Harry Verhoeven

The self-fulfilling prophecy of failed States: Somalia, State collapse and the Global War on Terror

Abstract Over recent decades, several states have experienced mounting difficulties in fulfilling classic state functions such as guaranteeing territorial integrity and law and order. Some “failing states” have even seen the disappearance of all central authority: “state collapse”. Since 11 September 2001, this phenomenon has been particularly associated with terrorism, trans-border criminality and global instability. The international community presents this “Orthodox Failed States Narrative” as an objective, apolitical analysis of a “new” problem. The hegemonic account cherishes ideological assumptions that are seldom made explicit and veil power asymmetries in the international political economy. The securitisation of the Global South provides the pretext for confrontation and top-down restructuring of domestic politics by Coalitions of the Willing in the context of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Through analysis of Americas Somalia policy, this article illustrates theoretical flaws underpinning the Orthodox Narrative together with the disastrous implications of Americas new “Long War” in Africas Horn. The absence of central government produced state collapses archetype in Somalia: anarchy, lawlessness and an “Al-Qaeda safe-haven”, dixit Washington. This article challenges conventional wisdom by highlighting spontaneous emergences of new political complexes amidst the “chaos”, capable of providing order and stability. It explores the rise and fall of the Union of Islamic Courts. The Courts resembled a national liberation movement, based on their concoction of Sharia-justice, security and welfare provision. However, the Islamists’ tangible improvements in livelihoods were not permitted to continue. Imprisoned analytically by the Orthodox Narrative, Washington perceived the Courts as Somalias “neo-Taliban”. This reductionist stance led to a self-fulfilling prophecy: as bellicose rhetoric radicalised positions in Mogadishu and Washington, an American-backed invasion by Ethiopia pushed-out the Islamists. Today, an insurgency is ravaging Somalia and the humanitarian situation has worsened dramatically: the GWOTs narrow world-vision has hindered the re-emergence of legitimate authority and blocked bottom-up responses to human security questions.

Gardens of Eden or Hearts of Darkness? The Genealogy of Discourses on Environmental Insecurity and Climate Wars in Africa

This article argues that the securitisation of Africa’s environment and climate in the early twenty-first century has less to do with multidisciplinary inquiry into the complexities of climate change, development and conflict, and more with historically established paradigms of thinking about Africa, its ecosystems and notions of disorder and violence. Securitisation is the result of a specific moment in the post–Cold War era with its particular geopolitical configuration and of deeply embedded modes of imagining the African continent, its peoples and their relationship with the environments they inhabit. The main objective of this article is to historicise and politicise the prevailing dystopian discourse about climate-induced insecurity. I show that the assumptions and chains of causality that constitute today’s climate wars narrative are remarkably similar in nature to the environmental narratives that underpinned imperialist and post-independence discourses on environment and development, legitimising highly authoritarian interventions against local populations by governments.

The politics of African energy development: Ethiopia’s hydro-agricultural state-building strategy and clashing paradigms of water security

As key economic, ecological and demographic trends converge to reshape Africa and its relationship with the outside world, a new politics is emerging in the twenty-first century around the water–food–energy nexus, which is central to the continents relevance in the global economy. On the one hand, Malthusian anxieties are proliferating; pessimists link population growth and growing water scarcity to state failure and ‘water wars’. On the other hand, entrepreneurs, sovereign wealth funds and speculators consider Africas potential in water resources, energy production and food output as one of the last great untapped opportunities for the global economy: Africa is on the brink of an agro-industrial transformation. This article examines how African actors are not merely responding to economic and environmental changes but also thinking politically about water, food and energy security. Many of them are seizing the new opportunities to redefine their national politics, their relationship with local communities and their ties with external players, regionally and globally. Ethiopias project of hydro-agricultural state-building helps to identify the most important fault lines of this new politics at the national, local and international level. The politics of water security and energy development simultaneously puts African states and their populations on the defensive, as they grapple with huge challenges, but also provides them with unique opportunities to take advantage of a more favourable global configuration of forces.

‘Our identity is our currency’: South Africa, the responsibility to protect and the logic of African intervention

Heavyweights of South Africas ruling African National Congress claim that the responsibility to protect citizens in the case of an unwilling or unable government is an African concept, owned by the continent: rooted in the security–development crisis of the past few decades, Pretoria stresses that there is an intellectual and political history of intervention, separate from Western conceptions of R2P. While the conception of an African responsibility to protect has come to constitute a major pillar of South African foreign policy, this is not without its critics—domestic or abroad—and, as the Libya case exemplifies, often presents decision-makers in Pretoria with tough real world dilemmas. South Africa shares the intense scepticism of China and Russia about Western claims of value-based foreign policies. But much as anti-imperialist ideology and growth-centred relations with other emerging powers inform South African foreign policy, it would be a mistake to see Pretorias scepticism about Western interpretations as a sign of profound normative convergence with Russian and Chinese critiques of liberal peace-building: the South African critique of the responsibility to protect is more procedural than substantive.

The nexus as a political commodity: agricultural development, water policy and elite rivalry in Egypt

Thinking of the interconnections between water, food, energy and climate is nothing new in the Nile Basin; it has long been anchored in political struggles. For 200 years, Egypts political economy has been defined by water use patterns and food security strategies that debunk the technocratic myth that rapid growth, interaction with global markets and technological modernization eliminate poor governance practices and allocative inefficiencies. In contrast, the prism of the nexus as a political commodity illuminates one of modern Egypts most consequential dialectics: the interaction between the very particular nexus at the heart of the countrys political economy, forged through factional strife and sustained by outside discourses and interests, and the economic and ecological ravages of this elite politics. Egyptian history serves as a warning. Todays conversation needs to be deconstructed in terms of how different forms of interconnectivity between water, energy and food are produced and experienced by different social groups. It reminds us to take interconnections not as given, but rather as contested and contestable outcomes from which opportunities for adaptation and transformation do not naturally emerge, but need to be struggled for.

Nurturing Democracy or into the Danger Zone? The Rwandan Patriotic Front, Elite Fragmentation and Post-liberation Politics

Seventeen years after capturing Kigali, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has reached a turning point. The RPF was built amidst conflicts in Uganda, Rwanda and Congo and the personal ties between its leaders were forged in battle. However the inner circle of the Front, which remains at its core a military organisation, not an ordinary political party, has recently begun to disintegrate, falling victim to its own history. The succession of Paul Kagame is an explosive dilemma, if things hold until the elections of 2017, that is.

Understanding Sudan's Saviors and Survivors: Darfur in the Crossfire between Humanitarian Fundamentalism and Khartoum's Divide and Rule

It had been hoped to include this Debates piece in ROAPE 120, Conflict & Peace in the Horn of Africa. While Mamdani’s overall argument about the West’s use of the ‘humanitarian intervention’ justification is still germane, obviously the specific context of the Sudan and the process of the International Criminal Court’s issuing a warrant against President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir has moved on. When this version of his piece was first published in 2008 in The Nation in the USA, the ICC Prosecutor had merely stated an intention to apply for a warrant. Since then, the African Union (AU) and the regional body, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) had suggested the process should be delayed whilst the prospect of a negotiated peace over Darfur was being sought. Eventually, however, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber 1 did issue a warrant against Bashir and two other Sudanese on counts of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, although it concluded there was insufficient evidence to sustain the count of ‘genocide’ requested by Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. After much argument the AU Summit in July 2009 decided not to cooperate with ICC in serving the warrant, over protests by Botswana, South Africa and a few other countries. The Arab League also engaged with the issue, asking the UN Security Council to delay operationalising the warrant. Thus the issues of justice versus peace, and of intervention and African nations’ sovereignty have been dramatically joined in the last few months.

To Intervene in Darfur, or Not: Re-examining the R2P Debate and Its Impact

The outrage over genocidal violence in Sudan provided impetus to “legalise” the concept of humanitarian intervention into a “responsibility to protect” (R2P). However, a decade on, the literature treats Darfur and R2P as coterminous with failure: continued inaction underscored its limitations in delivering protection to civilians. This article argues that this is an impoverished reading, which leaves out important dynamics. The legacy of Darfur is more usefully understood as a formative experience for further intervention, rather than as a benchmark of (non-)compliance with the specificities of an evolving R2P norm. We analyse an intensifying functional convergence between Western actors, the Chinese Communist Party and the African Union around the practice of intervention, with a view to creating political order and not to foster regime change, on the continent. Darfur, in this reading, was an indicator of the increasing tendency towards approaching Africa through an interventionist lens of stabilisation, more so than the premature abortion of a nascent norm.

The Rise and Fall of Sudan's Al-Ingaz Revolution: The Transition from Militarised Islamism to Economic Salvation and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement

Following the secession of South Sudan, Northern Sudan finds itself at a crossroads. Governed since 1989 by the Al-Ingaz regime, Khartoums political elites are under pressure from the international community and the ordinary Sudanese people to democratise and ditch the autocratic Islamism that has been their hallmark for decades. Omar Al-Bashir and Ali Osman Taha face fierce criticism for presiding over the break-up of Africas biggest country. Simultaneously, key constituencies in the security services and business community are signalling discontent too, lobbying instead for a further centralisation and the abandonment of the grudging liberalisation that started after Hassan Al-Turabis removal from power in 1999–2000. Based on interviews with key movement and party members, this article assesses to what extent the Comprehensive Peace Agreement has changed the National Congress Party (NCP) and the Harakat Al-Islamiyya. It examines the internal dynamics within Khartoums power bloc and argues that the current regime has in many ways become, ‘Al-Ingaz without its Islamic soul’, dixit one senior Islamist. Despite Bashirs controversial speech in Gedarif in December 2010, during which he called for Sharia and an end to multiculturalism in Northern Sudan, NCP ideologues are eyeing a strategic redeployment of political capital and economic investment, seeking to become an ordinary hegemonic party.

Taming Intervention: Sovereignty, Statehood and Political Order in Africa

A continent that was once the worlds most insistent on state sovereignty has become highly tolerant of military intervention.