark a turning point at which regime and state started to conflate. Furley, for example, notes that a ‘presidential’ style of government became recognisable in many aspects of Museveni’s regime, while Tripp argues that the NRM emerged as a de facto single ruling party and Rubongoya contends that state institutions resuscitated in the first ten years were thereafter ‘subsumed by the various organs of the Movement in its bid to shore up its legitimacy and power’, such that a ‘convergence between Obote II and Museveni II/III’ occurred.167 The 2000 referendum upheld the

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no-party system (by 97.7 per cent) but the NRM finally succumbed to demands for multipartyism in 2005, while at the same time lifting presidential term limits. As Tripp argues, the Faustian bargain struck by the NRM ensured its dominant political position but with greater legitimacy and credibility, and the opening of the political system allowed the NRM to ‘operate and develop more freely as the party it had already become’.168 From the mid-1990s the broad base of government started to give way to a preponderance of (south-western) NRM stalwarts and political space started to shrink. Decisions (again) became embedded in informal and personalised relationships and, despite the institution of various anti-corruption mechanisms (and Museveni’s declaration that 1996 was the year of fighting corruption), Uganda had the unenviable ranking of the 13th most corrupt country in the world in Transparency International’s 1998 Corruption Perception Index.169 Increasingly, press freedom was restricted, civil society curtailed and political opponents detained, with a concomitant rise in extra-legal security agencies and a remilitarisation of Ugandan society – which, in turn, further entrenched the government’s (re)emergent patronage machinery.170 The UPDF itself came under increasing criticism regarding gross rights abuses in the north and the number of ‘ghost’ soldiers on the payroll (itself one of the reasons behind the UPDF’s failure to combat the LRA). Moreover, the constitution notwithstanding, a non-partisan army that is subordinate to civilian authority has remained as elusive as the ghost soldiers: rather, ‘politicisation of appointments and promotions in the army has turned it into a force personally loyal to the president’.171 Three new insurgencies arose in the mid-1990s,172 and (following the breakdown of peace negotiations, brokered by Minister for the North Betty Bigombe) the quietening LRA rebellion resurged in 1994 in the midst of a proxy war between Sudan and Uganda.173 The second phase of the war marked a change in conduct towards the Acholi and the LRA’s hallmark child abduction gained new ground, as did its terrorisation of the civilian population – ensnaring the rebellion in a web of internal contradictions that separated it from its original intent to purify society and instead ‘exacerbated the process of dehumanisation the HSMF set out to counter’.174 For its part, the UPDF ‘encouraged’ the Acholi to move into government ‘protected villages’ – or, as Allen and Vlassenroot aptly termed them, ‘rural prisons’175 – and in 2002 and 2004

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Operations Iron Fist I and II, far from defeating the LRA, sparked new violence which also spread from the Acholi heartland into Lango and Teso. The referral of the situation to the new International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2003 and the subsequent issuance of arrest warrants for Kony and four other LRA commanders in October 2005 compromised the Juba peace talks and ‘exported’ the conflict from Ugandan soil.176 The ICC intervention also curtailed UPDF excesses and northern Uganda began to stabilise. However, for the Acholi in particular, the disruption and securitisation of local institutions, together with the militarisation of the public sphere, for 20 years limited the scope for citizen engagement and resulted in fear and suspicion of (and a feeling of being abandoned by) the state – which persists in the post-conflict period.177 Although more pronounced in the north, throughout Uganda real devolution of power has gradually been eroded since the RC system was established and, especially since the adoption of the 1995 constitution and the 1997 Local Government Act, LCs have become ‘more clearly part of the state and less part of the NRM’ – with a concomitant reduction in LC activity at lower levels of the pyramid.178 The NRM’s decentralisation programme was designed to give equal amounts of power to the various levels of the LC pyramid with a particular emphasis on LCIII but decentralisation has become ‘concentrated’ at the district level, especially in fiscal terms (with associated elite capture and conflict).179 Institutional incapacity and maladministration in district councils, combined with the diversion of resources and other financial abuses, have led some observers to speak of a ‘democratisation of corruption’, as Watt et al. explain: decentralisation has dispersed and ‘multiplied the possible sites for corruption to take place, complicated the lines of accountability and diluted enforcement capacity’.180 At the same time, there has been an exponential increase in the number of districts from 33 when the NRM took power in 1986 to 112 at the time of writing – ostensibly, in line with Article 179 of the constitution, to meet the needs of ‘effective administration’ and ‘bring services closer to the people’.181 It is certainly true that people in rural areas often feel marginalised but the timing of waves of district creation strongly supports assertions that it is more linked to electoral patronage.182 In short, new (often unviable) districts and the associated LC pyramids (together with the new jobs, contracts, government tenders

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and parliamentary positions they create) are an important mechanism for extending NRM patronage networks into and throughout the countryside. Thus, decentralisation imperatives are being sacrificed for political advantage, placing stresses on local government to an extent that led one of Museveni’s former supporters to exclaim, ‘the president is killing his own child’.183 Moreover, district creation – even if not openly or intentionally so – has been ‘driven by a de facto if not de jure balkanisation of local politics in Uganda’ and has increased the salience of the very sectarianism that Museveni sought to contain, as various ‘ethnic’ groups have campaigned for their ‘own’ districts.184At the same time, it has conflicted with Buganda’s continued campaign for federal status and contributed to unrest in the kingdom and a deterioration in Buganda’s relationship with the government which, as Goodfellow and Lindemann argue, has moved from one of ‘alliance to political violence’ over the last 20 years.185 Furthermore, the benefits of the Economic Recovery Programme have been unevenly reaped and accompanied by aid dependency and heightened indebtedness.186 Despite touting Uganda as an economic miracle akin to the East Asian tigers, the World Bank conceded that real poverty (especially in rural areas) actually increased under structural adjustment: the promotion of (and continued dependency on) export crops has led to domestic shortages (in some instances, where compounded by drought, even famine) and privatisation to retrenchments and layoffs, as well as placing healthcare beyond the reach of the rural poor.187 Infant mortality is high and life expectancy low (falling from 48 years in 1987 to 42.7 years in 1990– 5).188 Uganda has also been labelled the AIDS capital of the world. It was the first African country to identify cases of AIDS in 1982 and national prevalence rates were estimated to be 10– 20 per cent of the population in the early 1990s (with higher levels reported in urban areas); however, the government has been widely praised for its aggressive policy in tackling the pandemic (with prevalence rates dropping to 5 per cent by 2002) and has been held up as a role model for other African states.189 This, together with its embracement of structural adjustment and contribution to regional security, has enhanced Uganda’s international image (and legitimacy) and, as a result, donor pressure for political reform has been much more muted than in other countries (as has its criticism of domestic and foreign policies that might otherwise be the

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subject of international censure).190 Donors conferred considerable discretion on the government to enable the implementation of a difficult SAP but, in so doing, they unwittingly emboldened the undemocratic tendencies of the regime and ‘reproduced a corrupt and patronage-based government’, ultimately sustaining the NRM in power and undermining the capacity of the state to foster growth.191 Although donors have been disquieted by Uganda’s ‘creeping authoritarianism’, Museveni has skilfully positioned himself as one of the West’s most important strategic allies on the continent.192 This near indispensability and Museveni’s presidential victory in the 2016 elections achieved, in part at least, through an effective strategy of ‘carefully calibrated electoral violence’, suggests that ‘change’ – fundamental or otherwise – remains chimerical.193

Conclusion The way in which Uganda was ‘made’ resulted in a number of contradictions which have persisted into the post-colonial era and been manipulated by successive regimes. While colonial geopolitical interests determined the external borders of Uganda, strenuous efforts were made internally to align administrative units with ‘tribes’ as the British conceived them. The result was not only to hybridise customary and colonially invented traditional authorities but also to create, or at least give political significance to, local (and newly bounded) identities – which people found meaning in at the expense of forging a common sense of purpose in and loyalty to ‘Uganda’. Parochialism was further fostered by the piecemeal enlargement of the colonial protectorate from (and on the model of) the Bugandan ‘native state’ protectorate and the concomitant sub-imperialism and aggrandisement of the Baganda – and as Buganda outlived its usefulness, attempts to cut it down to size accentuated an already developing broader divide along a north-south axis. In the rush to decolonise, there was an attempt to reconcile these contradictions in the independence constitution which, together with the unlikely UPC-KY alliance and the subsequent Constitutional Heads Act, had the potential to legitimately represent the various groups that constituted Uganda. Within four years this delicate balance unravelled as Obote dissolved the alliance, suspended the constitution, abolished

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the kingdoms and declared a one-party state, thus achieving the unitary state the British had strived for – but in letter alone. Ethnic patrimonialism came to the fore and, combined with the impartation of ‘politico-functional indispensability’ on the military and their insubordination to political process,194 created the conditions for Amin’s coup. In taking the trends set by Obote to a logical conclusion, Amin brutalised the post-colony, inextricably interweaving the military into politics and bringing about socio-economic dislocation and the normalisation of violence, tearing apart the moral fabric in the process. Uganda came very close to state collapse in the last two years of Amin’s rule and has certainly been labelled as such.195 Besides confusing the processes that lead to institutional collapse and functional failure, classifying Uganda thus overlooks two facts. As much as personal violence increased and the army had no conception of being guarantors of national security, the state (or Amin personally) retained a monopoly of the means of violence and the capacity to provide security (when he chose to do so). Secondly, throughout his rule, state institutions, however corrupt and emaciated, continued to exist and the pattern of terror imposed a kind of order that prevented the disintegration of authority. Events after Amin’s demise are testimony to this. The agents of the state literally went with him but the post-liberation regime was able to quickly restore the machinery of central government, which suggests that it never actually collapsed. As Gertzel contemporaneously argued, ‘in each successive decade government had survived, but it had become progressively weaker’ such that there existed in 1979 ‘a fragile faith in the state’196 – a characterisation that remains apt. The interregnum between Amin and Obote II and Obote’s second premiership itself essentially perpetuated the situation of the late 1970s, leading people to say ‘it was better under Amin’. This stemmed from one key difference, which Mann’s paradox of power illuminates.197 Whereas Amin was weak in infrastructural power but strong in despotic power, Obote II lacked both. Control did not extend as far either in terms of forced compliance (evident in the re-emergence of sectarianism and Obote’s inability to monopolise the UNLA) or geographical radiation (evident in the numerous insurgencies and the emergence of the embryonic RC system, which in effect created a de facto state within the state in south-western Uganda).

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Amidst continental espousals of an African renaissance, it seemed that Museveni had embraced the opportunity presented by Amin’s ruination of the old order and heeded Mazrui’s words that true decolonisation is not liberation from colonial rule but from the colonial state.198 The revival of the kingdoms and customary rulers, together with the participatory RC system seemed to proffer an alternative to the hegemonic colonial system perfected and matured by previous regimes. However, in many respects, these initiatives just reinvented that system in a new guise and, especially since the concentration of decentralisation, an unmistakable similarity between the LC pyramid and the chieftaincy hierarchy, which originated in Buganda, has become apparent.199 It could almost be posited that Museveni’s regime has returned Uganda to the 1950s, and that the colonial north-south divide has re-manifested itself. The re-creation of Buganda and its success in establishing a ‘dual structure of power in its own region’ functioning ‘well beyond the letter and spirit of the 1995 constitution’,200 would seem to lend some weight to this assertion – as does the marginalisation of northern Uganda and the continuing (even enhanced) stigmatisation of the Acholi as a primitive warrior community.201 In both areas the reach of (and trust in) the government has been limited from the outset – and here, as elsewhere, as decentralisation imperatives have been sacrificed for political advantage, the salience of the very sectarianism Museveni sought to contain has become more pronounced. In short, as Rubongoya argues, while the NRM was able to legitimate its power in the first ten years, the Movement ‘did not extend legitimacy to the state itself’; and thereafter, institutions of the latter became increasingly subsumed (and patrimonialised) in the former.202

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

Myths of State Failure The concept of state failure arose out of the ashes of the new world order. While the origins of the term remain ambiguous, its emergence, in many respects, reflected international dismay at the upsurge in nationalist conflicts and the disappointment of Western ideologues that the fall of the Berlin Wall had not, in practice, led to the anticipated triumph of, and universal convergence towards, ‘liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.1 The straitjacket of the Cold War had seemingly imposed a period of unparalleled, albeit uncomfortable, stability and its removal had led to a new world disorder which represented a return to history (rather than its end). In an increasingly interdependent world, which had seen states being rolled back and marginalised, failed states (conceivably the sine qua non of the withering of the state system) reinforced the continued relevance of the state. Negating their effects became paramount not just for the functioning of the global marketplace and the promotion of development and social justice but for international peace and security. Threats to the latter were reinterpreted in a way that breached hitherto sacrosanct principles of state sovereignty, presaging increasingly permissive rights (or responsibilities) of international intervention which, in turn, precipitated a kind of benevolent (or post-modern) imperialism. Optimism about the UN’s re-found capabilities was however dashed, together with the humanitarian agenda of the 1990s, by the international community’s first encounter with a failed state in Somalia.

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Failed states thence remained isolated tragedies that imperilled their own citizens and destabilised neighbouring countries – until their ‘remarkable odyssey from the periphery to the very centre of global politics’ in the aftermath of 9/11.2 Increasingly feared as epicentres of international organised crime, global pandemics, weapons proliferation and, more acutely, as havens for transnational terrorists, failed states gained heightened strategic significance and remedying the ‘problem’ of such states became a critical component of homeland security agendas. In the process, the empirical line between intervention for the sake of others and intervention in self-defence began to blur.3 As the so-called ‘Long War’ followed on the heels of the Cold War, state failures were retrospectively recognised and other crises re-clothed in their guise, and the (already opaque) concept became increasingly elastic and securitised. Although, as ‘sober analysis’ replaced ‘anecdotal evidence’, the link between state failure and transnational terrorism proved specious,4 the state failure net has continued to widen. This is arguably because widening the net serves a political purpose – to delegitimise states that pose a perceived threat to Western interests or values. Further, by placing the culpability for state failure (and its ramifications) within those states, it creates a moral justification for successful states to help the not-so-successful ones. Thus, the constitution of state failure is based on a subjective political judgement, defined and constructed by the ‘great powers’ (according to the principles of appropriate statehood promoted and legitimised by them), as much as it is on the objective, empirically observed disintegration of statehood – and the latter is not necessarily sufficient for the designation of state failure (if those states serve Western interests and are ‘good for business’).5 In other words, failed states might be wryly described as ‘equal opportunity entities’ since ‘depending on one’s definition they can be found in any part of the world’.6 Indeed, one of the core problems inherent in the state failure discourse is the homogenisation of innumerable disparate crises through the application of a common but ill-defined label. More than 20 years after the term was coined, there remains uncertainty about what precisely constitutes a failed state – or how many such entities exist (or have existed) – in either academic circles or on donor lists. From initially circumscribed definitions focusing on minimum standards of ‘stateness’ and institutional implosion (now

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generally associated with state failure’s sibling – state collapse), definitions have gradually broadened and although still based on Weberian or social contractarian understandings of the state, focus has leaned towards the functional (rather than institutional) level of analysis. Protection (monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force) was the core facet in both understandings of the state and features in all definitions of state failure (often leading to the erroneous conflation of state failure with civil violence). However, state failure has increasingly come to be viewed in terms of the non-delivery of a range of positive political goods now considered implicit in the state’s side of the social contract – extending the contract far beyond its original conception (the provision of security within a recognised territory by an accepted authority) and overlooking the consensual origins of the contract (legitimacy precedes the contract and does not derive solely from effective performance of state functions). Moreover, this functional body of literature is beset by a certain arbitrariness: there is no agreed temporal or spatial frame of reference (for how long does a state need to be dysfunctional and over how much or which parts of its territory before the designation of failure?); the distinction between capacity and will is ill-specified (does it make a difference if a state is unable or unwilling to perform the functions expected of it?); the exact nature and requisite number of functions to be performed differs from one study to the next (as do the continua of faltering states and tipping points on the sliding scale to failed statehood); there is little correlation between the various indicators used to measure performance and these indicators are at one and the same time causes, symptoms and consequences of state failure – and they are also equally present in many so-called successful states. Defining state failure qua non-performance of certain functions is thus inadequate – not only because it ‘describes particular situations that can but need not result from a lack of empirical sovereignty’ but also because it places the focus on a state failing to function in terms of ends (or expected outputs), which ignores the fact that ‘in order to deliver on particular ends, the state requires specific means’.7 In other words, state failure is defined in consequential terms and as such the literature is notably silent on the processes and conditions through which states have come to fail – it does not go beyond descriptions of the supposed (in)capabilities of states to advance

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understanding of why states are experiencing the deficits or crises that have led to their designation as ‘failed’.8 The literature further tends to assume the existence of a state that was functioning and legitimate, which has subsequently failed, whereas in many instances it would be more accurate to speak of ‘states that fail before they form’.9 False conclusions are thus drawn about failed states, which equate the erosion of legal-rational domination with anarchy and social anomy and, in so doing, overlook the empirical emanations of political authority ‘within and beyond the state’ (as well as the fact that elites are ‘discriminating monopolists’ and ‘failure’ may actually be a governing strategy rather than a lack of capacity or will).10 This, in turn, calls into question the prevailing focus of state-building mantras. The solution to failed states may not be the (re)imposition of prescriptive Western blueprints through the reaffirmation of the pre-failed state (which could be part of the problem) but to ‘let them fail’ – in the sense of allowing a congruence between the design of the unit and the way in which power is actually exercised.11 In short, failed states are set in ‘binary opposition’ to successful states (and an idealised form of liberal democracy – to which all states should aspire), which is ‘reductive, non-contextual and ahistoric’ and assumes that all states can and should function in essentially the same way when, in fact, ‘every state is a culmination of unique historical processes’.12 The political branding of failed states thus not only leads to their pejorative representation as deviants (with various contagious maladies and dark energies) but obscures differences between states, reifies the idea of state and overlooks the historic normality of state failure.13

Histories of State Failure The phenomenon of state failure has a much longer history than often appreciated – from the ancient city states of Sumer and Maya to the mediaeval states of Burgundy and Aragon to that inherent in the consolidation of the modern secular system of states inaugurated at Westphalia. Indeed, the Westphalian system was marked more by failure than success with the number of states diminishing in a Darwinian struggle for survival. At the same time, and in part at least to forestall failure at home,14 the period of critical state formation in Europe developed in tandem with colonial expansion overseas – formalising and

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simplifying the emergent hierarchical dualistic international system. The diversity and rough equality which characterised the old regime (defined in early international law as an inner circle comprising the corpus of Christendom and an outer circle embracing all mankind under natural law) gave way to a more uniform and hegemonic (Eurocentric) system with the development of positive international law and selective formal sovereign equality in the nineteenth century. The new positivist doctrine postulated certain criteria before international personality could be recognised (conceived in terms of effective and civil government).15 It followed that, where these criteria were not met (and polities were not so recognised), sovereign states were entitled (and justified under the ‘sacred trust of civilisation’) to incorporate them into their dominions. Colonialism therefore not only transformed the dual system into an inner circle of the European family of nations (and their offspring) and an outer circle of their dependencies but also globalised the idea of the European state (as the only form of legitimate rule), spawning imitations around the world. In Africa, apart from the anomalous Liberian state, only the Ethiopian empire was able to resist European hegemony. On the vast majority of the continent, indigenous processes of polity formation were stalled, aborted or hybridised with colonial rule – and all were enclosed within new forms of territorial dependency. Burundi highlights this well. Its borders were carefully delimited (albeit after colonisation) to broadly coincide with the traditional kingdom but on the eve of colonial rule that kingdom was fragmented and arguably failing. Save for the colonial intrusion, it is probable that the core of the kingdom would have contracted and smaller principalities emerged in outlying areas. Uganda, by contrast, was an archetypal colonial contrivance, incorporating a group of kingdoms (whose development, like Burundi, was frozen at the point of colonisation) together with a variety of more or less acephalous societies. Illustrative of the ‘balkanisation’ of the continent, colonial Uganda thus amalgamated groups that had little in common and were often openly hostile to one another, while at the same time splintering some of those same groups (who found themselves under a different colonial administration).16 In short, the new political map of Africa was drawn by Europeans for Europeans – and the notion of a territorially defined polity as the sole source of authority, neighboured by other such polities, was an alien construct to the majority of Africans.

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In pre-colonial Africa, borderlands constantly shifted as central authority waxed and waned, and that authority was predominantly exercised over people rather than land and often shared. With some notable exceptions, such as Bunyoro, colonialism increased the scale of the complex, largely clan-based but loosely defined, ‘lacework’ of African political societies.17 At the same time, it fixed associations and primordialised identities (that had been fluid, multiple, overlapping and contextually constructed) in an internal administrative structure organised on ethno-religious grounds. Illfe’s words about Tanzania seem equally apt in the Ugandan and Burundian context – and elsewhere: ‘Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to’.18 These ‘tribes’ subsequently defined the parameters of the anti-colonial struggle (along local rather than national lines).19 Moreover, while both protectorates were ruled indirectly (in like manner to much of the continent), ‘native’ authorities were often colonial appointments (who lacked local legitimacy) and subimperialistic policies (e.g. the Baganda and Tutsi) contributed to uneven development and processes of othering. Yet, despite the profound administrative and cultural changes brought about by colonial overrule, the penetration of external ‘governmentalities’ into domestic society was shallow and indigenous sociopolitical structures (though eroded and manipulated) continued to shape practices and beliefs.20 This was, in part at least, owing to the relative brevity of European colonialism and the suddenness of decolonisation. The dismantling of the imperial system and the legal norms adopted to enable it – notably the successive juxtaposition, meshing and transformation of the principles of uti possidetis and self-determination – created the conditions for contemporary failed states, and state failure has been attendant if not embedded in all four waves of empire collapse and state creation since the Congress of Vienna. In the wake of World War II, however, the positivist practice of state recognition was ultimately turned on its head as new states were recognised not because they constituted de facto states (and the colonial powers had lost their right to sovereignty over them) but because of the moral and financial imperatives of decolonisation. UN Resolution 1514 of 1960 placed the right of independence above preparedness for that independence, all but disregarding the ‘Rights and Duties of States’ codified at Montevideo in 1933. In so doing, it levelled the previous hierarchical relationships of

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international society and instituted a new negative sovereignty regime based on the principle of legal equality – reviving ‘in different shape’ the principles of the classic law of nations.21 At the same time, while triumphing the Wilsonian conception of self-determination, Resolution 1514 also set limits on the unit of self-determination – through strict adherence to the uti possidetis line (and raising it above the de facto principle) – to prevent ‘multiple selves’ seeking to create a ‘whole personality’ in a scenario redolent of the post-World War I settlement.22 Self-determination was therefore no longer based on popular sovereignty but constituted in UN Headquarters. It had become a metaphor for decolonisation and synonymous with uti possidetis. A new form of dualism thus emerged on the back of the egalitarianism of decolonisation as the consecration of colonial boundaries ironically reaffirmed the European definition of the non-European world.23 The unrestricted and inalienable right to self-determination of former colonial dependencies (and concomitant universality of statehood and inviolability of borders) gave birth to the quasi-state, which possessed negative or legal sovereignty (juridical statehood) without yet possessing much in the way of positive or domestic sovereignty (empirical statehood).24 While made in the Western image, colonies were neither designed nor envisioned as proto-states and colonial governments merely imposed a mismatched overlay of fledgling European institutions on traditional sociopolitical structures which they did (or could) not destroy. As such, the idea of a post-colonial ‘state’ is a misnomer and, in the event, these post-colonies or quasi-states still faced the challenge of creating effective and legitimate national states within the confines of inherited (often arbitrary) colonial jurisdictions and modelled on the institutional structures of their erstwhile colonial metropoles. Despite their artificiality (and, in many cases – of which Burundi is a prime example – geopolitical and economic unsustainability for independent statehood), the sanctity of borders was endorsed in the founding Charter of the OAU in 1963 and African governments have maintained a united stance on border preservation since. Given, as Kwame Nkrumah said, there was ‘nothing between the tribe and the continent’, the practicable alternatives were perhaps few. There was neither sufficient support nor infrastructure for a pan-African jurisdiction and such a vast entity would not have fitted into the new world of territorial sovereign states any more than hundreds (if not

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thousands) of tribally defined statelets. At the same time, the wholesale adoption of the colonial partition as a basis for independent statehood in many respects contrived against the potential for creating unified postcolonial nation states. The nationalist sentiments that arose in support of the imported political system dimmed quickly after independence amidst competing sources of pre-colonial authority. Differently put, accentuated by the contradictions of colonial indirect rule, pre-colonial ‘statehood’ militated against post-colonial statehood – and the latter remained weakly legitimised.25 Notwithstanding developments peculiar to each, notably the way in which state failure has manifested spatially in Uganda and hierarchically in Burundi (in terms of how power and discontent have been defined), readings of Burundian and Ugandan post-colonial state creation trajectories reveal a familiar pattern. Within months of one another, independence constitutions (and the compromises therein which attempted to ameliorate late colonial era tensions) were discarded, monarchism abolished and state-centric strategies adopted. Through the installation of one-party regimes, which aimed to control rather than accommodate local particularisms, the autocratic hegemony of the colonial apparatus was internalised and patrimonialised along (colonially invented – or politicised) ethnic lines (despite denials of ethnic difference in Burundi), creating ‘a sort of parapolitics of clashing public identities and quickening ethnocratic aspirations’.26 Almost from the outset, the military were imparted with a sense of ‘politico-functional indispensability’,27 creating the conditions for direct military rule (lasting almost three decades in the case of Burundi) and thereafter a prominent place in (and often insubordinate to) domestic politics. With the possible exception of Obote’s second premiership, both states have maintained (or were) the monopoly of the legitimate means of violence but it has often been (over)used for illegitimate ends. On the tightrope which African regimes have continued to walk between too much and too little government,28 Uganda and Burundi have thus leaned towards the former but in the sense that highlights a paradox of power – they have been at once despotically strong and infrastructurally weak29 – neatly captured in the epithet ‘lame leviathan’ oft ascribed to African states.30 State bureaucratic institutions are ‘rarely more than empty shells’ and this is often by design since, for the elite (and the communities they owe their

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positions to and serve), the state’s ‘usefulness is greatest when it is least institutionalised’.31 In other words, the state has been ‘only in its pretensions omnipresent and by no means omnipotent’ – moreover, the ‘divergence between the efficacy and claims of the institutions of the state’ has discredited it in the eyes of the citizenry (or subjects once again), whose reactions have ranged ‘from indifference and silence to avoidance and evasion, sometimes [. . .] open resistance’.32 While infrastructural reach increased in the 1990s in Uganda and 2000s in Burundi, thereafter political space shrunk once more and accountability and reciprocity remain low at the national level. Especially since the extension of Museveni’s and Nkurunziza’s presidential terms beyond their constitutional lifespans, politics have become re-embedded in informal and personalised relationships. In many respects, personal rule is a throwback to pre-colonial times and derives from the way power was traditionally exercised (tribute rather than tax).33 It was reproduced in the colonial era when the clientelism of yore became entangled with the new patronage networks that sprang up around chiefs and colonial administrators and through whom the state came to be seen as the avatar of wealth and prestige.34 This, in turn, fostered a moral economy of corruption, well captured in Ekeh’s oft-cited notion of the ‘two publics’ (the primordial and civic) to which post-independence Africans in public positions simultaneously belong (the unwritten rule being that it is legitimate to rob the latter in order to strengthen the former).35 Its neo-patrimonial manifestation in the post-colony has been further entrenched as a result of the existential guarantee afforded by the negative sovereignty regime and the unintended succour given to predatory elites through auto-colonial relationships and development assistance. The negative sovereignty regime ‘rested on the contradiction that states could retain their independence of the international system while remaining dependent on the international system’ and sustaining African regimes became an ‘internationalised equivalent of colonial indirect rule’, which served the interests of those regimes and their external protectors – whether erstwhile colonial rulers or the two superpowers.36 Following Africa’s adoption of a policy of non-alignment (affirmed in the OAU Charter), which coincided with a new Third World majority in the UN, the continent was readily transformed into a theatre of war by proxy as the superpowers and their allies used financial and, especially, military

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aid as a diplomatic tool to nurture friendships. While this served to buttress African states in the short term – even rescue as in the case of the Ugandan army mutiny of 1964 – it had deleterious consequences for longer-term stability, which have been demonstrated in Uganda and Burundi alike. On the one hand, both are legatees of the militarised politics that the combination of aid and the Cold War arms trade bequeathed. This has resulted in disproportionate spending on ‘defence’ compared to other ministries and a tendency to deal with opposition by force rather than negotiation, as well as the continued (if not increased) diffusion of (particularly small) arms throughout society since the Cold War’s end, accompanied by a more general hastened resort to (or normalisation of) violence.37 On the other hand, ever-increasing financial support sheltered African governments from their inability to attract foreign private capital and exacerbated their marginalisation from the world economy.38 African economies have traditionally been reliant on foreign trade but the maintenance of the colonial primary export economy left many African states (Uganda and Burundi included) vulnerable to the volatility in commodity prices which, combined with poor agricultural sector management, ultimately resulted in declining shares in world trade. The mounting economic crisis was compounded by a fall in the already meagre levels of foreign investment and a rise in capital flight in the 1980s, leading to unprecedented levels of aid dependency and heightened indebtedness. At the same time, the shift from Keynesianism to the Washington Consensus – combined with the more stringent conditions applied to aid as the importance of Cold War dynamics receded – acutely affected African states. In both Uganda and Burundi, the economic shocks of SAPs were deeply felt – but the political consequences have been perceptibly different. In Burundi, SAPs were only partially implemented and did not bring about the economic reform they were conditional upon. At the same time, they upset the patronage system (albeit temporarily) and planned army cuts precipitated the third successful coup since independence. Museveni, however, embraced structural adjustment, earning Uganda the accolade of a donor darling but he also skilfully manipulated the reform process and rather than dislodging the patronage system, SAPs actually strengthened it. Moreover, economic

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growth (although uneven) and the ‘good enough governance’ of the noparty Movement muted donor criticism of policies that might otherwise have been the subject of international censure. Burundi, on the other hand, as the highest per capita recipient of IFI loans, could not stymie donor pressure for political reforms in the wake of the 1988 violence but, as the democratic wave swept across the continent, it became a paradigmatic example of the destabilisation inherent in the shift to multipartyism. The transition, to all intents and purposes, institutionalised ethnicity and, following the assassination of the first democratically elected president, triggered ‘mutual’ genocide and civil war. The sentiment expressed in Uganda that it is ‘not African’ to divide people into opposing political parties would thus seem to be borne out by the Burundian experience.39 The subsequent Arusha peace process also laid bare many of the flaws of post-conflict reconstruction and statebuilding, notably the crowding of the peacemaking environment and the disjuncture between elite and donor perceptions but perhaps best summed up by one Murundi: ‘we can’t eat the constitution’.40 In different ways, both Uganda and Burundi illustrate how externally sponsored political reform along democratic (or perhaps more accurately electoral authoritarian) lines may unwittingly undermine the development objectives of SAPs by accentuating nepotism, corruption and short-sighted economic policy.41 If the pre-imperial and post-colonial worlds merged briefly in the heyday of decolonisation, they quickly diverged. As Jackson explains, whereas the old natural law regime was a laissez-faire world with no international standards of empirical statehood, the post-colonial regime was an activist one which was not only non-discriminatory but positively discriminatory; it did not merely tolerate diversity but sought to supply a ‘safety-net’ for numerous floundering states, actively reinforcing the fragile integrity of ex-colonial states through development assistance and state-building.42 The post-Cold War era has, however, witnessed a return of the Western hegemony and hubris epitomised in the nineteenth-century positivist doctrine – and concomitantly a reintroduction of the standard of civilisation, albeit now based on a particular model of statehood rather than creed or demonstrable statecraft per se. In this way, the discursive labelling of states as ‘failed’ might be interpreted as non-recognition in an era when all states are legally guaranteed.

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New Beginnings and Alternative Futures State failure has long been part and parcel of the violent creation of order – of state formation – and there is no disputing Holsti’s observation that ‘the overwhelming majority of conflicts since 1945 have been a ubiquitous corollary of the birth, formation and fracturing of states’.43 Perhaps, therefore, state failure in Africa might be viewed in terms of a historical juncture, where new political structures on an indigenous base (with the potential to reconcile the ‘two publics’) may be emerging from a crumbling post-colonial system.44 At the beginning of the civil war, Mazrui suggested that Burundi may be ‘experiencing the death throes of the old order’ and asked whether we were ‘witnessing the agonising birth pangs of a genuinely post-colonial order’.45 Ten years later, Daley argued that the civil war ‘signals not the end but the still difficult birth of the modern state’.46 However, while the orchestration of a complex power-sharing arrangement led to the effacement of the ethnic conflict which had defined Burundi’s (post-)colonial history, since 2010 there has been a resumption of (politically partisan, if not ethnic) conflict and the nature of the state has remained essentially unchanged. In Uganda, on the heels of Amin’s ruination of the state, the NRM’s local governance system seemed to have (re)constructed the state from below but it has since been ‘captured’ in a way that has to all intents and purposes reinvented the colonial ‘state’. At the same time, Uganda seemed to offer a positive example of the resurgence of pre-colonial institutions through the Traditional Rulers Statute and the re-emergence of kingdoms (especially Buganda). However, in a 2001 poll, while displaying substantial affection for the kabaka, only 24 per cent of the Baganda supported a return to traditional rule and this was significantly higher than the 16 per cent figure for all Ugandans.47 These results are a salutary check against optimistic (often romanticised) accounts of traditional revivals in the midst of state failure and remind us that ‘the pre-colonial past is not recoverable’.48 Only in a few instances (Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland) has there been demonstrable confluence between the pre-colonial past and the post-colonial present. Elsewhere, as the Buganda experiment highlights, it has proven difficult to translate cultural affinity and historical legitimacy into sufficient political and developmental currency to lay claim to a comparative advantage in governance over the post-colonial state and, thus, effect a reconfiguration of power above

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the local level.49 In Burundi, there is no evidence of support for a monarchical revival and, in the still individualistic society, there are few other traditional structures to which authority could revert and limited social capital to foster new ones, although the values associated with the bashingantahe are still important for most Barundi.50 While both Uganda and Burundi illustrate the existence of ‘deep continuities with pre-colonial social and political patterns’, they counter Young’s suggestion that the parenthesis can be closed around the postcolonial state.51 In many respects, the colonial apparatus still exists and has been reinvented. But neither do these cases suggest that the postcolonial state is becoming more firmly institutionalised and legitimised. Ordinary Barundi appear to want ‘better people’ rather than ‘better institutions’ (which is indicative of how legitimate authority is constructed) and in Uganda there remains only a ‘fragile faith’ in the state – especially in the north.52 Even (or perhaps especially) Burundi – which may be seen in terms of a reversion to (a very different form of) sovereignty – would seem to bear out Englebert’s contention that ‘the African state is a failed state because it is not African’.53 This stems from the fact that the state is not historically embedded in sociopolitical relationships and has resulted in a ‘legitimacy deficit’ which, since legitimacy breeds capacity, has limited its effectiveness (and resulted in an excessive use of coercion). While the state has been adopted, transformed and endogenised to varying extents, it remains exogenous and set up against African societies, rather than having evolved out of them.54 Since independence, African societies have been caught between a rock and a hard place. In order to secure their desired participation in the community of states, they were expected to build territorially defined nation states (and latterly liberal democratic ones) on the shallow and uncertain foundations of colonial ‘states’ – and, in so doing, approximate the performance yardstick of effective and civil statehood represented by industrialised Western democracies. This was not only at odds with traditional African sovereignty which was exercised over people rather than land and, in kingdoms and segmentary societies alike, was paternalistic rather than democratic, albeit fluid and shared. It was also the obverse of the evolutionary process of European state-making, which was not an enterprise undertaken with any premeditation or with a set of predetermined goals: power-holders did not undertake war-making, extraction and capital accumulation with the intention of

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creating national states, nor did they foresee that national states would emerge from these three activities.55 In a bid to enhance understanding of a much-debated phenomenon and bring relevance to a concept which has become unhelpfully opaque, state failure has been historically framed herein as the failed postcolonial rooting and institutionalisation of an imported (and reified) model of Western statehood. This has occurred in different ways but all failed states share a common characteristic which underscores the problematics of contemporary state failure. International norms which shifted quickly to accommodate the retraction of empires (and brought about the universality of statehood) appear unalterable in the face of the failure of states that emerged from them. The inviolability of borders (which often impede development) and international unease at institutional alternatives to the state mean that, unlike their historic counterparts, contemporary failed states cannot legally shapeshift or die. They fail within their existing borders and remain on the map even if for all intents and purposes it is only in name that they exist. The state (and especially the liberal democratic state), as its failure to take root on much of the African continent suggests, is not appropriate everywhere. It evolved out of a particular set of circumstances in European societies and should not necessarily be viewed as the zenith of sociopolitical organisation. While the state has come to be considered the irrefutable and infallible building block of international order, the system of which it is part is still younger than the Roman Empire and may yet prove transient.56 Moreover, the state has never been ubiquitous or exclusive and the state system has never been static or ‘complete’. Areas of statehood have always coexisted with differently governed areas and, by dint of their difference, ‘failed’ states should neither be viewed as anathemas to international order nor, in and of themselves, as threats to Western interests and values. They simply exhibit alternative manifestations of legitimate authority which, although not yet recognised, in some cases ‘may well in the end endure and even become models for future political orders’.57 The question perhaps begged (but beyond the parameters of the present study to answer) is how natural law precepts, which assume that ‘states different in form or substance are nevertheless equal in value to their inhabitants’,58 might be legally restored and a more diverse and laissez-faire political landscape (re)created in an era of ever-increasing global interdependence?

NOTES

Introduction

Genealogies of State Failure

1. Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, Summer 1989. 2. G. John Ikenberry, ‘The Myth of Post-Cold War Chaos’, Foreign Affairs 75, no. 3 (1996), 79, 91. According to Ikenberry, the real historical watershed began in 1941 with the Atlantic Charter (where the liberal principles of the post-World War II settlement were outlined), and was solidified in 1944 at Bretton Woods (where agreement was reached on the future economic order based on open markets and economic co-operation) and Dumbarton Oaks (where the political vision in the form of the United Nations was proposed). The end of the Cold War was disorienting, he contends, because it brought about the end of the other post-World War II settlement – the ‘containment order’ – and an entire intellectual tradition. 3. Joseph S. Nye Jr., ‘What New World Order?’, Foreign Affairs 71, no. 2 (1992), 85. 4. James Mayall, ‘Nationalism and International Security after the Cold War’, Survival 24, no. 1 (1992), 19. 5. Fukuyama, ‘End of History’. See also, Francis Fukuyama, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, The National Interest, Fall 1989. 6. Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner, ‘Saving Failed States’, Foreign Policy, no. 89 (Winter 1992–3), 3. 7. Robert D. Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet’, The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994. 8. Homer-Dixon’s ‘On the Threshold’, in which he argues that resource scarcity will lead to conflict and environmentally induced praetorian regimes (Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, ‘On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict’, International Security 16, no. 2 (1991)); Martin Van Creveld’s pre-Westphalian vision of world-wide low-intensity communal conflict in

206

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

NOTES

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The Transformation of War. New York: The Free Press, 1991; and Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’, in which he argues that civilisational fault lines are more fundamental than ideology and will become the dominant site of global conflict (Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993)). Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, 63, 72, 75. Neo-mediaevalism is ‘an alternative path to world order’ where sovereign states are replaced by ‘a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organisation that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages’ – the central characteristic of which is a system of overlapping authorities and multiple, crisscrossing loyalties. See Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, 245– 6 and 254– 66. Martin Wolf, ‘Will the Nation-State Survive Globalization?’, Foreign Affairs 80, no. 1 (2001), 178, 189, 190. On the opposite view see, for example, Jessica T. Matthews, ‘Power Shift’, Foreign Affairs 76, no. 1 (1997), who argues that states are losing autonomy and sharing power with other actors, especially non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The engine of this change, she contends, is the information technology revolution; the result will be the decline of states and the rise of global governance. Susan L. Woodward, ‘Failed States: Warlordism and “Tribal” Warfare’, Naval War College Review 52, no. 2 (1999), 56. The oft-quoted phrase ‘bringing the state back in’ is taken from the book of that title by Evans et al. Writing in 1985, they identified a ‘paradigmatic reorientation’, whereby ‘[a] diverse set of scholars with wide-ranging substantive concerns has begun to place the state, viewed as an institution and social actor, at the center of attention’ (Peter D. Evans et al. (eds), Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 347). Boutros Boutros-Ghali, ‘An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping’. Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to the statement adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992. UN Doc. A/47/277 – S/24111, 17 June 1992, para 17. James Gow, ‘Stratified Stability: Interpreting International Order’, Brassey’s Defence Yearbook, 1997, 360. Cited in ibid., 361. Article 2(7) states that the UN is not authorised to intervene ‘in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state’. The invocation of Chapter VII over-rides this – all means necessary to ensure international peace and security. For example, consent of all parties, impartiality, non-involvement of Security Council members and the limitation of the use of force to self-defence. For an account of these interventions, see, for example, Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society. Oxford:

NOTES

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

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Oxford University Press, 2000; and Mats Berdal and Spyros Economides (eds), United Nations Interventionism: 1991 – 2004. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. It should be noted that there were a number of earlier post-Cold War success stories for UN peacekeeping operations (e.g. Namibia, 1989; Nicaragua, 1989; El Salvador, 1991; Cambodia, 1991; and Mozambique, 1992 – 5). Simon Chesterman, ‘Transitional Administration, State-Building and the United Nations’, in Simon Chesterman et al. (eds), Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2005, 339– 40. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, ‘Supplement to an Agenda for Peace: Position Paper of the Secretary General on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations’. UN Doc. A/50/60 – S/1995/1, 3 January 1995, para 12. He did not actually use the term here but described facets now commonly associated with state failure. Ibid., para 13. Anne-Marie Slaughter, ‘The Real New Order’, Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (1997), 183, who suggests that a new transgovernmental world order is emerging ‘with less fanfare but more substance’, which harnesses the state’s power by disaggregating it into its functional components. Stanley Hoffmann, ‘The Politics and Ethics of Military Intervention’, Survival 37, no. 4 (1995– 6), 32. Michael Mandelbaum, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Work’, Foreign Affairs 75, no. 1 (1996). Ironically, Bush Jr who derided Clinton as a naı¨ve idealist, was critical of multilateralism and eschewed quixotic efforts of rebuilding failed states – and whose advisers had ‘expressed dismayed amazement that US troops were being used to take children to kindergarten in Bosnia’ – would subsequently embark on far more ambitious projects than those attempted by Clinton (including using the US military to build kindergartens in Afghanistan and Iraq) – even if he did so using a different rhetoric. See James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, ‘Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States’, International Security 28, no. 4 (2004), who argue that Bush’s realism ‘collided with post-Cold War realities’ that previously shaped Clinton’s foreign policy (as opposed to Bush’s claims that 9/11 changed the game). Kofi A. Annan, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century. New York: United Nations, 2000, 7. Michael Ignatieff, ‘Human Rights, Power and the State’, in Simon Chesterman et al. (eds), Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2005, 65. At the turn of the millennium the retrenchment in humanitarian intervention eased slightly with new UN missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), East Timor, Sierra Leone (the latter two where the lead country had an interest in the country concerned – Australia and Britain respectively) and the controversial intervention in Kosovo. On the whole, though, the early Bush administration

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28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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was pre-occupied with the ‘axis of evil’ and prioritised so-called ‘rogue states’ (later replaced by the more neutral ‘states of concern’ appellation) over failed states. For a comprehensive account of the concept and innumerable expressions of ungoverned (or differently governed) spaces, see Anne L. Clunan and Harold A. Trinkunas (eds), Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, 2010. Phil Williams, ‘Here be Dragons: Dangerous Spaces and International Security’, in Anne L. Clunan and Harold A. Trinkunas (eds), Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, 2010, 40. Philip Cerny, cited in ibid., 36. See International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001. R2P was adopted at the UN World Summit in 2005, although it has yet to achieve the status of an international norm. On the evolution of R2P – and especially its contestation in the BRICS countries – see Philipp Rotmann et al. (eds), ‘Major Powers and the Contested Evolution of a Responsibility to Protect’. Special Issue of Conflict, Security and Development 14, no. 4 (2014). Robert O. Keohane, ‘Political Authority after Intervention: Gradations in Sovereignty’, in J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (eds), Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 295. J.E. Spence, ‘The Way We Live Now: Change and Continuity in Global Politics and Military Strategy’. Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2007, 10. Francis Fukuyama, State Building: Governance and World Order in the TwentyFirst Century. London: Profile Books, 2004, 125. Christopher Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, Review of International Studies 24, no. 2 (1998), 156, who questions the achievability (and desirability) of this reaction. For a recent example, see Natasha Ezrow and Erica Frantz, ‘Revisiting the Concept of the Failed State: Bringing the State Back In’, Third World Quarterly 34, no. 8 (2013). This is the obverse of the approach advocated by Evans et al. in Bringing the State Back In. Jean-Germain Gros, State Failure, Underdevelopment and Foreign Intervention in Haiti. New York: Routledge, 2012, 34. Martin Doornbos, ‘State Collapse and Fresh Starts: Some Critical Reflections’, in Jennifer Milliken (ed.), State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 45. Jeffrey Herbst, ‘Let Them Fail: State Failure in Theory and Practice: Implications for Policy’, in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, 302.

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209

41. Doornbos, ‘State Collapse’, 55 – 6. 42. Ibid., 46. 43. Ibid., 55– 6. Berger similarly highlights how ‘the routinisation of the nationstate has remained central to the dominant narratives on nation-building and international security’, underpinned by the assumption that nation-states are the ‘basic, even the natural, units of a wider international order’ (Mark T. Berger, ‘From Nation-Building to State-Building: The Geopolitics of Development, the Nation-State System and the Changing Global Order’, Third World Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2006), 14). ¨ sterud, ‘The Narrow Gate: Entry to the Club of Sovereign States’, 44. O¨yvind O Review of International Studies 23, no. 2 (1997), 169. 45. Cf., for example, Lisa Anderson, ‘Antiquated Before They Can Ossify: States that Fail Before they can Form’, Journal of International Affairs 58, no. 1 (2004); and Christopher Clapham, ‘The Global-Local Politics of State Decay’, in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 46. Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks, ‘Failed States, or the State of Failure’, University of Chicago Law Review 72, no. 4 (2005), 1169, 1172– 3. 47. Stephen D. Krasner, ‘Compromising Westphalia’, International Security 20, no. 3 (1995– 6), for example, argues that there has never been a ‘golden age of the Westphalian state’ and that compromises of Westphalia have been an enduring feature – occurring in four principal ways: conventions, contracting, coercion and imposition. ¨ sterud, ‘Narrow Gate’, who provides a succinct summary of the key 48. See O debate on this issue between Martin Wight and F.H. Hinsley. 49. The classic account of (and reasons for) the emergence of states in Europe is Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. 50. Gow, ‘Stratified Stability’, 354. 51. O¨sterud, ‘Narrow Gate’, 181. This dual system has persisted in one way or another ever since. See also Robert H. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes and Neoclassical Theory: International Jurisprudence in the Third World’, International Organization 41, no. 4 (1987); and Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. 52. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States, Sovereignty and the Third World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 54. See also Charles H. Alexandrowicz, ‘New and Original States: The Issue of the Reversion to Sovereignty’, International Affairs 45, no. 3 (1969). 53. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 535; and Jackson, Quasi-States, 61. 54. The standard of civilisation consisted of five criteria: (1) Europeans anywhere should be afforded protection of life, liberty and property consistent with the rule of law in Europe; (2) a civilised state must retain a rational-bureaucratic structure, uphold its international commitments and exercise control over a defined territory; (3) a state must be willing to accept the prevailing system of

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55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

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European international law; (4) a state must maintain adequate and permanent channels of diplomacy; and (5) unacceptable social practices should be ruled out, for example, suttee, slavery and polygamy (Dan Halvorson, States of Disorder: Understanding State Failure and Intervention in the Periphery. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, 32– 3). Jackson, Quasi-States, 62. Nil Lante Wallace-Bruce, ‘Africa and International Law – The Emergence to Statehood’, Journal of Modern African Studies 23, no. 4 (1985), 576, 582. The phrase ‘juristic baptism’ comes from James Crawford. Jackson, Quasi-States, 64. Ibid., 67. O¨sterud, ‘Narrow Gate’, 173. See also Mikulas Fabry, Recognising States: International Society and the Establishment of New States since 1776. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, ‘Sovereignty and Underdevelopment: Juridical Statehood in the African Crisis’, Journal of Modern African Studies 24, no. 1 (1986), 4. Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making’, in Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975, 38 – 9. Herbst, ‘Let Them Fail’, 303. Gros, State Failure, 37. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 535. This paragraph draws from Clapham, ‘Global-Local Politics’, 79 –80. Jackson, Quasi-States, 71 – 2. Ibid., 73; Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 536. Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22, 28 June 1919. The mandates system was developed to deal with the dependencies of the defeated Central Powers in the post-War settlement. There were three classes of mandate, determined by ‘stage of development’: ‘A’ Mandates for peoples of the Middle East, who required only administrative assistance and would soon be able to stand alone; ‘B’ Mandates for the majority of peoples in sub-Saharan Africa, who required an indefinite period of tutelage; and ‘C’ Mandates for the ‘primitive’ peoples of South-West Africa and the Pacific, who would likely remain wards of the League for centuries, if not forever. Anderson, ‘Antiquated Before They Can Ossify’, 7. Gros, State Failure, 44. Fabry, Recognising States, 49. Ibid., 50. The US offered uti possidetus as a basis for settlement with Britain during its war of independence. See ibid. Steven R. Ratner, ‘Drawing a Better Line: Uti Possidetis and the Borders of New States’, American Journal of International Law 90, no. 4 (1996), 590. Ibid., 593– 4.

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76. Ibid. 77. Gros, State Failure, 45 – 6. He further notes that Haiti (the subject of his study) is the only state whose failure spans both phases. 78. Cited in Fabry, Recognising States, 138. 79. Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today’, Anthropology Today 8, no. 1 (1991), 5. 80. This would later be enforced together with the further prohibition of conquest in UN Resolutions 1514 (1960) and 2625 (1970). 81. Taken from Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, 74. 82. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 526. 83. See Michael Barnett, ‘The New United Nations Politics of Peace: From Juridical Sovereignty to Empirical Sovereignty’, Global Governance 1, no. 1 (1995). 84. Jackson and Rosberg, ‘Sovereignty and Underdevelopment’, 8. 85. Jackson, Quasi-States, 77. 86. Helman and Ratner, ‘Saving Failed States’, 4. 87. Only Portugal and South Africa refused to relinquish their colonies, leading the UN to issue various resolutions reinforcing the message of 1514, and in 1970 the General Assembly issued Resolution 2621 which declared that ‘the further continuation of colonialism in all its forms and manifestations is a crime which constitutes a violation of the Charter of the United Nations, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, and the principles of international law’. This was reaffirmed in Resolution 3103 (1973) which also legitimised armed liberation movements, stating that ‘colonial peoples have the inherent right to struggle by all necessary means at their disposal against colonial powers and alien domination’ and that any attempt to suppress this struggle is incompatible with the Charter of the United Nations. 88. Fabry, Recognising States, 149. 89. Barnett, ‘New United Nations Politics’, 86. 90. Ratner, ‘Drawing a Better Line’, 610. 91. Fabry, Recognising States, 161 –2. 92. Ibid., 50. 93. On new and old sovereignty regimes, see Jackson, Quasi-States, especially Chapter 2. 94. Charles Alexandrowicz, ‘The New States and International Law’, Millennium 3 (1974), 228, 231. 95. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 529. 96. Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, ‘Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood’, World Politics 35, no. 1 (1982), 12. 97. Brooks, ‘Failed States’, 1168. 98. O¨sterud, ‘Narrow Gate’, 182. 99. Jackson and Rosberg, ‘Sovereignty and Underdevelopment’, 1. 100. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 528.

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101. Kwame Anthony Appiah, cited in Simon Chesterman et al., ‘Conclusion: The Future of State-building’, in Simon Chesterman et al. (eds), Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2005, 383. 102. Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994, 43. 103. Brooks, ‘Failed States’, 1174. 104. Alexandrowicz, ‘New and Original States’, 473. Although some of the Asian states that emerged after World War II held claim to ‘original’ statehood, reversion to sovereignty had limited application elsewhere, especially in Africa. 105. Gros, State Failure, 43. 106. Jackson, Quasi-States, 41. 107. Robert H. Jackson, ‘Surrogate Sovereignty: Great Power Responsibility and Failed States’. Paper presented at the ‘Failed States II: Sources of Prevention, Modes of Response and Conditions of State Success and Renewal’ Conference, Purdue University, West Lafayette, 8 – 11 April 1999, 2 – 3. 108. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 531. 109. Jackson, Quasi-States, 23. 110. Doornbos, ‘State Collapse’, 50. 111. Jennifer Milliken and Keith Krause, ‘State Failure, State Collapse and State Reconstruction: Concepts, Lessons and Strategies’, in Jennifer Milliken (ed.), State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 14. 112. The term comes from Florian Znaniecki and the explanation in the following paragraphs is drawn from the conclusion to Evans et al., Bringing the State Back In. They also highlight that since states are intrinsically janus-faced (standing at the intersection of transnational and domestic processes), a further methodological feature that the studies in their volume share is a sensitivity to ‘world historical contexts’ – this aspect, which the present study is also in agreement with, has been outlined in the preceding section and will not be elaborated upon further here. 113. Jack A. Goldstone et al., ‘A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability’, American Journal of Political Science 54, no. 1 (2010), 192. They stress that the larger number of episodes is not due to the larger number of countries in the region. 114. Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy, ‘The Failed States Index’, Foreign Policy, no. 149 (July – August 2005), 58, 62. 115. Pierre Englebert and Denis M. Tull, ‘Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa: Flawed Ideas about Failed States’, International Security 32, no. 4 (2008), 108 – 9. 116. Paul D. Williams, ‘State Failure in Africa: Causes, Consequences and Responses’, Europa World Yearbook: Africa South of the Sahara 2010, 39th edn. Taylor & Francis: Abingdon, 2009, 1, 3. 117. I. William Zartman (ed.), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995, 1 – 2.

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118. Jean-Pierre Chre´tien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History, trans. Scott Straus. New York: Zone Books, 2006, 9 – 10. In recent years, Burundi has received more attention from Anglo-American scholars which, combined with the translation of a number of important French works into English, has resulted in a voluminous literature – obviating the potential limitations of only consulting English-language works as done herein.

Chapter 1

The Failings of the Failed State ‘Thesis’

1. Jean-Germain Gros, ‘Towards a Taxonomy of Failed States in the New World Order: Decaying Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda and Haiti’, Third World Quarterly 17, no. 3 (1996), 456. 2. Christopher Clapham, ‘Failed States and Non-States in the Modern International Order’. Paper presented at the ‘Failed States III: Globalisation and the Failed State’ Conference, Florence, Italy, 7 – 10 April 2000, 1. 3. Michael Mann, ‘The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results’, in John A. Hall (ed.), States in History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, 112. 4. Ibid. 5. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968 (1922), 56. 6. Ibid., 53. Weber offers three legitimations of domination to explain why the dominated obey: traditional domination, where obedience is customary; legal domination, where obedience is secured by a belief in the validity of rationally created rules; and charismatic domination, where obedience is given because of personal devotion to the power-holder. 7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, eds Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997 (1651); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government. Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, 2010 (1698); and JeanJacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G.D.H. Cole. New York: Classic Books, 2010 (1762). 8. Hobbes, Leviathan, 70. 9. Williams, ‘State Failure in Africa’, 1 – 2. 10. Zartman, Collapsed States, 1, 5– 8. 11. Boutros-Ghali, ‘Supplement’, Para. 13. 12. Alexandros Yannis, ‘State Collapse and the United Nations: Universality at Risk?’, Brassey’s Defence Yearbook, 1999, 174. 13. Michael Ignatieff, ‘State Failure and Nation-Building’, in J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (eds), Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 305; and Michael Ignatieff, ‘Intervention and State Failure’, Dissent, Winter 2002.

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14. Robert H. Bates, ‘State Failure’, Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008). He argues that both revolution and state failure lead to violence but revolution creates a new order whereas state failure yields disorder. He further argues that not all civil wars originate in state failures and civil wars can make a state stronger. 15. All states have pockets of ungovernability but this does not mean that they have lost their monopoly of the legitimate means of violence. 16. Peter Wallensteen, ‘Beyond State Failure’. Paper presented at the ‘Failed States III: Globalisation and the Failed State’ Conference, Florence, Italy, 7– 10 April 2000. 17. Gros, State Failure, 21. 18. The relationship between state failure and conflict is a complex one and this is explored in more detail in the African context in the next chapter. 19. Daniel C. Esty et al., ‘The State Failure Project: Early Warning Research for US Foreign Policy Planning’. Paper presented at the ‘Failed States and International Security: Causes, Prospects and Consequences’ Conference, Purdue University, West Lafayette, 25 – 27 February 1998. Formed in 1994, the SFTF is a panel of (10 –15 core) scholars and methodologists drawn from US research institutions, who collaboratively work on the quantitative forecasting of state failures. It was commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence at the behest of senior US policy-makers ‘to design and carry out a data-driven study on the correlates of state failure since the mid-1950s’. Although the scope of the research programme has grown over the years, its central objective was, and remains: ‘using open-source data, the Task Force seeks to develop statistical models that can accurately assess countries’ prospects for major political change and identify key risk factors of interest to US policymakers’. For more information on the origins, evolution and work of the SFTF see: http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/political-instability-tas k-force-home/ [accessed 11 November 2013]. Annual datasets and reports are also accessible through this website. The SFTF was renamed the political Instability Task Force in 2003 to reflect the ever-expanding scope of the Task Force’s work and to distance it from the narrower notion of complex, systemic failure and state collapse. This new name more accurately reflects the object of study but the discussion here focuses on the Task Force’s earlier work, which was specifically on state failure. 20. Daniel C. Esty et al., Working Papers: State Failure Task Force Report. McLean, VA: Science Applications International Corporation, 1995, 1. 21. In both types of events there are two minimum thresholds for inclusion in the state failure problem set: (1) a mobilisation threshold, whereby each party must mobilise at least 1,000 people; and (2) a conflict intensity threshold, whereby there must be at least 1,000 conflict-related deaths over the course of the conflict and at least one year where the annual death toll exceeds 100. 22. Monty G. Marshall et al., ‘PITF State Failure Problem Set Codebook’. Vienna, VA: Societal-systems Research Inc., May 2013. Available at: http://

NOTES TO PAGES 33 – 35

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

215

www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/PITFProbSetCode book 2012. pdf [accessed 11 November 2013], 11. Esty et al., Working Papers; Daniel C. Esty et al., State Failure Task Force Report: Phase II Findings. McLean, VA: Science Applications International Corporation, 1998; Jack A. Goldstone et al., State Failure Task Force: Phase III Findings. McLean, VA: Science Applications International Corporation, 2000; Marshall et al., ‘PITF State Failure Problem Set’. The SFTF identifies two to three new state failures per year. See also Bates, ‘State Failure’. Esty et al., ‘State Failure Project’; and Goldstone et al., ‘Global Model’. Gary King and Langche Zeng, ‘Improving Forecasts of State Failure’, World Politics 53, no. 4 (2001), for example, provide a critical evaluation of the methods, analyses and claims of the SFTF, and some of their suggestions were subsequently incorporated into the SFTF models. Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy, ‘Failed States Index’, 57. The second index, in 2006, included 146 countries and the third index, in 2007, 177 countries. This was increased to 178 in 2013 with the independence of South Sudan. The Failed States Index was renamed the Fragile States Index in 2014. The social indicators are: demographic pressures (such as disease, natural disasters and population growth); refugees and internally displaced persons; group grievance (discriminations, sectarian conflict); human flight and brain drain. The economic indicators are: uneven economic development (ethnic, religious or regional disparities); poverty and economic decline. The political and military indicators are: state legitimacy (generally referring to corruption and lack of representativeness or effectiveness); public services (health, education, infrastructure and policing); human rights and the rule of law; security apparatus (monopoly of the legitimate use of violence but also riots, small arms proliferation, rebel activity, bombings, among others); factionalised elites (when local/national leaders engage in deadlock or brinkmanship for political gain); external intervention (in the form of assistance such as peacekeeping but also sanctions, military intervention and so on). It is interesting to note that the Fund for Peace refers to the ‘undermining’ or ‘weakening’ of, or ‘lack of commitment’ to, the social contract in a number of their descriptions of what the indicators entail. For the full descriptions of these 12 indicators and the methodology behind the index, see: ffp. statesindex.org [accessed 14 November 2013]. 0 – 29.9 is stable; 30 – 59.9 is in the monitoring zone; 60 – 89.9 is in the warning zone; and 90 – 120 is in the alert zone. Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy, ‘Failed States Index’, 57. Cf. Zartman’s definition of state failure above. Social contractarian definitions of state failure tend to view the state as a service provider and omit the consensual origins of the contract: in social contract theory legitimacy precedes the contract and is not a product of it, nor does

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

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legitimacy derive solely from the effective performance of functions. See Halvorson, States of Disorder, 22 – 4. Stewart Patrick, ‘Weak States and Global Threats: Fact or Fiction?’, Washington Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2006), 29. Robert I. Rotberg, ‘The Failure and Collapse of Nation States: Breakdown, Prevention and Repair’, in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, 1. Ibid., 3. Gros, ‘Towards a Taxonomy’, 456. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 116, 122. Weber did in fact recognise the broader and dynamic role of the state but purposively defined it in terms of its unchanging characteristics: ‘since the concept of the state has only in modern times reached its full development, it is best to define it in terms appropriate to the modern type of state, but at the same time, in terms which abstract from the values of the present day, since these are particularly subject to change’ (Weber, Economy and Society, 56). Ghani and Lockhart, Fixing Failed States, Chapter 7. Ibid., 164. See also Milliken and Krause, ‘State Failure’, who similarly note that ‘even Western European states today do not always reach the Weberian pinnacle in which a rationalised central bureaucracy enjoys a monopoly of organised violence over a given territory and population’ (3). Stefan Wolff, ‘The Regional Dimensions of State Failure’, Review of International Studies 37, no. 3 (2011), 960 [emphasis in original]. Cited in ibid. [translation by Wolff]. See also Max Weber, ‘Politics as Vocation’. Lecture delivered at Munich University in 1919. Reprinted in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (trans. and eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Here Weber elaborates on this point, originally made in Economy and Society, 65. He argues that ‘there is scarcely any task’ that the state ‘has not taken in hand’, and that ‘there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar’ to the state. In contrast, the use of force, while ‘not the only means of the state’, is ‘a means specific to the state’ (1). Note that Weber did list the various functions of the state (and that his list is not so different from Ghani and Lockhart’s) but the point is that he did not define the state in this way. See Weber, Economy and Society, 905. Zartman, Collapsed States, 2. Stewart Patrick, ‘“Failed” States and Global Security: Empirical Questions and Policy Dilemmas’, International Studies Review 9, no. 4 (2007), 646. What is also evident from this illustrative list is how the concept of failed states has absorbed states from (and taken over) other descriptors such as ‘rogue states’. Charles T. Call, ‘The Fallacy of the Failed State’, Third World Quarterly 29, no. 8 (2008), 1494, 1505.

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47. Yannis, ‘State Collapse’, 174n2; see also Karin von Hippel, ‘The Proliferation of Collapsed States in the Post-Cold War World’, Brassey’s Defence Yearbook, 1997, 194. This normative concern which was raised in the early literature has gained heightened attention in more recent critiques and will be returned to in the following sections. 48. For the following, see Rotberg, ‘Failure and Collapse’, 2 – 10. Rotberg states that ‘research on failed states is insufficiently advanced for precise tipping points to be provided’ and it remains so – a problem that led him to subsequently propose a ranking system for states. See Robert I. Rotberg, ‘Strengthening Governance: Ranking Countries Would Help’, Washington Quarterly 28, no. 1 (2004– 5). 49. This idea of state collapse as a gradual process or ‘a long-term degenerative disease’ was also present in Zartman’s work, although he did not identify a sliding scale per se. He likened the process of state collapse to the progress of an object tumbling down a staircase, landing and teetering on each step it hits, then either regaining its balance and coming to rest or losing its balance again and bouncing down to the next step where the exercise is repeated. Collapsed states are those that reach the bottom of the staircase. As in Rotberg’s analysis, collapse is an extreme case of governance problems – a ‘matter of degree but not a difference in nature from the normal difficulties of meeting demands and exercising authority’ (Collapsed States, 8). There is general agreement in the literature that state failure and/or collapse does not happen overnight and tends to be a drawn-out process, and that there are no warning lights on the critical stair treads or risers. 50. Wolff, ‘Regional Dimensions’, 961. 51. Marshall et al., ‘PITF State Failure Problem Set’, 11. 52. Jennifer A. Widner, ‘States and Statelessness in Late Twentieth-Century Africa’, Daedalus 124, no. 3 (1995), 147. 53. Ibid., 132, 136– 7. 54. Milliken and Krause, ‘State Failure’, 1 [emphasis in original]. These benchmarks clearly mirror the two levels of analysis inherent in definitions of the state identified by Mann in ‘Autonomous Power’. 55. Caty Cle´ment, ‘The Nuts and Bolts of State Collapse: Common Causes and Different Patterns?’. COMPASSS Working Paper WP2005-32, 2005. Available at: http://www. compasss.org/wpseries/Clement2005.pdf [accessed 18 January 2015], 2 [emphasis in original]. 56. Milliken and Krause, ‘State Failure’, 2. 57. Ibid., 4 – 10. In their definition, security is understood as the process whereby the institutions and instruments of violence are subordinated to political authorities; legitimate representation is understood as the idea that the state has to represent the symbolic identity of its subjects; and wealth is framed in terms of the establishment of a stable politico-legal framework to foster economic growth and development and provide welfare to its citizens.

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58. Ibid., 5. 59. Christopher Clapham, ‘The Challenge to the State in a Globalised World’, in Jennifer Milliken (ed.), State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 26; Williams, ‘State Failure in Africa’. 60. Milliken and Krause, ‘State Failure’, 13. 61. Gros, ‘Towards a Taxonomy’, 457. 62. Ibid., 461. 63. Ibid., 457– 61. Examples cited are Gros’. 64. According to the understanding of state failure suggested herein, in a sense, all failed states are aborted states. 65. See Gros, State Failure, 19 – 21. 66. See, for example, Stephen Ellis, ‘How to Rebuild Africa’, Foreign Affairs 84, no. 5 (2005). 67. Gros, ‘Towards a Taxonomy’, 457. 68. Gros, State Failure, 18. 69. Morten Bøa˚s and Kathleen M. Jennings, ‘“Failed States” and “State Failure”: Threats or Opportunities?’, Globalizations 4, no. 4 (2007), 476. 70. Cf. Helman and Ratner, ‘Saving Failed States’. 71. In ‘Failed States After 9/11: What Did we Know and What Have we Learned’, International Studies Perspectives 6, no. 1 (2005), Robert H. Dorff has argued that more was known about the linkages between state failure and transnational threats prior to 9/11 than is often realised – but 9/11 brought existing knowledge of the ways in which the security environment had been changing since the end of the Cold War into clearer focus, spurring a (still incomplete) realignment of knowledge and policy. 72. Cf. Kaplan, ‘Coming Anarchy’. 73. Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy, ‘Failed States Index’, 57. 74. Jack Straw, ‘Failed and Failing States’. Speech delivered at the University of Birmingham, 6 September 2002. 75. White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002. Washington, DC: White House, 2002, 1. 76. White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March 2006. Washington, DC: White House, 2006, 33. 77. White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, May 2010. Washington, DC: White House, 2010, 8; White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, February 2015. Washington, DC: White House, 2015, 2. 78. European Union (EU), ‘A Secure Europe in a Better World’. European Security Strategy. Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2003, 8 – 9. 79. Kofi A. Annan, Press Conference, UN Headquarters, 21 March 2005. Press release SG/SM/9772. 80. Kofi A. Annan, Farewell Address, delivered at the Truman Presidential Museum and Library, Missouri, 11 December 2006. Text available at: http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6170089.stm [accessed 16 July 2014].

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81. World Bank, Engaging with Fragile States: An IEG Review of World Bank Support to Low-Income Countries Under Stress. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006, 155; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – Development Assistance Committee (OECD – DAC). Whole of Government Approaches to Fragile States. Paris: OECD, 2006, 18; Government of Canada, International Policy Statement: A Role of Pride and Influence in the World. Ottawa: Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 2005, 13; and Government of Australia, ‘Background Brief to the White Paper on the Australian Government’s Overseas Programme: Australian Aid: Promoting Growth and Stability’. Canberra: Australian National Aid Agency (AusAID), 2006, 1. 82. Ray Takeyh and Nikolas Gvosdev, ‘Do Terrorist Networks Need a Home’, Washington Quarterly 25, no. 3 (2002), 98. See also, for example, Princeton N. Lyman and J. Stephen Morrison, ‘The Terrorist Threat in Africa’, Foreign Affairs 83, no. 1 (2004). 83. Ken Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism. Adelphi Paper 364. Oxford: Oxford University Press/International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2004, 12. 84. Ibid., 73. 85. Patrick, ‘Weak States and Global Threats’, 35. 86. Ken Menkhaus and Jacob N. Shapiro, ‘Non-State Actors and Failed States: Lessons from Al-Qa’ida’s Experiences in the Horn of Africa’, in Anne L. Clunan and Harold A. Trinkunas (eds), Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, 2010, 78. 87. Greg Mills, ‘Africa’s New Strategic Significance’, Washington Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2004), 157. 88. Edward Newman, ‘Weak States, State Failure and Terrorism’, Terrorism and Political Studies 19, no. 4 (2007), 464, 483. 89. Menkhaus, Somalia, 71. 90. Ibid., 71 – 5. See also Menkhaus and Shapiro, ‘Non-State Actors’ for a discussion of the relative success of the Al Qaeda East African cell in Kenya compared to Somalia. 91. Patrick, ‘Weak States and Global Threats’, 35. 92. Aidan Hehir, ‘The Myth of the Failed State and the War on Terror: A Challenge to the Conventional Wisdom’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 1, no. 3 (2007), 315–17. 93. Newman, ‘Weak States’, 481–3. This point is also corroborated by Hehir, who argues that al-Qaeda’s presence in Sudan and Afghanistan was a ‘function of active government support not administrative incapacity and the attractiveness of lawless zones’. Thus, ‘state failure in Afghanistan and Sudan was incidental rather than causal in terms of these states’ linkages with al-Qaeda’ (‘Myth of the Failed State’, 319 – 20). 94. Newman, ‘Weak States’, 465. 95. Patrick, ‘“Failed” States’, 644.

220 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114.

115.

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Newman, ‘Weak States’, 472. Bøa˚s and Jennings, ‘“Failed States”’, 476. Milliken and Krause, ‘State Failure’, 1– 2, 10. Halvorson, States of Disorder. Bøa˚s and Jennings, ‘“Failed States”’. This leads them to expand on their original question and ask: ‘who does a state’s failure help or hurt – and how?’. Halvorson, States of Disorder, Chapters 2 and 3. Call, ‘Fallacy of the Failed State’, 1499. Jonathan Hill, ‘Beyond the Other? A Postcolonial Critique of the Failed State Thesis’, African Identities 3, no. 2 (2005), 148, 150. Pinar Bilgin and Adam David Morton, ‘From “Rogue” to “Failed” States? The Fallacy of Short-Termism’, Politics 24, no. 3 (2004), 169, 174. Bøa˚s and Jennings, ‘“Failed States”’, 477. Milliken and Krause, ‘State Failure’, 10. Patrick, ‘“Failed States”’, 647–8 [emphasis in original]. See also Jonathan Hill, ‘Challenging the Failed State Thesis: IMF and World Bank Intervention and the Algerian Civil War’, Civil Wars 11, no. 1 (2009); and Branwen Gruffydd Jones, ‘The Global Political Economy of Social Crisis: Towards a Critique of the “Failed State” Ideology’, Review of International Political Economy 15, no. 2 (2008). Pinar Bilgin and Adam David Morton, ‘Historicising Representations of “Failed States”: Beyond the Cold-War Annexation of the Social Sciences’, Third World Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2002), 66. Ken Menkhaus, ‘State Collapse in Somalia: Second Thoughts’, Review of African Political Economy 30, no. 97 (2003), 407 – 8. Zartman, Collapsed States, 267–8. See also, for example, Tobias Debiel with Axel Klein (eds), Fragile Peace: State Failure, Violence and Development in Crisis Regions. London: Zed, 2002. Ellis, ‘How to Rebuild Africa’, 136. Gros, State Failure, 2. Gros argues that interventions keep failed states within the aforementioned Type IV category rather than moving them beyond the fluid halting place towards so-called successful statehood. Helman and Ratner, ‘Saving Failed States’. They offer three models. The first two essentially involve an expansion of existing practice of governance assistance (for failing states) and transitional administrations (for failed states) – in each case the sovereignty of the state is left intact. The third would involve direct UN guardianship by resurrecting the dormant trusteeship system. Richard Caplan, A New Trusteeship? The International Administration of War-Torn Territories. Adelphi Paper 341. London: Oxford University Press/International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002, 7. See also Michele Griffin and Bruce Jones, ‘Building Peace through Transitional Authority: New Directions, Major Challenges’, International Peacekeeping 7, no. 4 (2000), 75–90. Fearon and Laitin, ‘Neotrusteeship’, 7. Another key difference is that ‘Western empires were flexible about the sort of governance arrangements that fitted difference contexts’ (for example, recognition of local potentates, indirect rule,

NOTES

116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123.

124.

125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130.

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direct occupation), whereas the ‘political imagination of the new protectorates is much narrower, assuming instead that familiar Western arrangements are entirely appropriate regardless of context’ (James Mayall and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (eds), The New Protectorates: International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States. London: Hurst, 2011, 14). Ignatieff, ‘State Failure and Nation-Building’, 320– 1. Stephen D. Krasner, ‘Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States’, International Security 29, no. 2 (2004), 106–7. Practical barriers include questions of who would appoint the trustee and manage the system – if the UN, how would the Charter, based on sovereign equality of member states, be reconciled with applying a trusteeship to self-governing (even if only nominally) member states; how would the issue of consent be managed; how would the scope of the trusteeship be determined; who would pay for the system; how would the transference of authority back to local actors be decided and managed; would a trusteeship system preclude other ad hoc engagements? On these sorts of issues see also, for example, Fearon and Laitin, ‘Neotrusteeship’; and Helman and Ratner, ‘Saving Failed States’. Krasner, ‘Sharing Sovereignty’, especially 108– 19. Keohane, ‘Political Authority after Intervention’, especially 296– 8. Both Keohane and Krasner use the post-World War II ‘semi-sovereign’ Germany as a premise for their suggestions. The context in which intervention takes place and the concept of good and bad neighbourhoods is central to Keohane’s arguments, given that ‘institutions grow best in institutionalised soil’ (‘Political Authority after Intervention’, 292). Englebert and Tull, ‘Postconflict Reconstruction’. See United Nations (UN), ‘Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations’. UN Doc. A/55/305 – S/2000/809, 21 August 2000. The report was commissioned by the Secretary-General and the committee chaired by Lakhdar Brahimi. It sought to examine the failures of past UN peacekeeping operations. Brooks, ‘Failed States, or State of Failure’, 1164– 5. The obvious rejoinder to this statement is that there has never been a world state or global government. The same, however, is of course true about a number of entities to which the failed state label has been applied. Englebert and Tull, ‘Postconflict Reconstruction’, 110, 118. The term ‘discriminating monopolists’ is taken from Gros, State Failure, 18. Cf. Wolff, ‘Regional Dimensions’. Englebert and Tull, ‘Postconflict Reconstruction’, 121. Louise Anderson, ‘What to Do? The Dilemmas of International Engagement in Fragile States’, in Louise Anderson et al. (eds), Fragile States and Insecure People? Violence, Security and Statehood in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 39. Von Hippel, ‘Proliferation of Collapsed States’, 198. Williams, ‘State Failure in Africa’, 5.

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131. Englebert and Tull, ‘Postconflict Reconstruction’, 125. 132. Cited in Mats Berdal, ‘Lessons Not Learned: The Use of Force in “Peace Operations” in the 1990s’, International Peacekeeping 7, no. 4 (2000), 60. 133. Nicolas Lemay-He´bert, ‘Statebuilding without Nation-building? Legitimacy, State Failure and the Limits of the Institutionalist Approach’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 3, no. 1 (2009), 37. 134. Ibid., 35. Cf. O.P. Richmond, Failed Statebuilding: Intervention, the State, and the Dynamics of Peace Formation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. 135. Englebert and Tull, ‘Postconflict Reconstruction’, 135 – 6. 136. Herbst, ‘Let Them Fail’, 310. 137. Ibid., 311– 16. 138. Ibid., 303. 139. Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, 151. 140. Paul Collier, ‘The Political Economy of State Failure’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 25, no. 2 (2009). However, he concedes that such a compact would be more limited in its application at the extreme end of state failure. Cf. Keohane’s discussion of good and bad neighbourhoods in ‘Political Authority after Intervention’. 141. Ignatieff, ‘State Failure and Nation-Building’, 312– 14. 142. On this idea, see Tobias Hagmann and Markus V. Hoehne’s discussion of alternative forms of authority which transcend conventional dichotomies between state and non-state, formal and informal or public and private in the Somali territories (‘Failures of the State Failure Debate: Evidence from the Somali Territories’, Journal of International Development 21, no. 1 (2009)). See also Nigale Bagayoko et al., ‘Hybrid Security Governance in Africa: Rethinking the Foundation of Security, Justice and Legitimate Public Authority’, Conflict, Security & Development 16, no. 1 (2016). 143. On the complexities of this issue, see, for example, Sukanya Podder, ‘Mainstreaming the Non-State in Bottom-Up State-Building: Linkages between Rebel Governance and Post-Conflict Legitimacy’, Conflict, Security & Development 14, no. 2 (2014). 144. Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, 157. 145. Hagmann and Hoehne, ‘Failures of the State Failure’, 54. Rather than equating the erosion of legal-rational domination to anarchy and social anomy, they call for a more differentiated approach to statehood that, following Herbst, renders intelligible the empirical emanations of political authority within and beyond the nation state (43, 53). 146. Hill, ‘Beyond the Other?’, 139– 40. 147. Call, ‘Fallacy of the “Failed State”’, 1494 – 6; Charles T. Call, ‘Beyond the “Failed State”: Towards Conceptual Alternatives’, European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 2 (2010), 304 – 5. 148. Call, ‘Fallacy of the “Failed State”’, 1492, 1500– 4. 149. Call, ‘Beyond the “Failed State”’. 150. Call, ‘Fallacy of the “Failed State”’, 1505.

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151. Ibid., 1500. 152. Sarah Cohen Wood, ‘What Really Works in Preventing and Rebuilding Failed States: Nation Building, Conflict and Civil Society’, in Muna Ndulo and Margaret Grieco (eds), Failed and Failing States: The Challenges to African Reconstruction. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, 2 – 3. 153. A whole-of-government approach is defined by the OECD as ‘one where a government actively uses formal and/or informal networks across the different agencies within that government to coordinate the design and implementation of the range of interventions that the government’s agencies will be making in order to increase the effectiveness of those interventions in achieving the desired objectives’. See OECD-DAC, Whole of Government Approaches. 154. Finn Stepputat et al., ‘Introduction: Security Arrangements in Fragile States’, in Louise Anderson et al. (eds), Fragile States and Insecure People? Violence, Security and Statehood in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 3. 155. OECD-DAC, Whole of Government Approaches, 17. 156. Center for Global Development, On the Brink: Weak States and US National Security. Report of the Commission on Weak States and US National Security. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2004, 13 – 15. Weak states are defined in terms of capability gaps in three functions of effective government: ensuring security, meeting the basic needs of citizens and maintaining legitimacy. 157. Department for International Development (DfID). Why We Need to Work More Effectively in Fragile States. London: DfID, 2005, 7. DfID’s working definition of fragile states (which contain 14 per cent of the world’s population) is those where the government cannot or will not deliver core functions to the majority of its people. The most important of these are territorial control, safety and security, capacity to manage public resources, delivery of basic services, and the ability to protect and support the ways in which the poorest people sustain themselves. 158. The World Bank coined the term LICUS in 2001 when in it established a task force to examine the challenges to aid effectiveness of low-income countries with weak policies, weak institutions and weak governance. The LICUS initiative, which was launched in 2002, uses two criteria to identify LICUS: per capita income within the threshold of International Development Association (IDA) eligibility; and performance on the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA). That it relies almost entirely on the CPIA to identify LICUS is one of the major shortcomings of the Bank’s approach since, as acknowledged by the Bank, the CPIA does not sufficiently capture some key aspects of state fragility and conflict. Depending on the income level and CPIA rating, a LICUS country is classified in one of three subgroups: ‘core’, ‘severe’ and ‘marginal’. Only the first two categories are included in the total with ‘marginal’ LICUS identified for monitoring purposes only. See World Bank, Engaging with Fragile States.

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159. See World Bank, World Bank Group Assistance to Low-Income Fragile and ConflictAffected States: An Independent Evaluation. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013. This new list still identifies such states according to the previous IDA eligibility and CPIA criteria (as a proxy indicator of FCS), the only exceptions being states where UN and/or regional peacekeeping or peace-building missions have been present during the past three years. Since the 2002 Task Force, the scope of the LICUS Initiative has shifted from general aid effectiveness concerns to state-building and peace-building objectives. 160. Wolff, ‘Regional Dimensions’, 957–9. The World Bank, OECD and DfID all purport to operationalise a similar conceptualisation of fragile states, centred on that outlined the OECD Principles of Good International Engagement in Fragile States: ‘states are fragile when state structures lack political will and/or capacity to provide the basic functions needed for poverty reduction, development and to safeguard the security and human rights of their populations’. See Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). International Engagement in Fragile States: Can’t we do Better? Paris: OECD, 2011. 161. OECD-DAC, Whole of Government Approaches, 8. 162. James Putzel, ‘Why Development Actors Need a Better Definition of “State Fragility”’. Policy Directions Paper, Crisis States Research Centre, LSE, September 2010, 4. Putzel’s main critique is directed at the OECD and its failure to distinguish between ‘the particular conditions of “fragility” and the general conditions of “underdevelopment”’. He argues that by definition all poor countries lack the capacity to reduce poverty but some are more unstable and prone to conflict (fragile) while others remain peaceful (resilient). Thus, ‘the counterpoint to state fragility is not development but state resilience’ (2). 163. Hagmann and Hoehne, ‘Failures of the State Failure’, 44 – 6. 164. Call, ‘Fallacy of the Failed State’, 1495. 165. Hill, ‘Challenging the Failed State Thesis’, 42. 166. Bilgin and Morton, ‘From “Rogue” to “Failed” States?’, 174. 167. Anderson, ‘Antiquated Before They Can Ossify’. 168. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 525. 169. Bilgin and Morton, ‘Historicising Representations of “Failed States”’, 75.

Chapter 2

The State and its Failure in Sub-Saharan Africa

1. Even Liberia and Ethiopia have been described by Jackson as early quasi-states owing to their anomalous invitation into the club of sovereign states at the turn of the twentieth century (Quasi-States, 66 – 7). 2. Clapham, ‘Global-Local Politics’, 84. 3. Jackson, Quasi-States, 67. 4. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 5. Ibid., 39.

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6. Ibid., 40– 1. 7. See Jeffrey Herbst, ‘Responding to State Failure in Africa’, International Security 21, no. 3 (1996 – 7), 127 – 8. He further notes that in both respects precolonial Africa was not dissimilar to feudal Europe, where a spatial definition of power was a late development; and where sovereignty was shared between the Church and various political units. Where Europe and Africa diverge is the speed with which they moved from one system to another: in Europe it was very slow, whereas in Africa there was ‘an abrupt discontinuity between the old political order and the new one’ (ibid., 130). 8. Jackson, Quasi-States, 68. 9. Ali A. Mazrui, ‘The Triple Heritage of the State in Africa’, in Ali Kazancigil (ed.), The State in Global Perspective. Aldershot: Gower, 1986, 107. 10. Clapham, ‘Failed States and Non-States’, 2, 6 [emphasis in original]. 11. Ibid., 6. Clapham takes the term ‘governmentalities’ (sets of attitudes towards power and politics) from Bayart. Bayart, it should be noted, challenges the consensus view of the African state as imported, seeing it instead as deeply rooted in African history. The colonial ‘graft’, he contends, was only of marginal significance and part of the long-term process of indigenous state formation. In focusing on the level of individuals, rather than institutions, he convincingly illustrates a certain authenticity in the contemporary African state and continuity (even stasis) in the mode of African politics (which he sees in terms of access to wealth – the ‘politics of the belly’). In so doing, however, he neglects the parameters in which politics is conducted and how the discontinuity in those parameters has transformed politics and society into something quite unfamiliar to Africa’s past. See Jean-Francois Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. 12. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 525. The basic premise of colonialism should be borne in mind – colonies were paying propositions, generating profit for the colonial government which was, in turn, part of a larger imperial economy, centred on the metropole. 13. Robert H. Jackson, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Robert H. Jackson and Alan James (eds), States in a Changing World: A Contemporary Analysis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, 139. 14. Edmund Burke advised: ‘Never entirely nor at once depart from Antiquity’ for ‘people will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors’. This sensitivity to history was reflected in domestic British politics and influenced colonial policy. 15. Mahmoud Mamdani, ‘Indirect Rule, Civil Society and Ethnicity’, in Preben Kaarsholm (ed.), From Post-Traditional to Post-Modern? Interpreting the Meaning of Modernity in Third World Urban Societies. Occasional Paper 14. International Development Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark, 1995, 222. Mamdani notes that the basic features of indirect rule were first sketched in the colony of Natal in the nineteenth century but were elaborated by the British in equatorial Africa in the early part of the twentieth century, then emulated by

226

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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the French after Word War I, the Belgians in the 1930s and finally the Portuguese in the 1950s. Mahmoud Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. See also Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, for an interesting account of how Europeans misunderstood African ‘traditions’ and as a consequence ‘invented’ tribes and transformed ‘flexible custom into hard prescription’. For example, the British privileged the Buganda Kingdom in Uganda and the Belgians the Tutsi in Ruanda-Urundi – as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. Clapham, ‘Failed States and Non-States’, 6. Jackson, Quasi-States, 71. Jackson, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, 141. Ieuan L.L. Griffiths, The African Inheritance. London: Routledge, 1995. G.L. Beer, cited in Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 525. Griffiths, African Inheritance, 78 – 9. Kaplan, for example, notes that: ‘Part of West Africa’s quandary is that although its population belts are horizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away from the Sahara and toward the tropical abundance of the Atlantic littoral, the borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at cross-purposes with demography and topography [. . .] The Lome´-Abidjan coastal corridor is one burgeoning megalopolis that by any rational economic and geographic standard should constitute a single sovereignty, rather than the five (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria) into which it is currently divided’ (‘Coming Anarchy’, 52). Griffiths, African Inheritance, 86 – 7, 91. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 91 – 2. Ibid., 123. Cited in Jackson, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, 140. Saadia Touval, ‘Treaties, Borders, and the Partition of Africa’, Journal of African History 7, no. 2 (1966), 290– 1. Ibid. Treaties were often useful in conferring bargaining advantages between the European powers and although European powers acted in their own interest, they considered their interest in some cases ‘to try to preserve the territorial integrity of African polities’ and, in this way, ‘indigenous African political circumstances indirectly influenced border delimitations’. When, despite treaty obligations, a territory was ceded to a rival power, special arrangements were sometimes made to provide for the needs of the local African population (e.g. Somali grazing rights in the Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty), 288– 9. Often the treaties played no part in territorial negotiations yet there were cases when African appeals to the Europeans to honour treaty obligations

NOTES

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

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were heeded (e.g. Botswana’s appeal to remain a British protectorate was agreed, minus a strip of territory which was ceded to the British South Africa Company), 290. Ibid. Griffiths, African Inheritance; Jackson, Quasi-States. The small economic size of countries means a range of scale economies cannot be realised, resulting in low income and hence limited investment in state capacity which, in turn, impacts on social cohesion. See Collier, ‘Political Economy’, 223. See Herbst, States and Power. See Griffiths, African Inheritance, Chapter 9. It should be further noted that capital cities were located away from the centres of power that had developed in pre-colonial Africa. See Herbst, State and Power, 16 –17. Griffiths, African Inheritance, 92, 110. Herbst, ‘Responding to State Failure’, 120. Clapham, ‘Global-Local Politics’, 80. Jackson and Rosberg, ‘Sovereignty and Underdevelopment’, 15. Cited in Luc van de Goor et al. (eds), Between Development and Destruction: An Enquiry into the Causes of Conflict in Post-Colonial States. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, 15. On the dimming of nationalism after independence, see also Clifford Geertz, ‘After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States’, in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Writing in the late 1960s, he argues that the idea that the ‘nationalists would make the state and the state would make the nation’ has not borne fruit and it is not easy to avoid confronting the fact that ‘to make Italy is not make Italians’ (240). James Mayall, ‘The Legacy of Colonialism’, in Simon Chesterman et al. (eds), Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2005, 41. Clifford Geertz, ‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States’, in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973, 269. Mazrui, ‘Triple Heritage’, 112. Gros provides further credence to this argument in an interesting account of how Haitians’ experience of institutions in Africa prior to their capture might have influenced their attitude towards the state in Haiti in its colonial and post-colonial forms and, therefore, affected the outcome of state-making in Haiti and, in the process, mortgaged Haitian development. See Gros, State Failure, Chapter 3. He argues that Africans took to the New World pre-slave trade institutions – especially informal ones – and patterns of behaviour that were inimical to state-making in an enclosed space. (It is noteworthy that slave traders were not inclined to acquire Africans from groups with a history of strong centralised authority, considering them troublesome, and, by the same token, those centralised African states were likely collaborators in the slave trade and, therefore, unlikely to sell their own citizens into servitude.) These behaviour patterns were reinforced by New World social institutions (industrial slavery) and natural constraints (Haitian

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

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geography). They became successively entrenched as a result of the short life expectancy of slaves (28 – 30 years) and restrictions on natural reproduction among slaves in favour of replacement with new slaves. In other words, AfroHaitians did not live long enough to undergo an existential transformation that might have obliterated Old World habits. Instead, the response to the new dispensation was marronage (evasion), in much the same way that Africans would devise various strategies of flight in response to the closedfrontier (post-)colonial state – to ostensibly recreate pre-slave trade and pre-colonial communities respectively. Marronage was ‘the expression of African resistance to the efforts at statecraft based on the European model’ and ‘demonstrated the resilience of African institutions through path dependence’ (79). The ‘legendary volatility of Haitian politics’ Gros argues ‘does not underscore Haitian immaturity; rather it is a consequence of the lack of popular legitimacy of the state’ which came to be seen as ‘something of a tin god’ (82). Mamdani, ‘Indirect Rule’, 223 – 4. Ibid., 225– 6. The character of patrimonial rule is considered in the third section of this chapter. Geertz, ‘Integrative Revolution’, 270. Bruce J. Berman, ‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State: The Politics of Uncivil Nationalism’, African Affairs 97, no. 388 (1998), 323. Geertz, ‘Integrative Revolution’, 274. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 261. Pauline H. Baker and John A. Ausink, ‘State Collapse and Ethnic Violence: Toward a Predictive Model’, Parameters 26, no. 1 (1996), 3. See also, for example, Nelson Kasfir, ‘Domestic Anarchy, Security Dilemmas and Violent Predation’, in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Geertz, ‘Integrative Revolution’, 264. Note that although the traditional ‘state’ emerged at independence, this had not always been the case through colonialism. For example, Rwanda and Burundi had been ruled together in a single colony – Ruanda-Urundi. Conversely Somalia was split between British Somaliland and the Italian trust territory of Somalia; it also lost territory to Kenya and Ethiopia which was not returned at independence – and has led to continued Somali irredentism since. Somalia also has a predominantly nomadic society and has never had a centralised political system. Only in Swaziland, Lesotho and Zanzibar did the traditional shape and identity of the state continue unchanged through colonialism into the post-colony. Zanzibar, however, joined with Tanganyika to form Tanzania in 1964. Pierre Englebert, ‘Pre-Colonial Institutions, Post-Colonial States, and Economic Development in Tropical Africa’, Political Research Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2000), 13 – 14. Englebert further notes that in all three cases, the

NOTES

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

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encroachment of Boer settlers from South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century led authorities to request the establishment of a British protectorate, ‘choosing colonisation over the threat of institutional extinction’. Upon independence Lesotho and Swaziland resumed monarchic structures. Botswana became a republic but the hegemony of the traditional Tswana hierarchy remained unchallenged and a descendent of the royal family assumed the presidency. Jackson, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, 140. Griffiths, African Inheritance, 123. Jackson, Quasi-States, 68. Jackson, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, 140. Mohammed Ayoob, ‘The New-Old Disorder in the Third World’, Global Governance 1, no. 1 (1995), 73. Jackson, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, 141. See David Armstrong, The Rise of the International Organisation: A Short History. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982, 105 –12, for a brief history of the origins of the OAU. Englebert et al., for example, identify 34 cases of disputes among African countries over border issues and although these represent only about 29 per cent of Africa’s 104 borders, they have involved no less than two thirds of its countries. They further note that since 1960, 57 per cent of all international dispute cases brought before the International Court of Justice were African (yet only 33 per cent of all bilateral boundaries worldwide are in Africa). See Pierre Englebert et al., ‘Dismemberment and Suffocation: A Contribution to the Debate on African Boundaries’, Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 10 (2002), 1101. African leaders have been keen to cling onto their new-found sovereign status and both border preservation and limited federative arrangements between states should perhaps, at least partially, be seen in this light. The OAU, as Julius Nyerere put it, became ‘a trade union of African leaders, essentially designing the rules for their own survival’. See Jeffrey Herbst, ‘The Creation and Maintenance of National Boundaries in Africa’, International Organization 43, no. 4 (1989). Herbst, ‘Let Them Fail’, 307. The Eritrean liberation movement stressed their separate colonial status under Italian rule and therefore, in keeping with the rules of decolonisation, claimed its right to self-determination on the basis of the former colony. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) also made similar claims about separate colonial administration, as has Somaliland but as yet the latter has not been recognised. The only other incidences of boundary redrawing were the return of 26 villages in the Kantora region from Senegal to Gambia in the 1960s and the shifting of a line of the Mali-Mauritania border. In both cases contradictory colonial treaties had resulted in discrepancies between the delimitation of boundaries (on maps) and their demarcation (on the ground). Other such disputes over ambiguous or ill-defined borders have

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67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

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not resulted in any boundary changes. See Englebert et al., ‘Dismemberment and Suffocation’, 1098. Jackson, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, 140. Clapham, ‘Failed States and Non-States’, 5. Clapham, thus, suggests that ‘those areas of Africa that maintained reasonably settled and effective state structures during the period prior to colonialism are proving best able to do so as the institutional legacies of colonialism fade’ (‘Global-Local Politics’, 87). In contrast, Englebert’s research points in the opposite direction – he shows that (except where there is a match between pre- and post-colonial states as in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland) ‘the more state-like on average the precolonial societies of today’s African states, the weaker the quality of contemporary governance. Hence, the experience of large-scale statehood appears inimical to state capacity and development’. He suggests that ‘the more state-like were a country’s pre-colonial institutions, the weaker the allegiance of these populations to the post-colonial state’. In other words, ‘societies with strong state traditions seem to find the post-colonial state less acceptable, less legitimate, more arbitrary than their more lineage-oriented counterparts that can be thought of as providing the modern state with an institutional blank page’. More in support of Clapham’s hypothesis, he also shows that the greater the variety of pre-colonial political cultures and systems that a state comprises, the weaker its capacity’. This is also true where a statelike pre-colonial political culture is split across colonial boundaries. See Englebert, ‘Pre-Colonial Institutions’, 20. Taken together, albeit on different premises, both authors uphold the basic point that the post-colonial state is not legitimated by the societies over which it presides and that this reduces its capacity. Pierre Englebert, ‘The Contemporary African State: Neither African Nor State’, Third World Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1997), 767, 769. Jackson, Quasi-States, 135– 6. Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, 146 [emphasis in original]. Jackson, Quasi-States, 104. The term ‘autocolonialisation’ was coined by Karen Dawisha to refer to the process whereby the target country seeks or accepts a diminution in its sovereignty in the hope of receiving certain benefits, primarily security and material, from an external power. See Karen Dawisha, ‘Constructing and Deconstructing Empire in the Post-Soviet Space’, in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrot (eds), The End of Empire: The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996, 339. Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, 147. The term ‘neo-colonial peace’ is taken from Nicholas Van de Walle, ‘The Economic Correlates of State Failure: Taxes, Foreign Aid, and Policies’, in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, 107– 8.

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74. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of Unity, 1967. Reprinted in Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, 240. 75. Robert S. Litwak and Samuel F. Wells, Superpower Competition and Security in the Third World. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1988, x. 76. Herbst, ‘Let them Fail’, 306. 77. Examples taken from ibid. and Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, 147. Somalia had previously received training and military aid from the Soviets before the Somali-Soviet relationship deteriorated in the face of increasing SovietEthiopian co-operation. Indeed, as Clapham notes: ‘the states of the Horn, most damagingly of all, sought and obtained the patronage of the rival superpowers, in order to gain access to the weaponry that they needed both to control unruly domestic systems and to pursue their rivalries with one another’. 78. Andrew J. Pierre, The Global Politics of Arms Sales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982, 3. 79. Ibid., 5. 80. Ibid., 255. 81. Ibid., 10 – 11. 82. Clapham, ‘Failed States and Non-States’, 9. 83. Cited in Mohammed Ayoob, ‘State-Making, State-Breaking and State Failure: Explaining the Roots of “Third World” Insecurity’, in Luc van de Goor et al. (eds), Between Development and Destruction: An Enquiry into the Causes of Conflict in Post-Colonial States. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, 81. 84. Gros, ‘Towards a Taxonomy’, 464. 85. Abdel-Fatau Musah, ‘Privatisation of Security, Arms Proliferation and the Process of State Collapse in Africa’, in Jennifer Milliken (ed.), State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 176, 168. He contends that the need to build new alliances in Africa to protect economic interests and contain unfriendly regimes remains paramount. 86. Michael T. Klare, ‘The Deadly Connection: Paramilitary Bands, Small Arms Diffusion, and State Failure’, in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, 124. 87. Musah, ‘Privatisation of Security’, 166. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 168– 9. For example, he documents how the Rwandan invasion of the DRC in 1996 took place with guidance from a US-built military base in Cyangugu, near the Congolese border and that African-American mercenaries and US private security firm Brown & Root trained and supported Rwandese forces with arms and logistics and participated in the massacre of thousands of Hutus. On the other side, a Serb mercenary army, put together and supported by the French internal and external secret services, propped up Mobutu’s forces. In addition, American Mineral Fields (a mining company with close ties to International Defence and Security PMC) part-financed and militarily supported Kabila’s campaign against Mobutu.

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90. Ibid., 158. For example, in return for arms and mercenary support from Sandline International to restore his administration, Sierra Leone’s deposed President Kabbah agreed to cede 30 per cent of the country’s diamantiferous landmass to Sandline’s mining partner DiamondWorks. 91. Ibid., 174. 92. Robert Muggah with Francis Sang, ‘The Enemy Within: Rethinking Arms Availability in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Conflict, Security & Development 13, no. 4 (2013), 421 [emphasis in original]. 93. Ibid., 422. 94. Ibid., 423. 95. Boutros-Ghali, ‘Supplement’, para. 63. 96. Muggah and Sang, ‘Enemy Within’, 418. Part of the problem, they suggest, is that arms availability is viewed in reservedly supply side terms and attempts to regulate weaponry begin (and often end) with turning off the supply tap. 97. Ibid., 434. 98. Ibid., 432. 99. Woodward, ‘Failed States’, 56. 100. Manufacturing accounted for 9 per cent of economic activity in Africa in 1965; by the late 1980s it had only risen to 11 per cent – and much of it was inefficient. See Thomas Callaghy, ‘Africa and the World Political Economy: More Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place’, in John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild (eds), Africa in World Politics: The African State System in Flux, 3rd edn. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000, 45. 101. Cited in Carol Lancaster, ‘Foreign Exchange and the Economic Crisis in Africa’, in Zaki Ergas (ed.), The African State in Transition. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987, 217. 102. As early as the mid-nineteenth century Africa was a leading supplier of palm oil, groundnuts, coffee and cocoa. European colonialism extended the export economy into the hinterland and not only left a legacy of economies highly dependent on trade sectors but fashioned certain trading patterns (exporting primary commodities to the metropole and in return purchasing manufacturing goods) that have not really changed since and the largest trading partner typically remains the ex-colonial power. See Nicholas Van de Walle, Africa and the World Economy: Continued Marginalisation or Reengagement?’, in John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild (eds), Africa in World Politics: The African State System in Flux, 3rd edn. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000, 264– 7. 103. High taxation and currency overvaluation created disincentives for agricultural export producers, leading many to turn instead to subsistence farming or even to smuggling crops into neighbouring countries where the terms of trade were more favourable. 104. Callaghy, ‘Africa and the World Political Economy’, 45. 105. Van de Walle, ‘Africa and the World Economy’, 265.

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106. Callaghy, ‘Africa and the World Political Economy’, 46. For example, 43 of 139 British firms with industrial investments in Africa withdrew their holdings during the 1980s. Callaghy notes that Africa’s return on investment fell from 30.7 per cent in the 1960s to just 2.5 per cent in the 1980s (45). Further, Africa’s share of global foreign investment was 4.5 per cent in the 1980s; by 1990 it had fallen to 0.7 per cent (52). There was a subsequent rise but mostly in the mineral sector and still left Africa with a smaller percentage of foreign investment than it had enjoyed a decade earlier (60). 107. Ibid., 46. 108. Van de Walle, ‘Economic Correlates of State Failure’, 108 –10. By way of comparison, he notes that at their peak, Marshall Plan resources accounted for 2.5 per cent of the GDP of countries like France and Germany. 109. Carol Lancaster, ‘Africa in World Affairs’, in John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild (eds), Africa in World Politics: The African State System in Flux. 3rd edn. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000, 214. 110. Jeffrey Herbst, ‘The Structural Adjustment of Politics in Africa’, World Development 18, no. 7 (1990). See also Lancaster, ‘Foreign Exchange’. 111. Mayall, ‘Legacy of Colonialism’, 47. See also William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998, who argues that rulers subjected to heightened vulnerability in the face of external pressures for reform developed new strategies, contracting economic roles to outsiders and transforming patronage politics into warlord politics (1– 12). Echoing Mayall, Reno contends that ‘control over commerce rather than territory has become the key demarcator of political power’ (71). 112. Musah, ‘Privatisation of Security’, 167. 113. Van de Walle, ‘Economic Correlates of State Failure’, 111. 114. Callaghy, ‘Africa and the World Political Economy’, 57. 115. Richard Jeffries, ‘The State, Structural Adjustment and Good Government in Africa’, Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 31, no. 1 (1993), 24. 116. Van de Walle, ‘Africa and the World Economy’, 275. 117. Ibid., 276. 118. Van de Walle, ‘Economic Correlates of State Failure’, 111. 119. Ibid., 111– 12. 120. Ibid., 112. 121. Van de Walle, ‘Africa and the World Economy’, 276. 122. Callaghy, ‘Africa in the World Political Economy’, 48. While much bilateral debt was rescheduled by Western governments through the Paris Club (an ad hoc forum of creditor countries that reschedules public debt of developing states provided they are engaged in economic reform programmes of the IMF or World Bank), IFI debt could not be formally rescheduled and arrears accumulated, leading some countries to be cut off from IMF and World Bank assistance. Between 1980 and 1986, 25 countries rescheduled their debts with the Paris Club some 105 times (Van de Walle, ‘Africa and the World Economy’, 274). In 1996 the World Bank and IMF launched the Heavily

234

123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130. 131.

132. 133.

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Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative to reduce debt burdens to sustainable levels. The Initiative underwent a comprehensive review in 1999 to allow the provision of faster, deeper and broader debt relief, and to strengthen the link between debt relief and poverty reduction. In addition to addressing poverty, countries have to have a good track record of reform through IMF and World Bank programmes to be eligible for HIPC Initiative assistance. At the time of writing, 36 countries are receiving debt relief under the HIPC Initiative – 30 of them are in Africa. In 2005, the HIPC Initiative was supplemented by the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) to help HIPCs (and other countries with a per capita income of US$ 380 a year or less) advance towards the Millennium Development Goals. Under the MDRI, three multilateral institutions (the IMF, World Bank and the African Development Fund) have cancelled 100 per cent of their debt claims on countries that have qualified for the HIPC Initiative. The Paris Club also continues to provide debt rescheduling – which also now includes concessional relief of multilateral debt. See International Monetary Fund (IMF), ‘Debt Relief Under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative’. IMF Factsheet, September 2014. Available at: http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/hipc. htm [accessed November 2014]. See also Callaghy, ‘Africa and the World Economy’, 73 – 8. IMF, ‘Debt Relief’, 2. World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. A LongTerm Perspective Study. Washington, DC: World Bank, 1989, 15. Jeffries, ‘State, Structural Adjustment and Good Government’, 20, 28. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. See, for example, Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratisation and Nationalist Conflict. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000; and Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, who argue that most nationalist conflicts have occurred in states that experienced a partial improvement in political or civil liberties in the year before violence broke out. Rwanda and Burundi provide compelling evidence of this. Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, ‘Popular Legitimacy in African Multi-Ethnic States’, Journal of Modern African Studies 22, no. 2 (1984), 178. Robert H. Dorff, ‘Democratisation and Failed States: The Challenge of Ungovernability’, Parameters 26, no. 2 (1996), 21. Englebert and Tull, ‘Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa’, 114. Writing in 2008, they note that in some countries more than 20 per cent of total aid is channelled through NGOs, up from less than 1 per cent in 1990, as donors have encouraged NGOs to become service providers. Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, 149. Ibid., 149– 50.

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134. Woodward, ‘Failed States’, 59. 135. Lancaster, ‘Africa in World Affairs’, 219, 208– 9. As a percentage of the GNP of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, aid averaged 5 per cent in the mid1990s, compared to 10 per cent in the 1980s. 136. Herbst, ‘Responding to State Failure’, 124. 137. Zartman, Collapsed States, 6. 138. Ibid., 2. 139. Ibid., 2 – 3. 140. See ibid., 8 – 10 for the following account. 141. Between 1963 and 1970 alone there were nearly 30 successful military coups in Africa (W.F. Gutteridge, Military Regimes in Africa. London: Meuthen, 1975); the first year in post-independence Africa that a coup did not overthrow a government was 1989 (Von Hippel, ‘Proliferation of Collapsed States’, 198). See also Samuel Decalo, ‘Military Coups and Military Regimes in Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies 11, no. 1 (1973). 142. See also Aristide R. Zolberg, ‘The Specter of Anarchy: African States Verging on Dissolution’, Dissent, Summer 1992, 310, for collaborative account of this sequence: ‘Beleaguered governments relied heavily on the instruments of despotic power [. . .] but the strategy proved self-defeating, for the agents of repression quickly learned where the true power lay’. Soldiers had often been recruited from hinterland regions, ‘unspoiled by the dawning of political consciousness: hence they tended to be even more parochial than the civilians they replaced and, with no experience of statecraft, quicker to fall back on brute force’. 143. Zartman, Collapsed States, 7. 144. Peter Wallensteen, ‘State Failure, Ethnocracy and Armed Conflict: Towards New Conceptions of Governance’. Paper presented at the ‘Failed States II: Sources of Prevention, Modes of Response and Conditions of State Success and Renewal’ Conference, Purdue University, West Lafayette, 8– 11 April 1999. 145. Wallensteen, ‘Beyond State Failure’. This delicate balance of state power dates back to the debate between Hobbes and Locke on the amount of control a state should legitimately possess and the constraints that ought to be placed upon it. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan; and Locke, Two Treatises of Government. 146. Ali A. Mazrui, ‘The Failed State and Political Collapse in Africa’, in Olara A. Otunnu and Michael W. Doyle (eds), Peacemaking and Peacekeeping for the New Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998, 235. Somalia under Siyad Barre was a case when tyranny ultimately led to state failure and the Congo in 1960 a case where anarchic conditions nearly destroyed the postcolonial state. 147. Mazrui, ‘Failed State and Political Collapse’, 236 – 7. 148. Rotberg, ‘Failure and Collapse’, 25 – 6. 149. Tonya Langford, ‘Things Fall Apart: State Failure and the Politics of Intervention’, International Studies Review 1, no. 1 (1999), 63.

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150. Kalevi J. Holsti, The State, War and the State of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 104; and Zolberg, ‘Specter of Anarchy’, 309. See also Mann, ‘Autonomous Power’, 113– 14. Mann defines the two categories of power thus: despotic power refers to the range of actions which the state elite is empowered to undertake without routine, institutionalised negotiation with civil society groups; infrastructural power is the capacity of the state actually to penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm. Put more succinctly, the former is state elite power over civil society and latter is the power of the state to centrally co-ordinate the activities of civil society through its own infrastructure. 151. Berman, for example, argues that ‘civil society in the sense in which it ostensibly exists in Western liberal democracies does not exist in Africa, where the boundaries between state and society, public and private, are neither clear nor consistent (‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State’, 340). Jeffries similarly disputes the notion that there has been a flowering of civil society in Africa, arguing that various forms of local-level arrangements have been romanticised (‘State, Structural Adjustment and Good Government’, 32). 152. Thomas Callaghy, ‘The State as Lame Leviathan: The Patrimonial Administrative State in Africa’, in Zaki Ergas (ed.), The African State in Transition. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. 153. Mann, ‘Autonomous Power’, 115. 154. Ibid., 116. He refers to the oscillation between imperial/patrimonial (high despotic and low infrastructural power) and feudal regimes (low on both despotic and infrastructural power) first analysed by Weber (135). 155. Ibid., 126. 156. Wallerstein, Politics of Unity, 247. 157. Callaghy, ‘State as Lame Leviathan’, 89. 158. Englebert, ‘Pre-Colonial Institutions’, 11–12. More specifically, he argues that in historically non-legitimate, incongruent or mismatched states, political contestation will turn into challenges to the state itself and in such states leaders find it less destabilising to adopt neo-patrimonial strategies of power. 159. Guenther Roth, ‘Personal Rulership, Patrimonialism and Empire-Building in the New States’, World Politics 20, no. 2 (1968), 204– 6. Note that Englebert (arguably erroneously) denies the importance of ethnicity – instead focusing on the incongruence of pre- and post-colonial political systems. 160. Michael Bratton and Nicholas Van de Walle, ‘Neopatrimonial Rule in Africa’, in Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 60. Weber distinguished the patrimonial authority of small political systems from rational-legal authority and contended that the emergence of the latter depended on the end of the former (see Weber, Economy and Society). The remainder of this paragraph draws on the distinction drawn by Bratton and de Walle, ‘Neopatrimonial Rule’, 59 – 63. They further note that while ‘neo-patrimonial practices can be found in all polities, it is the core feature of politics in Africa and in a small number of

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161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

168. 169. 170. 171. 172.

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other states, including Haiti’, 61 [emphasis in original]. See also Robin Theobald, ‘Patrimonialism’, World Politics 34, no. 4 (1982), for a comprehensive review of the concept and practice. On departicipation, see Nelson Kasfir, The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation and Ethnicity in African Politics with a Case Study of Uganda. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976. Crawford Young, ‘The End of the Post-Colonial State in Africa? Reflections on Changing African Political Dynamics’, African Affairs 103, no. 410 (2004), 34. Berman, ‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State’, 335, citing Achille Mbembe. See also Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. See, for example, Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg. Personal Rule in Black Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. Bayart, State in Africa. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz. Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Oxford: James Currey, 1999, 15. Peter P. Ekeh, ‘Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 1 (1975), 108. Ekeh explains the relationship of the two publics in terms of citizenship. The individual sees his duties as a citizen as moral obligations to benefit and sustain the primordial public of which he is a member. While his duties to the primordial public are material, his rights are intangible, immaterial benefits. The civic public, however, is amoral and seen entirely in material terms but with a bias – while he seeks to gain from the civic public there is no moral urge on him to give back anything in return: ‘Duties are de-emphasised while rights are squeezed out of the civic public with the amorality of an artful dodger’ (106 – 107). Chabal and Daloz similarly highlight a certain moral economy of corruption in Africa: while petty corruption is usually despised by the population at large as self-serving, there is often recognition that elites’ more significant abuse of power serves larger more legitimate ‘moral’ purposes (Africa Works, 159). Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works, 14. Ibid., 7. The term ‘shadow state’ was coined by William Reno in Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works, 9; and Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 528. See William Reno, ‘Explaining Patterns of Violence in Collapsed States’, Contemporary Security Policy 30, no. 2 (2009). On states as protection rackets, see particularly Charles Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organised Crime’, in Peter D. Evans et al. (eds), Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. This was a tactic that Amin, for example, honed into a fine art.

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173. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’, 527. 174. Bayart, State in Africa, 78. Bayart thus suggests that Joeseph’s characterisation of the relationship between power and enrichment in terms of prebendalism rather than patrimonialism is apt (80). See Richard A. Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 175. Holsti, State, War and the State of War, 114. 176. Cited in Zolberg, ‘Specter of Anarchy’, 309. 177. Bratton and Van de Walle, ‘Neopatrimonial Rule’, 67. Control of the state apparatus and capital city has of course sufficed for both political survival (and the trappings that go with it) and diplomatic purposes. As noted in the previous chapter, part of the state failure pathology is to associate control of the capital city with control of the state. 178. Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works, 161. 179. Ibid., 162. As the neo-patrimonial state weakens, the magendo (second economy) becomes prevalent as a resource base for clientalism but is harder to control and competition from rival big men intensifies. See, for example, Reno, Warlord Politics. 180. Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works, 14. 181. Rotberg, ‘Failure and Collapse’, 12. 182. Ibid., 20– 1. 183. Ibid., 25. 184. Ibid., 26. 185. Clapham, ‘Failed States and Non-States’, 9. 186. Ibid., 8. 187. Patrick Chabal, ‘Book Review’, International Affairs 85, no. 1 (2009), 190. 188. Jackson and Rosberg, Personal Rule. Le Vine similarly argues that post-colonial neo-patrimonialism has traditional roots which have been translated and adapted to the modern political arena. See Victor T. Le Vine, ‘African Patrimonial Regimes in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Modern African Studies 18, no. 4 (1980). 189. Berman, ‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State’, 319. 190. Ibid., 316. 191. Reno, Corruption and State Politics, 33. Reno thus argues that ‘state decay and shadow state construction are firmly rooted in colonial rule’ (25). 192. Berman, ‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State’, 316. 193. Ibid., 317. 194. Ibid., 333. 195. Georg Sorensen, ‘Sovereignty, Security and State Failure’. Paper presented at the ‘Failed States III: Globalisation and the Failed State’ Conference, Florence, Italy, 7 – 10 April 2000. 196. Reno, Warlord Politics, 72. 197. Zolberg, ‘Specter of Anarchy’, 309. 198. Ibid., 311, 310.

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199. Ibid., 303. 200. Young, ‘End of the Post-Colonial State’, 43, 46. He further notes that this trend fed on two altered international circumstances: the end of the Cold War removed the motivation for outside powers to intervene militarily in support of friendly African regimes; and a new-found disposition within Africa for involvement in conflicts in neighbouring states, which eroded the older OAU doctrine of non-intervention. Conflicts readily flowed across borders creating the ‘bad neighbourhood’ syndrome, aided by the growing pool of black market weaponry and mercenaries, to which the development of child soldiering added another dimension to these new conflicts (43 –4). 201. Kalevi J. Holsti, ‘International Theory and War in the Third World’, in Brian L. Job (ed.), The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992, 38. 202. Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’, 172. 203. Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict and the International System. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995, 115. 204. Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History’, 71. 205. Ayoob, ‘New-Old Disorder’, 59. 206. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968, 123. 207. Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’, 172. See also Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History’. 208. Ayoob, ‘State-Making’, 71; Cohen et al., ‘The Paradoxical Nature of State Making: The Violent Creation of Order’, American Political Science Review 75, no. 4 (1981). 209. Cohen et al., ‘Paradoxical Nature of State Making’, 909. 210. Christopher Cramer, Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries. London: Hurst, 2006, 282. 211. Ibid., 51. 212. Ibid., 208– 9. 213. Ayoob, ‘State-Making’, 71 – 2. 214. Mohammed Ayoob, ‘The Security Predicament of the Third World State: Reflections on State Making in Comparative Perspective’, in Brian L. Job (ed.), The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992, 73. 215. Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’, 169. 216. Georg Sorensen, ‘War Making and State Making – Why it Doesn’t Work in the Third World’. Paper presented at the ‘Failed States IV: Structures, Cases, Policies’ Conference, Florence, Italy, 10 – 14 April 2001, 4 – 5. See also Jeffrey Herbst, ‘War and the State in Africa’, International Security 14, no. 4 (1990), 117. 217. Sorensen, ‘War Making and State Making’, 6– 7. 218. Yannis, ‘State Collapse’, 175. 219. Sorensen, ‘War Making and State Making’, 8.

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220. Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’, 185. 221. Herbst, ‘War and the State’, 118. This is not to suggest that there have been no inter-state wars in Africa prior to or after decolonisation – although they were notably rare prior to the late 1990s. Obvious exceptions to such a claim are Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1978–9 (but this was strictly limited to overthrowing Amin); Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara (which has not been internationally recognised); conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia (again Somali irredentism has not been recognised); and, more recently, the Congo war which has drawn in many of its neighbours, leading some to call it Africa’s first continental war (see, for example, Ge´rard Prunier, From Genocide to Continental War: The ‘Congolese’ Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa. London: Hurst, 2009). Rather, it is to suggest that the survival of the state (as opposed to the governing regime) has not been threatened as a result of these wars. 222. Herbst, ‘War and the State’, 123– 9. 223. Richard Joseph and Jeffrey Herbst, ‘Correspondence: Responding to State Failure in Africa’, International Security 22, no. 2 (1997), 175– 6. 224. Herbst, ‘War and the State’, 119, 138. 225. Clapham, ‘Global-Local Politics’, 90. 226. Ellis, ‘How to Rebuild Africa’, 148. 227. Pierre Englebert, ‘Born-again Buganda or the Limits of Traditional Resurgence in Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies 40, no. 3 (2002), 347; cf. Ekeh, ‘Colonialism and the Two Publics’. 228. See Pierre Englebert, ‘Patterns and Theories of Traditional Resurgence in Tropical Africa’, Mondes en De´velopment 30, no. 118 (2002). 229. Carolyn Logan, ‘The Roots of Resilience: Exploring Popular Support for African Traditional Authorities’, African Affairs 112, no. 448 (2013), 355. 230. Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State. Oxford: James Currey, 1992., 315; Englebert, ‘Patterns and Theories’, 17. 231. Young, ‘End of the Post-Colonial State’, 48 – 9. He argues that ‘the silent incorporation of many defining attributes of the colonial state in its postindependence successor for three decades validated the post-colonial characterisation’ but that ‘by the 1980s a corrosive dynamic was visible, weakening most states, and by the 1990s eviscerating several’. The reordering of politics since is ‘poorly captured by the notion of post-coloniality’ and most states have now ceased to resemble the colonial state (24 – 5). 232. Ali A. Mazrui, ‘The Blood of Experience: The Failed State and Political Collapse in Africa’, World Policy Journal 12, no. 1 (1995), 28. 233. Jackson and Rosberg, ‘Sovereignty and Underdevelopment’. 234. Ayoob, Third World Security Predicament; Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’. 235. Christopher Clapham, ‘Discerning the New Africa’, International Affairs 74, no. 2 (1998), 263. 236. Englebert, ‘Pre-Colonial Institutions’, 11. 237. Jackson, Quasi-States, 82.

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Chapter 3 Burundi: The Freezing of a Failed Kingdom 1. In Bantu languages, the following prefixes apply: Burundi refers to the country or the kingdom; Barundi to the inhabitants (Burundians) – singular Murundi; Kirundi to the language of Burundi. The prefix ‘Ba’ for Hutu and Tutsi has been dropped throughout in line with common practice. 2. The apt appellation of ‘false twin’ is borrowed from Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 34. Their geographical proximity, similar dynastical histories and peoples, together with a shared colonial experience, leads to undue comparisons between the two countries (especially with regard to their traditional sociopolitical characteristics). 3. Thomas Laely, ‘Peasants, Local Communities, and Central Power in Burundi’, Journal of Modern African Studies 35, no. 4 (1997), 697. 4. David Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda: Local Loyalties, Regional Royalties’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 2 (2001), 257. As noted by Newbury and others, deciphering the particularities of Burundi’s history (especially prior to the nineteenth century but also since) is wrought with difficulties. It was not in the interests of the Barundi to record history and it has been in their interests to reinterpret it. See also, for example, the discussion of Vansina’s work in Rene´ Lemarchand, ‘Burundi’, in Rene´ Lemarchand (ed.), African Kingships in Perspective: Political Change and Modernisation in Monarchical Settings. London: Frank Cass, 1977, 95 – 6. 5. On its evolution, see Edith R. Sanders, ‘The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective’, Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969). The variant widely accepted (and utilised) by the beginning of the twentieth century derived from John Hanning Speke’s observations in 1862 – according to which everything ‘civilised’ about the kingdom was attributable to the Tutsi who, with their Caucasian features, were considered Hamites (not African in origin) and racially superior to the native Hutu who, with their Negro features, were preordained to servitude. Although Speke ‘admitted hypothesising on the history of the kingdoms he visited’, as Newbury notes, ‘such was the authority of the written word that Speke’s admitted conjecture became accepted as truth, and over the next century subsequent further research was conducted fully within Speke’s intellectual framework’ (Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’, 273). 6. This version is corroborated by evidence of bovines in the area much earlier than the supposed invasion and holds some explanatory power for the fact that the three groups share the same culture, speak the same (Bantu) language and live in the same territories (key attributes of ethnic difference), and why there were no Tutsis outside the area. See Chre´tien, Great Lakes, Chapter 1; and Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’. 7. Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’, 271 – 2. Newbury further points out that ‘social categorisation judged by unilineal descent through the male line does not adequately account for biological reality’. For example, a child of

242

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

NOTES TO PAGES 111 –112 a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother is classified as Hutu, while a child of a Hutu mother and a Tutsi father is classified as Tutsi. See, for example, Chre´tien, Great Lakes; and Rene´ Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide. New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996. The existence and origins of ethnicity in Burundi are highly contested (particularly between these two authors – see their exchange in Issue, Winter 1990). However, there would seem to be general agreement that the terms Hutu and Tutsi had a different meaning in pre-colonial times and were reshaped as ethnically opposed categories either during the colonial era (Chre´tien) or in the early post-independence era (Lemarchand). This development is teased out in the following sections. Nigel Watt, Burundi: Biography of a Small African Country. London: Hurst, 2008, 24. The ganwa were unique to Burundi, in contrast to Rwanda where the aristocracy was unequivocally Tutsi. Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’, 274. There are two contrasting genesis traditions of Burundi. The first, more broadly accepted tradition, is referred to as the Nkomo cycle and traces the founder of the dynasty (Ntare Rushatsi) to Buha in the south (contemporary Tanzania) and then onto Kilimiro and parts of Mugamba – highlands that became the centre of the kingdom. The second is the Kanyaru cycle which claims that the dynasty emerged in the extreme north (in the area of the former Bugesera kingdom) and descended from Gihanga, the putative ancestor of the Nyiginya dynasty in Rwanda. This latter version evolved with deepening colonial rule and served an important political function: it provided a link between the two kingdoms (justifying a unified colonial administration) and tied into the Hamitic Hypothesis – the Burundi dynasty is Tutsi (rather than Hutu as in the Nkoma cycle). Ibid., 278– 80. The foundation myths are described in Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 115– 16. Peter Uvin, Life after Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi. London: Zed, 2009, 7. On kinship, see, for example, Albert Trouwborst, ‘Kinship and Geographical Mobility in Burundi (East Central Africa)’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology 6 (1965), who notes that there was no limit to the extension of the patrilineal core of a kin group and the genealogical depth varied from one instance to another. Sometimes a kin group could be composed only of members of a nuclear family or it could be so large that members of the patrilineal core could not trace their exact genealogical relations to all other members but knew their relative genealogical position. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 88 – 9. Ibid., 90. Clans typically include a mix of Tutsi, Hutu and Twa in varying proportions. Chre´tien also interestingly notes that the Bajiji clan, for example, are considered Hutu in Burundi and Tutsi in Buha. See Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 11. Lemarchand, ‘Burundi’, 98.

NOTES

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18. Sub-Chiefs tended to be responsible for one hill (colline). The hill (consisting of 150 – 300 households) remains the primary political and social unit, beyond which there is little unity among rural communities – villages as such do not exist in Burundi. On the limited associational tradition (and difficulties of engineering social capital) in Burundi, see Thomas Vervisch and Kristof Titeca, ‘Bridging Community Associations in PostConflict Burundi: The Difficult Merging of Social Capital Endowments and New Institutional Settings’, Journal of Modern African Studies 48, no. 3 (2010). 19. This discussion on clientship is drawn from Rene´ Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi. London: Pall Mall Press, 1970, 36 – 41. 20. See also Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 12 –13. 21. See ibid., 8. Lemarchand further notes that in Kirundi the term Hutu refers both to a cultural identity and also to someone who is a ‘social son’ – subordinate to someone higher up the pecking order. So someone could be a Tutsi and Hutu at the same time (in the sense that a pastoralist could be a client to a wealthier patron). Ibid., 10. 22. Rene´ Lemarchand and David Martin, Selective Genocide in Burundi. London: Minority Rights Group, 1974, 6. 23. Laely, ‘Peasants, Local Communities’, 699; Patricia Daley, ‘Ethnicity and Political Violence in Africa: The Challenge to the Burundi State’, Political Geography 25, no. 6 (2006), 664. 24. Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’, 284. The new regions (especially Imbo) had developed different political forms (from the centralised kingdom) and were ecologically and culturally linked to the areas adjoining them. Regional awareness remained relevant and coexisted uneasily with attempts to forge a ‘national’ identity (ibid., 265 – 6). 25. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 36. Rarely, if ever, did these factional struggles have anything to do with a Tutsi-Hutu opposition – on the contrary, the princes needed to maximise their support among both groups (ibid., 37). 26. Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, 23. 27. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 39 – 40. 28. W.M. Roger Louis, Ruanda-Urundi 1884 – 1919. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963, 114. 29. Roger Botte, ‘Rwanda and Burundi, 1889– 1930: Chronology of a Slow Assassination. Part 1’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 18, no. 1 (1985), 53. In a rather novel analysis, Botte convincingly shows how disease (which remained circumscribed within precise geographical zones in precolonial times) reached pandemic proportions during colonial rule. In addition to the propagation of pre-existing diseases, colonialism also resulted in the importation and long-distance dissemination of new diseases, together with repeated periods of famine (ibid., 72 –91; and Botte, ‘Rwanda and Burundi, 1889– 1930. Part 2’).

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114 –120

30. Louis, Ruanda-Urundi, xvi, 84. This section draws heavily on Louis’s work, which is one of the few reliable accounts of the German colonial period in Burundi. 31. Louis, Ruanda-Urundi, 103. 32. The first White Fathers to set foot in the Kingdom were massacred at Rumonge in 1881. 33. Louis, Ruanda-Urundi, 103. 34. See Albert Wirz, ‘The German Colonies in Africa’, in Rudolf von Albertini (ed.), European Colonial Rule, 1880–1940: The Impact of the West on India, Southeast Asia and Africa, trans. John G. Williamson. Oxford: Clio Press, 1982. 35. Ibid., 391. 36. As in Europe, Germany was afraid of encirclement. It also wanted to prevent the Cape-to-Cairo route which, if established, would channel commerce (to British advantage) between north and south and jeopardise the east-west commerce Germany was striving for. 37. Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’, 286. This was, in part, as Newbury goes onto remark, a reflection of regional autonomy, since European contacts were first made through the north-west and north-east – areas that did not recognise the authority of Mwezi’s rule. In common with much of Africa, the ‘capital’ was situated on the edge of the country – away from the monarchical centre of power. 38. Louis, Ruanda-Urundi, 115. 39. Ibid., 118. 40. Ibid., 127. 41. Wirz, ‘German Colonies’, 404– 5. The Maji-Maji rebellion in 1905 (in contemporary Tanzania) directly impacted on policy in German East Africa and the form administration in Ruanda-Urundi took. 42. Ibid., 406. 43. Louis, Ruanda-Urundi, 130. 44. Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’, 287. 45. Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, 53. 46. Louis, Ruanda-Urundi, 132. 47. Ibid., 132 – 3. Throughout Mutaga’s reign, there was a struggle for domination between his mother and his regent. This feud enabled the chiefs to withdraw beyond the influence of the mwami – greatly facilitated by the Germans (ibid., 136). 48. Ibid., 133– 4. 49. Ibid., 137. 50. Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, 55. The German Resident was killed the same year during the East Africa Campaign. 51. Cited in ibid., 56. The Germans had also failed to realise their dreams of a German coffee farm or a central railway and only in 1914 was the hut tax introduced in Burundi. 52. On World War I in East Africa and the peace settlement, see Louis, RuandaUrundi, Part 3.

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120 –123

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53. Watt, Burundi, 8 – 9. 54. Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, 77 –8. In the words of Ryckmans, the kings are ‘the familiar de´cor which permits us to act in the wings without alarming the masses’ (cited in ibid., 66). 55. Cited in ibid., 66. 56. Ibid., 67. 57. Ibid., 68. 58. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 47 – 50. Baranyanka’s ‘Hamitic dispositions’ also played a key role in confirming and writing the European version of Burundi’s history. 59. Daley, ‘Ethnicity and Political Violence’, 665. 60. Rose M. Kadende-Kaiser and Paul J. Kaiser, ‘Modern Folklore, Identity and Political Change in Burundi’, African Studies Review 40, no. 3 (1997), 30. 61. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 288. 62. Cited in Lemarchand, ‘Burundi’, 104. 63. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Violence, 43. 64. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 268. 65. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Violence, 43 –4. 66. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 285, 281. 67. Cited in ibid., 285. 68. Ibid., 283. 69. Ibid., 288. 70. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 28. 71. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 284. 72. Barnett R. Rubin, ‘Burundi and the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa: Strengthless Cures, in Vain’, in Blood on the Doorstep: The Politics of Preventive Action. New York: The Century Foundation Press, 2002, 36 –7. 73. Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’, 288. 74. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 269– 70. In the course of the so-called ‘Holy Spirit’s tornado’, the number of Barundi baptised rose from less than 7,000 in 1916 to 176,000 in 1935, 365,000 by 1940 and over 1 million by 1955. Umuganuro was restored by Mwambutsa in 1956. 75. Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’, 288. 76. Warren Weinstein and Robert Schrire, Political Conflict and Ethnic Strategies: A Case Study of Burundi. Foreign and Comparative Studies/Eastern Africa Series XXIII. Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1976, 8. 77. Laely, ‘Peasants, Local Communities’, 706. In the pre-colonial system, ruler and ruled never directly faced one another; rather, access to rulers for most people was indirect and mediated through a highly differentiated system of go-betweens and intercessors – usually courtiers (ibid., 702 – 6).

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NOTES TO PAGES 123 –126

78. Ibid., 707. Despite restrictions, the bashingantahe continued to provide a system of authority at the local level; after World War II colonial officials were invested into the bashingantahe, effectively divesting the institution of any traditional importance (ibid). 79. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 269. 80. See Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 44 – 7, on the two revolts. A compulsory cultivation system was introduced in 1932 for exploitation of coffee as a cash crop. 81. On the trusteeship period, see Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, 79 – 89. A UN fact-finding commission in February 1962 found Burundi (and Rwanda) ill-prepared for independent statehood and up until two months before independence, the UN still hoped for the emergence of a ‘United States of Rwanda and Burundi’. However, both countries were adamantly opposed to such a union and the right to self-determination trumped the requirement for effective statehood. 82. Lemarchand, ‘Burundi’, 108. 83. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 311. 84. Lemarchand and Martin, Selective Genocide, 11. 85. Birori and Ntidendereza were both sentenced to death for orchestrating the assassination. The PDC dissolved as did the Batare as political competitors. 86. Uvin, Life after Violence, 9. 87. Weinstein and Schrire, Political Conflict and Ethnic Strategies, 10. 88. Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, 344. Lemarchand explains it thus: ‘By identifying their political aims and aspirations within those of PARMEHUTU [Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement], they imputed to the Tutsi of Burundi motives which they (the Tutsi) at first did not possess but to which they eventually gave a substance of truth, a phenomenon which is best understood by reference to Merton’s notion of self-fulfilling prophecy. By giving the Burundi situation a false definition to begin with, these Hutu politicians evoked a new behaviour, both among themselves and the Tutsi, which made their originally false imputations true’. 89. On the discourse of violence, see Rene´ Lemarchand, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 90. Lemarchand, ‘Burundi’, 111. 91. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 65. The usage of the terms in Burundi is only tangentially related to the language of inter-African alignments from which they are borrowed. 92. See Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, 354 – 5. The majority of newly created bureaucratic posts went to Tutsis. 93. The Belgian administrator charged with the establishment of the army was instructed to recruit predominantly among Hutu – indeed, Michel Micombero was selected as the ranking officer because he was believed to be in part if not entirely Hutu – but succeeded in establishing a mixed army ‘intended to have a Hutu tilt’. See Warren Weinstein, ‘The Limits of Military

NOTES

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106.

107.

108. 109. 110.

111. 112.

TO PAGES

126 –130

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Dependency: The Case of Belgian Military Aid to Burundi, 1961 – 1973’, Journal of African Studies 2, no. 3 (1975), 428– 9. Lemarchand and Martin, Selective Genocide, 11. See also Lemarchand, ‘Burundi’, 112– 17, from which the remainder of this paragraph draws. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 11 – 12. Lemarchand, ‘Burundi’, 115. Attacks of Tutsis in Muramvya followed which, in turn, met with retaliation by the army killing an estimated 5,000 Hutu civilians. Mwambutsa never returned to Burundi; he died in Geneva in 1977. Laely, ‘Peasants, Local Communities’, 709. Reginald Kay, Burundi since the Genocide. London: Minority Rights Group, 1987, 5. Lemarchand and Martin, Selective Genocide, 13. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 81. There is substantial overlap between Hima and Bururi, on the one hand, and Banyaruguru and Muramvya on the other – and the terms are often used interchangeably. However, Hima are not limited to Bururi and Banyarugruu are not limited to Muramvya; nor is either region composed entirely of Hima and Banyaruguru respectively. Weinstein and Schrire, Political Conflict and Ethnic Strategies, 27. Kay, Burundi since the Genocide, 5. Warren Weinstein, ‘Tensions in Burundi’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 2, no. 4 (1972), 27. The term ‘Mulelist’ comes from Pierre Mulele, the key figure in the Kwilu rebellion in Congo in 1964, however, Mulelists in this context were Congolese refugees. Rwandan Tutsis were perturbed by the co-operation between their home country and the Burundi government, and likely favoured the Muramvya faction; the latter, in turn, were less extreme in their opposition to the Hutu and the Hutu had always been monarchists. Weinstein and Schrire, Political Conflict and Ethnic Strategies, 40 – 5. It is also worth noting that the revolt followed price rises in January which were passed onto the peasantry and, as in the past, the use of amulets and incantations was noted. Ibid., 40. Rumonge and Nyanza-Lac are located in the historically troublesome Imbo region, which as previously noted had always been on the margins of monarchical and colonial control. Laely, ‘Peasants, Local Communities’. Ibid., 709, 712, 710. For example, all members of UPRONA party committees were officially nominated as bashingantahe, while those who had been traditionally initiated were denied official recognition and their indigenous way of investment (kwatirwa) was declared illicit. Thus, confronted by their statecentred imitations, the bashingantahe lost a great deal of their power. Ibid., 715, 711. The phrase ‘selective genocide’ comes from an Intelligence Memorandum circulated within the US State Department and was quoted by Lemarchand

248

113. 114. 115. 116.

117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124.

125.

NOTES

TO PAGES

130 –133

and Martin, Selective Genocide. A detailed account of the anatomy of violence can be found in their report. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 62. Lemarchand, Dynamics of Violence, 138, 144. Weinstein and Schrire, Political Conflict and Ethnic Strategies, 19. With the exception of France (which provided active support to Micombero), genocide in a small African country went virtually unnoticed. The UN remained silent, even when UNICEF trucks were being used to transport Hutu bodies to mass graves, and the OAU was reluctant to intervene in an internal matter. See Jeremy Greenland, ‘The Reform of Education in Burundi: Enlightened Theory Faced with Political Reality’, Comparative Education 10, no. 1 (1974). Jeremy Greenland, ‘The Two Options Now Facing Burundi’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 5, no. 2 (1975), 4. Daley, ‘Ethnicity and Political Violence’, 669. Greenland, ‘Two Options’, 3. Weinstein, ‘Limits of Military Dependency’, 427, 421. Belgium continued to provide development assistance but distanced itself from close co-operation with the government – in contrast to France which became the principal source of aid. Kay, Burundi since the Genocide, 7. Bagaza was out of the country in 1972. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 107. See Kay, Burundi since the Genocide. Seen as the last vestige of colonialism, the influence of the Catholic Church was systematically weakened through nonrenewal of visas for (or expulsion of) European priests and missionaries, suppression of radio programmes and newspapers, severe restrictions on religious worship and prayer meetings and the transfer of education from the Church to government (the Catholic Church ran a third of primary schools and half of secondary schools attended predominantly by Hutus). The latter formed part of a larger programme of educational discrimination designed to extend the power of the minority government far into the future. Few Hutu were admitted to the limited secondary level school places (many Hutu parents remained mindful of 1972 but also the inspectors who determined entry were all Tutsi). The state’s control was further facilitated by the successful promotion of co-operatives and not so successful implementation of villagisation (regrouping of peasants to form self-sufficient units of production purportedly to increase agricultural yields). By the end of 1983, 102 villages had been created (mainly in the south) but the programme was resisted by many who did not want to abandon traditional habits and were (rightly) suspicious that the real intention of the government was to further regulate their lives. Citizens were already required to carry identity cards and residence papers at all times, and had to attain permission to leave their zone of residence, hold public meetings and so on. Ibid., 7.

NOTES

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133 –136

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126. Uvin, Life after Violence, 10. 127. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 116. 128. Burundi was one of the first recipients of a World Bank SAP in 1986 which, although only partially implemented, upset the patronage system and increased elite competition. 129. The coup was precipitated by the decision to place limitations on length of army service in the face of economic austerity. Bagaza subsequently went into exile in Libya. 130. Cited in Filip Reyntjens, ‘The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating: The June 1993 Elections in Burundi’, Journal of Modern African Studies 31, no. 4 (1993), 563. 131. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 106, 127. 132. See ibid., 119. 133. Ibid., 121. Lemarchand also draws attention to the fact that the two provinces were key coffee growing areas and that it was the Hutu communities, in particular, that had been affected by the fall in coffee prices in the mid-1980s. 134. Filip Reyntjens, Burundi: Prospects for Peace. London: Minority Rights Group, 2000, 8. PALIPEHUTU was founded by Re´my Gahutu in April 1980 and at the time of the 1988 massacres had bases in Rwanda. Gahutu was arrested by Tanzanian authorities in March 1989 and died in prison on 23 August 1990. The leadership was taken over by Etienne Karatasi. In the same year FROLINA (Front for Democracy) – a breakaway group of PALIPEHUTU – was formed by Joseph Karumba. 135. Malkki, Purity and Exile, 111. In the camp, people lived in interconnected villages rather than the isolated hills of those who remained in Burundi. 136. Ibid., 234– 5 [emphasis in original]. Malkki notes that the Tanzanian authorities were mapped onto the Tutsi as the dominant other or ‘tutsianised antagonists’ – a positioning that was reinforced by familiar admonitions to forget (in this case Burundi). 137. Ibid., 54 [emphasis in original]. 138. Ibid., 242– 4. 139. Ibid., 68. Malkki further notes how the Hutu viewed the colonisers (and subsequently UNHCR agents) in benign terms and as protectors (even liberators) of the Hutu. This stands in contradistinction to official (Tutsi) discourse blaming external involvement for internal discord. 140. Ibid., 243– 4. 141. Ibid., 221– 31. 142. Ibid., 230. 143. Ibid., 244. 144. Ibid., 66. 145. Kadende-Kaiser and Kaiser, ‘Modern Folklore’, 35. 146. Filip Reyntjens, Burundi: Breaking the Cycle of Violence. London: Minority Rights Group, 1995, 9. International pressure was all the more salient given Burundi’s dependency on aid in the context of the thawing of the Cold War.

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147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153. 154.

155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

160. 161.

NOTES

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136 –139

Burundi was the highest per capita recipient of World Bank and IMF loans in 1988. For a critique of the Report, see Rene´ Lemarchand, ‘The Report of the National Commission to Study the Question of National Unity in Burundi: A Critical Comment’, Journal of Modern African Studies 27, no. 4 (1989). Also of note is that a silent five-kilometre march on 29 April 1991 from Cibitoke (in the Imbo region) to Bujumbura by 800 men and women to honour the victims of 1972 was allowed. Le´once Ndikumana, ‘Institutional Failure and Ethnic Conflicts in Burundi’, African Studies Review 41, no. 1 (1998), 33. Peter Uvin, ‘Ethnicity and Power in Burundi and Rwanda: Different Paths to Mass Violence’, Comparative Politics 31, no. 3 (1999), 261. See Malkki, Putity and Exile, postscript. It is assumed (but not proven) that the aim of the coup was to bring Bagaza back into power. Members of the Bayanzi clan had profited from clientelism in the Second Republic and therefore had a vested interest in reinstating their kinsman. Regardless of culpability, all members of the Bayanzi clan in prominent positions were arrested and on account of Tripoli’s ‘destabilising activities’, the diplomatic staff at the Libyan Embassy were given 48 hours to leave the country. See Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 139– 41. It is perhaps noteworthy that these attacks occurred on the border with Rwanda – and just a year after the RPF invasion of Rwanda. Stef Vandeginste, Stones Left Unturned: Law and Transitional Justice in Burundi. Antwerp: Intersentia, 2011, 27. A year later the radical armed faction of PALIPEHUTU identified itself as PALIPEHUTU-FNL, led by Cossan Kabura – who was subsequently ousted by Agathon Rwasa in 2001. Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict, 142. FRODEBU, which was only officially registered in 1992, also had Tutsi membership. Kadende-Kaiser and Kaiser, ‘Modern Folklore’, 36. See Reyntjens, ‘Proof of the Pudding’ for a contemporaneous analysis of the elections. Ibid., 580. Eighty per cent of full-time employment was in the small public sector. Moreover, almost all large private firms belonged to high-ranking civil servants and changes in leadership historically precipitated changes in firms’ profitability: ‘a whole fringe of business go bankrupt with the departure of former leaders, while, at the same time, a new class of “businessmen” emerge with the arrival of new leaders’. See Floribert Ngaruko and Janvier D. Nkurunziza, ‘An Economic Interpretation of Conflict in Burundi’, Journal of African Economies 9, no. 3 (2000), 387– 8. Reyntjens, Burundi: Breaking the Cycle, 12. Devon Curtis, ‘The International Peacebuilding Paradox: Power Sharing and Post-Conflict Governance in Burundi’, African Affairs 112, no. 446 (2013), 82.

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139 –142

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162. Ndikumana, ‘Institutional Failure’, 40, 31. For the people originating from those (southern) regions, control of the public sector as a source of accumulation, the army as guarantor of this control and the education sector as a means of accessing it were crucial factors (Ngaruko and Nkurunziza, ‘An Economic Interpretation’, 384). 163. Uvin, Life after Violence, 13. For a detailed account of the coup, see Reyntjens, Burundi: Breaking the Cycle. 164. Cited in Glynne Evans, Responding to Crises in the African Great Lakes. Adelphi Paper 311. London: Oxford University Press/International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1997, 27. 165. Reyntjens, Burundi: Breaking the Cycle, 15. 166. Reyntjens, Burundi: Prospects for Peace, 14. The creeping croup, perpetrated by a coalition of the army and opposition forces aimed to destroy the legitimacy (if not the very existence) of FRODEBU through more covert means. 167. For his own account of the period, see Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, Burundi on the Brink 1993– 95: A UN Special Envoy Reflects on Preventive Diplomacy. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 2000. 168. Uvin, ‘Ethnicity and Power’, 266. 169. CNDD-FDD later split in 1998 into the political arm CNDD and the more powerful politico-military CNDD-FDD, led by Jean-Bosco Ndayikengurukiye. Pierre Nkurunziza assumed the leadership in 2001. Various smaller dissident factions also emerged from the original organisation over the years. 170. Ndikumana, ‘Institutional Failure’, 44. 171. Rubin, ‘Burundi and the Great Lakes’, 41. 172. Reyntjens, Burundi: Breaking the Cycle, 19. 173. Stef Vandeginste, ‘Power-Sharing, Conflict and Transition in Burundi: Twenty Years of Trial and Error’, Africa Spectrum 44, no. 3 (2009), 71. 174. Reyntjens, Burundi: Prospects for Peace, 16. Civilian governors were replaced by military governors in a number of provinces in 1995. 175. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 339 – 40. The last ‘mixed’ neighbourhoods of Bujumbura (notably the Muslim suburb of Buyenzi) were ‘purified’ in March 1995. 176. Evans, Responding to Crises, 36. 177. Daley, ‘Ethnicity and Political Violence’, 673. In 1993, 40 per cent of the population lived below the monetary poverty line – this increased to 60 per cent by 1998 (Ngaruko and Nkurunziza, ‘An Economic Interpretation’, 377 – 8). See also Le´once Ndikumana, ‘Towards a Solution to Violence in Burundi: A Case for Political and Economic Liberalisation’, Journal of Modern African Studies 38, no. 3 (2000), 440– 1, who notes that GNP and agricultural production declined annually from 1993 onwards, which, in a country where over 90 per cent of the population is engaged in subsistence farming, meant self-sufficiency in food supply could not be maintained – a situation made worse by rising inflation.

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178. Human Rights Watch (HRW), Proxy Targets: Civilians in the War in Burundi. March 1998. Available at: http://www.hrw.org/reports/1998/03/01/proxytargets-civilians-war-burundi [accessed 30 May 2015]. The appalling conditions in the camps – compared to concentration camps – provoked international acrimony and a number of camps were dismantled in 1997– 8. 179. Laely, ‘Peasants, Local Communities’, 695– 6. 180. On elder statesmen and Nyerere’s role in Burundi, see Gilbert Khadiagala, Medlers or Mediators? African Interveners in Civil Conflicts in Eastern Africa. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2007. Nyerere had been involved informally in resolving the conflict in Burundi since 1993 and formally since 1995 – first through the Regional Initiative for Peace and then as the designated mediator of the Mwanza process (March – July 1996), which collapsed before dialogue had been achieved. He was also the key figure behind the imposition and maintenance of the sanctions regime. 181. The regroupment policy was revived in mid-1999 in the south-east and extended to Bujumbura Rural (where the FNL was particularly active) in September, with 80 per cent of the population (350,000 people) of the province living in 53 camps by the end of the year. See Human Rights Watch (HRW), Emptying the Hills: Regroupment in Burundi. June 2000. Available at: http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/burundi2/ [accessed 30 May 2015]. 182. Rene´ Lemarchand, ‘Consociationalism and Power Sharing in Africa: Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’, African Affairs 106, no. 422 (2007), 10. Most of these parties had no constituencies to speak of (beyond a few friends or relatives), their primary aim being to cash in perquisites and position themselves for access to government positions. 183. Curtis, ‘International Peacebuilding Paradox’, 85; and Reyntjens, Burundi: Prospects for Peace, 16. 184. Reyntjens, Burundi: Prospects for Peace, 17. 185. The peacemaking environment was further crowded by the ‘parallel diplomacy’ conducted by the multiplicity of NGOs working alongside the negotiations. See Fabienne Hara, ‘Burundi: A Case of Parallel Diplomacy’, in Chester Crocker et al. (eds), Herding Cats: Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 2003. 186. Curtis, ‘International Peacebuilding Paradox’, 85 – 6, 91. 187. On Mandela’s mediation, see Kristina A. Bentley and Roger Southall, An African Peace Process: Mandela, South Africa and Burundi. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2005. Mandela castigated parties for prevarication when people were still dying and was especially critical of the regroupment policy. 188. Filip Reyntjens, ‘Briefing: Burundi: A Peaceful Transition after a Decade of War?’, African Affairs 105, no. 418 (2006), 118. He notes that a number of the parties ‘signed the accord, but did not subscribe to it’ [emphasis in original].

NOTES

189.

190.

191. 192. 193.

194. 195. 196.

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See also Jan Van Eck, ‘Burundi: An Ongoing Search for Durable Peace’, African Security Review 16, no. 1 (2007). The GCA incorporated the Ceasefire Agreement of 2 December 2002, three Pretoria Protocols on power-sharing (27 January, 8 October and 2 November 2003) and the Technical Forces Accord on demobilisation and reintegration of former rebels of 2 November 2003. Between 2004 and 2006, almost 30,000 rebels and FAB soldiers were demobilised. In addition, the Gardie´ns de la Paix and other militias were disbanded with a further 11,000 demobilised. Results of disarmament programmes and the reintegration of ex-combatants into civilian life have been more mixed. On the DDR process, see Henri Boshoff et al., The Burundi Peace Process: From Civil War to Conditional Peace. Monograph 171. Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, June 2010. Uvin, Life after Violence, 29. An estimated 150 Congolese refugees (mostly Tutsi Banyamulenge) were killed in Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi. Stef Vandeginste, ‘Power-Sharing as a Fragile Safety Valve in Times of Electoral Turmoil: The Costs and Benefits of Burundi’s 2010 Elections’, Journal of Modern African Studies 49, no. 2 (2011); and Lemarchand, ‘Consociationalism and Power Sharing’. This was at least in part due to South African mediation, as Vandeginste further postulates: ‘indirectly, Arend Lijphart, who decisively inspired the drafters of South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution, also held the pen when the Arusha Agreement and the Burundi constitution of 18 March 2005 were drafted’. For a counter-intuitive analysis of consociationalism (and its failure) in 1993, see Daniel P. Sullivan, ‘The Missing Pillars: A Look at the Failure of Peace in Burundi through the Lens of Arend Lijphart’s Theory of Consociational Democracy’, Journal of Modern African Studies 43, no. 1 (2005). Reyntjens, ‘Briefing’, 120. Reyntjens provides a detailed account of the elections, from which this paragraph draws. Watt, Burundi, 189. Dave Peterson, ‘A Beacon for Central Africa’, Journal of Democracy 17, no. 1 (2006), 125, 131. In addition to noting the continued militarisation of society (with 80 per cent of Barundi carrying firearms), Peterson especially draws attention to the deprivation facing the Barundi after 10 years of civil war. See also Mariam Bibi Jooma, ‘“We Can’t Eat the Constitution”: Transformation and the Socio-Economic Reconstruction of Burundi’. ISS Paper 106. Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, May 2005 – the striking title is a quote from a Murundi (frustrated by international donors’ obsession with elections). Jooma argues that a ‘narrow focus on the ethnic composition of Burundi’s state may mask deeply embedded structural causes of conflict, most notably the unequal distribution of, and access to, resources’. She further notes that in 2005, 2 million people required food aid in areas traditionally regarded as Burundi’s bread basket (a 40 per cent increase from 2004) and GDP had fallen

254

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198.

199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204.

NOTES TO PAGES 146 –148 25 per cent between 2000 and 2005, compounded by a shortage in foreign exchange caused by falling global coffee prices. External debt constituted 180 per cent of GDP and debt servicing absorbed 157 per cent of exports and 98.8 per cent of total revenue (Burundi qualified for debt relief under the HIPC Initiative in 2009 and over 90 per cent of its debt was cancelled). Furthermore, there was a staggering increase in endemic diseases and a decline in primary education. All of these problems were compounded by the refugee crisis, land scarcity and attendant disputes arising between returnees (between 2002 and 2007, some 350,000 refugees returned to Burundi) and those who had (legitimately or otherwise) appropriated their land. Lemarchand, Dynamics of Violence, 185. In March 2006, FRODEBU almost pulled out of the government because of CNDD-FDD’s lack of transparency and failure to consult other parties, and in September Alice Nzomukunda resigned in protest at the interference and incompetence of the party chairman, Hussein Radjabu, who himself was suspected of corruption – a practice, mounting evidence suggested, he was far from alone in (ibid., 171 –8). Radjabu was imprisoned in 2007 for 13 years (on charges of plotting against the state) amidst rumours of a rift with Nkurunziza. He escaped from prison in March 2015. Van Eck, ‘Burundi: An Ongoing Search’, 114. For example, in July 2006, Ndayizeye was stripped of immunity and imprisoned together with several other former politicians for allegedly plotting a coup. Also of note is that the Bashingantahe (which had been ‘reinvented’ by presidential decree in 1997, leading to the creation of a National Council of the Bashingantahe in 2002) were ousted from their role as an institution auxiliary to the courts of law in 2005. A further municipal law in 2010 formally put an end to their role as local mediators and conciliators. However, despite their exclusion from the national legal system and the historical changes they have undergone, the bashingantahe continue to play a fundamental role in family and neighbourhood conflicts – and people distinguish the ‘real’ bashingantahe from the ‘false’ ones and the ‘old’ ones (invested in the era of the monarchy) from the ‘new’ ones (Bert Ingelaere and Dominik Kohlhagen, ‘Situating Social Imaginaries in Transitional Justice: The Bashingantahe in Burundi’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 1 (2012), 43 –7). For full discussion of the elections, see Vandeginste, ‘Power-Sharing as a Fragile’, from which this discussion draws. Curtis similarly argues that international actors have accepted a version of ‘good enough’ peace in Burundi since 2005 (‘International Peacebuilding Paradox’). International Crisis Group (ICG). Burundi: Bye-bye Arusha. Africa Report, no. 192. Bujumbura/Nairobi/Brussels: ICG, 25 October 2012. Vandeginste, ‘Power-Sharing as a Fragile’, 325, 327. Ibid., 331– 2. Curtis, ‘International Peacebuilding Paradox’, 87.

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205. ICG, Bye-bye Arusha?. 206. Ndikumana, ‘Institutional Failure’, 31. On the silencing of independent and oppositional voices, and institutional weakness ‘by design’, see also Ndikumana, ‘Towards a Solution’, 442. 207. International Crisis Group (ICG), ‘Burundi: Peace Sacrificed?’. Africa Briefing, no. 111. Nairobi/Brussels: ICG, 29 May 2015, 4. 208. Ibid. 209. AU plans to deploy a 5,000-strong force to protect civilians were thwarted by the Burundi government’s statement, in January 2016, that it would treat such an intervention as an invasion and respond accordingly, and regionally brokered peace talks have repeatedly stalled. 210. International Crisis Group (ICG), ‘The African Union and the Burundi Crisis: Ambition versus Reality’. Africa Briefing, no. 122. Nairobi/Brussels: ICG, 28 September 2016, 1. 211. Lucy Hovil, ‘Are International Actors Steering the Right Course in Burundi?’, African Arguments, 23 December 2015. Available at: http://africanarguments. org/2015/12/23/are-international-actors-steering-the-right-course-in-burundi/ [accessed 3 February 2016]. 212. This phrase is Vesna Peˇsic´’s, cited in Donald Rothchild and David A. Lake, ‘Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict’, International Security 21, no. 2 (1996), 43. 213. Chre´tien, Great Lakes, 352. 214. Rubin, ‘Burundi and the Great Lakes’, 38. 215. In traditional society, an individual wrongdoing was compensated by the whole lineage group, thus, in the post-independence era of rigid and antagonistic ethnic identities, ‘wrongdoings’ by members of one group were accordingly compensated by avenging the whole group. This insight is inspired by Kadende-Kaiser and Kaiser, ‘Modern Folklore’, 49. 216. Ngaruko and Nkurunziza, ‘An Economic Interpretation’, 384. 217. Daley, ‘Ethnicity and Political Violence’, 676. 218. Rene´ Lemarchand, ‘Patterns of State Collapse and Reconstruction in Central Africa: Reflections on the Crisis in the Great Lakes’, African Studies Quarterly 1, no. 3 (1997), 7. 219. Uvin, Life after Violence, 189, 64–8.

Chapter 4 Uganda: A Foundational Failure and Post-Colonial Revival 1. The delimitation of these boundaries is discussed in the previous chapter. 2. Andrew Roberts, ‘The Evolution of the Uganda Protectorate’, Uganda Journal 27, no. 1 (1963), 95. 3. The same Bantu prefixes apply as in Burundi: Bu for the kingdom and Ba for the inhabitants (sing. Mu)

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4. K. Ingham, ‘Some Aspects of the History of Buganda’, Uganda Journal 20, no. 2 (1956). According to Baganda tradition, Kabaka Kintu (who originated from the Mount Elgon region) first united the various clans (of disparate origins) into one polity. Although Kintu is likely a mythical figure that represents a (difficult to date but significant) period in time, he symbolises the pre-eminence of the kabaka in Baganda society. Kintu also features as a deity in Busoga history. 5. See Peter M. Gukiina, Uganda: A Case Study in African Political Development. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972, 32 – 8. 6. Speke’s impressions of Buganda are recorded in K. Ingham, The Making of Modern Uganda. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958. These differing opinions (of north and south) would have a significant influence on the colonisation of ‘Uganda’ and the transformation of the societies therein, as discussed further below. 7. Samwiri Rubaraza Karugire, A Political History of Uganda. Nairobi: Heinemann, 1980, 49. 8. A.D. Roberts, ‘The Sub-Imperialism of the Baganda’, Journal of African History 3, no. 3 (1962), 437. 9. Ingham, Making of Modern Uganda, 40. Ingham provides a full account of this period and the continued influence of religion in the formative years of the protectorate. 10. The term ‘protectorate’ signified a state which had agreed – through the ‘amiable farce of treaty-making’ – to be protected by another state (meaning that it had ceded control of external relations while otherwise retaining its sovereignty). The advantage for the protecting power lay in the acquisition of rights (forestalling the incursion of other European powers) without responsibilities. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the equation of colonial protectorates with protected states (together with the moral validity of treaties) was called into question and the need for the establishment of effective imperial authority was recognised. Buganda seemed to be a fortunate exception – representing ‘a true state’, therefore negating the need for interference in details of local administration and enabling the maintenance of British influence with ‘a minimum of expense and moral humbug’ (Roberts, ‘Evolution of the Uganda Protectorate’, 96 – 7). 11. Roberts, ‘Sub-Imperialism of the Baganda’, 437. 12. Ibid., 435. 13. Bunyoro’s rich oral tradition holds that the Kitara Empire was founded by the Batembuzi between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries – a period oft referred to as the ‘reign of the gods’. They are said to have been succeeded by the Bacwezi (demi-gods) who, though equally steeped in mythology, are credited with extending and consolidating the Empire before mysteriously vanishing after only two to three generations. Archaeological evidence (in the form of the Bigo earthworks) would seem to prove the earthly existence of the latter. For a convincing alternate analysis, see C.C. Wrigley, ‘Some Thoughts

NOTES

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15. 16.

17.

18.

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on the Bacwezi’, Uganda Journal 22, no. 1 (1959). On more certain (and earthly) grounds, the Babito dynasty reigned from around the sixteenth century, under whom the Empire reached its peak. As in Burundi, disentangling historic fact from symbolism in oral traditions has been compounded by the sway of Eurocentric frames of reference. Following the discreditation of the Hamitic Hypothesis, scholars homed in on an alternate theory of conquest to explain the formation of complex, centralised polities in pre-Uganda – the Luo migrations from southern Sudan, which occurred in several waves from the fifteenth century onwards. For a critique of the explanatory power of the Luo migrations in pre-colonial ‘state’ formation, see M.S.M. Kiwanuka, ‘The Empire of Bunyoro Kitara: Myth or Reality?’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 2, no. 1 (1968). For example, Kiwanuka posits that if kingship sprang from Bunyoro and the Babito were of Luo origin, it is hard to explain why kingdoms only emerged in southern and western Uganda – and not in northern Uganda and Nyanza (Kenya) where the Luo settled in large numbers and formed more segmentary societies. On the Luo, see, for example, Okot P’Bitek, Religion of the Central Luo. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1971; Bethwell Ogot, History of the Southern Luo: Migration and Settlement 1500– 1900. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967; and R.S. Herring et al., ‘The Construction of Dominance: The Strategies of Selected Luo Groups in Uganda and Kenya’, in Ahmed Idha Salim (ed.), State Formation in Eastern Africa. Nairobi: Heineman Educational Books, 1984. On this and other contributing factors to Bunyoro’s decline see M.S.M. Kiwanuka, ‘Bunyoro and the British: A Reappraisal of the Causes for the Decline and Fall of an African Kingdom’, Journal of African History 9, no. 4 (1968). John Beattie, The Nyoro State. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, 28 –9. For a detailed account of the war, see A.R. Dunbar, ‘The British and Bunyoro-Kitara, 1891 to 1899’, Uganda Journal 24, no. 2 (1960). Dunbar suggests that Kabarega made overtures to the British on several occasions which were rebuffed. Bunyoro was viewed as implacably hostile to the British, largely owing to Samuel Baker’s clash with Kabarega in the 1870s, when the latter resisted Baker’s attempt to annex Bunyoro-Kitara into the British-backed Egyptian Equatoria province. Baker’s view was reinforced by the (mis)representations of Baganda agents. Emin Pasha was governor of Equatoria Province from 1878 until it was severed from Egypt as a result of the Mahdist rebellion in the 1880s. During his governorship, the province extended over much of northern Uganda but his troops were as much of a threat to the people as the slavers they were there to rein in (the slave trade had been abolished by Baker in 1871). The Sudanese troops mutinied from British service in 1898, retreating north and east of the Nile. See A.D. Roberts, ‘The “Lost Counties” of Bunyoro’, Uganda Journal 26, no, 2 (1962). The annexation was confirmed in 1896, at Ernest Berkeley’s (Colvile’s

258

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

NOTES

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successor) request which, in turn, was made to placate the Catholics in southern Bunyoro. In some accounts, Singo and Bulemezi are also included – but, while part of Bunyoro in the past, they were already under Buganda rule at this time. The southern parts of Buwekula, Buruli and Bugerere also shifted between Bunyoro and Buganda influence. See Kiwanuka, ‘Bunyoro and the British’, 614– 15. Elliott D. Green, ‘Understanding the Limits to Ethnic Change: Lessons from Uganda’s “Lost Counties”’, Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 3 (2008), 480. The British seem to have been unaware of the royal tombs prior to 1915. They then allowed the Bunyoro Native Government to appoint a special salaried chief (the mugema) to reside in Buganda and look after the tombs but they ignored the nine formal requests from the bakama of Bunyoro between 1931 and 1958 to investigate the issue of returning the lost counties to Bunyoro. This represented ‘an escape from the purist conception of protectorate exemplified in Buganda’ and the adoption of a conception based on deterrence (a ‘keep out’ sign for other European powers), with little intention of administrative expansion over more than a fraction of the territory in the immediate future (Roberts, ‘Evolution of the Uganda Protectorate’, 99). Mwanga died in exile in 1903. Kabarega was permitted to return to Bunyoro in 1923 but died at Jinja before reaching his home. Daudi Chwa remained on the throne until his death in 1939. He was succeeded by Edward Mutesa II. For detailed analysis of the Buganda and other Kingdom Agreements, see G. N. Uzoigwe (ed.), Uganda: The Dilemma of Nationhood. New York: NOK Publishers, 1982, Chapters 3 and 4. The position of second katikiro was also abolished (Mugwanya became chief justice – Omulamuzi). Uzoigwe, Uganda, 69– 71. The Agreement with Toro was unworkable due to Kasagama being designated saza chief of ‘Toro proper’ (the original kingdom) and supreme chief of Toro Confederacy. The situation was rectified when the Agreement was amended in 1906 and ‘Toro proper’ was redivided into four sazas and Kasagama was recognised as mukama of the whole of the Toro Confederacy (thenceforth kingdom). The Ankole Agreement was withdrawn in 1905 after the murder of the sub-commissioner. It was restored in 1912. See K. Ingham, Some Aspects of the History of Western Uganda’, Uganda Journal 21, no. 2 (1957). Uzoigwe, Uganda, 122 –6. Ruzumbura was part of the old Kingdom of Mpororo (the other parts having been absorbed into Ankole and Rwanda). Although the kingdom had lasted for only two generations, breaking up into semi-independent principalities in the eighteenth century, the Bahororo maintained a separate identity and (unsuccessfully) petitioned the colonial authorities for the creation of a district based on the reconstitution of their former kingdom. See H.F. Morris, ‘The Kingdom of Mpororo’, Uganda Journal 19, no. 2 (1955).

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29. D.A. Low, ‘Uganda: The Establishment of the Protectorate 1894 – 1919’, in Vincent Harlow and E.M. Chilver (eds), History of East Africa: Volume Two. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Political forms in these societies varied but they were all small in scale. Around the same time as the Luo migrations from the north-west, another migration (the Ateka) occurred from the northeast into Teso (the Iteso becoming distinct from the Jie and Karamajong through the adoption of settled agriculture – a separateness accentuated by the Iworopom War of 1830). The Ateka also settled in Lango (where the Ateka age-set tradition was later merged with the Luo tradition of individual leadership and clan affiliation – diluting both in the formation of loose polities) and in Bukedi which (like Bugisu) is home to a particularly hetergenous group of peoples. Bukedi lies on one of the ancient migration corridors (from the Nile Valley to Kenya) and its traditional history is one of the most confused in East Africa. Cf. Karugire, Political History; and Ogot, History of the Southern Luo. 30. Low, ‘Uganda’. Throughout the protectorate, lukiikios and katikiros were appointed and areas divided into sazas (and so on) with their own chiefs but it was done unevenly and there was no systematic protectorate-wide administrative policy. 31. J.P. Barber, ‘The Moving Frontier of British Imperialism in Northern Uganda 1898– 1919’, Uganda Journal 29, no. 1 (1965), 41, 27. It is on Barber’s discussion of the incorporation of northern Uganda that this section predominantly draws. 32. Ibid., 31 – 2. 33. Cited in J.P. Barber, ‘The Karamoja District of Uganda: A Pastoral People under Colonial Rule’, Journal of African History 3, no. 1 (1962), 111. 34. Barber, ‘Moving Frontier’, 35 – 6. 35. R.M. Bere, ‘An Outline of Acholi History’, Uganda Journal 11, no. 1 (1947), 8. Scholars are divided on the extent to which an Acholi ethnic identity is a colonial creation. Behrend, for example, categorically states that the unification of Gulu and Chua districts created ‘an ethnic group that had not existed before’ (Heike Behrend, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985– 97. Oxford: James Currey, 1999, 14– 18. Cf. Tim Allen, ‘Ethnicity & Tribalism on the Sudan – Uganda Border’, in Katsuyoshi Fukui and John Markais (eds), Ethnicity & Conflict in the Horn of Africa. London: James Currey, 1994). Conversely, Atkinson contends that the ‘social order and political culture that came essentially to define an emergent Acholi had become widely and firmly entrenched even before 1800’ (Ronald R. Atkinson, ‘The (Re)Construction of Ethnicity in Africa: Extending the Chronology, Conceptualisation and Discourse’, in Paris Yedos (ed.), Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa: Constructivist Reflections and Contemporary Politics. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, 34. Cf. J.M. Onyango Ku Odongo and J.B. Webster (eds), The Central Lwo during the Aconya. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1976, who trace the origins of the Acholi back to mediaeval

260

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37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

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times). Atkinson suggests that the notion of early Luo descent should be treated with caution and that Acholi was part of the Central Sudanic and Eastern Nilotic cultural-linguistic worlds (west and east of the Aswa River respectively) until a new sociopolitical order was introduced from the late seventeenth century – and that it was the movement of ideas (rather than people) from Paluo in northern Bunyoro-Kitara that provided the primary impetus for change. In the eighteenth century, a common language (Luo) and new collective identity evolved as groups intermingled and co-operated on a larger scale than previously, distinguishing themselves from neighbouring groups in the process (particularly in response to the droughts of the 1720s, 1790s and 1830s – and the accompanying raids/immigration from the east). The name ‘Shuuli’ was first given to the people by the Arab traders, becoming widely used by the 1870s. See, for example, Ronald R. Atkinson, ‘The Evolution of Ethnicity among the Acholi of Uganda: The Precolonial Phase’, Ethnohistory 36, no. 1 (1989). Charles Amone and Okulla Muura, ‘British Colonialism and the Creation of Acholi Ethnic Identity in Uganda, 1894– 1962’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 2 (2014), 240, who also provide a list of the chiefdoms which varied in size but typically had a population of 2,000– 4,000. For a detailed study of Acholi sociopolitical order, see F.K. Girling, The Acholi of Uganda. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Service, 1960. Atkinson, ‘Evolution of Ethnicity’, 22. Barber, ‘Moving Frontier’, 32, 36. These new chiefs were referred to as rwodi kalam (chiefs of the pen) and were thus differentiated from rwodi moo (the ‘oiled’ hereditary chiefs – so called because at their initiation they were anointed with shea butter oil). See Sverker Finnstro¨m, Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 42. Societies in the Lado Enclave, especially those of the Alur and Madi, resembled Acholi. The Madi (like the Kakwa and Lugbara) are Central Sudanic (and were likely part of the same cultural-linguistic world as the western Acholi until at least the nineteenth century) and many speak Acholi. The Alur (like the Acholi) are considered Central Luo, while the Langi have been termed ‘luoised’ Eastern Nilotes. See P’Bitek, Religion of the Central Luo. Barber, ‘Moving Frontier’, 39. Adjustments were made to the Sudan border in 1926 and the Kenya border in 1932. On the particularities of Karamoja, and the problems encountered therein, see Barber, ‘Karamoja District’. The Karomojong are characterised by unstable populations (owing to the movement of cattle to new pastures during the dry season) and the prominence of (and respect for) elders (according to the age-set system of authority) in the timing of movements and all matters affecting the community. This ultimately led to a different colonial policy (beginning in 1923) from the rest of the protectorate, summarised as ‘protection from

NOTES

45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

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raids and incursions from hostile neighbours’, ‘internal peace and order, freedom of movement’ and ‘leaving the Karamajong to their own customs’. This continued until after World War II, by which time the enclosure of land enforced by colonialism had resulted in overstocking of cattle and a resumption of raids within Karamoja and across district (and colonial) borders. When a ‘development scheme’ was introduced in the 1950s it existed side by side with – and not as a development of – the traditional life of the Karamajong. Joan Vincent, ‘Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and Power: Prologomena to the Study of the Colonial State’, in Ronald Cohen and Judith Toland (eds), State Formation and Political Legitimacy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1983, 138–9. Contrary to Vincent’s otherwise useful categorisation, Kigezi was not a single ‘Agreement’ kingdom and, at this time, Acholi was not a unified district. R.C. Pratt, ‘Administration and Politics in Uganda 1919– 1945’, in Vincent Harlow and E.M. Chilver (eds), History of East Africa: Volume Two. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, 487– 92. Taris B. Kabwegyere, The Politics of State Formation: The Nature and Effects of Colonialism in Uganda. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1974, 50. Carole A. Buchanan, ‘Perceptions of Ethnic Interaction in the East African Interior: The Kitara Complex’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 11, no. 3 (1978), 427, 417. Allen similarly notes from his travels with informants that the first thing they would do on arriving in a new area would be to discuss genealogical histories and ‘after a few minutes would almost invariably turn to me in surprise and say: “I thought these people were strangers, but now I find we are kaka”’ (‘Ethnicity & Tribalism’, 129). Buchanan, ‘Perceptions of Ethnic Interaction’, 427. Ibid., 427. Cited in ibid., 417. Karugire, Political History, 12 [emphasis in original]. Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works, 58, 57. This predicament was the subject of an inquiry into local government in 1952. On the resultant Wallis Report, see Ingham, Making of Modern Uganda, 262– 3; and Kabwegyere, Politics of State Formation, 99 – 100. Roberts, ‘Evolution of the Uganda Protectorate’, 103. Cited in Amone and Muura, ‘British Colonialism’, 254. Cited in Finnstro¨m, Living with Bad Surroundings, 81. The stereotypical view of northerners as a warrior community or militarised ethnocracy became entrenched in Ugandan consciousness and, as Finnstro¨m illustrates, still resonates today (ibid., 60 – 1, 78 – 81). Karugire, Political History, 154. On this period, see also Uzoigwe, Uganda, 73– 91. Christopher Wrigley, ‘Four Steps towards Disaster’, in Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development. London: James Currey, 1988, 32.

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167 –168

60. The Asian immigrants formed, what Kabwegyere terms, an ‘econocracy’ – almost entirely controlling trade and the commercial sector (Politics of State Formation, 107–9). Invited by Britain and in whom the British had raised the hope that ‘East Africa was their America’, the Asians sought a ‘politics of partnership’ with the British but while they maintained economic predominance they were politically eclipsed by the emergent educated African classes in the late colonial period; and the colonial structure never allowed for the development of a partnership between Asians and Africans (ibid., 123– 53) – the significance of which became apparent in the 1970s. On the three-tiered hierarchy of the colonial political economy, see also Ramkrishna Mukherjee, Uganda: An Historical Accident? Class, Nation, State Formation. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1985. 61. The apt label is taken from Low, ‘Uganda’, 114– 15, who notes that although Church and state started to separate out after the 1900s, for many years they persisted side by side and the missions were the sole providers of education until the 1920s, remaining important even when a government education policy was developed (beginning with the foundation of Makerere in 1921) – and, wherever a Protestant school was established a Catholic one appeared nearby and vice versa. Furthermore, as facilitators of education, the missions were the compilers of standardised written histories of the peoples of Uganda (fusing local myths and oral clan histories with colonial folklore imbued with biblical imagery) which, as noted by Finnstro¨m in the case of the Acholi, precipitated a fascination with the past and aided a higher degree of ‘tribal’ cohesiveness (Living with Bad Surroundings, 39– 40). 62. Uzoigwe, Uganda, xii. 63. The alliance between the UPC and KY was one purely of convenience, having been forged in 1961 principally to marginalise the DP (who had won the preindependence elections in March of that year) and to stem the emergence of a Catholic government. This they achieved with the DP being ousted from power in the April 1962 elections. 64. Sebei had been a county of Bugisu until 1961 and Madi a sub-district of Acholi and then West Nile until 1962. See Kasfir, Shrinking Political Arena, 126– 9, on the sub-nationalism of the former (and comparative lack thereof in the latter). 65. Yoramu Barongo, ‘Ethnic Pluralism and Political Centralisation: The Basis of Political Conflict’, in Kumar Rupesinghe (ed.), Conflict Resolution in Uganda. Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1989, 72. This it did quite successfully for the first four years – by and large the kingdom and district administrations remained inward-looking (ibid., 75). 66. Ibid., 75; Kabwegyere, Politics of State Formation, 234. 67. For the first year of independence, Uganda’s head of state was the Queen of England represented by a governor-general. For detailed discussion of this Act and other aspects of the constitution, see Abraham Kiapi, ‘The Constitution as a Mediator in Internal Conflict’, in Kumar Rupesinghe (ed.),

NOTES

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

TO PAGES

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Conflict Resolution in Uganda. Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1989. For detailed discussion of the mutiny, see Amii Omara-Otunnu, Politics and the Military in Uganda, 1890– 1985. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987, Chapters 4 and 5. Idi Amin was promoted to colonel and appointed deputy army commander in 1964. Garth Glentworth and Ian Hancock, ‘Obote and Amin: Change and Continuity in Modern Uganda Politics’, African Affairs 72, no. 288 (1973), 248. Dan Mudoola, ‘Communal Conflict in the Military and its Political Consequences’, in Kumar Rupesinghe (ed.), Conflict Resolution in Uganda. Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1989, 122. Phares Mutibwa, Uganda since Independence: A Story of Unfulfilled Hopes. London: Hurst, 1992, 23. The president had no discretion to refuse assent to bills. On the respective roles of president and prime minister, see Kiapi, ‘Constitution as Mediator’, 102 – 3. These allegations related to the misappropriation of gold and ivory during the Ugandan Army’s involvement in the Congolese rebellion in 1964– 5. Obote appointed a commission of inquiry to examine the allegations – it found those accused involved in no wrongdoing. Barongo, ‘Ethnic Pluralism’, 80. Obote, writing in the East African Journal in 1968, cited in Glentworth and Hancock, ‘Obote and Amin’, 242, who go onto note that this ‘authorised’ (but inaccurate) version attempted to apply a neo-Marxist analysis to the crisis – to set the confrontation within the context of a class war and to substitute class solidarity for tribal division. In so doing, emphasis was placed on the clash between Obote and Mutesa (feudalist), with the dissident UPC ministers (capitalist) cast as secondary conspirators. But both stood on the side of the privileged – who reflected and encouraged inequality and exploited tribal divisions – and opposed the socialists and nationalists who wanted to root out oppression. In fact, the masses were inert, the imperialists were absent and the description of the two sides a distortion (ibid., 243). See Kabwegyere, Politics of State Formation, 242. Documents appended to the Charter included a proposed non-military ‘national service’ programme in rural areas to inculcate a new political culture and a nationalisation programme (the Nakivubo Pronouncements) aimed at 60 per cent public ownership of commercial enterprises (foreign and local). Glentworth and Hancock, ‘Obote and Amin’, 245. Loyalty to him was largely seen as devotion to the socialist cause (and appropriately rewarded). Bert N. Adams, ‘Uganda Before, During and After Amin’, Rural Africana 11 (Fall 1981), 18.

264

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170 –172

81. Dan Mudoola, ‘Political Transitions since Idi Amin: A Study in Political Pathology’, in Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development. London: James Currey, 1988, 290– 1. 82. E.A. Brett, ‘Neutralising the Use of Force in Uganda: The Role of the Military in Politics’, Journal of Modern African Studies 33, no. 1 (1995), 135– 6. 83. For further detail, see Glentworth and Hancock, ‘Obote and Amin’, 246 – 248. 84. Samuel Decalo, ‘African Personal Dictatorships’, Journal of Modern African Studies 23, no. 2 (1985), 220. It is something of an irony that Obote commissioned Amin on the eve of independence against the advice of the last colonial Governor of Uganda, Walter Coutts. The Kenyan colonial administration had submitted evidence that Amin was responsible for the murder of Turkana tribesmen, whose mutilated bodies were found in an area previously patrolled by his platoon. Not only did Obote refuse to hand Amin over for trial but subsequently promoted him – twice. See George W. Kanyeihamba, ‘Power that Rode Naked through Uganda under the Muzzle of a Gun’, in Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development. London: James Currey, 1988, 79 – 80. 85. Donald Rothchild and John W. Harbeson, ‘Rehabilitation in Uganda’, Current History 80, no. 464 (1981), 116. 86. Glentworth and Hancock, ‘Obote and Amin’, 238. 87. Mudoola, ‘Communal Conflict’, 131. 88. Ali A. Mazrui, ‘Between Development and Decay: Anarchy, Tyranny and Progress under Idi Amin’, Third World Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1980), 44. 89. Mutibwa, Uganda since Independence, 85. 90. Peter Woodward, ‘Ambiguous Amin’, African Affairs 77, no. 307 (1978), 153– 6. Referred to by Amin as ‘a unique tribe’, the Nubi are an East African Muslim community which, as aforementioned, was created from among Emin Pasha’s troops (of multifarious ethnic origins). Their culture is essentially urban and the army is regarded as their historical occupation. They have remained a marginal (even alien) group in Uganda and identification with the Nubi from the outset would have likely led to Amin’s rejection by many Ugandans. See also Aiden Southall, ‘General Amin and the Coup: Great Man or Historical Inevitably?’, Journal of Modern African Studies 13, no. 1 (1975), who places the fact that Amin was a Nubi at the centre of his analysis. 91. Adams, ‘Uganda Before’, 17– 18. The flip side, of course, was that people were only to go to Amin (and hence nowhere else), which gave him control of the dissemination of information such that a picture of (controlled) unity rather than dissention could be painted. 92. Caroline Thomas, ‘Challenges of Nation Building: Uganda – A Case Study’, India Quarterly 41, no. 3 – 4 (1985), 348. In the Common Man’s Charter, Obote stated that ‘[. . .] these people (Indians with British passports) are not Uganda citizens and are not entitled to remain in our country at their own will

NOTES

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101.

102. 103. 104.

105. 106.

107. 108. 109.

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or because they cannot be admitted into any other country. They have never shown any commitment to the cause of Uganda or even to Africans’ (cited in Kabwegyere, Politics of State Formation, 244). Mazrui, ‘Between Development and Decay’, 57. Holger Bernt Hansen, ‘Uganda in the 1970s: A Decade of Paradoxes and Ambiguities’, Journal of East African Studies 7, no. 1 (2013), 91, 95. Ibid., 88. Decalo, ‘African Personal Dictatorships’, 228, 226. Hansen, ‘Uganda in the 1970s’, 100. Hansen goes onto note that the fact ministries continued their work eased the return to normal practices after Amin’s demise. Decalo, ‘African Personal Dictatorships’, 227. Jan Jelmert Jorgensen, Uganda: A Modern History. London: Croom Helm, 1981, 279. Glentworth and Hancock, ‘Obote and Amin’, 254. Decalo, for example, highlights Amin’s functional illiteracy not only to explain his lack of mastery with the intricacies of banking procedures and affairs of state but also his educational insecurity which manifested itself in his discomfort in formal government settings, his affinity with the rank-and-file and the anti-education thread that ran through his appointments and policies (‘African Personal Dictatorships’, 213– 18). Prior to the Asians, in March 1972 Amin had expelled the 800 Israelis living in Uganda, gaining him Libyan support and financial backing. Broader links with the Arab world followed, and in 1974 Uganda joined the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Aidan Southall, ‘Social Disorganisation in Uganda: Before, During and after Amin’, Journal of Modern African Studies 18, no. 4 (1980), 632. Rothchild and Harbeson, ‘Rehabilitation in Uganda’, 116. Nelson Kasfir, ‘Uganda’s Uncertain Quest for Recovery’, Current History 84, no. 501 (1985), 170. Since the colonial period, the Ugandan economy had remained dependent on agricultural exports, especially coffee and cotton, which accounted for over 80 per cent of export earnings in the 1960s (Rothchild and Harbeson, ‘Rehabilitation in Uganda’, 115). Southall, ‘Social Disorganisation in Uganda’, 635. Kasfir, ‘Uganda’s Uncertain Quest’, 170. For example, sugar production fell from 141,266 to 12,436 metric tons between 1971 and 1977; soap from 13,600 to 3,600 tons between 1971 and 1975; and the number of hoes produced dropped from 1.4 million in 1971 to 333,000 in 1978 (which was one of the main causes of the decline in cotton production). Copper mining ceased altogether by 1978. These figures and other examples can be found in Jorgensen, Uganda, 296– 7. Southall, ‘Social Disorganisation’, 630. Coffee prices rose by 350 per cent. Jorgensen, Uganda, 297. Thomas ‘Challenges of Nation Building’, 329.

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174 –177

110. Ibid., 323. Thomas further notes that purges of Lango and Acholi towns occurred in 1976 –7 (in response to an alleged plot to overthrow Amin), after which Gulu was declared a Nubi town (with surviving Acholi forced to live outside specific limits). 111. Jorgensen, Uganda, 275. At the time of expansion (between 1971 and 1975), Uganda was the largest recipient of Soviet military aid in sub-Saharan Africa. See George Roberts, ‘The Uganda-Tanzania War, the Fall of Idi Amin, and the Failure of African Diplomacy, 1978– 1979’, Journal of East African Studies 8, no. 4 (2014), 696. 112. Thomas, ‘Challenges of Nation Building’, 327. 113. Southall, ‘Social Disorganisation’, 629. 114. Makerere, in particular, came under the close scrutiny of the regime. 115. One such ‘accident’ which caused notable outrage was that involving the death Archbishop Luwum (after he openly criticised the regime). 116. Jorgensen, Uganda, 315. 117. Ibid., 309– 15. 118. Thomas, ‘Challenges of Nation Building’, 330. 119. Cited in Oliver Furley, ‘Uganda’s Retreat from Turmoil?’. Conflict Studies, no. 196. London: Centre for Security and Conflict Studies, 1987, 14. 120. Mutibwa, Uganda since Independence, 122 – 3. 121. Mazrui, ‘Between Development and Decay’, 57. 122. Michael Twaddle, ‘The Ousting of Idi Amin’, The Round Table, no. 275 (1979), 220. 123. Relations between Nyerere and Amin, which had been acrimonious from the start, soured further in 1972 following an unsuccessful invasion by Ugandan exiles from Tanzania and again in 1975 when Tanzania boycotted the OAU Summit chaired by Amin in Kampala (together with Zambia, Botswana and Mozambique). Amin’s occupation of the Kagera Salient was a step too far, claiming as he did that the annexation was in self-defence (against a Tanzanian attack) and restored Uganda’s ‘rightful’ boundary to the old colonial boundary between German and British spheres of influence – not to mention the wanton destruction caused by his troops and his proposal to solve the crisis by a boxing match between Nyerere and himself. The Tanzanian invasion received the tacit approval of African Heads of States at the OAU Summit in July 1979 and although the violation of the non-intervention principle remained a moot point in Africa and internationally, Amin’s downfall was widely welcomed. See Thomas, ‘Challenges of Nation Building’, 331 –43; Roberts, ‘UgandaTanzania War’; and Wheeler, Saving Strangers, Chapter 4. 124. Rothchild and Harbeson, ‘Rehabilitation in Uganda’, 117. 125. Ibid., 115. 126. Southall, ‘Social Disorganisation’, 629. 127. On this period see Jimmy K. Tindigarukayo, ‘Uganda, 1979 – 85: Leadership in Transition’, Journal of Modern African Studies 26, no. 4 (1988). Lule’s quick demise stemmed, in part, from his redistribution of abandoned businesses and

NOTES

128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

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properties among his Baganda associates, from his proposals for literacy and proportional regional recruitment in the army and police (so that none achieved ascendency but also seen to favour the Baganda) and from latent fear that he intended to restore monarchism but ultimately resulted from his assumption of executive authority in accordance with the unpopular 1967 constitution (and without NCC consultation). Binaisa, in his turn, tried to neutralise the NCC by increasing its membership more than threefold, but it was his rejection of a pluralist system (on the basis that it would revive past religious and ethnic sectionalism) – with the announcement that general elections would be held within two years under the umbrella of the UNLF (implying that only the UNLF would be eligible to participate) – that sealed his fate, although his popularity was already compromised by his previous position as attorney-general under Obote in the 1960s. He was finally deposed after attempting to marginalise the key members of what became the Military Commission, under the chairmanship of Paulo Muwango. The Commission also comprised Yoweri Museveni (Vice Chairman and Minister of Defence), David Oyite-Ojok (Army Chief of Staff), Tito Okello (Army Commander), Colonel Zeddi Maruru and Lieutenant-Colonel William Omaria. Ibid., 621. Adams, ‘Uganda Before’, 21, 23. Cherry Gertzel, ‘Uganda After Amin: The Continuing Search for Leadership and Control’, African Affairs 79, no. 317 (1980), 462. This was despite Binaisa’s attempt to mitigate sectarianism by making the enlarged NCC representative of all (now 33) districts. On the contrary, an emphasis on regional rather than national politics was sustained and contributed to a revival of intra-district cleavages. It also alienated the Baganda, especially after Binaisa’s reversal of Lule’s decision to restore former provinces – which would have reconstituted Buganda as a single entity (ibid., 475 – 6). Ibid., 481. Obote had remained on the edge of politics during his nine-year exile in Tanzania and had not been present at Moshi. Furley, ‘Uganda’s Retreat’, 8, 11. Tindigarukayo, ‘Uganda, 1979– 85’, 615– 16. Kasfir, ‘Uganda’s Uncertain Quest’, 173. Given coffee still provided most revenue and cotton production was slow to recover, regional inequalities in income dramatically widened. Furley, ‘Uganda’s Retreat’, 13. Kasfir, ‘Uganda’s Uncertain Quest’, 173. Mutibwa, Uganda since Independence, 152. Cf. A Correspondent, ‘Uganda: “The Pearl of Africa” Loses its Lustre’, World Today 40, no. 5 (1984), 219; and Furley, ‘Uganda’s Retreat’, 11. From 1982, no foreign correspondents were allowed to live in Uganda. Mutibwa, Uganda since Independence, 150. Furley, ‘Uganda’s Retreat’, 13 – 14.

268

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179 –182

141. Kanyeihamba, ‘Power that Rode’, 72–3. Refugee figures taken from Richard Dowden, ‘Uganda: Britain’s Blind Eye to Terror’, The Times, 3 May 1985. 142. A Correspondent, ‘Uganda’, 215– 16. The Luwero Triangle is an area northwest of Kampala including the districts of Mubende, Mpigi and Luwero. 143. The other key movements were the Uganda Freedom Army (UFA – headed by Andrew Kayiira, Lule’s Minister of Internal Affairs) operating mainly in Buganda and the Uganda National Rescue Front (UNRF – headed by Amin’s Minister of Finance, Moses Ali) operating mainly in West Nile. 144. Mutibwa, Uganda since Independence, 159. 145. As Omara-Otunnu argues, ‘the perception among the men from Acholi was that they were being sent so that they would be killed’ (Politics and the Military, 163). The situation worsened after David Oyite-Ojok (who was killed in a helicopter crash in December 1983) was replaced as Chief of Staff in August 1984 by another Langi (Smith Opon-Acak) rather than the more senior (and Acholi) Basilio Okello. 146. The main bone of contention was Article 7 of the Agreement, which provided for the establishment of a national army to number 8,480 leading to a widespread sense of insecurity within the 15,000-strong UNLA. See Tindigarukayo, ‘Uganda, 1979– 85’, 620. 147. A second insurgency (the Uganda People’s Army) arose in Teso in (1987 –92), sparked by the government’s disbandment of local militias (which had been set up to protect the Teso from Karomojong cattle rustling) – as a consequence of which a series of raids in 1986– 7 devastated the region. See Joan Vincent, ‘War in Uganda: North and South’, in S.P. Reyna and R.E. Downs (eds), Deadly Developments: Capitalism, States and War. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1999. The Acholi were also subject to Karomojong raids (with suspected government complicity) in 1987 – 8. 148. For more on Alice, see Behrend, Alice Lakwena; and Tim Allen, ‘Understanding Alice: Uganda’s Holy Spirit Movement in Context’, Africa 61, no. 3 (1991). 149. Frank Van Acker, ‘Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army: The New Order No One Ordered’, African Affairs 103, no. 412 (2004), 346– 7. 150. Alice fled to Kenya, where she died in Ifo refugee camp in 2007. 151. The apt characterisation ‘radical heir’ is taken from Ruddy Doom and Koen Vlassenroot, ‘Kony’s Message: A New Koine? The Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda’, African Affairs 98, no. 390 (1999), 23. 152. For a discussion of the ten-point programme, see Michael Twaddle, ‘Museveni’s Uganda: Notes Towards an Analysis’, in Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds), Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development. London: James Currey, 1988. 153. Brett, ‘Neutralising the Use’, 144, 147. 154. Susan Dicklitch, ‘Uganda: A Microcosm of Crisis and Hope in Sub-Saharan Africa’, International Journal 51, no. 1 (1995– 6), 118. This is in contrast to an

NOTES

155.

156. 157. 158. 159.

160.

161. 162. 163.

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182 –184

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annual growth rate of 0.7 per cent for the period 1965– 73; -6.2 per cent for 1973– 80; and -2.4 per cent for 1980–7. However, the drawing out of the process (which was originally supposed to take two years) increasingly led to criticism that it was ‘shadow play’ rather than ‘an integral part of nation-building and a means of establishing common values’ (as articulated by the Commission) and that what began as a transparent process became more and more a ‘manipulated’ one (David E. Apter, ‘Democracy for Uganda: A Case for Comparison’, Daedalus 124, no. 3 (1995), 174). It was in response to such criticism that the government agreed to a democratically elected constituent Assembly to debate, enact and promulgate the Commission’s draft Constitution. Cf. Oliver Furley and James Katalikawe, ‘Constitutional Reform in Uganda: The New Approach’, African Affairs 96, no. 383 (1997), who suggest that the notion of ‘the people’s constitution’ was a ‘noble lie’, and the Commission ultimately delivered the constitution the NRM intended – which had an ‘uncanny family resemblance to its predecessors’ (252). Tom Goodfellow and Stefan Lindemann, ‘The Clash of Institutions: Traditional Authority, Conflict and the Failure of “Hybridity” in Buganda’, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 51, no. 1 (2013), 14. Englebert, ‘Born-again Buganda’, 350. Oliver Furley, ‘Democratisation in Uganda’, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 38, no. 3 (2000), 81. J. Oloka-Onyango, ‘Uganda’s “Benevolent” Dictatorship’, Current History 96, no. 610 (1997), 213. This rhetoric fed into traditional cultural attitudes and communal practices which favour decisions by consensus and the argument that ‘it is not African to organise society in such a way that one side exists to oppose another’ (Kiapi, ‘Constitution as Mediator’, 109). Cf. Mikael Karlstro¨m, ‘Imagining Democracy: Political Culture and Democratisation in Buganda’, Africa 66, no. 4 (1996), 494– 5, whose informants were unanimous in their dislike of political parties – which they thought promoted unregulated competition and fostered social exclusion, disrupting even the most fundamental of solidarities, pitting father against child and neighbour against neighbour. Cf. Oloka-Onyango, ‘Uganda’s “Benevolent” Dictatorship’; and Dicklitch, ‘Uganda: A Microcosm’. As Kasfir interestingly points out, Museveni’s rationale evokes Nyerere’s defence of Tanzania’s single-party system 30 years previously (Nelson Kasfir, ‘No-Party Democracy in Uganda’, Journal of Democracy 9, no. 2 (1998), 59– 60). On the development of village committees during the war, see Nelson Kasfir, ‘Guerrillas and Civilian Participation: The National Resistance Army in Uganda, 1981– 86’, Journal of Modern African Studies 43, no. 2 (2005). Oloka-Onyango, ‘Uganda’s “Benevolent” Dictatorship’, 213. Cited in Elliott D. Green, ‘Decentralisation and Conflict in Uganda’, Conflict, Security & Development 8, no. 4 (2008), 431.

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184 –185

164. Kasfir, ‘No-Party Democracy’, 54, who further provides a discussion of the contradictions inherent in combining popular (participatory) and parliamentary (representative) democracy in theory and in the NRM no-party system (56 – 8). 165. Joshua B. Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony in Museveni’s Uganda: Pax Musevenica. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 25. Former DP leader Paul Ssemogerere was the other main contender with 24 per cent. 166. Article 246 of the constitution clearly states its federal limits: ‘A traditional or cultural leader shall not join or take part in politics or exercise any administrative, legislative or executive powers of government’. 167. Furley, ‘Democratisation in Uganda’, 87; Aili Mari Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2010, 81; and Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony, 3 – 4 [emphasis in original]. 168. Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda, 107. Tripp suggests that the driving force behind the discontinuance of the no-party system was the haemorrhaging of the NRM (especially western) elite (ibid., 69 –70). 169. David Watt et al., ‘Democratisation or the Democratisation of Corruption? The Case of Uganda’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 37, no. 3 (1999), 60. See also Roger Tangri and Andrew M. Mwenda, ‘Politics, Donors and the Ineffectiveness of Anti-Corruption Institutions in Uganda’, Journal of Modern African Studies 44, no. 1 (2006), who argue that elite corruption has constituted an important instrument of regime consolidation and that high-level elites have influenced, manipulated and pressured anti-corruption institutions in ways that have constrained their effectiveness in checking wrongdoing – such that no top political leader has been prosecuted. 170. See Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda, Chapter 6, for a discussion of the various security agencies that have been employed since 1986. As Tripp argues, the need to stay in power (and the use of patronage to do so) becomes more acute once corrupt and violent means have been engaged in to quell opposition, for to relinquish power would invite retribution of the same kind upon themselves (ibid., 146). 171. Roger Tangri and Andrew M. Mwenda, ‘Patronage Politics, Donor Reforms, and Regime Consolidation in Uganda’, African Affairs 104, no. 416 (2005), 463. 172. The Allied Democratic Forces (1996 – 2002) composed of Baganda and operating in western Uganda, the West Nile Bank Front (1995 – 7) and a revival of the UNRF (1998 –2002) both of and in West Nile. 173. The LRA received weapons and other assistance from Khartoum in response to Museveni’s support for the SPLA. In 1999, Uganda and Sudan normalised diplomatic relations and in 2002 Sudan withdrew support for the LRA. 174. Doom and Vlassenroot, ‘Kony’s Message’, 25 – 6; Van Acker, ‘Uganda and the LRA’, 348. Former LRA commanders say that the spirits (13 were alleged to speak through him) left Kony around 1999 and he now remains with ‘wisdom’

NOTES

175. 176.

177.

178.

179.

180. 181.

182.

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(Anna Borzello, ‘The Challenge of DDR in Northern Uganda: The Lord’s Resistance Army’, Conflict, Security & Development 7, no. 3 (2007), 394). Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot (eds), The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality. London: Zed Books, 2010, 14. On the ICC and LRA see Tim Allen, Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army. London: Zed Books, 2006. On the ‘exported’ conflict, see, Allen and Vlassenroot, The LRA. Kony and the LRA command moved to Garamba National Park in north-eastern DRC in 2005 and have remained in the DRC, Sudan and Central African Republic since. Marjoke A. Oosterom, ‘The Effects of Protracted Conflict and Displacement on Citizen Engagement in Northern Uganda’, Conflict, Security & Development 16, no. 1 (2016). As a result of the inadequacies and excesses of the UPDF, the Acholi felt the NRM was using the war to stigmatise them as ‘primitive’ and ‘violent’, which led to a further withdrawal from and non-interaction with the state. See also Finnstro¨m, Living with Bad Surroundings. Kasfir, ‘No-Party Democracy’, 55. In practice, RCs have always been closely supervised by the NRC. A 1987 law placed the RCs under the direction of the minister of local government, who has broad powers to suspend them. In addition, each district has a presidentially appointed resident commissioner who may intervene to reverse RC decisions and even remove existing councils. Further recentralisation resulted from an amendment to the Local Government Act in 2005, which stipulated that chief administrative officers would no longer be subject to their respective RCV but would instead be appointed by the Public Service Commission of the central government and assigned to districts by the Ministry of Local Government. Green, ‘Decentralisation and Conflict’, 432. This ‘concentrated decentralisation’ has resulted in few funds trickling down to LCs I– IV, thus undermining their capacity to deliver services – a situation that has been exacerbated by the elimination of the unpopular graduated personal taxes prior to the 2006 elections (which provided upwards of 80 per cent of local governmentgenerated revenue) and while central government funding was initially increased to compensate for this it was subsequently cut in the 2011– 12 budget. Watt et al., ‘Democratisation’, 48. Writing in 2008 (of Uganda’s then 80 districts), Green noted that Uganda has the highest number of sub-national political units of any country in Africa and a population per unit ratio among the lowest on the continent (‘Decentralisation and Conflict’, 440). Cf. Green, ‘Decentralisation and Conflict’; Terrell G. Manyak and Isaac Wasswa Katono, ‘Decentralisation and Conflict in Uganda: Governance Adrift’, African Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4 (2010); and Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda. While just six new districts were created between 1986 and 1994, five new districts accompanied the 1996 elections followed by the

272

183. 184.

185.

186. 187.

188. 189. 190.

191.

NOTES TO PAGES 186 –188 announcement of a further 11 just before the 2001 elections, 24 before the 2006 elections and 25 before the 2011 elections. The creation of an additional 23 districts was approved ahead of the 2016 elections – to become effective in phases over the next four financial years, beginning on 1 July 2016. Cited in Manyak and Katono, ‘Decentralisation and Conflict’, 5. Green, ‘Decentralisation and Conflict’, 443 – 6. However, while concentrated decentralisation has bred more local-level conflicts, it has ‘bought’ the government an element of stability by easing existing violence over ethnic imbalances at the centre and preventing the emergence of new civil wars. See Stefan Lindemann, ‘Just Another Change of Guard? Broad-Based Politics and Civil War in Museveni’s Uganda’, African Affairs 110, no. 440 (2011). Goodfellow and Lindemann, ‘Clash of Institutions’, 4 – 5. For example, in January 2003 there was a peaceful demonstration by more than 100,000 Baganda. In July 2009, Buganda accused the government of a hate campaign against the kabaka and asked it to relocate from Kampala to somewhere outside Buganda. Two months later the government prevented the kabaka from visiting a corner of his kingdom where a small breakaway group had proclaimed independence from Buganda, leading to a series of riots. Tensions flared again in March 2010 when the Kasubi tombs (the burial ground of many past kabakas) were burned in a suspected arson attack. External debt rose from US$ 375 million in 1975 – 9, to US$ 948 million in 1985 reaching US$ 1,638 billion by 1990 (Dicklitch, ‘Uganda: A Microcosm’, 120). Oloka-Onyango, ‘Uganda’s “Benevolent” Dictatorship’, 214. Unequal access to resources has been felt more keenly in the north where over 1.8 million people have been displaced during the course of the war (up to 90 per cent of the Acholi into ‘protected’ camps) and an estimated 67 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, compared to 38.8 per cent nationwide (Borzello, ‘Challenge of DDR’, 388). Dicklitch, ‘Uganda: A Microcosm’, 121. Justin O. Parkhurst, ‘The Response to HIV/AIDS and the Construction of National Legitimacy: Lessons from Uganda’, Development and Change 36, no. 3 (2005). Ibid. Parkhurst illustrates that the government strategically addressed AIDS to turn a situation of political challenge into one of political success: by shaping its response to fit the agendas of the most influential international development actors and adopting a multi-sectoral approach, it engaged international and national non-state actors, while at the same time maintaining government control of (and credit for) the process. In a similar vein, its structural adjustment success story paved the way to Uganda being one of the first countries to benefit from HIPC and Paris Cub debt relief with debt cut to US$ 1.4 billion in 2005. See Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda, 184. Tangri and Mwenda, ‘Patronage Politics’, 452. Donor support has financed more than 50 per cent of Uganda’s budget and 80 per cent of its development

NOTES

192. 193. 194. 195.

196. 197. 198. 199.

200. 201. 202.

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expenditures, especially since the late 1990s (ibid., 453). In turn, it has subsidised an increase in state spending, especially in public administration (16 per cent on average between 1999 and 2002 – including over 70 new donor-sponsored semi-autonomous statutory agencies to carry out reforms, which enabled the government to evade the ban on civil service recruitment and provide higher salaried jobs to supporters thus countering the reduction in – and duplicating functions of – public offices while at the same time manipulating and benefitting from the privatisation process). Defence spending has similarly grown from US$ 44 million in 1991 to US$ 88 million in 1996 to over US$ 155 million in 2003 and around US$ 200 million in 2004 (ibid., 456– 7). Rita Abrahamsen and Gerald Bareebe, ‘Uganda’s 2016 Elections: Not Even Faking it Anymore’, African Affairs 115, no. 461 (2016), 760. Ibid., 762. Museveni won 60.6 per cent of the votes cast. Mudoola, ‘Political Transitions’, 291. See, for example, Gilbert M. Khadiagala, ‘State Collapse and Reconstruction in Uganda’, in I. William Zartman (ed.), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995; and Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony. Gertzel, ‘Uganda After Amin’, 488 – 9. Mann, ‘Autonomous Power’. Mazrui, ‘Blood of Experience’. Karstrom’s interviews with Baganda and Finnstro¨m’s interviews with Acholi are instructive here – the former considering the LC system ‘the same as’ the old Buganda system (i.e. legitimate) and the latter considering LC officials rwodi kalam (i.e. illegitimate). Englebert, ‘Born-again Buganda’, 347, 358. Cf. Finnstro¨m, Living with Bad Surroundings; and Oosterom, ‘Effects of Protracted Conflict’. Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony, 3.

Concluding Reflections 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Fukuyama, ‘End of History?’. Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy. ‘Failed States Index’, 57. Keohane, ‘Political Authority after Intervention’, 295. Cf. Patrick, ‘Failed States’; Newman, ‘Weak States’; and Menkhaus, Somalia. Cf. Halvorson, States of Disorder; Milliken and Krause, ‘State Failure’; and Bøa˚s and Jennings, ‘“Failed States”’. 6. Gros, ‘Towards a Taxonomy’, 456. 7. Wolff, ‘Regional Dimensions’, 960 [emphasis in original]. 8. Cf. Bilgin and Morton, ‘From “Rogue” to “Failed” States?’; and Hill, ‘Challenging the Failed State Thesis’.

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9. Anderson, ‘Antiquated Before They Can Ossify’. 10. Hagmann and Hoehne, ‘Failures of the State Failure’; Williams, ‘State Failure in Africa’; and Gros, State Failure. 11. Herbst, ‘Let Them Fail’. 12. Bilgin and Morton, ‘From “Rogue” to “Failed” States?’, 169; Bøa˚s and Jennings, ‘“Failed States”’, 477. 13. Cf. Hill, ‘Beyond the Other’; and Hagmann and Hoehne, ‘Failures of the State Failure’. 14. Gros, State Failure, 37. 15. Cf. Jackson, Quasi-States; and Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’. 16. Griffiths, African Inheritance. 17. Cf. Jackson, Quasi-States; and Mazrui, ‘Triple Heritage’. 18. John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 324. 19. See Mamdani, ‘Indirect Rule’. 20. Cf. Clapham, ‘Failed-States and Non-States’; and Bayart, State in Africa. 21. Alexandrowicz, ‘The New States’, 228. 22. Cf. Fabry, Recognising States; Ratner, ‘Drawing a Better Line’; and Barnett, ‘New UN Politics’. 23. Jackson, Quasi-States, 41. 24. Cf. Jackson, ‘Quasi-States, Dual Regimes’; and Jackson, Quasi-States. 25. Mazrui, ‘Triple Heritage’, 112. 26. Geertz, ‘Integrative Revolution’, 274. 27. Mudoola, ‘Political Transitions’, 291. 28. Mazrui, ‘Failed State and Political Collapse’. 29. Mann, ‘Autonomous Power’. See also Zolberg, ‘Specter of Anarchy; and Holsti, State, War and the State of War. 30. Callaghy, ‘State as Lame Leviathan’. 31. Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works. 32. Laely, ‘Peasants, Local Communities’, 715, 711. 33. Cf. Jackson and Rosberg, Personal Rule. 34. Cf. Berman, ‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State’; and Reno, Corruption and State Politics. 35. Ekeh, ‘Colonialism and the Two Publics’. 36. Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, 146 – 7 [emphasis in original]. 37. Cf. Musah, ‘Privatisation of Security’; and Muggah with Sang, ‘Enemy Within’. 38. Van de Walle, ‘Africa and the World Economy’. 39. Cf. Kiapi, ‘Constitution as Mediator’; and Karlstro¨m, ‘Imagining Democracy’. 40. Jooma, ‘“We Can’t Eat the Constitution”’. 41. Cf. Jeffries, ‘State, Structural Adjustment and Good Government’. 42. Jackson, Quasi-States, 79 – 80. 43. Holsti, ‘International Theory and War’, 38. Cf. Ayoob, Third World Security Predicament.

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275

44. Cf. Clapham, ‘Global-Local Politics’; Ellis, ‘How to Rebuild Africa’; and Englebert, ‘Born-again Buganda’. 45. Mazrui, ‘Blood of Experience’, 28. 46. Daley, ‘Ethnicity and Political Violence’, 677. 47. Englebert, ‘Born-again Buganda’, 360. 48. Davidson, Black Man’s Burden, 315. 49. Englebert, ‘Born-again Buganda’, 365 –6. 50. Cf. Vervisch and Titeca, ‘Bridging Community Associations’; Inglelaere and Kohlhagen, ‘Situating Social Imaginaries’. 51. Young, ‘End of the Post-Colonial State’, 48–9. 52. Cf. Uvin, Life after Violence; and Gertzel, ‘Uganda after Amin’. 53. Englebert, ‘Contemporary African State’. 54. Cf. Englebert, ‘Contemporary African State’; and Englebert, ‘Pre-Colonial Institutions’. 55. Ayoob, Third World Security Predicament; Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’. 56. See Brooks, ‘Failed States’. 57. Hagmann and Hoehne, ‘Failures of the State Failure’, 53. 58. Jackson, Quasi-States, 80.

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INDEX

Acholi, district of, 161 –8, 180, 186 people, 161 –2, 165, 171, 174, 179–81, 185–6, 187n.187, 190 ADC, 147, 148 ADF, 185n.172 African Union see AMIB, OAU Agenda for Peace, 4 supplement to, 5 –6 aid, 61 –2, 78–81, 83–90, 105, 132, 142–3, 149, 178, 187, 199 –201 conditionalities of, 84, 87–9, 105, 135–6, 187 –8, 200–1 see also debt; structural adjustment al-Qaeda, 48–9 see also terrorism Albania, 41 Albright, Madeleine, 2 Algeria, 132 Ali, Moses, 179n.143 Alur, 163, 174 American Colonisation Society, 67 American Revolution, 14–15 AMIB, 144 Amin, Idi, 44, 96n.172, 98, 103n.221, 153, 169, 171– 7, 179, 180, 189, 190, 202 anarchy, 2–3, 30, 39, 43– 4, 45, 47, 63, 92–3, 194 Angola, 43, 79, 104 Ankole, 155, 158– 60, 163, 164, 168, 183 Rwandese in, 179 Annan, Kofi, 6, 46, apartheid, 133, 142, 145n.193 see also ethnic cleansing; genocide arms transfers, 80–3, 90, 132, 200

Arusha negotiations, 143–5, 148, 150, 201 Asians in Uganda, 167, 170, 172–3, 182 Australia, 6n.27, 46 authoritarianism, 39, 91, 93–4, 99, 156, 198–9 colonial, 99, 128, 184, 198 creeping, 134, 188 electoral, 148–9, 201 auto-colonialism, 78, 199 see also neo-colonialism Babito dynasty, 157n.13 Bacwezi, 157n.13 Bagaza, Jean-Baptiste, 132–4, 136n.152, 137, 141 Bajiji clan, 112n.15 Baker, Samuel, 158n.16–17 Bakiga, 160 bakungu, 155, 156, 183 ‘balkanisation’, 71–2, 106, 187, 195 Bandung Conference, 17, 79 Bantu, 109n.1, 111, 135, 154, 155n.3, 161, 169, 170, 182 Baranyanka, Pierre, 121, 123, 124 Barre, Siad, 58, 98 bashingantahe, 112, 123, 130n.110, 146n.198, 151, 203 Bashingo clan, 133 bataka, 155, 156, 159, 182 see also clan, in Uganda Batare, 114, 117, 121–2, 124 Batembuzi, 157n.13 batongole tenure, 159 Bayanzi clan, 133, 136

298

STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Belgium see also Leopold II colonial administration, 17, 25, 70n.15, 109, 116– 17, 120–5, 126n.93, 160 post-colonial assistance, 127, 128, 132 see also neo-colonialism Bell, Henry, 161–2 Benin, 71 Beringe, Captain von, 117–8 Berlin Conference, 71, 115 see also ‘scramble for Africa’ Bezi, 114, 121–2, 124, 126 Biafra, secession of, 75, 79 Bigombe, Betty, 185 Bihumugani (Biha), Le´opold, 124, 127 Binaisa, Godfrey, 177 BINUB, 147, 148 BNUB, 148 borders, colonial see also ‘scramble for Africa’; uti possidetis drawing of, 25, 71–6, 97, 106, 115– 7, 151, 154– 63, 188, 195, 197–8 inviolability of, 18– 19, 21–2, 65, 67, 73, 77, 105–6, 197–8, 203–4 Botswana, 73n.31, 76, 176n.123, 182, 202 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 2, 4–6, 31, 82, 140 Brazzaville Group, 77 Britain, 6n.27 colonial rule, 15n.73, 25, 67, 70, 73n.31, 76n.54, 114–116, 153– 68, 176n.123, 188–9 post-colonial assistance, 79, 168 see also neo-colonialism British East Africa, 154, 161, 163 see also Kenya Bubanza, 137 bugabire, 112–3 Buganda, 72, 155–60, 162, 163, 164, 166–9, 177n.130, 182–3, 187, 188, 190, 202 Baganda, 155 –161, 166 –7, 172, 177n.127, 177n.130, 179–80, 185n.172, 188, 190n.199, 196, 202 Bugangaizi, 158, 169 see also ‘lost counties’ Bugerere, 158 see also ‘lost counties’ Bugisu, 160n.29, 163, 168 Bujumbura, 117, 129, 137, 140, 142, 149 Bukedi, 160, 163, 168 Bulemezi, 158n.19 see also ‘lost counties’ Bunyoro, 155, 157–60, 162n.35, 163, 164, 168, 169, 196 Banyoro, 160

Burkino Faso, 72 Buruli, 158 see also ‘lost counties’ Bururi, 128, 129, 132, 133, 138 Bush Sr, George, 1 Bush Jr, George, 5n.25, 6n.27 Busoga, 158, 160, 163, 165, 168 Buwekula, 158 see also ‘lost counties’ Buyaga, 158, 169 see also ‘lost counties’ Buyoya, Pierre, 133–8, 142 –4 Cambodia, 2, 5n.19, 9, 43, 53 Cameroon, 72, 152 Canada, 46 Cankuzo, 129 Cape-to-Cairo route, 115– 16, 120 Casablanca Group, 77 of Burundi, 126 Catholic Church, 126, 132, 156–8, 167 see also Christianity and missionaries Central African Republic, 66, 186n.176 Chad, 79, 91 Charter of National Unity, 136–7 chieftaincy, 20, 98–9, 199 in Burundi, 112, 114, 117–25 in Uganda, 155– 6, 159–60, 162, 164– 5, 184, 190 China, 11, 132 Christianity and missionaries, 89, 155– 7, 159, 122–3, 132, 175, 180 Chua district, 162 Chwa, Kabaka Daudi, 158 Cibitoke, 137 civil society, in Africa, 70, 75, 86, 89, 91, 93– 4 in Burundi, 149 in Uganda, 182, 185 civil war, 31 –5, 193 in Africa, 79, 97, 100–2 in Burundi, 139–144, 149, 201, 202 in Uganda, 156, 158, 159 civilising mission, 13, 20 see also ‘sacred trust of civilisation’ clan, 77n.66, 196 see also kin group in Burundi, 111–13, 133–4, 136 in Uganda, 155, 159, 160, 162, 164 see also bataka; kaka ‘clash of civilisations’, 2n.8, 6, 50 clientelism, 85–6, 95–9, 106, 199, 200 in Burundi, 111, 112 –13, 122– 3, 126– 7, 136n.152, 139, 148, 150–1 in Uganda, 155, 173–5, 185, 186–7, 188

INDEX Clinton, Bill, 5n.25 CMSN, 133 CNDD, 141, 146 CNDD-FDD, 141, 144–9 youth wing of Imbonerakure, 149 Cold War order, 2, 4, 6, 8, 191 end of see new world order proxy wars/patronage of see neo-colonialism post-Cold War humanitarian intervention, 4–8, 45, 191–2 see also peace-building; state-building collapsed states, 21, 38–44, 60, 63, 192–3 in Uganda, 153, 189 Colvile, Sir Henry, 158 Common Man’s Charter, 170, 172 Commonwealth Observer Group, 178 Communist, 1, 79, 124 Comprehensive Ceasefire Agreement, 146 –7 Congo, 5, 17, 24, 127, 157 Belgian, 116– 17, 120 Democratic Republic of, 6n.27, 41, 44, 81n.89, 103n.221, 186n.176 Free State, 11, 114–6, 154, 163 Congo-Brazzaville, 186 Congolese, 129, 144n.192, 158, 169n.74 consociationalism, 145 constitution, 201 independence, 67, 73 in Burundi, 125 –6, 198 in Uganda, 167–8, 182, 188, 198 Burundi constitution of 1974, 132 Burundi constitution of 1981, 132, 133 Burundi constitution of 1992, 137 –8, 140–1 Burundi constitution of 2005, 144 –9 Uganda constitution of 1967, 170, 177n.127, 182 Uganda constitution of 1995, 184–5, 186, 190 Constitutional Commission, 136 see also Odoki Commission Constitutional Heads Act, 168, 188 Convention of Government, 141–2 corruption, 88, 96–8, 104, 133, 146n.197, 147, 182, 185, 186, 199, 201 Coˆte d’Ivoire, 44, 71n.23 coup d’e´tat, 30, 91 Burundi attempted coup, of 1965, 127 of 1989, 136–7 of 1991, 136–7

299

of 2015, 149 Burundi, coup of 1966, 127 –8 of 1976, 132 of 1987, 133, 200 Burundi, ‘creeping’ coup of 1993–6, 139 – 42 Burundi, suspected coup of 1969, 128 Uganda, coup of 1971, 171–2, 189 of 1985, 180 –1 Coutts, Walter, 171n.84 CP, 178, 180, 182 Crisis of 1966, 169 –70 Dar es Salaam, embassy bombings, 48 Dar es Salaam Agreement of Principles towards Lasting Peace, Security and Stability, 146–7 DDR, 53, 144, 182 debt, 84– 5, 87, 96, 146n.196, 187, 188n.190, 200 HIPC initiative, 87n.122, 146n.196, 188n.190 decentralisation, Uganda, 183–4, 186–7, 190 decolonisation, 14–21, 25, 67, 73– 8, 104, 106–7, 110, 124 –5, 167–8, 188, 190, 196 –8, 201 see also self-determination; uti possidetis democratisation, third wave of, 88–9, 99, 137, 183, 201 DfID, 61, 62n.160 despotic power, 93–4, 189, 198 development assistance see aid divide and rule, 75, 117–9, 121–2, 163–7, 188 Doe, Samuel, 98 donors, 55–6, 61 –2, 84– 90, 133, 140, 143, 146–8, 151, 187–8, 192, 200– 1 DP, 167, 169, 178, 180, 182, 184n.165 DRC see Congo Duhaga, Mukama, 160 East African Community, 149, 174 East African Federation (proposed), 166–7 Eastern Europe, 1, 106 Economic Recovery Programme, 182, 187 see also structural adjustment ‘Economic War’, 172–4 education, 87, 122, 126, 132, 136, 146n.196, 166, 167n.61, 173n.100, 176 Egypt, 132, 154, 156, 158n.17

300

STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

elders, 162, 163n.44 elder statesmen, 143 elections, 88 in Burundi, 124 –5, 127, 138, 145–6, 147–8, 149 in Uganda, 167n.63, 168, 177–9, 184, 186n.182, 188 electoral fraud, 125, 147, 149, 178, 186, 188 embargos, 142 –3, 174 Emin Pasha, 158, 172n.90 empirical statehood, 19–22, 24, 67, 76, 105, 197, 201 see also sovereignty, domestic ‘end of history’, 1, 2, 6, 191 Entebbe, 173 Equatoria, 158n.16–17 Eritrea, 75, 77 Ethiopia, 11, 44, 67, 68, 79 –80, 122, 157, 161, 195, 103n.221 ethnic cleansing, 140, 174–5 see also genocide ethnic conflict, 75 –6, 91, 93, 94, 126–43, 149–51, 177, 180, 185, 187, 189, 198, 202 mitigation of, 168, 172, 181 –3, 188 see also power-sharing ethnic denial, 131–3, 135, 150, 198 ethnicity see also nationalism colonialism and, 72, 74 –5, 99, 106, 110–13, 121–2, 125, 150–1, 163–7, 188, 196 institutionalisation of, 137, 201 politicisation of, 75, 106, 125, 169–171, 189, 198 EU, 46 family of nations, 10–12, 195 FAP see FROLINA Fashoda incident, 161 FDD see CNDD FDN, 144, 145, 146 FEDEMU, 180, 182 Feruzi, Zedi, 149 feudalism, 69n.7, 122, 159, 170 FNL see PALIPEHUTU-FNL foreign investment, 83–4, 87, 182, 200 fragile states, 61–2 France, 70, 79, 84n.108, 131n.116, 132n.121 ‘frodebisation’, 138 –9 FRODEBU, 137– 41, 145–7 FRODEBU NYAKURI, 148

FROLINA, 134n.134, 141 FROLINA-FAP, 141 FUNA, 180 FSI, 24, 34– 5, 37, 45, 48, 61 G-7, 143 G-10, 143 gabunga, 155, 159 Gahutu, Re´my, 134n.134 Gambia, 71, 77n.64 ganwa, 111, 114, 122, 123, 125–7 Gardie´ns de la Paix, 142 Gatumba, 144 GCA, 144 General Service Unit, 171 genocide see also ethnic conflict; rebellion Burundi, 125, 129–131, 132, 133–5, 139, 141, 142, 201 ‘forgotten’, 76, 131, 134, 136, 151 ‘selective’, 130– 1 Rwanda see Rwanda Uganda, ‘experiments in’, 179–80 Germany, 55n.120, 84n.108 German Empire, 15–16 German East Africa, 25, 109, 114–21, 154, 160, 163, 176n.123 Ghana, 67, 71, 87, 91 Gitega, 119, 123, 129 glasnost, 135 globalisation, 1– 4, 5–6, 36, 46–7, 89, 191, 205 gombolola, 155, 183 Gondokoro, 163 good governance, 4, 5–6, 61, 87– 9, 146, 148, 201 Go¨tzen, Count von, 117–18 ‘governmentalities’, external, 70, 196 Grant, James Augustus, 155 Grawert, Captain von, 118 –19 Great Lakes region, 25, 68, guerrilla movements, 179, 182, 183, 184 see also rebellion Gulu, 162, 174n.110 Gulu Peace Accord, 180 gutahira, 111 Habsburg Empire, 15 –16, 72 Habyarimana, Juvenal, 41, 140 Hague Conferences, 11 Haiti, 2, 11, 15n.77, 43, 44, 74n.43, 94n.160

INDEX Hamitic Hypothesis, 111, 121, 135, 157n.13 Harushingoro, Re´verien, 134 HIV/AIDS, 187, 188n.190 Hobbes, Thomas, 29 –30, 36, 93n.145 HSMF, 180–1, 185 human rights, 4 –6, 45, 61, 84, 88, 105, 133, 146, 179, 182 Hutu, identity, 110–13, 121–2, 134–5 Hutu-Tutsi discord, 125–143, 149 –51 intra-Hutu discord, 137, 141, 150 IBEAC, 156–8 Ibingira, Grace, 169 ICC, 186 Imana, 111 Imbo region, 113, 129n.108 IMF, 78, 85– 7, 178, 182, 136n.146, 201 imiryango, 111–12 see also clan, in Burundi; kin group imperialism, decline of, 14 –17, 21– 2, 67, 196–7 see also decolonisation post-modern, 6–7, 53–5, 191 sub-, 70, 121–3, 157–61, 166–7, 188, 196 Inamujandi revolt, 123–4 indirect rule, 54n.115, 70, 74–5, 78, 198, 199 in Burundi, 118 –24 in Uganda, 159–67, 188 individualism, Burundi, 151, 203 infrastructural power, 93–4, 189, 198, 199 see also civil society insurgency see rebellion internally displaced people, 139, 149, 185 see also regroupment; refugees international society, 8– 14, 19, 22, 50, 78, 194–5, 196–7 dualism of, 10–14, 21, 194 –5, 197, 201 irredentism, 75– 6, 80, 103n.221 Israelis in Uganda, 173n.101 Italian, 67, 74n.40, 76n.53, 77n.64 Ivory Coast see Coˆte d’Ivoire Jinja, 158n.22 Johnson, Prince, 98 Johnston, Sir Harry, 159, 160 Juba peace talks, 186 juridical statehood, 19–22, 67, 105, 197 see also legal sovereignty

301

kabaka, king of Buganda, 155– 7, 159, 164, 165, 167–9, 172, 182 –3, 187n.185, 202 kabaka crisis, 167 Kabarega, Mukama, 158, 160 Kaboyo, Prince, 158 Kabura, Cossan, 137n.154 Kagera, 117, 120, 176 Kagwa, Apolo, 156 Kajaga Accord, 140–1 Kajambere, Emmanuel, 134 kaka, 162, 164n.48 see also clan, Uganda Kakunguru, Semei, 160 Kakwa, 163, 172, 174 Kamenge riots, 126, 130 Kampala, 156, 173, 174, 175, 177, 179n.142, 180, 181, 183, 187n.185 Kanyaru cycle, 111n.11 Kanyenkiko, Anatole, 140 KAR, 161, 166 Karamoja, 161, 163, 168 Karatasi, Etienne, 134n.134 Karumba, Joseph, 134n.134 Karuzi, 142 Katanga, secession of, 75 katikiro, 155, 156, 157, 159n.24, 160n.30, 183 Kayiira, Andrew, 179n.143 Kenya, 72, 79, 147, 154, 157, 162n.43, 168, 174 Keynesian, 84, 94, 200 neo-Keynesian, 88 Kigali, 140 Kigezi, 160, 163, 168 Kigobe Accord, 140–1 kihutura, 113 Kilima, 117, 118, 119, 121 kin group, 69, 85, 95, 111–12, 171 see also clan Kinigi, Sylvie, 138 Kintu, Kabaka, 155n.4 Kirundo, 134 Kitara Empire, 157 –8, 162n.35 Kivu, Lake, 115–7 South, 141 Kiwanuka, Benedicto, 167, 175 Kony, Joseph, 181, 186 KY, 167–9, 188 see also UPC, alliance with Lado Enclave, 163 Lakwena, Alice, 180–1

302

STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

‘lame leviathan’, 94, 198 Lamogi rebellion, 162 Lango, 158, 160n.29, 161, 163, 168, 174n.110, 186 Langi, 162, 163n.41, 171, 174, 179, 180 Latin America see South America LCs, 184, 186 –7, 190, 202 see also RCs League of Nations, 13 –14, 16–17, 25, 109, 120 Leopold II, King of Belgium, 114–16, 163 Lesotho, 71, 76, 77n.66, 202 liberal democratic order, 1–6, 49 –52, 87–8, 151, 191 model of statehood, 51 –3, 57, 59, 105, 151, 194, 203–4 Liberia, 2, 11, 41, 43, 67, 81, 91, 98, 104, 195 Libya, 79, 132, 133n.129, 136, 173n.101 lineage societies see clan; kin group Local Government Act, 186 Local Government Ordinance, 166 Locke, John, 29–30, 93n.145 ‘Long War’, 6, 192 ‘lost counties’, 158–160, 169 LRA, 181, 185 –6 Lugard, Frederick, 156, 158 Lugbara, 163, 174 lukiiko, 155, 159, 160, 183 Lule, Yusuf, 177, 179n.143 Luo, 157n.13, 160n.29, 162n.35, 163n.41 Luwero Triangle, 179–80, 181 Macmillan, Harold, 17 Maconco, 117, 118 Madi, 163, 168, 174 magendo, 83, 87, 92, 97n.179, 173 Mahdist rebellion, 158n.17 Maji Maji rebellion, 118n.41 Makerere, College/University of, 167 n.61, 175n.114, 177 Mali, 77n.64 Mandela, Nelson, 143 Marangara, 134 Martyazo ‘popular republic’, 129 –30 Mauritania, 77n.64 Mauritius, 182 Mayanja-Nkangi, Jehoash, 178 Mbale, 160 media, 129, 133, 149, 172, 178–9, 182, 185 mediaeval, 8, 194 neo-mediaeval, 3, 6

Mengo, Battle of, 156 mercenaries, 81–3, 86, 100n.200, 129 Mfumbiro, 116– 17 Micombero, Michel, 127–32, 133, 134 militarisation, 80–3, 86, 90, 106, 125–6, 146n.196, 169–73, 179, 185–6, 189, 200 Military Commission (of the UNLF), 177–8 Military Council, 180 military rule, 93, 127– 38, 142–3, 150, 171–7, 180 –4, 189, 198 miruka, 155, 183 Miti, Jemusi, 160 Mobutu, Sese Seko, 81n.89, 97, 127, 130 Mogadishu, 57, 58 Mogadishu Line, 5 Moi, Daniel arap, 180 Mombasa, 145 monarchism, 14, 76, 104 in Burundi, 111, 113– 14, 117–27, 128, 129, 130, 150– 1, 195, 198 in Uganda, 155– 60, 164, 166–7, 168– 70, 177n.127, 182–3, 187, 188– 90, 195, 198, 202–3 Monrovia Group, 77 of Burundi, 126 Montevideo Convention, 16, 19, 67, 196 Morocco, 77, 103n.221 Moshi Conference, 176–7 Mozambique, 5n.19, 43, 79, 176n.123 Mpororo, 117, 160n.28 MRC, 146 mugabe, king of Ankole, 158 Mugwanya, Stanilas, 157, 159n.24 mujasi, 155, 159 mukama, king of Bunyoro, 158, 160 of Toro, 158, 160n.26 Mulelists, 129 multiparty system, transition to, 88–9, 93, 133, 136–8, 151, 185, 201 Muramvya, 114, 127n.97, 128, 129 Museveni, Yoweri, 93, 178– 88, 190, 199, 200 Mutaga, mwami, 111 Mbikije, 118–19 Mutebi, Kabaka Ronald, 182–3 Mutesa I, Kabaka Edward, 156 Mutesa II, Kabaka Edward, 158n.22 167–9, 170, 172 mutiny, East African army, 79, 168–9, 170, 200

INDEX Muwanga, Paulo, 178 Mwambutsa, mwami, 111 Bangiricenge, 119– 20, 123, 126 –7 mwami, king of Burundi, 111, 114, 119–20, 122, 124 –7 king of Rwanda, 116 Mwanga, Kabaka, 156–7, 158 Mwanza Process, 143n.180 Mwezi, mwami, 111 Kisabo, 114, 117 –8, 119 mythicohistory, 135 Nadiope, William, 168, 169 Nairobi, embassy bombings, 48 Nairobi Peace Agreement, 180 Nakivubo Pronouncements, 170n.78 see also Common Man’s Charter Namibia, 53, 66, 67, 5n.19 National Commission to Study the Question of National Unity, 136 nationalism see also ethnicity anti-colonial, 17, 73 –7, 94, 124, 167, 196, 198 nationalist conflict, 1–2, 15– 16, 88, 191 see also ethnic conflict national unity, 106, 110, 113, 124 –5, 132, 136–8, 151, 165 –7, 181– 3, 196 NATO, 81 natural law, 10–11, 19, 195, 197, 201, 204 NCC, 177 Ndadaye, Melchoir, 138–9 Ndayikengurukiye, Jean-Bosco, 141n.169 Ndayizeye, Domitien, 144, 146n.198 Ndora, 123 Nduwimana, Martin, 146 negative sovereignty regime, 19, 78, 90, 105, 197, 199 see also juridical statehood neo-colonialism, 68, 78 –83, 86, 89–90, 99, 106, 199 –200 neo-patrimonialism, 68, 75, 85, 87, 94–100, 104, 106, 198–9 in Burundi, 126 –7, 139, 148, 150–1 in Uganda, 170–1, 173–5, 185, 189–90 neo-trusteeship, 53–6, 59 see also statebuilding New World, the, 14–5, 74n.43 new world order, 1–6, 8, 25, 51, 191, 201 Ngendandumwe, Pierre, 127

303

NGOs, 3, 89, 143n.185 see also donors Ngozi, 134 Nicaragua, 5n.19 Nigeria, 71n.23, 72, 79, 93 Nile, River, 153, 155, 158, 160n.29, 161, 163 Nilote, 154, 162n.35, 163n.41, 170 Nimule, 163 Nkomo cycle, 111n.11 Nkrumah, Kwame, 73, 76, 78, 197 Nkurunziza, Pierre, 141n.169, 146–9, 199 Non-Aligned Movement, 79, 199 no-party system, 93, 183–5 Northern Uganda, 160– 3, 166, 181, 182, 185–6, 190 NRA, 179–82, 184 NRC (Burundi), 128 NRC (Uganda), 184, 186n.178 NRM, 181–8, 190, 202 Ntare, Mugabe of Ankole, 158 Ntare, mwami, 111 Rugamba, 113–4 Rushatsi, 111n.11, 113 Ndizeye, 127, 129, 130 Ntaryamira, Cyprien, 140 Ntega, 134 Ntibantunganya, Sylvestre, 141 Nubi, 158, 172, 174, 176 Nyangoma, Le´onard, 141 Nyanza-Lac, 129 Nyerere, Julius, 73, 77n.63, 83, 143, 176n.123, 183n.160 Nzomukunda, Alice, 146 OAU, 77, 79, 100n.200, 131n.116, 142, 172, 176n.123, 197, 199 Obote, Milton, 167– 73, 175, 177 –80, 184, 188–9, 198 Ochieng, Daudi, 169 Odoki Commission, 182, 184 OECD, 46, 61, 62n.160, 162 Okello, Basilio, 180 Okello, Tito, 177n.127, 180 Old World, the, 14–15, 74n.43 one-party state, 93, 94, 128, 146, 148, 170, 179, 183 –5, 189, 198 ONUB, 144, 145, 147 Operation Bonanza, 179 –80 Operation Iron Fist (I/II), 185– 6 organised crime, 45–6, 192

304

STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Ottoman Empire, 15–16 Ould-Abdallah, Ahmedou, 140–1 Oyite-Ojok, David, 177n.127, 180n.145 PALIPEHUTU, 134, 137, 141 PALIPEHUTU-FNL, 137n.154, 141, 144, 146– 7 pan-Africanism, 176, 197 parastatals, 85, 95, 128, 182 PARENA, 141 Paris Club, 87n.122 Paris Peace Conference, 18 see also World War I PARMEHUTU, 125n.88 see also Rwanda, Revolution patron-client relationships see clientelism PDC, 124–5 peace-building, 4, 52, 143, 201 perestroika, 136 personal rule see clientelism; neo-patrimonialism Portugal, 14, 18n.87, 70n.15 positive international law, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, 195, 196, 201 see also empirical statehood positive political goods, 35, 38 –9, 64, 193 post-conflict reconstruction see state-building; peace-building poverty, 142, 187 power, primitive accumulation of, 68, 100–1, 105, 204 power-sharing, Burundi, 138 –9, 141, 143–8, 202 PP, 124, 126, 138 Pretoria Power-Sharing Agreement, 144 primary export economy, 83, 124, 134n.133, 166, 174, 178, 187, 200 primordialism, 75, 95–6, 111, 122, 150, 196, 199 see also ethnicity privatisation of security, 81– 2, 86, 185 Protestants, 156 –8, 167 see also Christianity and missionaries PSU, 175, 177 quasi-states, 19–22, 24, 67, 68, 78, 85, 197 Radjabu, Hussein, 146n.197 RCs, 183– 4, 186, 189, 190 see also LCs rebellion, 30, 74– 5, 79, 91, 93 in Burundi, 114, 118, 120, 123-4, 142, 150

of 1972, 129 –30 of 1988, 133 –4, 201 of 1991, 137, 139 in Uganda, 158, 162, 179– 81, 185, 189 Rechenberg, Baron von, 118–9 refugees, 45 in Burundi, 127, 131, 132, 134 –6, 144n.192, 146n.196 in Uganda, 179 see also regroupment; internally displaced people regionalism see also ethnicity; national unity in Burundi, 111, 113– 14, 117–19, 128, 130, 132, 133, 134, 136, 138– 9, 146, 150 in Uganda, 159, 165–7, 167–70, 177, 180, 183, 185, 187, 188– 90 regroupment, 142– 3 rent-seeking see neo-patrimonialism Responsibility to Protect, 6–7 revolt see rebellion ‘rhizome state’, 95 rogue states, 6n.27, 38n.45 Rohero Agreement, 141 Roman Empire, 9, 204 Romanov Empire, 15–16 Roosevelt, Franklin, 1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacque, 29–30 RPB, 138 Ruanda-Urundi, 76n.53, 109, 114– 120 Rumonge, 115n.32, 129 Runyota-Kanyarufunzo revolt, 123–4 Rutovu, 132, 133 Ruzizi River, 113, 115, 117 Rwagasore, Prince Louis, 124–5, 151 Rwanda, 43, 76, 81n.89, 88n.128, 104, 110, 111n.10–11, 113–7, 120–2, 124n.81, 127, 128, 129, 134, 137n.153, 149, 157, 160n.28, 174 Genocide, 5, 41–2, 76, 140 Interahamwe of, 86 Revolution, 125, 134, 140, 149 –50 RPF, 42, 137n.153 Rwasa, Agathon, 137n.154 rwot/rwodi, 162, 165, 190n.199 Ryckmans, Pierre, 120– 2 Sabiiti, Jack, 184 ‘sacred trust of civilisation’, 13– 14, 195 see also League of Nations

INDEX Sans Defaite, 140 Sans Echec, 140 saza, 155, 159, 160, 183 Schnee, Heinrich, 119 ‘scramble for Africa’, 13–14, 71–3, 114–17, 153–4 Sebei, 168 secessionism, 16, 58, 75–6, 77, 79 sectarianism see ethnic conflict; regionalism securitisation, of state failure, 7, 27, 45, 63, 192 self-determination, 14–19, 21, 54–5, 106, 196–7 Senegal, 77n.64 Seychelles, 158 SF/PITF, 24, 32– 4, 40, 61 ‘shadow state’, 96, 98n.191 Sibomana, Adrien, 136 Sierra Leone, 6n.27, 41, 81n.90, 97 –8 Singo, 158n.19 see also ‘lost counties’ slave trade, 67, 75n.43, 158n.17 small arms, 80–3, 200 smuggling, 47, 83n.103, 161, 174, 178 social contract, 29 –31, 34n.28, 35–38, 50, 67, 77 –8, 193 socialism, 132, 170 –1, 178 Somalia, 2, 5, 41, 43, 44, 48–9, 52, 58, 63, 76, 77, 80 –1, 91, 103n.221, 104, 140, 191 Somaliland, 76n.53, 77n.64 South Africa, 18n.87, 67, 76n.54, 145n.193 SAPSD, 144 South America (states of), 11, 13, 14–15, 19 sovereignty, 4, 10, 21, 36 –7, 92, 191 domestic, 20, 37, 53–5, 67, 193, 197 see also positive international law gradations of, 55, 59 legal, 20, 53 –5, 65, 67, 197, 201 see also negative sovereignty regime pooled, 58–9 popular, 14, 16, 19, 196–7 pre-colonial, 69, 118, 122, 203 reversion to, 20, 203 shared, 54–5, 59 Soviet Union, 15, 16, 68, 79–81, 83, 99, 132, 136, 174n.111, 199–200 Spain, 14 Special Force, 171 Speke, John Hanning, 111n.5, 155 –6 SRB, 175, 177 Ssemogerere, Paul, 178, 184n.165

305

standard of civilisation, 11, 16, 101, 201 Stanley, Henry Morton, 116, 156 state, alternatives to, 3, 6, 9, 58–9, 76–7, 191, 194, 197 –8, 202 –5 state-building, 5–7, 46–7, 52– 9, 61–2, 63, 194, 201 state formation, 8–10, 12, 14, 20, 25, 68, 100, 102, 194, 202 ‘statelessness’, 3, 8–9 stateless societies, 68–9, 154, 160, 162, 165, 195, 203 state-making, 68 –9, 194, 100–3, 105, 203–4 state recognition, 10 –12, 14 –17, 20 –1, 58, 67, 103n.221, 195–6, 201, 204 state, universality of, 8– 10, 13, 17, 19, 21–2, 50– 1, 65, 105, 197, 204 Stevens, Siaka, 97–8 Straw, Jack, 45– 6 structural adjustment, 85–88, 133n.128–9, 182, 187–8, 200–1 Sudan, 2, 49n.93, 154, 158, 163, 180, 185–6 South Sudan, 34n.27, 75, 77 SPLA, 77n.64, 185 Sudanic, 162n.35, 163n.41 superpowers see Soviet Union; USA Swaziland, 76, 77n.66, 202 Tanganyika, 17, 76n.53 Lake, 113, 115, 140 see also Tanzania Tanzania, 17, 68, 76n.53, 79, 103n.221, 111n.11, 118n.41, 132, 134, 157, 168, 183n.160, 196 invasion of Uganda, 176 –7 tax, 69, 98, 120n.51, 123, 159, 199 see also tribute taxonomies of state failure/collapse, 42– 4 Taylor, Charles, 98 terrorism failed states and, 6– 7, 45–9, 192 9/11, 5n.25, 6 –8, 27, 45– 6, 50, 61, 192 Teso, 160, 163, 168, 180n.147, 186 Iteso, 160n.29 Timor, East, 6n.27, 53 Togo, 71 Toro, 158–60, 163, 164, 168, 180 trade, 10, 20, 81, 83–4, 92, 114– 15, 156, 161, 167n.60, 172, 173 –4, 178, 200 traditional resurgence, 68, 103–4, 183, 190, 202–3

306

STATE FAILURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Traditional Rulers Statute, 182–3, 190, 202 Transparency International, 185 treaties, European-African, 11, 72–3, 115–16, 156, 157, 158, 160 tribute, 69, 98, 106, 112, 123, 157, 162, 199 see also clientelism Turkana, 161, 163, 171n.84 Tutsi, identity, 110–13, 121–2 Banyaruguru, 111, 113, 125, 128 –9 Hima, 111–13, 125, 128–9, 131, 132, 133 intra-Tutsi discord, 113, 125, 128– 30, 136–7, 150 Tutsi-Hutu discord, 125–143, 149 –51 Twa, 111, 112n.15, 145 UFA, 179n.143, 180, 182 UK see Britain umuganuro, 112, 123 ungoverned spaces, 6, 46 United Nations, 1n.2, 2, 46, 79, 131n.116, 142, 199 peacekeeping, 4–6, 53, 55–6, 140, 190 see also ONUB; BINUB; BNUB ‘Second Charter’, 17–20, 196–7 Trusteeship Council, 17, 124– 5 UNLA, 176, 179–81, 189 UNLF, 176–7 UNRF, 179n.143, 180, 185n.172 UPA, 180n.147 UPC, 167–70, 178–9, 182, 188 alliance with KY, 167– 9, 188 UPD, 149 UPDA, 180– 1 UPDF, 184– 6 UPM, 178, 180 UPRONA, 124– 6, 130n.110, 131, 132, 133, 136 –41, 145–8 youth wing of (JRR), 126, 130 USA, 5, 11, 14 –15, 32n.19, 34, 46, 63, 68, 79–81, 83, 99, 199–200 USSR see Soviet Union Usumbura, 117, 118 see also Bujumbura uti possidetis, 14–16, 18 –19, 73, 77, 196 –8 Uvira, 140 Victoria, Lake, 114–16, 155, 156 Vienna, Congress of, 11, 14, 196 vigilantes, 82 –3, 140– 2

ville morte campaign, 140 violence, discourse of, 125, 150 monopoly of legitimate means of, 31, 37, 40, 189, 193, 198 see also Weberian state normalisation of, 81, 83, 100, 176–7, 179– 80, 189, 200 see also militarisation personal, 130, 175–6, 177, 179, 189 political, 96, 102– 3, 147 see also civil war; rebellion; genocide in Burundi: 126–9, 132–3, 137, 139–43, 146–150 in Uganda: 169–70, 171, 174–7, 179, 185, 187–90 structural, 175–6, 146n.196 see also civil war; genocide; rebellion Voisin, Charles, 121–2 warlordism, 39, 81, 83, 86, 91, 173 see also rebellion Warsaw Pact, 81 Washington Consensus, 3, 84, 200 weak states, 38–40, 42, 61 Weberian state, 29–32, 36, 37, 50, 51, 67, 94–5, 97, 193 Western Sahara, 103n.221 West Nile, 163, 168, 171, 179, 185n.172 Westphalia, Treaties of, 9–10, 25, 194 White Fathers, 115n.32, 156 see also Christianity and missionaries Wilson, Woodrow, 1, 15 –16, 18, 197 WNBF, 185n.173 World Bank, 46, 78, 85–8, 133n.128, 136n.146, 182, 187, 201 LICUS, 61–2 World War I, 1, 10, 13, 14, 15–16, 25, 120, 163, 197 World War II, 1, 10, 16, 67, 105, 196 Yugoslavia, former, 2, 5 Zaire, 43, 79, 97 see also Congo Zambia, 72, 176n.123 Zanzibar, 76n.53 Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, 116 Zimbabwe, 147 Zuma, Jacob, 144