Ricardo Soares de Oliveira

Business success, Angola-style : postcolonial politics and the rise and rise of Sonangol

This paper investigates a paradoxical case of business success in one of the worlds worst-governed states, Angola. Founded in 1976 as the essential tool of the Angolan end of the oil business, Sonangol, the national oil company, was from the very start protected from the dominant (both predatory and centrally planned) logic of Angolas political economy. Throughout its first years, the pragmatic senior management of Sonangol accumulated technical and managerial experience, often in partnership with Western oil and consulting firms. By the time the ruling party dropped Marxism in the early 1990s, Sonangol was the key domestic actor in the economy, an island of competence thriving in tandem with the implosion of most other Angolan state institutions. However, the growing sophistication of Sonangol (now employing thousands of people, active in four continents, and controlling a vast parallel budget of offshore accounts and myriad assets) has not led to the benign developmental outcomes one would expect from the successful ‘capacity building’ of the last thirty years. Instead, Sonangol has primarily been at the service of the presidency and its rentier ambitions. Amongst other themes, the paper seeks to highlight the extent to which a nominal ‘failed state’ can be successful amidst widespread human destitution, provided that basic tools for elite empowerment (in this case, Sonangol and the means of coercion) exist to ensure the viability of incumbents.

Illiberal peacebuilding in Angola

Angola’s oil-fuelled reconstruction since the end of the civil war in 2002 is a world away from the mainstream liberal peacebuilding approach that Western donors have promoted and run since the end of cold war. The Angolan case is a pivotal example of what can be termed ‘ illiberal peacebuilding ’, a process of post-war reconstruction managed by local elites in defiance of liberal peace precepts on civil liberties, the rule of law, the expansion of economic freedoms and poverty alleviation, with a view to constructing a hegemonic order and an elite stranglehold over the political economy. Making sense of the Angolan case is a starting point for a broader comparative look at other cases of illiberal peacebuilding such as Rwanda, Lebanon and Sri Lanka.

‘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 struggle for the state and the politics of belonging in contemporary Angola, 1975–2015

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Angola’s independence, this essay revisits key dimensions of the country’s postcolonial trajectory through the prism of the complex politics of the nationalist struggle and the first decades of self-rule. Its goal is to provide a series of reflections, mostly centred on the MPLA regime, rather than a comprehensive treatment of all political actors in Angolan politics of recent decades. It argues, firstly, that Angola’s trajectory from independence to the end of the country’s long civil war in 2002 was powerfully conditioned by the structural legacies of late colonialism, the associated intra-nationalist politics and the particular circumstances of the end of empire in 1975. To these legacies, the essay adds the (constrained, but real) choices made by Angolan decision-makers in terms of institutional consolidation, the management of the economy and state–society relations. Secondly, the essay outlines the extent to which the MPLA’s 2002 victory against UNITA in the country’s civil war did away with the fragmentation that had characterised Angolan politics since the 1960s. The clashing, indeed mutually exclusionary, nationalist projects that had jostled for control of the Angolan state were replaced by a would-be hegemonic political force with a strong sense of legitimacy and a self-defined project of postwar nation building. The key question for the contemporary study of Angola – and one that the oil-fuelled politics of the national reconstruction era provided plenty of reflection on – is the extent to which the MPLA’s postwar vision can supersede the country’s historical divisions and provide the population with both the material prosperity it yearns for and a shared understanding of belonging.On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Angola’s independence, this essay revisits key dimensions of the country’s postcolonial trajectory through the prism of the complex politics of the nationalist struggle and the first decades of self-rule. Its goal is to provide a series of reflections, mostly centred on the MPLA regime, rather than a comprehensive treatment of all political actors in Angolan politics of recent decades. It argues, firstly, that Angola’s trajectory from independence to the end of the country’s long civil war in 2002 was powerfully conditioned by the structural legacies of late colonialism, the associated intra-nationalist politics and the particular circumstances of the end of empire in 1975. To these legacies, the essay adds the (constrained, but real) choices made by Angolan decision-makers in terms of institutional consolidation, the management of the economy and state–society relations. Secondly, the essay outlines the extent to which the MPLA’s 2002 victory against UNITA in th...

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.

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.