William Reno

Uganda's politics of war and debt relief

The return of interstate war in Africa after the end of the cold war and global awareness of predatory economic motivations for war raises the question of whether African states are reviving early modern European methods of building states. This study of Ugandas intervention in Congo reveals that this is not so. Ugandas peripheral position in the world economy, coupled with its relations with creditors, gives its leaders unexpected capabilities to plunder a neighbouring countrys resources. Creditors remain surprisingly willing to tolerate this behaviour, while providing debt relief. Ugandas leaders exploit creditor anxieties about growing disorder among highly indebted countries and fears that chaos will undermine creditor efforts to manage uncollectable debt. Nonetheless, warfare, plunder and manipulation of creditor interests does not result in stronger institutions. The predatory behaviour of the Ugandan military resembles that of their state-building counterparts. But contemporary plunderers form their own ties to the world economy. Ugandas leader faces greater obstacles to consolidating control over violent commerce, and private interests of plunderers actually weakens existing central political control as Ugandas leaders and its creditors become even more tied to new loans to maintain short-term order.

Anti-corruption Efforts in Liberia: Are they Aimed at the Right Targets?

International agencies intervene to promote reform in Liberia with promises to remake the country. Yet elections produce victories for former wartime commanders and officials accused of corruption. Many of these people continue to play important roles in the economy and command vocal followings. International organizations face a choice between a more radical intervention that amounts to a counterinsurgency operation to remove these people from their positions at the risk of creating political instability, and tacit acceptance of their power. Looking beyond these choices, is it possible that corrupt members of the elite and insiders can contribute to economic growth and political stability? Comparison of the organization of corruption in Liberia with models in East Asia indicates that political networks rooted in Liberias economy may offer the promise of helping to integrate ex-combatants into the economic life of the country and address local demands for participation in politics.

Ironies of post-cold war structural adjustment in Sierra Leone

Africas creditors stress ‘capacity building’ measures to strengthen bureaucratic effectiveness to reverse economic and political decline (Dia, 1993). World Bank officials point to the East Asian example of success at using government policies and institutions to promote ‘market friendly’ growth policies insulated from the pressures of clients demanding payouts as a positive example for Africa (World Bank, 1993a). Analysts recognise, however, that decades of patron‐client politics and intractable rent‐seeking (the use of state resources for personal gain) behaviour among state officials limits short‐term prospects for increasing revenue collection. With little internal financing for market boosting policies, World Bank programmes prescribe extensive civil service layoffs. Subsequent reductions in unproductive expenditures will reduce corruption, balance national budgets and remove obstacles to private market growth. Economic growth will in turn produce a class of entrepreneurs to demand more policies and ...

Patronage Politics and the Behavior of Armed Groups

The structures of pre-conflict patronage politics in West Africa play a major role in shaping the organization and behavior of armed groups that have appeared in that region since the 1990s. Patronage networks provide the social context in which armed group leaders arise and influences how they obtain and use resources. It weighs heavily in influencing who they recruit and how fighters and leaders define their goals. Two general principles emerge out of this investigation. First, political leaders who enjoyed close ties to prewar capital-based patronage networks tend to organize predatory armed groups. Leaders who come from communities that were marginal to these networks organize armed groups that are more likely to benefit local communities and take community norms more seriously. Overall, the latter maintain more stable internal organizations and are less prone to commit extreme human rights violations, at least in comparison to their better connected rivals. Evidence indicates that leaders of these groups often are tempted to pursue more predatory strategies. They discover, however, that this social context in which they gather resources and recruit fighters inhibits the pursuit of such strategies.

Understanding Criminality in West African Conflicts

Most standard analyses and policies aimed at peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction in West Africa understand members of armed groups, and especially their leaders who engaged in illicit commerce, as criminals. This analysis and the policies that follow from it miss the extent to which these transactions now contribute to the construction of new political relationships and are seen by those who participate in them as one of the few avenues for active participation in the post-war economy and politics. This article explains how illicit commerce underlies new political relationships in West Africa. It shows how measures to disrupt these transactions can destabilize politics. But often those who participate in illicit markets prove able to manipulate externally imposed measures and assert their own interests.

Transforming West African militia networks for postwar recovery

Conventional analyses and policy prescriptions for postwar societies in West Africa typically conflate wartime networks with continued violence and criminal economic activities. However, while posing real problems, these networks also are potential vehicles for economic transformation. As evidence from Liberia and Sierra Leone shows, some of these networks show signs of developing commercial activities outside old political patronage networks based in the national capital. They provide avenues for ex-combatants to gain direct access to economic opportunities in defiance of the control previously exercised by local political insiders. Alongside this unexpected development lies the risk that foreign-sponsored reform programs unintentionally strengthen centrally organized insider networks that are, to many wartime combatants, avenues of privilege and exploitation. The analysis presented here provides a contrast to the view that the survival of wartime associations of combatants is purely negative in its effects on society and the economy. It suggests that appropriate reform strategies should take into account the potential for some of these associations of ex-combatants to develop as more purely business operations and should seek ways to integrate them into the formal economy.

Somalia: State Failure and Self-Determination in the Shadow of the Global Economy

Somalia was one of Africa’s few real nation-states, with a shared language and single ethnic culture. The five points of the star on its flag were meant as a call to ‘lost’ Somalis in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti left out in 1960 when independence led to the union of British Somaliland and the UN trust territory under Italian administration, a cause for which Siyyad Barre’s regime (1969–91) attacked Ethiopia in 1977–78. Yet in 1991 Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, hosted 40 distinct armed groups (Peterson 2000, p. 21). Shortly before, the dying regime killed 50,000 fellow Somalis in a failed attempt to repress rebellion in the north (Africa Watch 1990, p. 218). At the start of 2005, the closest thing to a central government in Mogadishu had been evicted from a Nairobi hotel and then faced rioters when its officials ventured into the old capital.

The Collapse of Sierra Leone and the Emergence of Multiple States-Within-States

AUN report links competition to control alluvial diamonds, Sierra Leone’s main source of foreign exchange earnings since the start of the Second World War, with a brutal civil war that started in March 1991 and ended only in early 2002.This and later reports also link Charles Taylor, president of neighboring Liberia, to this violence and to the commercial network operated by Lebanese, Israeli, Russian, Liberian, and other traders.2 This conflict came on the heels of a prolonged collapse of formal state access to domestic revenues, which had generated about

The politics of war and debt relief in Uganda

250 million annually during the mid-1970s, plummeting to

The Dilemmas of Security Assistance to a Failed State: Lessons from Somalia

10 million in 2000. Meanwhile the GDP declined to