Pierre Englebert

Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa: Flawed Ideas about Failed States

Postconflict state reconstruction has become a priority of donors in Africa. Yet, externally sponsored reconstruction efforts have met with limited achievements in the region. This is partly due to three flawed assumptions on which reconstruction efforts are predicated. The first is that Western state institutions can be transferred to Africa. The poor record of past external efforts to construct and reshape African political and economic institutions casts doubts on the overly ambitious objectives of failed state reconstruction. The second flawed assumption is the mistaken belief in a shared understanding by donors and African leaders of failure and reconstruction. Donors typically misread the nature of African politics. For local elites, reconstruction is the continuation of war and competition for resources by new means. Thus their strategies are often inimical to the building of strong public institutions. The third flawed assumption is that donors are capable of rebuilding African states. Their ambitious goals are inconsistent with their financial, military, and symbolic means. Yet, African societies are capable of recovery, as Somaliland and Uganda illustrate. Encouraging indigenous state formation efforts and constructive bargaining between social forces and governments might prove a more fruitful approach for donors to the problem of Africas failed states.

Solving the Mystery of the AFRICA Dummy

Most empirical studies have reported a negative effect on growth of being an African country, even when accounting for ethnic heterogeneity. Modeling policy choices has reduced this effect in recent studies, but these have begged the question of why Africa appears adverse to developmental policies. This paper uses a cross-sectional data set to show that the governments of arbitrary postcolonial states---as are most African states---face substantial limitations to their power and are constrained in their responses, deriving greater relative power payoffs from neo-patrimonial than from developmental policies. Differing levels of state legitimacy account therefore largely for the policy choices which characterize most of Africa.

DISMEMBERMENT AND SUFFOCATION A Contribution to the Debate on African Boundaries

Do African countries suffer from their arbitrary boundaries? The authors test several hypotheses from the debate on this question. They differentiate, one by one, the degree of arbitrariness of African boundaries along two axes: the extent to which they partition preexisting political groupings (dismemberment) and the degree to which they bring together distinct precolonial political cultures (suffocation). They find that dismemberment is positively associated with international disputes and that suffocation magnifies the likelihood of civil wars, political instability, and secession attempts. The evidence appears to support claims that Africa has paid a substantial price for refusing to challenge some of the arbitrary boundaries it inherited from colonialism. The authors discuss the policy implications of their findings.

Born-again Buganda or the limits of traditional resurgence in Africa

Since the restoration of traditional leaders in Uganda in 1993, the Kingdom of Buganda has developed unusually effective institutions, financing mechanisms and policy tools, re-building itself as a quasi-state. The reinforcement of Bugandas empirical statehood provides one of the farthest-reaching examples of the current trend of traditional resurgence in African politics and to some extent supports claims for the participation of traditional structures in contemporary political systems. Yet, the Buganda experiment also highlights the limits of traditional resurgence as a mode of reconfiguration of politics in Africa. First, it is unclear how the kingdom can maintain the momentum of its revival and the allegiance of its subjects in view of its fiscal pressure on the latter and the limited material benefits it provides to them. Already the monarchists are finding it difficult to translate the kings symbolic appeal into actual mobilisation for development, shedding doubts on one of the main justifications for the kingdoms rebirth. Second, Bugandas claims to political participation clash with the competing notion of sovereignty of the post-colonial state. These limits are likely to confront other similar experiments across the continent.

Why Congo Persists: Sovereignty, Globalization and the Violent Reproduction of a Weak State

Wherever one looks, many elements conspire to suggest that the Democratic Republic of Congo should have collapsed some time ago under the multiple assaults of its own inadequacies as a state, the extreme heterogeneity and polarization of its populations, and the dislocations of globalization and foreign occupation. Yet Congo has gone on defying such expectations and has continued to display a stunning propensity for resilience. This chapter addresses this paradox.

Shifting Grounds for African Secessionism

While international law stands on the side of the territorial integrity of African states, maintaining their colonially inherited boundaries and entertaining the right of self-determination in contexts of decolonization only, we show in this conclusion that its implementation has been inconsistent, before being overturned with the independence of South Sudan. Yet, despite this reversal, relatively little has changed for African secessionists, largely because of the high humanitarian threshold South Sudan has set for recognition. We note, however, an increased legitimacy of secessionist discourse in the wake of South Sudan’s independence, reinforcing a trend begun after the Cold War. We also note a renewed emphasis on sub-national referenda. Finally, we identify an increased coincidence between secessionism and Islamism that challenges our understanding of the state in Africa.

A research note on Congo's nationalist paradox

Precious little is redeeming about the state in Congo. Created as a foreign enterprise of exploitation, it reproduced as the instrument of an extractive colonization system, in turns violent and paternalistic. Once independent, it provided the stage and the reason for five years of sheer chaos and three decades of brutal arbitrary rule, predation and economic ruin, before collapsing at the end of the 1990s into civil wars marked by ethnic polarization, displacements, plunder, deprivation and death. Yet Congo endures, and the Congolese profess unusual fervor in their attachment to it. Their support for its territorial integrity and its failed institutions is stronger even than their powerful commitment to democratic principles and it stands in contrast with the lack of material benefits that the state has ever provided the larger mass of them. This is Congos nationalist paradox.

Africa’s Secessionism: A Breakdance of Aspiration, Grievance, Performance, and Disenchantment

This chapter offers four interpretations of Africa’s secessionism: aspiration, grievance, performance, and disenchantment. Secessionism remains a fundamental theme of African politics, despite being largely removed from the realm of the thinkable. Yet, South Sudan’s independence against all odds shows that African secessionism is also contradictory. Its aspirational simplicity obscures a complex political phenomenon that often couples a territorial demand with invocations of the right to self-determination. Claims are based on grievances, marginalization, narratives, and economic interests. The consequences of such claims vary; the two cases of successful post-colonial secession highlight that secessionism does not guarantee improvements. And secessionist claims rarely challenge the notion that the sovereign territorial state is the answer to Africans’ problems rather than one of its roots.

A Potemkin state in the Sahel? The empirical and the fictional in Malian state reconstruction

ABSTRACT Despite significant reconstruction efforts in the wake of its 2012–2013 collapse, Mali remains mired in crisis: violence is on the rise, institutions are dysfunctional, the military is inefficient, investments are few, and corruption is rampant. We suggest that Mali’s reconstruction’s failure is but the latest iteration of a general failure at building the Malian state. This failure derives from a sheer lack of resources to sustain statehood and from a systematic tendency to emulate the French state model despite its incongruence with local conditions. As a result, the Malian state is mimicked more than it is built and its reconstruction imagined more than it is implemented. Conflict plays an important role in this production, as it presents Mali with significant opportunities to stage itself, to develop and multiply institutions, and to derive outside support. Evocations of Mali’s precolonial imperial past, meant to provide cover and legitimacy to its leadership, further disconnect the state from the realities of modern governance. The enactment of reconstruction is not, however, irrational for leaders with few short-run alternatives or for international partners eager to engage local security threats. There might be other alternatives, however, with greater potential for embedding the state into local resources, populations, and practices. Exploring opportunities for a greater adjunction of Islamic governance and for decentralization reforms more genuinely predicated on local institutions of collective action might prove fruitful.