Eboe Hutchful

The Civil Society Debate in Africa

Civil society is suddenly all the rage in social science and comparative politics circles. Seminars, books, special issues of journals, even institutes have expounded the idea of civil society in developing countries. Civil societies have been sought and apparently found in nascent, incipient, or emerging (in some cases re-emerging) forms in places, such as the Middle East and China, where Western social science had long denied their presence even their possibility. Academics are not the only ones employing the concept. Political movements and lately even non-governmental organizations (ngos) have used it, although how much in both cases seems to vary from country to country and to reflect local conditions and intellectual traditions. The recent revival of the concept follows on the democratic revolutions in eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa, and even earlier on the rise of social movements in the West; it is at once the product of an attempt by political actors to conceptualize the nature of their struggles and by scholars to provide a key to understanding global political developments. Indeed the term has come to be virtually synonymous with democracy. The growth of the concept in African studies has been particularly rapid.1 As recently as 1989 Michael Bratton

‘Smoke and mirrors’: the world bank's social dimensions of adjustment (SDA) programme

The World Banks social dimensions of adjustment (SDA) policy has developed in a number of phases. The first involved revisions in the development paradigm of the Fund and the Bank that resulted in the incorporation of poverty perspectives. The adoption of adjustment with a human face was part of series of revisions that extended the horizons of neo-orthodoxy in the 1980s, partly in response to theoretical and policy advances within the multilateral institutions and partly in order to co-opt sources of political and intellectual challenge to adjustment (Hutchful 1994). The first phase of adjustment (from 1981 to 1984) concentrated mainly on restoring macroeconomic balances. It assumed that economic recovery would occur quite rapidly, and while recognising that groups could be hurt in the short run by adjustment, did not see a need for specific policies to address poverty issues. It was felt that the longer-term interests of the poor would be best served by macroeconomic reform and that their situation would have been worse had past policies been maintained. In the second phase of adjustment programmes in Africa (roughly 1984 to 1986) there was a recognition that it would take longer to achieve the desired objectives of reform sufficiently to benefit all citizens, and that in the interim vulnerable groups negatively affected by adjustment would require assistance (World Bank 1986). This involved compensatory measures that sought to protect or mitigate the effects of adjustment on specific target groups through welfare and consumption interventions.

Hybrid security governance in Africa: rethinking the foundations of security, justice and legitimate public authority

Abstract This article asks whether the concept of ‘hybridity’ offers a more convincing account of security governance in Africa than the standard state-focused models. It seeks to clarify the complex intersections between formal and informal, state and non-state security actors, and the varied terrains on which hybridity is constructed, instrumentalised and recalibrated over time. Rather than romanticising informal or ‘traditional’ institutions, it suggests that they too embed their own power hierarchies, become sites of contestation, and do not work equally well for everyone, least of all for the weak, vulnerable and excluded. Thus the focus is placed upon the real governance of security in hybrid systems, and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion (including gender biases) they reinforce. Finally the paper considers how policy-makers and shapers can work with the grain of hybrid security arrangements to create more legitimate, broadly-based and effective African security governance.

A tale of two regimes: imperialism, the military and class in Ghana

Written before the 1979 coup led by Jeny Rawlings and the recent return to civilian rule, this article provides essential background to those events. It outlines the crisis that was looming and that eventually created the setting for this latest military intervention. This is set against the background of an analysis of the two earlier military regimes, of 1966 and 1972, which explores their social character and their economic policies. It is argued that such an analysis has to explore the complex relations and mediations between imperialism and the local petty bourgeoisie and between different fractions of the petty bourgeoisie. Beyond, these differences between the various regimes, however, there is a common stance of compromise rather than confrontation with imperialism, and a common fate: recurrent crises which stem from the differing attempts to mediate between foreign and local capital.

Military Policy and Reform in Ghana

T HE question of how countries in Africa are dealing withn the control and restructuring of their military forces and security agencies has aroused some scholarly and political interest but little systematic research. The story of the transition in Ghana may be said to have begun when the Supreme Military Council (SMC) was removed by a coup detat on 4 June 1979 and replaced by the Armedn Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) headed by Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. The young officers had intervened, as they soon explained, because of the growing corruption and deteriorating conditions of service, the severe economic crisis and reduced military budgets, and the mismanagement of both the Armed Forces and the national government. Although power was restored to civilians only four months later, Rawlings intervened again on 31 December 1981 after the regime headed by President Hilla Limann had failed in the viewn of supporters of the ‘June 4 Movement’ to respond effectivelyn to the problems faced by Ghana. Ironically this coup by Rawlings, widely known as his ‘Second Coming’, and described with some truthn as ‘a popular affair’, interrupted efforts that were being maden to re-professionalise the Armed Forces and restore civilian control.

Trends in Africa

In recent years, the militarization of African countries has increased considerably. Many African armed forces have been expanded, more repressive regimes have emerged, and violent seizures of state power have become more frequent as military values penetrate more pervasively African politics and socjal institutions. On one level, the nature and extent of this militarization are the result of conditions specific to Africa-in particular, the contradictions of peripheral capitalist accumulation on the continent. In the larger scheme, however, African miIitarization is part of a global militarization. It is a product of the decline of Wcstern capitalist hegemony during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the increasing use of military means to accelerate or to arrest this decline. Contradictions in capitalist economic and military production at the center of this decaying hegemony, and the threat posed by national liberation struggles to Western investments and sources of strategic raw materials at its periphery, have necessitated increasing arms exports, direct armed intervention on behalf of client regimes, and growing domestic repression. Soviet support for liberation movements and revolutionary regimes, the dynamics of Soviet arms production, and the partial reintegration of the Soviet Union into the capitalist world economy have also contributed to global militarization. Rut these trends are particularly salient for Africa, which was divided among different colonial empires in the nineteenth century and had often to fight long and difficult wars of national liberation. The liberation wars offer definite opportunities for I .

Adjustment in Africa and Fifty Years of the Bretton Woods Institutions: Change or Consolidation?

ABSTRACT Responding critically to the 1994 World Bank report (Adjustment in Africa: Reform, Results and the Road Ahead) this article examines the circumstances of adoption of structural adjustment lending (SAL) by the World Bank and the IMF. It argues that the present adjustment paradigm of the multilateral institutions has undergone successive reconceptualizations designed to co-opt a variety of sources of intellectual and political challenge manifested during the 1980s. However the emerging syntheses remain precarious in both intellectual and policy terms and have been characterised by equivocation and lack of real action. Hence they should not be seen as constituting a fundamental departure in the approach to adjustment. The article discusses some of the critiques levelled against adjustment by African and other development economists and urges fundamental rethinking of adjustment and particularly in Jive areas: conditionality, design, ownership, monitoring, and impact on democratic consolidation.

New Elements in Militarism: Ethiopia, Ghana, and Burkina

The change in the attitude of the military towards politics is to my mind the most important development in the character of militarism brought about by the current crisis in Africa. Dating at least from the Ethiopian revolution in 1974, and in a sense from the Libyan coup in 1969, but gathering speed since 1979, a new genre of military regime has emerged which differs in important ways from the typical corrective r6gime of the 196os and 197os. It is characterized both by the emergence to power of new strata within the military itself and by the militarys fundamentally different relationships with the civilian mass sectors and with the political/ideological realm. This popular, progressive, or revolutionary regime which typically denies that it is a military regime has become more and more widespread since 198o. The coups in Ghana in December 1981 and in Burkina in August 1983, the attempted coups in Gambia in December 1982 and in Kenya in August 1982, as well as other coups staged to pre-empt more radical coups, such as those in Nigeria in 1983 and in 1985, all suggest important new developments in the character of militarism in Africa. This statement requires some qualification. First of all, the radical military regime is not an entirely new phenomenon; in the past there have been self-proclaimed revolutionary r6gimes in Congo-

The Peace Movement and the Third World

This paper explores the nature of the relationship between the peace movement in the West and the Third World. Western countries lack, individually and collectively, the materials essential for the smooth functioning of their armament industries and require easy access to cheap supplies from well-endowed Third World countries. This appropriation is facilitated by their manipulation of the capitalist world economy which is dominated, after all, by the United States and, where possible, by their control over Third World countries, often with the collusion of their ruling elites. Liberation from this asymmetric relationship is imperative for the peoples of the Third World who are engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. However, Western countries do not tolerate such developments and, in fact, consider any nation that supports liberation struggles (especially the Soviet Union) as an enemy to be destroyed—if necessary, in a “winnable nuclear war.” Since the Soviet Union, China, and their allies support liberation movements as a matter of course, the Third World, instead of being peripheral, is actually central to the current climate of nuclear confrontation and superpower rivalry. And actually, the liberation struggles in the Third World are the corollary of the struggles of the peace movement in the West: that is, if the focus of the peace movement in the West were adjusted to stress liberty and justice as vital ingredients of peace. It is important to grasp this nexus, not only to preclude one party working against the other, but also to encourage their joining forces to work toward their goals more effectively. Clearly, this sort of cooperation will require the peace movement to enlarge its program of action. The paper concludes on this note by proposing some amendments to the current agenda of the peace movement.