Category Archives: Africa
Social Covenants: The Missing Ingredient in State Building Efforts
Political theorists have for the most part focused on the state when thinking about how to make countries work better for their populations. This has naturally led to a concern with state-society relations, how governments are chosen and run, and institutions. There is wide consensus that social contracts play the central role in state building.
This thinking has heavily influenced how the international community approaches fragile states, post-conflict situations, and transitions as well as development in general. As the OECD/DAC explained in Concepts and Dilemmas of State Building in Fragile Situations:
Fragility arises primarily from weaknesses in the dynamic political process through which citizens’ expectations of the state and state expectations of citizens are reconciled and brought into equilibrium with the state’s capacity to deliver services. Reaching equilibrium in this negotiation over the social contract is the critical if not sole determinant of resilience, and disequilibrium the determinant of fragility. [page 7]
This focus on the state shapes responses to crises in places such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, compelling the international community to prioritize the establishment of a transitional regime and fast track elections under the belief that this is the sole way to create legitimacy no matter the circumstances or the context.
But many of these countries have deeply-entrenched problems that a focus on the state cannot solve. Different religious, ethnic, and clan groups do not work together well, and see any competition for power as a zero sum game for exclusive control of the state. Government is weakly institutionalized, and unable to act as an independent, equitable arbitrator between different interests. Judges and officials are beholden to personal relationships, power politics, or money (and sometimes all three). In such places, winners of elections rarely see it as their duty to serve all their people, and often define their rights as whatever they can get away with—negating whatever social contract the process was supposed to establish. (more…)
Discordant Development – Progress That Increases Instability
Samuel Huntington argued in his 1968 classic Political Order in Changing Societies that rapid development could be highly destabilizing:
Social and economic change—urbanization, increase in literacy and education, industrialization, mass media expansion—extend political consciousness, multiply political demands, broaden political participation. These changes undermine traditional sources of political authority and traditional political institutions; they enormously complicate the problems of creating new bases of political association and new political institutions combining legitimacy and effectiveness. The rates of social mobilization and the expansion of political organization are high; the rates of political organization and institutionalization are low. The result is political instability and disorder. The primary problem of politics is the lag in the development of political institutions behind social and economic change.
Richard Joseph, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Professor at Northwestern University, discusses a similar point in a recent article on Africa. In it, he introduces the very useful phrase “discordant development,” defining it as:
More than just “unequal development,” but rather how deepening inequalities and rapid progress juxtaposed with group distress can generate uncertainty and violent conflict. (more…)
A Multidimensional Approach to Resolving Conflict: The Eastern DRC
Problems that have been intractable for decades are very likely the product of many different issues that intertwine with each other in a way that makes attempts to fix things highly problematic. Simple solutions — changing a person, introducing a reform, holding an election, penalizing one party — rarely work.
Conflict, weak governance, state failure, economic backwardness — all have many causes and many issues that must be dealt with. There are no magic bullets, no easy remedies, no quick strategies.
The eastern Congo is representative. Depending on who you listen to, the ongoing violence is caused by either a weak state, grievances over land and identity, greedy local elites, or international business. Some say the root cause is local, another group says it is national, and a third group defines the problem as regional. In fact, all these interpretations are correct — to some degree. Interests, actors, and causes are intertwined in a complex web. It is hard to say where one factor stops playing a role and another starts. (more…)
More on Africa, Conflict and Security, Foreign aid, Governance
Development: Solving Collective Action Problems
There has been a lot of deep thinking about development problems over the past decade or so. But for the most part, a better understanding about how countries progress has not translated into dramatic changes in the activities aimed at promoting it.
International development agencies now say they emphasize politics and seek to find “best fit” solutions tailored to individual country circumstances. However, as David Booth writes in a recent Africa Politics and Power Policy Brief,
Much of the newer governance programming looks much like the old kind. Even the most reflective country activists and the best governance advisers have trouble imagining what to do differently.
Improving governance in developing countries in Africa and beyond requires that international actors undertake much greater reforms in how they operate than has been contemplated up to now. Many of the assumptions about development need to be challenged and overturned. (more…)
More on Africa, Economic Development, Foreign aid, Governance, Review
Can Numbers Lie? Is Africa Rapidly Urbanizing (or Not)?
By Edward Paice
Everyone knows that Nairobi’s Kibera district is the largest “informal settlement”, or slum, in sub-Saharan Africa. At least, they used to know. Politicians, journalists, NGOs and urban planning professionals routinely declared that 700,000 – 1,000,000 people lived in Kibera. But when the district was geo-statistically mapped for the first time in 2009 its population was estimated at no more than 220,000-250,000. Kibera has not exactly disappeared, but it is a shadow of its former imagined self.
In similar vein, the city of Lagos is widely believed to have about 15 million inhabitants – an estimate supported by the city authorities in the wake of Nigeria’s contested (and manipulated) 2006 census. But the 2009 Africapolis survey of West Africa’s urban population, the most sophisticated to date and compiled with the aid of satellite imagery, found that the city was home to no more than 10 million people. Even more significantly, while Nigeria’s census claimed that the country’s population was 140 million, the Africapolis team concluded that “in reality, [Nigeria] probably does not contain 100 million”. (more…)
More on Africa, Economic Development, Policies
Why Was Jerry Rawlings Different?
Africa has had a number of good leaders and growth stories in the years since independence. But it is had very few countries whose success spanned multiple leaders and which included a substantial increase in the institutionalization of politics, such that the country came to not depend on any particular leader.
Jerry Rawlings and Ghana are different. (more…)
More on Africa, Economic Development, Governance, Politics
Graduate Level Course on Fragile States
I will be teaching a course this fall (780.718 Promoting Development in Fragile States) in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University:
Hindered by weak institutions, social divisions, and difficult historical legacies, fragile states face fundamentally different challenges than other countries. This course focuses on understanding the drivers of state fragility and what steps might counteract these. It encourages participants to think deeply about the nature of development, political incentives, the role of geography in governance, social identities, the nature of public authority, and a variety of other issues relevant to state building in difficult circumstances. It will be of interest to students working on African and Middle Eastern issues, conflict management, comparative politics, and economic/political development.
The syllabus for the course provides a good reading list for anyone wanting to understand the problems facing fragile states and what policies might deal with their unique problems.
If anyone wants more information, contact me at seth@sethkaplan.org.
Somalia’s 20-Year Experiment in Hybrid Governance
By Ken Menkhaus, Davidson College
The below are excerpts from an article originally appearing in World Politics Review.
Later this month, Somalia’s eight-year political transition is scheduled to end with the declaration of a “post-transition” government. Casual observers will be forgiven for assuming such a step signals that, after 21 years of complete state collapse, a functional central government in Somalia is now in place.
The reality is that the post-transition government will be unable to project its authority beyond much of the capital, Mogadishu. Most of the country and parts of the capital itself remain under the de facto control of autonomous strongmen, self-proclaimed regional states, clan militias and the jihadi group al-Shabab. Of these, only al-Shabab has demonstrated any will and capacity to impose basic law and order in its areas of control, but the group is losing ground to multiple armed offensives and is focusing its waning energies on war-fighting, not administration. (more…)
Can Informal Accountability Replace Elections?
Improving the accountability of leaders tops the agenda of just about everyone involved with development. But the preferred solution—elections—often comes up short in countries with divided populations and democratic structures that are not well institutionalized. There is a great need for alternatives.
Such alternatives can take many forms—including improving governance, enhancing the rule of law, promoting transparency, decentralizing government (where leaders might be held more accountable in some cases), ensuring equity in governance and the distribution of resources (which may matter more than better governance), and increasing the leverage of societal groups to monitor the performance of state officials.
One neglected area that deserves much more attention is promoting social cohesion. Indeed, it can be argued that the greatest difference between the successful developmental states and their far less successful developing country peers is the degree of social cohesion.
But how do you promote social cohesion when it is lacking? (more…)
Promoting Human Rights in non Western Countries
A key challenge faced by those engaged in international human rights policy and practice is adopting an effective framework for protecting and promoting human rights around the world in a way that preserves and articulates their universal nature, while at the same time respecting local values and practices.
One way to approach this challenge is to examine values, norms, customs and practices in non-Western cultures which can act as ‘receptors’ for human rights principles and practice. A new Dutch collaborative research project adopts just such an approach (and is thus called the ‘Receptor Approach’). It brings together experts from around the world and from a variety of disciplines – law, anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations and philosophy among others. (more…)
More on Africa, East Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Policies, Poverty, Religion, South Asia
