Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africa:

Flawed Ideas about Failed States

Pierre Englebert, [email protected]

Denis Tull, [email protected]

Abstract: The paper questions the limited achievements of state reconstruction in Africa

and identifies three flawed assumptions which underpin reconstruction failure. The first

is that Western state institutions can be successfully transferred to Africa. The second is

that the diagnosis of failure is shared among donors and Africans. And the third is that

international actors have the capacity to rebuild African states. After presenting a

theoretical and empirical critique of these assumptions, the paper offers policy

recommendations focusing on a greater acknowledgement of indigenous rebuilding

efforts.

Revised version

September 19, 2007

Introduction

Whether in the wake of internal conflict or foreign military intervention, the

reconstruction of public institutions in failed or collapsed states has become a key priority

of the international community. State reconstruction differs from classical peace-keeping

operations, which focus on preventing a resumption of hostilities, by its more extensive

efforts to durably resolve violent conflict, with a particular emphasis on the restoration of

an effective state monopoly over the means of coercion. Standard reconstruction

packages include the re-establishment of political institutions (governments, ministries,

local administration, national armies, police forces, judiciaries, etc.), the promotion of

political participation (elections) and human rights, the provision of social services and

the recovery of national economies.

There have been 19 UN “complex peace operations” since 1989 to support

transitions from war to peace and rebuild states, ten of which have taken place in Africa. 1

Notwithstanding some qualified successes, like Namibia, Mozambique and possibly

Liberia, the results of these operations in Africa have been rather paltry, particularly as

regards the establishment of self-sustaining institutions. Although Sierra Leone held its

first post-transition elections in 2007, these were marred by violence. Former belligerent

youth remained marginalized, the economy was stagnant and economic mismanagement

1
Complex peace operations involve multiple dimensions of institutional reconstruction and peace-building
in addition to peacemaking. They have taken place in Namibia, Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador,
Mozambique, Liberia (1993-97 and since 2003), Bosnia, Croatia, Guatemala, Timor-Leste, Kosovo, Sierra
Leone, DR Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Burundi, Haiti and Sudan.
 2

remained rampant. 2 In Burundi, pockets of violence endured in 2007. In Côte d’Ivoire,

the international community was unable to put an end to the conflict and reunite the

country despite UN and French military deployments. Although northern and southern

Sudanese elites reached a much-heralded power-sharing agreement in 2005, it then

teetered on the brink of collapse while violence in the Darfur region, which began in

2003, exploded. In the DR Congo, the UN’s largest state reconstruction mission, 17,000

peacekeepers and 2,500 European Union troops were unable to prevent violence in the

wake of the 2006 elections, and conflict in the eastern region actually increased after the

transition. Even Africa’s relative earlier success stories, like Mozambique, remain weak

and aid-dependent, and face significant erosion. 3

This paper examines the obstacles to successful reconstruction in the failed states

of Sub-Saharan Africa. For sure, state reconstruction problems are not unique to Africa

and the overall record is ‘mixed at best’. 4 Moreover, the considerable and insightful

scholarly work that has been published on state failure and reconstruction in general has

also addressed Africa’s plight. 5 Yet, the stunning geographical concentration of state

2
International Crisis Group, Sierra Leone: the Election Opportunity. Africa Report No. 129 (Brussels:
ICG, 2007).
3
Michael Cahen, “Success in Mozambique?” in Simon Chesterman, Michael Ignatieff and Ramesh Thakur,
eds., Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance (New York: United Nations
University Press, 2005).
4
Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, United Nations Peace Operations. Making War & Building
Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 1; Alberto Cutillo, International Assistance to
Countries Emerging from Conflict: A Review of Fifteen Years of Interventions and the Future of
Peacebuilding (New York: International Peace Academy, 2006).
5
See, among others, Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), part 4; Robert I. Rotberg, ed., State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Cambridge,
Mass.: World Peace Foundation, 2003); Robert I. Rotberg, ed., When States Fail : Causes and
Consequences (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Michael Barnett, “Building a
Republican Peace: Stabilizing States after War,” International Security, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Spring 2006), pp.
87-112; James Dobbins et al., The UN’s Role in Nation-Building : From the Congo to Iraq (Santa Monica,
Cal.: RAND, 2005); Francis Fukuyama, State Building : Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First
 3

failure in Africa, its particularly costly human toll, and the apparent disjuncture between

reconstruction policies and important features of African politics call for special attention.

First, the extent to which state failure is a broadly African phenomenon can hardly

be overstated. As of end 2005, 82.4 percent of UN peacekeepers worldwide (more than

51,000 blue helmets) were stationed in Africa. 6 In the rankings of the 2006 Fund for

Peace Failed States Index, African countries constituted 53% of the most failed category

(and six of the top seven), 28% of the second, 7% of the third and 0% of the best

performing group. 7 Using data from the US Millenium Challenge Account (MCA),

Weinstein and Vaishnav similarly conclude that 75% of the “worst performers” are

African, as are 90% of states “struggling on many fronts.” 8 Even the continent’s

seemingly stable countries are capable of rapid downward spirals, as recently

demonstrated by Côte d’Ivoire or Zimbabwe. In fact, 19 out of the 25 countries ranked

by the Center for International Development and Conflict Management as at highest risk

Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2004); James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Neotrusteeships
and the Problem of Weak States,” International Security, Vol. 28 No. 4 (Spring 2004), pp. 5-43; Simon
Chesterman, You, the People. The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004); Robert O. Keohane, “Political Authority After Intervention: Gradations in
Sovereignty,” in J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Humanitarian Intervention. Ethical, Legal
and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 275-298; Stuart E. Eizenstat,
John Edward Porter and Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Rebuilding Weak States,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 1
(January-February 2005), pp. 134-146. Specifically for Africa see Stephen Ellis, “How to Rebuild Africa,”
Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 5 (September-October 2005), pp. 135-148; Tony Addison, ed., From Conflict
to Recovery in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
6
Center on International Cooperation, Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2006 (Boulder, CO.:
Lynne Rienner, 2006), p. 138.
7
http://www.fundforpeace.org/programs/fsi/fsindex2006.php (accessed 20 August 2007).
8
Jeremy M. Weinstein and Milan Vaishnav, “A Mismatch with Consequences: U.S. Foreign Policy and the
Security-Development Nexus,” in Nancy Birdsall, Milan Vaishnav and Robert L. Ayres, eds., Short of the
Goal: U.S. Foreign Policy and Poorly Performing States (Washington, D.C.: Center for Global
Development, 2006), pp. 11f.
 4

for instability in 2007 were African. 9 The level of violence in the continent—and the

subsequent demand for state building operations—is thus unlikely to diminish soon. 10

The damage from state failure in Africa also dwarfs the human misery it provokes

elsewhere. In the DRC alone, the war of 1998-2004 is estimated to have cost close to 4

million lives. 11 In 2006, 25% of “persons of concern” to the United Nations High

Commissariat for Refugees (UNHCR) were in Africa, which hosts only 13% of the

world’s population, and the continent included five of the top ten countries of origin of

refugee populations (Sudan, Burundi, the DRC, Somalia and Liberia). 12 Africa is also

the most affected continent for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), with almost 12

million in 21 countries in 2006 (out of 24.5 million worldwide). 13 Moreover, failed

African states have all but stopped performing any of the functions expected of them.

Hardly any of these states still vaccinates children, delegating the task to the World

Health Organization.

State failure also reverberates more broadly in Africa. When the DRC failed, it

dragged at least seven other countries in its conflict. State decay in Côte d’Ivoire was

linked to failure in Liberia and Sierra Leone and had severe repercussions for other

countries in West Africa. Lose militias cross at will and carry violence between Sudan,

Chad and the Central African Republic. And Ethiopia got dragged into Somalia’s

9
J. Joseph Hewitt, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and Ted Robert Gurr, Peace and Conflict 2008: Executive
Summary (College Park, MD: CIDCM, 2007), p.5.
10
See, for example, Mapping Sub-Saharan Africa’s Future (Washington, D.C.: National Security Council,
Discussion Paper, 2005), p. 1.
11
Benjamin Coghlan et al., “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: a Nationwide Survey,” The
Lancet, 7 January 2006, No. 367, pp. 44-51.
12
http://www.unhcr.org/basics/BASICS/3b028097c.html (accessed 22 August 2007).
13
Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, “Internal Displacement: Global Overview of Trends and
Developments in 2006” (Geneva: Internal Displacement Monitoring Center and Norwegian Refugee
Council, April 2007).
 5

conflict. 14 Moreover, with Africa accounting for an increasing proportion of world-wide

oil exports and concerns rising about terrorist activities in Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone

and the Sahel, state failures can only have wider-rippled consequences in the future. 15

Second, there is a substantial disconnect between scholarly work on African

statehood and the reconstruction policies applied in the continent. Scholars have linked

African state failure to leadership failure, the structure of African states, the dynamics of

democratization in polarized societies, or the vagaries of aid dependency. 16 Yet,

reconstruction exercises typically consist in bringing all violent actors together in power-

sharing agreements (including the very people, in fact, who previously demonstrated

failed leadership), re-asserting the integrity of the failed state, organizing elections, and

showering the country with aid. Moreover, while there is some consensus that African

elites adopt policies which maximize their power and material interests, the typical

reconstruction agenda assumes instead their altruism and desire to maximize the welfare

of the country as a whole with recommendations such as “improve the rule of law”, “hold

14
On the regional implications of conflict and state failure in Africa, see Adekeye Adebajo and Ismail
Rashid, eds., West Africa’s Security Challenges: Building Peace in a Troubled Region (Boulder, CO.:
Lynne Rienner, 2004); United Nations Office for West Africa, The Regional Impact of the Crisis in Côte
d’Ivoire, Dakar 2004; Gilbert M. Khadiagala, ed., Security Dynamics in Africa’s Great Lakes Region
(Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 2006); Edmond J. Keller, “Understanding Conflicts in the Horn of Africa”,
in Chandra Lekham Sriram and Zoe Nielsen, eds., Exploring Subregional Conflict: Opportunities for
Conflict Prevention (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 2004), pp. 17-54.
15
More Than Humanitarianism: Towards a Strategic U.S. Approach Toward Africa (Washington, D.C.,
Council on Foreign Relations, 2005). On the alleged activities of Islamic terrorists in Liberia and Sierra
Leone, see Douglas Farah and Richard Shultz, “Al Qaeda’s Growing Sanctuary,” Washington Post, 14 July
2004.
16
Robert I. Rotberg, “The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown, Prevention, and Repair,” in
Rotberg, ed., When States Fail; I. William Zartman, “Introduction,” in I. William Zartman, ed., Collapsed
States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 1995);
Christopher Clapham, “The Challenge to the State in a Globalized World,” Development and Change, Vol.
33, No. 5 (2002), pp. 775-795 Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills, “Africa’s Big Dysfunctional States: An
Introductory Overview,” in Christopher Clapham, Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills, eds., Big African States
(Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2006), pp. 1-15; Paris, At War’s End; Nicolas van de Walle,
Overcoming Stagnation in Aid-Dependent Countries (Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development,
2005)
 6

free and fair elections”, “combat corruption” and “hold perpetrators of violence

responsible for their action.” 17 Given the poor record of state reconstruction in Africa,

this disconnect and its implications deserve particular scrutiny.

Finally, Africa is unique in the extent to which its states were already

dysfunctional prior to violent collapse and failure. Most African states have never had

very effective institutions, relying instead on the personalized networks of patronage.

They have never generated sustainable growth or managed to absorb their youth

economically. Factionalism has always been politically prevalent, and states have more

often been instruments of private predation and extraction rather than tools for the pursuit

of public goods. In Africa, state failure is less an objective condition than a permanent

mode of political operation. Recognition of the past deficiencies of African states sheds

doubt on the goals that reconstruction can plausibly attain and on the value of the

exercise itself.

In an attempt to address these shortcomings, we focus on three particular flaws

which underpin African reconstruction failure. 18 First we question the idea implicit in

nation building that what are essentially Western state institutions can be successfully

transferred to Africa. 19 The history of Africa’s relations with the outside world suggests

17
On the behavior of African elites, see Robert Bates, Markets and States in Sub-Saharan Africa (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981); Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as
Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The
Politics of the Belly (London: Longman, 1993). For examples of the standard policy prescriptions, see
Susan Rose-Ackerman, “Establishing the Rule of Law,” in Rotberg, ed., When States fail, pp.182-221;
International Crisis Group, A Congo Action Plan. Africa Report No. 34 (Brussels: ICG, 2005).
18
This article is based on fieldwork in two African “failed” states: the DR Congo (2001, 2002, 2004 and
2005) and Sierra Leone (2005). We have also done research in Nigeria (2005), Senegal (2002 and 2005),
and the Republic of Congo (2001). In all these countries we conducted informal interviews with
government officials, politicians, rebels and ex-rebels or militiamen, administrative personnel, civil society
representatives, foreign diplomats and UN staff.
19
For the operational checklist of the typical institutional fixes, including effective judicial and law
enforcement agencies, functional parliaments, tax authorities, public expenditure institutions and more
 7

instead that the region has obstinately resisted transformational projects. Looking at

recent market and democracy promotion efforts by donors, we find little evidence that the

grander vision of state building, with its one-size-fits-all approach, can usher in the

results expected by the international community. Second, we critique the extent to which

reconstruction exercises are based on a logic of cooperation between donors and African

leaders, which presumes a shared understanding of failure and reconstruction. We argue

instead that most African political elites share neither the diagnosis of failure nor the

objectives that outsiders seek to advance. Many of these local elites maximize personal

or factional benefits from political instability and outsiders’ reconstruction efforts, thus

casting doubts on the notion of local ownership. Finally, we highlight the internal

inconsistency of the rebuilding agenda of donors. Our data on the international fiscal and

military resources allocated to Africa’s failed states suggest a lack of political will to

embark on the long-term and cost-intensive efforts that would be consistent with the lofty

goals of state reconstruction. In addition, mixed agendas among donors can compound

the deficiencies of their material commitment to undermine the legitimacy of their state

building efforts in the eyes of African war-torn societies. In conclusion, we recommend a

greater acknowledgement of indigenous rebuilding efforts.

Flaw # 1: The Institutional Transfer Fallacy

generally a state administration that delivers public services, see International Crisis Group, “Liberia and
Sierra Leone: Rebuilding Failed States.” Africa Report No. 87 (Brussels: ICG, 2004), p. i; and United
Nations Development Program, High Level World Bank - European Commission Meeting on Governance
Priorities in the DRC, 31 May – 1 June 2006. For a similar argument about ‘implicit universalism’
underpinning state building, see Charles T. Call and Elizabeth M. Cousens, Ending Wars and Building
Peace (New York: International Peace Academy, 2007), p. 14.
 8

In the literature on state reconstruction in Africa, the agency of Western donors is too

often unproblematized and expectations regarding the behavior of outside interveners

unrelated to their historical record. A look at Western attempts at engineering

institutional change in Africa reveals specific shortcomings with significant bearing on

the odds of success of their reconstruction efforts. In this section, we briefly revisit the

original state construction project in Africa—colonization—and highlight the institutional

shallowness of the enterprise. We then review Western policies of development and

democracy promotion to suggest the obstacles and constraints to engineering changes

from outside Africa.

THE ABSENT LEGACY: WHY MODERN STATES NEVER EXISTED IN AFRICA

The premise of state building is to restore states as “constituted repositories of power and

authority within borders” and “performers and suppliers of political goods.” 20 Most

African states, however, never lived up to these definitions. Many of them are “states

that fail[ed] before they form[ed].” 21 There is indeed overwhelming evidence that most

of Africa’s collapsed states at no point in history remotely resembled the ideal-type of the

modern Western polity. 22 The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example,

20
Robert I. Rotberg, “The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown, Prevention, and Repair,” in
Rotberg, ed., When States Fail, p. 28.
21
Lisa Anderson, “Antiquated Before They Can Ossify: States That Fail Before They Form,” Journal of
International Affair, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Fall 2004), pp. 1-16.
22
See Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative
Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Bayart, The State in Africa;
Pierre Englebert, State Legitimacy and Development in Africa (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 2000);
Leonardo Villalón and Phillip A. Huxtable (eds.), The African State at a Critical Juncture (Boulder, CO.:
Lynne Rienner, 1998); Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in
Perspective (London: Heinemann, 1983); Bates, Markets and States; Crawford Young, The African
Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
 9

never possessed a monopoly of coercion, let alone a legitimate one, nor has it ever

enjoyed the rule of law or rational Weberian bureaucracy. 23 These elements of statehood

may be the desired goal of state building but they are generally at odds with past and

present empirical conditions in Africa. One can thus argue that “what has collapsed is

more the vision (or dream) of the progressive, developmental state that sustained

generations of academics, activists and policy-makers, than any real existing state.”24

The historical “deviation” of the African state from the Western prototype has

major implications for the strategies of contemporary state-builders. Terms like re-

building, re-suscitating, or re-establishing are misleading in so far as they imply the prior

existence of effective public institutions waiting to be born again. Given the historical

dysfunctions of the African state, the reconstruction agenda amounts to re-creating the

structures that caused failure in the first place. Why the outcome would differ this time is

hard to fathom. In Sierra Leone, for example, a diplomat recently complained that “all

our resources have gone toward recreating the conditions that caused the conflict.” 25 In

the DRC too, there are signs that the 2003-2006 foreign-sponsored democratic transition

merely ushered in another authoritarian and corrupt system akin to that of the late

Mobutu (1965-1997). At best, the stark reality of Africa’s failed states is that their

institutions need to be re-built and reformed at the same time. At worst, and this may

23
See Thomas Callaghy, The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984); Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, The Rise and Fall of the Zairean
State (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
24
Jennifer Milliken and Keith Krause, “State Failure, State Collapse, and State Reconstruction: Concepts,
Lessons and Strategies,” Development and Change, Vol. 33, No. 5 (2002), p. 762.
25
Cited in International Crisis Group, Liberia and Sierra Leone, p. 8, our emphasis. This is not a lone voice.
A wide range of interviewees (UN officials, diplomats and local civil society activists) aired similarly
skeptical views that the re-constructed state was positively different from its failed predecessor. Authors’
interviews, Freetown, April 2005.
 10

more often be the case, the task at hand is to establish effective state institutions for the

very first time.

The reason for the structural weakness of Africa’s states harkens back to the

colonial era and the peculiar nature of the polities that were brought on African societies

by their colonial masters. Despite its relative brevity, colonial rule had a long-lasting

impact on Africa’s independent states as it launched radical new ideas of territoriality and

control. Yet, the transfer of modern state institutions proved extremely shallow.

Notwithstanding some exceptions, Britain’s famous indirect rule was a common feature

of all colonial administrations, relying on intermediary local elites to compensate for the

thinly spread colonial apparatus. 26 Thus, although colonialism and decolonization

represent early instances of state building, they reflected a transfer of modern state

institutions in all but theory. Largely as a result, when they reached independence, the

vast majority of these entities “plainly did not meet what had hitherto been the normally

accepted criteria of statehood”. 27

THE LIMITS OF POLITICAL ENGINEERING FROM WITHOUT: PAST EXPERIENCES AND

LESSONS FOR STATE-BUILDERS

Having superficially exported foreign state structures to Africa, outsiders have repeatedly

attempted to mold its institutions according to their own templates. Over the last 25 years

26
Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Sara Berry, No Condition is Permanent. The Social Dynamics of
Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 25;
Jean-François Bayart, “The ‘Social Capital’ of the Felonious State” in Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis
and Beatrice Hibou, eds., Criminalization of the African State (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), p. 46; Herbst,
States and Power in Africa, pp. 64-93; Joshua B. Forrest, Lineages of State Fragility: Rural Civil Society in
Guinea-Bissau (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003).
27
Christopher Clapham, Africa in International Relations: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 34.
 11

particularly, Western donors have increasingly endeavored to engineer economic and

political change in Africa’s weak states. Generally, their goal has been to improve the

effectiveness of governance institutions and promote development.28 Since 1990,

democracy assistance has also grown in importance, partly as a result of increased

perceptions that Africa’s economic stagnation has political roots. 29 To seek these

reforms, donors have made their aid conditional on the implementation of specific policy

prescriptions. The intrusiveness of these externally-driven policies provides important

clues as to the chances of success of the even more ambitious contemporary state

building efforts. As the following sections show, the inherent limitations of outside

attempts at institutional change and the resistance of African states, however weak, speak

against such efforts.

Development Assistance

Africa remains by far the poorest region of the world, with average per capita income

lower than 30 years ago. 30 Between 1981 and 2001, the share of people living on less

than $1 a day rose from 41.6 to 46.4 percent. 31 Only a handful of countries are likely to

meet even half of the eight Millennium Development Goals laid down by the United

28
The document that first drew attention on the need for domestic institutional and policy reforms in Africa
was the World Bank’s so-called Berg Report. World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub Saharan
Africa (Washington, D.C., World Bank, 1981). For an excellent analysis of donor goals and policies see
Nicolas van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979-1999 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), in particular chapters 5 and 6.
29
Gordon Crawford, Foreign Aid and Political Reform : A Comparative Analysis of Democracy Assistance
and Political Conditionality (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
30
David K. Leonard and Scott Straus, Africa’s Stalled Development. International Causes and Cures
(Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 2003); Carol Lancaster, “Development in Africa: The Good, the Bad, the
Ugly,” Current History, Vol. 104, No. 682 (May 2005), p. 222.
31
United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2005 (New York: UNDP, 2005), p.
34.
 12

Nations to reduce poverty by 2015. 32 Despite some specific successes, bilateral and

multilateral donors have rather little to show for the more than $500 billion they have

spend in Africa since the early 1960s. 33 Of course, the effectiveness of past aid was

hampered by numerous factors, including strategic Cold War considerations, which led

all foreign donors to provide ample funding to kleptocratic rulers like Zaire’s Mobutu

Sese Seko and Liberia’s Samuel Doe. 34 Yet, equally important have been the conceptual

and capacity limitations of donors themselves and the resistance of African governments.

As well established as the current emphasis on capacity building seems to be,

donors have historically wavered regarding the proper role of the state in African

development. After a brief Keynesian moment in the early 1960s, they regarded the state

as an obstacle to development for most of the post-independence period, before

progressively abandoning this bias in the 1990s. Recognizing that development requires

an effective state, programs to build capacity have since become a major donor priority. 35

Nevertheless, donor attitudes towards the state have remained contradictory,

simultaneously showing an infatuation with the non-state sector, which has at times

hampered the strengthening of state institutions. In some countries, for example, more

than a fifth of total aid is channeled through Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs),

up from less than 1 percent 15 years ago, as donors have encouraged non-state actors to

32
“A Glimmer of Light at Last?”, Economist, 22 June 2006.
33
William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
34
See, Thad Dunning, “Conditioning the Effects of Aid: Cold War Politics, Donor Credibility, and
Democracy in Africa,” International Organization, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Spring 2004), pp. 409-423; Michael
Schatzberg, Mobutu or Chaos? The United States and Zaire, 1960-1990 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of
America, 1991).
35
See World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997). See also Clapham, Africa in the International System, p. 169, 174.
 13

become service providers. 36 The zero-sum nature of these policies has occasionally

provoked fierce competition between state and non-state actors for outside funding and

has had far reaching repercussions on state capacity, including the attrition of civil

servants to better-paying NGOs. 37

Besides waffling on the role of the state, donor agencies have also been remiss

and inconsistent in implementing conditionality towards African governments so much so

that there is little correlation between the quality of economic management and the

allocation of aid. 38 Donor coordination has also been lacking, with grave consequences

for state building where myriad actors claim to have a role. 39 In Cameroon, for example,

various donor agencies were implementing 1,184 different projects in 2005. These were

evaluated by 400-500 annual missions, with each donor agency having its own modalities

and reporting requirements, thus putting a huge strain on already weak state

administration. 40 Furthermore, the average rate of implementation of World Bank and

IMF policy programs was only 50 to 60%. 41 Reviewing these and other anomalies,

Nicolas van de Walle has come to the conclusion that contemporary capacity-building

efforts are largely “Sisyphean” and “doomed to fail.” 42

36
Van de Walle, Overcoming Stagnation, p. 58.
37
For concrete examples, see Joseph Semboja and Ole Therkildsen, eds., Service Provision under Stress in
East Africa: The State, NGOs and People’s Organizations in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda (Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann, 1995).
38
van de Walle, Overcoming Stagnation, pp. 38-43.
39
As a report observes, “In many post-conflict environments, the chaos on the ground is paralleled only by
the chaos of the international response.” See Play To Win. Final Report of the Bi-Partisan Commission on
Post-Conflict Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2003), p. 2.
40
Authors’ interview with World Bank country representative, Yaoundé, May 2005. See also Nancy
Birdsall, Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian, “How to Help Poor Countries,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84,
No. 4 (2005), p. 142.
41
van de Walle, African Economies, p. 67.
42
van de Walle, Overcoming Stagnation, p. 73.
 14

On the recipient side, many African governments have skillfully evaded outside

pressures for structural changes. In a fair number of cases, state elites effectively

instrumentalized economic reform and were thus able to strengthen and even

“recentralize” their neopatrimonial power, notably in the realm of privatization of state-

owned enterprises. 43 These and related strategies manifest a stark divergence of interests

between external actors and local state elites, often leading to a situation where “outsiders

seek to promote development in countries with governments not particularly interested in

development”. 44 In other words, externally-prescribed policies haven often faltered in

the absence of local individuals and institutions wit a stake in them. As we further argue

below, the divergences and contradictions that characterize the respective interests and

strategies of donors and recipient governments are at the core of the limited successes

that outside engineering has met in Africa’s weak states.

Democracy Promotion

Whether because of their own normative biases, 45 their desire to counter the perception

that they put stability ahead of democracy, or the belief that authoritarianism contributes

to state failure, 46 donors have made the holding of multi-party elections a central tenet of

their state reconstruction efforts. Yet, earlier attempts at democracy promotion on the

continent, in less challenging environments, led to sufficiently underwhelming results to

question the capacity of donors to instigate such changes.

43
See van de Walle, African Economies, pp. 162-164 and the references therein.
44
van de Walle, Overcoming Stagnation, p. 80.
45
Roland Paris, “International Peacebuilding and the Mission Civilisatrice,” Review of International
Studies, Vol. 28, No. 4 (October 2002), pp. 637-656.
46
See, for example, Robert I. Rotberg, “Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and
Indicators”, in Rotberg, ed., State Failure and State Weakness, p. 21.
 15

Although democracy has made undeniable strides in many parts of Africa, the

multiparty elections of the 1990s have rarely ushered in effective institutions, able to rein

in governments. 47 As of 2005, only 12 countries south of the Sahara were democratic by

one measure. 48 The majority of the states of the region are hybrid or semi-democracies

where authoritarian practices and violations of human and political rights remain

common. Not surprisingly, the level of frustration with democracy seems to be on the rise

among Africa’s citizens. 49

What factors account for the mitigated success of democracy promotion in Africa?

To be sure, African democratization is first of all an indigenous process, and it would be

mistaken to conceive of its fate as merely a function of external efforts. Nevertheless, the

insignificant or outright negative empirical association between democracy assistance

and democratization in Africa begs for an explanation. 50

Democracy assistance has suffered from two major deficits. First, donors have

paid scant attention to the coexistence in Africa of informal political institutions with

formal bureaucratic procedures and structures of the state. 51 Behind the rational-legal

47
Marina Ottaway, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism (Washington, DC:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003), p. 3.
48
Monty G. Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr, Peace and Conflict 2005. A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts,
Self-Determination Movements, and Democracy (College Park: CIDCM, 2005), p. 43f. See also Freedom
House, Freedom in Africa Today, 2006 <http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/36.pdf>
49
The Afrobarometer Network, “Citizens and the State in Africa. New Results from Afrobarometer Round
3. A Compendium of Public Opinion Findings from 18 Countries, 2005-2006,” Cape Town 2006.
50
Stephen Brown, “Foreign Aid and Democracy Promotion: Lessons from Africa,” The European Journal
for Development Research, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2005), pp. 179-198; Letitia Lawson, “External Democracy
Promotion in Africa: Another False Start?” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol. 37, No. 1
(1999), pp. 37-58
51
See Ian Taylor, “Advice is Judged by Results, not by Intentions: Why Gordon Brown is Wrong About
Africa,” International Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 2 (March 2005), pp. 299-310; Percy S. Mistry, “Reasons for
Sub-Saharan Africa’s Development Deficit that the Commission for Africa Did Not Consider,” African
Affairs, Vol. 104, No. 417 (2005), pp. 665-678; William Brown, “The Commission for Africa: Results and
Prospects for the West’s Africa Policy,” Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2006), pp.
349-374.
 16

façade of statehood, informal decision-making processes, which are strongly determined

by personal relations, dominate politics. Based on reciprocity, these relations constitute

patronage-based clientelist networks which vertically connect the political center and its

elites to groups in society. 52 Political allegiance to the patron is exchanged for services

and goods received by the clients. As a result, the line between private and public sphere

is so blurred that the notions of the public good and of civil society standing opposite the

state are ultimately absent. 53 From the outside, this form of politics may be regarded as

engendering corruption, misrule and bad governance. For those involved in it, however,

it is eminently rational, facilitating accommodation processes among elites that lend an

often astonishing stability to otherwise weak institutional state structures. 54

This particular form of governance came under pressure in the early 1990s when

donors sought to impose democracy by tying assistance to political reforms. For African

rulers, such increased economic pressure clashed with the exigency of distributing

patronage to key allies. Keenly aware that reforming political systems would endanger

their survival in power, most governments embarked on partial reforms only, essentially

organizing multiparty elections, which accommodated the demands of Western donors

and softened political pressure. 55 Often grossly manipulated, these elections usually

52
Jean François Médard, “The Underdeveloped State in Africa: Political Clientelism or Neo-
Patrimonialism?” in Christopher Clapham, ed., Private Patronage and Public Power: Political Clientelism
and the Modern State (London: Pinter, 1982), pp. 162-189; Richard Sandbrook, “Patrons, Clients and
Factions: Explaining Conflict in Africa,” in Peter Lewis, ed., Africa: Dilemmas of Development and
Change (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 64-83; Robert Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, “Personal Rule:
Theory and Practice in Africa,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 16, No. 4 (July 1984), pp. 421-442.
53
See Peter Lewis, “Political Transition and the Dilemma of Civil Society in Africa,” Journal of
International Affairs, Vol. 46, No. 1 (1992), pp. 31-54.
54
Bayart, Politics of the Belly; Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emerging African
Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
55
Michael Cowen and Liisa Laakso, eds., Multi-Party Elections in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2002);
On partial reform, see van de Walle, African Economies, p. 61.
 17

allowed incumbents to stay in power. Indeed, with 14 victories in 100 elections,

opposition electoral success remains the exception. 56

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that electoral reforms have proved insufficient

to substantially change Africa’s entrenched informal institutions. 57 Donor leniency has

contributed to this resilience. For not only have donor demands essentially been limited

to elections, but donors have also frequently failed to implement their own

conditionalities, even in cases of egregiously obvious foul play by state elites. The

widely condemned stealing of the elections by Cameroon’s Paul Byia in 1992, for

example, was met with no particular aid sanction. On the contrary, Biya as well as his

fellow autocrats Eyadema in Togo and Mobutu in Zaire benefited from increased (French)

assistance while democratizing Benin saw a reduction of development aid. 58

To make matters worse, state elites have also been quick to capitalize upon

donors’ struggles to determine priorities. African governments have learned to evade

pressures for political reform by embracing some degree of economic liberalization along

the lines prescribed by donors. This approach has, for example, bestowed a degree of

respectability upon the government of Uganda and given it quasi-democratic

credentials. 59 This is not to discount that the introduction of multiparty elections may

56
Daniel N. Posner and Daniel J. Young, “The Institutionalization of Political Power in Africa,” Journal of
Democracy, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2007), p. 131. Note that this rate has increased from 6% in 1990.
57
Some claim, however, that formal institutions and rules have grown in importance since 1990. See
Posner and Young, “The Institutionalization of Political Power in Africa”.
58
Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 241.
59
Christopher Clapham, “Governmentality and Economic Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Third World
Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1996), p. 818. On Uganda, still widely considered to be an outstanding reformer,
see Andrew M. Mwenda and Roger Tangri, “Patronage Politics, Donor Reforms, and Regime
Consolidation in Uganda,” African Affairs, Vol. 104, No. 416 (2005), pp. 449-467.
 18

have positive democratization effects in the long run. 60 At present, however,

liberalization and democracy promotion by donors has resulted in the widespread

dominance of hybrid illiberal regimes whose salient features remain excessive

presidential powers, clientelism and patronage.

Failed postcolonial states exhibit thus a peculiar nature as the subject of external

reconstruction. Due to the shallowness of colonial rule and the political strategies of

post-independent rulers, they have always lacked bureaucratic capacities, resting instead

on informal institutions such as patronage networks. Moreover, African states have

proved resistant to outside attempts to transform them. A review of past experiences

indicates the limits of externally inspired institutional engineering in Africa. That

outsiders’ limited achievements have taken place in far less demanding conditions than

those of failed states should caution state-builders against overly ambitious objectives.

Flaw # 2: Belief in a Shared Understanding of Failure and Reconstruction

There are three dimensions of state failure and reconstruction along which donors and

Africans have developed conflicting understandings and experiences. First, in most

African peace-building interventions, there is a cognitive dissonance regarding the very

nature of state failure and reconstruction. Donors typically see failure as systemic

breakdown and reconstruction as some new form of social contracting. African elites are

more likely to maximize the political opportunities afforded by both failure and

60
Staffan I. Lindberg, “The Surprising Significance of African Elections,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 17,
No. 1 (2006), pp. 139-151.
 19

reconstruction, including external assistance. They may see the state reconstruction

exercise as the continuation of war and political competition for resources by new means.

Second, state reconstruction also frequently finds itself at odds with the remarkable

degree of institutional resilience in and of failed states. The public institutions of failed

states may be deeply dysfunctional, yet they hardly ever altogether disappear. As a result,

while reconstruction agreements typically create new institutions for the transition period

and beyond, African elites tend to see legitimacy as remaining in pre-existing sovereign

institutions. Third, state failure is often accompanied by the creation or growth of

parallel local institutions, which provide substitutes for the provision of public goods,

such as health, education and security. Reconstruction efforts often neglect these grass-

root institutions, despite their demonstrated ability to cope with state weakness and

failure.

THE INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF FAILURE AND RECONSTRUCTION

Donors act as if they assume that they and African political elites share a common

understanding of state failure and reconstruction. A 2004 World Bank report on the DR

Congo noted, for example, that “there is a consensus in DRC that economic recovery and

political stabilization both require the rebuilding and transformation of the State” and that

“key actors share a vision of a market-based economy in which the State would withdraw

from productive sectors, and work in coalition with non-governmental networks to

deliver social services […] [P]owerful constituencies all have to gain from reforms,”

including the “government’s anti-corruption strategy”—on which President Kabila and

members of his government were said to have placed a “heavy emphasis.” 61 In light of

the nature of politics in Africa’s weak states, how valid are these assumptions? How

realistically can African elites be considered local counterparts of the international

community in reconstruction projects? We argue that the evidence suggests that the

“normal” African politics of instrumentalization of power extends to violent conflict,

state failure and state reconstruction and that a belief in a common understanding, much

less common objectives is hazardous.

African rulers typically instrumentalize their control of the state to privately

appropriate public resources rather than providing public goods to their citizens. 62 This

behavior also extends to situations of disorder, as state failure represents potentially

significant benefits to those in power. For, the weaker the institutionalization of politics,

the less accountability and the greater the opportunities for predation and domination. 63

While weak institutionalization is a main characteristic of African personal rule systems,

state failure can be thought of as an extension or consequence of it. It is not so much an

affliction of the system as a rather acute manifestation of it. Hence, failed states coexist

with regular politics. 64 To a large extent, many of the domestic conflicts associated with

state failure in places like the DRC, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan or Côte d’Ivoire, are

conflicts about access to the perks of weak statehood.

61
World Bank, Transitional Support Strategy for the Democratic Republic of Congo, (Washington, D.C.:
The World Bank, 2004), p. 22-23. The Bank’s optimism is also captured in the following phrase: “The
commitment to continued reforms, which has been reaffirmed and already demonstrated by the new
Government, suggests that it will be possible to build on earlier success in the coming period.” (p. 18)
62
Peter P. Ekeh, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement”, in Lewis, ed.,
Africa: Dilemmas of Development and Change, pp. 87-109; Bruce Berman, “Ethnicity, Patronage and the
African State: The Politics of Uncivil Nationalism,” African Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 388 (1998), pp. 305-341.
63
The classic statement of this thesis can be found in Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works, particularly chap. 1.
64
Hironaka provides a useful overview over why various facets of disorder constitute “normal politics” in
weak states. Ann Hironaka, Neverending Wars: The International Community, Weak States, and the
Perpetuation of Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), particularly chap. 4.
 21

The absence of checks and balances which accompanies state failure provides

opportunities to privately appropriate public resources, a necessary condition for personal

rule to function. Using Sierra Leone, William Reno has shown how the rulers of

collapsed bureaucracies privatize the means of political control by engaging in shadow

parallel economic activities from which they derive the revenues to perpetuate networks

of patronage. 65 In Chad, President Idriss Deby used the chaos brought about by the

Darfur conflict in neighboring Sudan and a related domestic insurrection to renege on his

earlier commitment to donors to spend oil royalties on development. 66 In Sudan, the

Bashir government which depends on the appropriation of oil revenues from the South,

has promoted chaos in that region (and, by the same logic, in Darfur), thereby

simultaneously undermining the formal authority and functioning of the state but also

improving the relative standing of the Northern Arabs within its institutions. 67

In the DRC, the Lutundula Commission of the transitional National Assembly which

studied mining and other business contracts that rebels and government authorities signed

during the wars between 1996 and 2003 identified dozens of illegal contracts. 68 In Côte

d’Ivoire, the presidential clan is believed to have used the confusion of state failure to

65
William Reno, “The Changing Nature of Warfare and the Absence of State-Building in West Africa”, in
Diane Davis and Anthony Pereira, eds., Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State
Formation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 322-345
66
On donor’s alleged “shared sovereignty” with Chad, see Stephen D. Krasner, “Sharing Sovereignty:
New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States,” International Security, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Fall 2004), pp.
85-120. On the collapse of the oil deal, see Chip Cummins, “Exxon Oil-Fund Model Unravels in Chad”,
Wall Street Journal, 28 February 2006, A4.
67
See International Crisis Group, Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: the Long Road Ahead.
Africa Report No. 106 (ICG: Brussels, 2006); see also Gerard Prunier and Rachel M. Gisselquist, “The
Sudan: A Successfully Failed State”, in Rotberg, ed., State Failure and State Weakness, pp. 101-127.
68
République Démocratique du Congo, Assemblée Nationale, Commission Spéciale chargée de l’examen
et de la validité des conventions a caractere économique et financier conclues pendant les guerres de 1996-
1997 et de 1998. Rapport des Travaux, 1ere partie. February 2006.
<http://www.monuc.org/downloads/RapportLutundula.pdf>. See also Human Rights Watch, DR Congo:
End Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/02/20/congo12692_txt.htm.
 22

extend its informal control over the cocoa industry and divert in “complete opacity”

about $170m between 2002 and 2004 to be used as “the principal source of occult

financing of the regime,” according to a report commissioned by the European Union. 69

We do not suggest that rulers in collapsing states deliberately dismantle state

institutions, but that their strategies for political survival de facto accelerate the

destruction of state institutions. This is particularly evident in the security sector. In

Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Sudan, for example, governments supported the creation

of proxy militias to fight opponents but in the process found it hard to maintain control

over these paramilitary forces which gained a life of their own (thereby further corroding

the state’s control over coercion and weakening the role of the official coercive agencies

(police, army). 70 While they may not necessarily promote such chaos, many African

rulers are apt at navigating such environments.

The same logic, we suggest, goes with reconstruction. Whereas international

actors tend to see reconstruction as a new beginning after the crisis of failure, African

elites more often see it as continued competition and struggle for power and resources,

facilitated by power-sharing agreements, increases in foreign aid, and lax international

oversight. In a nutshell, there is a deep cognitive disconnect between the systemic

continuity of the politicsÆfailureÆreconstruction cycle for African elites and its

ruptured nature for donors.

69
Sid Amiri and Alain Gourdon, “Etude diagnostic des organisations et des procédures de la filière café-
cacao de Côte d’Ivoire.” Rapport réalisé pour le compte du gouvernement de Côte d’Ivoire sur financement
de l’Union Européenne, nd. See also Pascal Airault, “Ou va l’argent du cacao?”, Jeune Afrique, No. 2365,
7 May 2006, pp. 32-33.
70
Particularly illuminating is the case of the “Young Patriots” militias in Côte d’Ivoire. See Richard
Banégas and Ruth Marshall-Fratani, “Côte ‘Ivoire: Negotiating Identity and Citizenship” in Morten Bøås
and Kevin C. Dunn, eds., African Guerrillas: Raging Against the Machine (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner,
2007), p. 99ff.
 23

It might be helpful here to develop a keener sense of who many of the African

transition elites are. Frequently, they are the leaders of armed factions who have fought

each other in bloody civil wars and have become partners by virtue of power-sharing

arrangements brokered by the international community for the sake of peace. 71 This has

been the case in Burundi, DR Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan.

These individuals are, however, fundamentally problematic partners, as nearly all of them

bear responsibility for large-scale atrocities, human rights abuses and destruction. Yet,

there is no obvious solution to this moral conundrum, as there can be no peace without

involving them.

No less significant is the fact that many of these leaders are not social outcasts but

former members of the political establishment. They have usually not fought to address

deep societal grievances but to re-integrate a system from which they had been excluded,

which further highlights the political continuity of reconstruction. In the DRC, many of

the guerilla and militia leaders of the second war (1998-2002) had ministerial positions in

the previous corrupt administrations of Mobutu Sese Seko or Laurent-Désiré Kabila. 72

These individuals possess the wherewithal to organize violence and force their re-

inclusion into a profitable political system which, as a result, they do not want to change.

That these elites were part of the machinery that led the state into failure, later self-

recycling by violent means, casts serious doubts on the assumption that they may share

the state building agenda of the international community.

71
Denis M. Tull and Andreas Mehler, “The Hidden Costs of Power-Sharing: Reproducing Insurgent
Violence in Africa,” African Affairs, Vol. 104, No. 416 (2005), pp. 375-398; see also Philip G. Roeder and
Donald Rothchild, eds., Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy After Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 2005).
72
This is true, for example, of Lunda Bululu, José Endundo, and Alexis Thambwe. For more examples,
including from Liberia, see William Reno, “The Politics of Insurgency in Collapsing States,” Development
and Change, Vol. 33, No. 5 (2002), p. 841f.
 24

Due to their violent strategies and imprecise agendas, these non-state actors are

often described as warlords. The ease with which they may move from outsider status to

government positions suggests however, that the term warlord should not be reserved for

non-state actors alone. Moreover, the behavior of many state elites in war-torn countries

is not so different from that of non-state actors in terms of human rights abuses and

economic exploitation, setting aside the former’s claims of legitimacy by virtue of state

sovereignty. 73 For that reason, rulers of failed states such as Presidents Kabila (DRC)

and Gbagbo (Côte d’Ivoire) are no less problematic interlocutors of the international

community than their violent non-state challengers.

International state reconstruction efforts offers political elites—be they

government or insurgents co-opted by virtue of power-sharing agreements—new

opportunities for accumulation and advancement. From their point of view, international

reconstruction support provides resources for what Jean-François Bayart has

characterized as “strategies of extraversion”.74 According to Bayart, African elites

extract a rent, in terms of domestic domination and economic accumulation, from their

relation of dependence with the rest of the world. Bayart’s historical examples of this

process include slavery, some dimensions of the colonial relationship, the Cold War,

structural adjustment programs and recent civil conflicts. In each case, some African

elites have utilized their country’s overall relationship of dependence vis-à-vis the rest of

the world to pursue and consolidate domestic strategies of authority and representation.

73
See, for example, Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources
and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (New York: United Nations, 2002
74
Jean-François Bayart, “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion,” African Affairs, Vol. 99, No.
395 (2000), pp. 217-267; Robert Latham, Ronald Kassimir and Thomas M. Callaghy, “Introduction:
Transboundary Formations, Intervention, Order, and Authority”, in Thomas M. Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir
and Robert Latham, eds., Intervention & Transnationalism in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 13.
 25

The combination of Africa’s extraversion and the redistributive centrality of its states

have made corruption exceptionally pervasive on the continent. 75

Strategies of extraversion find fertile grounds in the relationship that state

reconstruction creates between Western powers and African elites. The massive

resumption or increase in foreign aid for post-conflict transitions represents a direct and

indubitable rent to holders of state power, as it subsidizes governments and state agencies

where corruption remains rampant. In fact, as mentioned earlier, donors eager for peace

and stability may well be more lenient towards corruption in post-conflict states.

Reconstruction promotes thus new aid inflows with laxer conditionality. The willingness

of the IMF and the World Bank, for example, to finance the DRC’s economic recovery

program and forgive large chunks of its debt in the face of overwhelmingly massive

corruption and limited macroeconomic progress, was rather telling in this respect. 76

While receiving an estimated $8bn in aid between 2001 and 2006, 77 Congolese transition

elites literally went on a corruption binge. Some $8m earmarked for military pay

reportedly disappeared each month before reaching their intended recipients in 200578 A

2005 audit also showed that 41% of government spending in 2003, the year the transition

started, had taken place outside proper budgetary processes. The Presidency had

exceeded it budget by 89% while one of the vice-presidents had spent seven times his

75
Giorgio Blundo, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan with N. Bako Arifari and M. Tidjani Alou, Everyday
Corruption and the State. Citizens and Public Officials in Africa (London: Zed Books, 2006); Berman,
“Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State”, p. 308, 341.
76
The International Financial Institutions insist that their economic policies in the DRC are working and
have contributed to an economic and political “turnaround”. See Jean A.P. Clément, ed., Postconflict
Economies in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from the Democratic Republic of Congo (Washington, D.C.:
International Monetary Fund, 2004). However, the IMF suspended its disbursements in early 2006 because
of the government’s spending spree in the run up to the elections.
77
Data by MONUC, http://www.monuc.org/News.aspx?newsID=11448&menuOpened=DRC%20profile
78
Le Potentiel (Kinshasa), 2 November 2005.
 26

allocation. 79 In the 2005 budget, according to a Congolese NGO, no less than $22m were

“obscure allocations” to the president and the other leaders of transition institutions,

which dwarfed the amounts allocated to public health, national education, rural

development and the independent electoral commission combined. 80

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that African transition elites try to

prolong these transitions for as long as possible. In Congo, it took them between 1999

(cease-fire) and 2003 (end of the “Inter-Congolese Dialogue”) to agree on a transition

platform. Much of the subsequent two-year transition was then largely wasted until it

had to be extended another year. Still, the elections could not be held in time. In Côte

d’Ivoire, elections originally scheduled for October 2005 were also postponed, to October

2006, and then again further delayed as neither the government nor the rebels acted upon

their pledges of disarmament and continued to hamper the functioning of the “national

reconciliation” government. 81 In Sudan too, President Bashir and his National Congress

Party (NCP) have “systematically [undermined], [delayed] or simply [ignored] the

elements called for in the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005] that would

fundamentally alter the status quo and [their] grip on power.” 82

Finally, the instrumentalization of reconstruction is also associated with the

maintenance of conflict in what outsiders euphemistically call “post-conflict” societies.

In the DRC, transition government members continued their war by proxy through

multiple militias and guerilla groups in the eastern provinces. In the 12 months following

79
Le Potentiel, 29 October 2005; Le Phare (Kinshasa), 31 October 2005, digitalcongo.net, 2 November
2005.
80
SERACOB-Afrique Centrale. Analyse du projet de budget 2005. Personal e-mail communication, 22
June 2005.
81
Eighth Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (New York:
United Nations, 11 April 2006).
82
International Crisis Group, Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement, p. 2.
 27

the Pretoria Peace Agreement, for example, fighting in the DRC displaced a further

662,000 people, an increase of 22 percent over the previous year, bringing the total

number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the country to 3.4 million. 83 Although

it has specific local and international dimensions, this violence also largely involved the

very actors who were then part of the transition government, highlighting the duplicity of

reconstruction commitments. 84

The misunderstanding between donors and African elites on the nature of politics

and reconstruction in Africa is not without consequences. For, while speaking the same

language, domestic and international actors engage in fact in different games. On the one

hand, international actors commit to what is presented as a partnership with transition

governments, composed of both former incumbents and rebels who are thought of as

having made peace and as working towards the democratic settlement of their previous

dispute. On the other hand, transition governments emanating from power-sharing

agreements lack homogeneity and see former incumbents and rebels engaged in a game

of their own for control of power and resources. This competition stimulates corruption,

policy procrastination, and continued violence in contradiction to the spirit of

reconstruction. Because the prize of politics remains the failed state itself, now made

even more appetizing by the rents from reconstruction, there is no real incentive for

proper reconstruction while there are some for sabotaging the process. This is what

Jacques Klein, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Liberia,

referred to when he labeled the Liberian transition government “a coalition of the

83
Fourteenth Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Organization Mission in the
Democratic Republic of Congo (New York: United Nations, 17 November 2003), p. 14.
84
See Stephanie Wolters, “Is Ituri on the Road to Stability? An Update on the Current Security Situation in
the District,” Situation Report (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 12 May 2005).
 28

unwilling, that is a government that is quite often not interested in what we are.” 85 The

frequent lack of success of post-conflict transitions comes in large part from the mistaken

belief in a shared understanding of failure and reconstruction and from international

actors misreading the nature of politics in Africa, particularly with respect to the utility-

enhancing properties of failure.

INSTITUTIONAL VACUUM V. RESILIENCE

A second dimension of the disconnect between Africans and the West regarding state

failure arises from the remarkable degree of institutional resilience in and of failed states.

Foreign observers often equate state failure with the absence of public institutions.

Robert Rotberg, for example, defines state collapse, an extreme version of failure, as a

“vacuum of authority” where the state is reduced to “a mere geographical expression, a

black hole into which a failed polity has fallen.” 86 In reality, however, even

dysfunctional public institutions endure in times of failure, whether in the hands of

governments or rebels. Furthermore, an intrinsic dimension of state failure is the

development or adaptation of non-state and self-help institutions for the provision of

public goods. State reconstruction efforts may clash with institutional resilience in two

ways. First, foreign actors tend to create transition institutions which may compete with

the pre-existing remnants of public authority and end up lacking significant legitimacy.

Second, the centralizing desire to reconstruct the formal sovereign state may neglect or

even undermine the local institutional developments which have allowed for the survival

85
“Liberia: A Shattered Nation on the Long Road to Recovery”, IRIN News, 17 August 2004.
86
Robert I. Rotberg, “Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators” in Rotberg, ed.,
State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, p. 9.
 29

and organization of social life during the years of conflict and which represent important

indigenous assets for the future.

Post-conflict agreements commonly create new institutions that are expected to

supersede or replace pre-existing ones for the transition period. For example, in the DRC,

the presidency was expanded to an espace présidentiel where power was to be shared

between the President and four vice-presidents representing the two main rebel groups,

the unarmed opposition and civil society. 87 A transition parliament and several

institutions in charge of monitoring the transition were also established. A similar system

was devised in Sudan with the new position of First Vice-President accruing to the

Southern Sudanese People Liberation Movement (SPLM). The CPA also created

multiple new shared state institutions for the reconstruction of the country, including a

National Constitutional Review Commission to write an interim constitution.

Yet, there is evidence across Africa of the resilience of pre-failure public

institutions and of their maintenance by state actors. A particularly frustrating area of

institutional resilience has been the question of where state sovereignty resides during

transitions when incumbent heads of state have been forced to share power with their

opponents. For foreign sponsors, sovereignty emanates from the transition texts and is

inclusive of all participants in power sharing. Incumbents, on the other hand, tend to

continue to see sovereignty as residing within the state over which they presided as a side

in the conflict. Curtailed as it may be by the transition agreements, they do not see their

authority as emanating from these accords. In the DRC, for example, President Kabila

maintained and developed a parallel structure of authority while formally sharing power

87
For a detailed account of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, see Paule Bouvier and Francesca Bomboko, Le
Dialogue Intercongolais: Anatomie d’une négociation à la lisière du chaos (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004).
 30

in the transition institutions. He maintained his personal control over all intelligence

services and set up a Special Presidential Security Group (GSSP), estimated at 15,000

troops, separated from the integrated national army and under his own immediate

authority.

Congo’s Kabila is no exception. Many “post-conflict” African leaders appear to

hold on to a perception of their office as holding public authority distinct from the

transition agreements. After the January 2006 decision of Côte d’Ivoire’s International

Working Group that the mandate of the pro-president national parliament should end,

President Laurent Gbagbo protested that “Côte d’Ivoire is not a failed state where

institutions have collapsed. Every institution functions. Unfortunately, the decisions we

take do not manage to reach the entire territory. Hence we have called on [the West], not

in order to replace our institutions, but to disarm the rebels who prevent my decisions

from reaching the whole country.” 88 Throughout the failed transition, Gbagbo

systematically promoted ambiguities in the understanding of his powers as opposed to

those of the Reconciliation Government and did not hesitate to use his Young Patriots

militia to undermine the actions of UN-sponsored institutions.

While the reproduction of failed institution by state actors may not be so

surprising, there is also widespread evidence that rebel movements actively embrace the

institutions of the states they otherwise challenge. The rebels of the Rassemblement

Démocratique Africain (RCD-Goma) in eastern Congo mostly maintained the institutions

of the Congolese state from 1998 to 2003. “Far from building an administrative structure

from scratch”, Denis Tull writes, “the RCD simply took charge of the feeble

88
A. Christopher, “Laurent Gbagbo: Je n’ai pas lutté pour la démocratie pour supprimer les contre-
pouvoirs,” www.cotedivoireisback.com, accessed January 27, 2006.
 31

administrative apparatus it found in place.” 89 Few rebel groups anywhere in Africa have

developed significant public institutions over the areas they control. In Northern Côte

d’Ivoire, the Forces Nouvelles tried to maintain the state administration, despite the

fleeing of many civil servants to the government-controlled southern region. In Southern

Sudan, two decades of separatist conflict generated only the flimsiest of public

institutions. 90

The fact that decayed state institutions remain broadly unchallenged reflects their

enduring utility. For state elites and other holders of state authority, public institutions

(especially failed ones where norms of public accountability cannot be enforced) provide

opportunities for predation and domination which tend to dwarf the benefits of other

economic activities. Because they benefit from the popular recognition imparted by

history and sovereignty, these state institutions are unlikely to be reformed, even by

rebels in search of resources.

In addition, numerous other mostly informal but more effective institutions tend

to develop or strengthen in the margins of failed states. The rise of non-state institutions

is not a recent phenomenon. They have emerged over the last couple of decades as a

result of state weakness and the lack of state services. Failure, however, tends to magnify

their presence and growth. During the war in eastern Congo, for example, church

organizations played an essential role in the continuation of public services, such as

health and education, particularly the Catholic Church with its networks of schools and

89
Denis M. Tull, The Reconfiguration of Political Order in Africa: A Case Study of North Kivu (DR
Congo) (Hamburg: Institute of African Affairs, 2005), pp. 132-133.
90
Ken Crossley, “Why Not to State-Build New Sudan”, in Paul Kingston and Ian S. Spears, eds., States
within States: Incipient Political Entities in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 135-
151; Øystein H. Rolandsen, Guerilla Government. Political Changes in the Southern Sudan in the 1990s
(Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute, 2005).
 32

primary health care centers. In Somalia, the creation of Somaliland in 1991 largely

resulted from the initiative of clan elders in the margins of statehood. 91 In general, across

the continent, many ethnic, religious, gender-based or professional welfare associations

have developed over the last decades, providing services to their members which no

longer can be expected from weak states, in a form of “new communal politics.” 92

Consequences for State Reconstruction

The resilience of failed state institutions and the relative vibrancy of their non-state

counterparts tend to conflict with the international reconstruction agenda. First, the

tendency of transition agreements to create new institutions (such as integrated armies or

transition parliaments) can generate overlap and confusion, and reduce the legitimacy of

the new system. The conflict between the Marcoussis-derived reconciliation government

of Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny and the pre-conflict parliament composed of

supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo in Côte d’Ivoire in 2006, illustrates this clash of

institutions and the headaches it can give international transition sponsors, as it resulted

in attacks against UN forces and international humanitarian personnel.93

The creation of new integrated national armies also frequently poses problem. In

DR Congo, several army battalions in the east, formerly under the control of the RCD-

Goma, refused to integrate the new national army and continued to threaten its

91
Matt Bryden, “State-Within-a-Failed-State: Somaliland and the Challenge of International Recognition”
in Kingston and Spears, eds., States within States, p. 167.
92
Catherine Boone, “‘Empirical Statehood’ and Reconfigurations of Political Order” in Villalón and
Huxtable, eds., The African State at a Critical Juncture, p.137.
93
For a detailed recapitulation of these events, see “Côte d’Ivoire: Anti-UN Riots,” Africa Research
Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural Series, Vol. 43, No. 1 (January 2006), p.16487-16489.
 33

effectiveness beyond the transition period. 94 In addition, the demobilization of large

numbers of fighters tends to let loose armed youth to whose violence militias and

guerillas provided at least some controllable structure. In Sierra Leone, for example,

many ex-combatants have joined quasi-gangs engaged in diamond mining, with the result

that “the conditions for ongoing conflict are still very much present” in this country

widely considered a success of reconstruction. 95

Second, the tendency to dismiss local indigenous institutions—such as self-help

associations, churches, NGOs and other grass-root organizations—from reconstruction

efforts alienates African citizens from the rebuilding of their states and undermines

democratic accountability. In the DRC, former belligerents and professional politicians

virtually took over all the transition functions, leaving representatives of genuine

indigenous organizations sidelined. Human rights groups and women’s associations, in

particular, many of whom represented the only safeguard against predation during the

conflict, were poorly integrated and continued to be repressed by the government during

and after the transition. 96 Of course, not all local actors are automatically legitimate, and

there is also much individual interest maximization going on at this level of public life.

In addition, some local “indigenous” organizations have historically been associates of

state power and instruments of its domination. 97 Yet, bona fide popular representation

94
See International Crisis Group, Congo’s Elections: Making or Breaking the Peace. Africa Report No.
108 (Brussels: ICG, 2006).
95
Bruce Baker and Roy May, “Reconstructing Sierra Leone,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics,
Vol. 42, No. 1 (March 2004), p.45.
96
See Human Rights Watch, DR Congo: Elections in Sight: Don’t ‘Rock the Boat’? (New York: Human
Rights Watch, 2005).
97
See, for example, the ambiguities of the restoration of Paramount Chiefs by the British in Sierra Leone:
Paul Jackson, “Chiefs, Money and Politicians. Rebuilding Local Government in Post-War Sierra Leone,”
Public Administration and Development, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2005), pp. 49-58; Richard Fanthorpe, “On the
 34

and the foundations of political accountability are more likely to develop from local

initiatives than from political elites at the center.

Flaw # 3: Inconsistencies between Ends and Means

The final flaw in Western state reconstruction ambitions is the dramatic inconsistency

between their lofty goals and the means available to reach them. First, irrespective of

whether or not it can be successful in Africa (which we doubt), the international nation-

building agenda requires military and financial resources which donors cannot

realistically harness. Second, it implies a degree of organization and of donor

homogeneity that exceeds their capabilities. Finally, the moral capital necessary for

credible reconstruction is often undermined by the vagaries of diplomacy and national

interest.

FISCAL AND MILITARY CREDIBILITY

International reconstruction does not come cheap. In the DR Congo, it is estimated that

MONUC operations alone cost over $1bn a year. In addition, the funding of the 2006

elections reached over $400m. 98 These amounts do not include overall Official

Development Assistance (including reconstruction aid), which totaled some $8bn

between 2001 and 2006.

Limits of Liberal Peace: Chiefs and Democratic Decentralization in Post-War Sierra Leone,” African
Affairs, Vol. 105, No. 418 (2006), pp. 27-49.
98
MONUC, Elections Fact Sheet <http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/monuc/elecFS.pdf>
 35

As of 2007, there were five ongoing UN reconstruction operations in Africa, a

considerable financial toll on the organization and its main contributors. As UN

operations end in countries like Sierra Leone, other places like Chad, the Central African

Republic, Guinea or even Zimbabwe are credible candidates for the next instances of full-

fledged failure and UN intervention. The financial demands of African state

reconstruction are thus likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Moreover, there

have been increasing calls for broader, deeper and longer-lasting types of state

reconstruction exercises. This “neo-trusteeship” agenda involves an international

presence over periods of up to several decades, including international civilian

administrations. 99

Although there are merits to the neo-trusteeship approach, its implications

regarding the capacity and will of international actors to continue rebuilding African

states and expand their involvement contrast with empirical patterns to date, from which

two trends emerge. First, reconstruction aid to Africa is typically short lived. Pledges

tend to peak in the year of, or the one immediately following, the formal transition or

cease-fire agreement between belligerents, and then rapidly decline. Second, with the

exception of the smallest states, international reconstruction exercises are often skin-deep

and limited in their capacity to lastingly contribute to the restoration of peace and security.

Figure 1 illustrates the first pattern. 100 Aid pledges to the DRC and Sierra Leone

showed rapid rises with the beginning of their formal transition away from failure, only

99
On the neo-trusteeship argument, see Fearon and Laitin, “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak
States”; Krasner, “Sharing Sovereignty”; Fukuyama, Governance and World Order; specifically for Africa,
Ellis, “How to Rebuild Africa”.
100
Figure 1 includes all aid commitments recorded by Africa Research Bulletin for these countries over the
2001-2006 period, excluding debt reduction agreements in the DR Congo and Sierra Leone. Actual
disbursements can fall short of these pledges.
 36

to collapse as rapidly the following year. In Côte d’Ivoire, where the conflict began in

2002, aid pledges that same year represent World Bank, IMF, EU and French

commitments after what appeared then to have been a successful “Reconciliation Forum”

between the country’s main political figures and the organization of pluralistic local

elections, which were deemed a significant progress over the flawed presidential election

of Laurent Gbagbo in 2000. Aid to Burundi, which peaked with the elections of 2005,

fell in 2006 after a February donor conference raised only $85m of an expected

$168m. 101

Figure 1: Reconstruction Aid Pledges in Four African Countries

1,800

1,600

1,400

1,200

Burundi
1,000
Cote d'Ivoire
$mn

DRC
800
Sierra Leone

600

400

200

-
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Commitments to African state reconstruction also appear significantly less

substantial than in some other regions. According to DRC government data, at $39 per

101
Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical Series, Vol. 43, No. 2 (February-March
2006), p. 16870.
 37

year, the per capita cost of reconstruction in Congo compares unfavorably with non-

African cases such as Afghanistan ($129), Bosnia and Herzegovina ($211), El Salvador

($79), Iraq ($508), Kosovo ($240) or East Timor ($278). 102 Although additional

spending in these other countries may not always lead to greater success, reconstruction

funding in Africa certainly falls short of the immensity of the donors’ self-appointed task.

The fleeting nature of these commitments also augurs ill of the likelihood that the

financial momentum of neo-trusteeships could be carried across several years or decades.

Table 1. UN Peace-Keeping Operations in Five African Failed States

Country Highest number Date Peace-keepers Peace-keepers

of peace-keepers per 100,000 pop per 100 sq. km

Burundi 7,145 May 2004 112 28

Côte d’Ivoire 9.098 June 2004 53 3

DRC 19,566 Jan 2006 33 1

Liberia 17,700 Jan 2006 508 18

Sierra Leone 18,339 March 2001 304 25

Table 1 illustrates the second but related pattern. By and large, small-size and small-

population countries have relatively dense operations with more than 100 peace-keepers

102
Cited in Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Report: Democratic Republic of Congo, December 2004,
p. 23.
 38

per 100,000 people. 103 Larger countries, however, have very understaffed and superficial

forces. While MONUC total personnel numbered close to 20,000, their size was dwarfed

by the combined number of former government and rebel troops (about 200,000), and by

the size of the many militias they were called to engage in the east of the country. In

order to reach the same density per population as Liberia, a relative success story so far,

the DRC would need 301,198 UN peace keepers, or a 15-fold increase. The required

annual increase in Peace-Keeping Operations spending in Congo would be in excess of

US$14bn, more than half the average annual flow of aid to all of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Similar increases would also be needed for Côte d’Ivoire and for Sudan. Although Sudan

is not included in Table 1, its situation is similar with a peace-keeping density for the

country as a whole or 39 per 100,000 people and 0.64 per hundred square kilometers. It

is hard to conceive of this scattered presence as more than symbolic.

103
In comparison, however, pre-surge US and allied troops in Iraq numbered 672 per 100,000 people and
41 per hundred square kilometer, and were still deemed insufficient for the task of rebuilding by several
analysts and dissident generals.
 39

Figure 2. Trends in UN Peace-Keepers in Five African

20,000

15,000 Burundi
Cote d'Ivoire
Troops

10,000 Liberia
Sierra Leone
5,000
DR Congo

-
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

Note: Data for 2007 as of August 30.

In addition, multilateral troops depart rather soon after the formal end of

transitions. Figure 2 shows this trend clearly for Sierra Leone and Burundi. In August

2007, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also called for a draw-down of UN troops in

Liberia to 9,750 by 2010. In the DRC, MONUC was expected to continue for a few

years after the 2006 elections but with declining numbers. To some extent, this is logical.

After all, if the country is deemed rebuilt, there should be no further reason to provide

troops. Yet, the frequent continuation of lower-intensity conflict or the resilience of

many of the factors originally associated with the conflict challenge the consistency of

these withdrawals with the reconstruction objectives. In Burundi, the rebels of the Party

for the Liberation of the Hutu People—National Forces for Liberation were still engaged

in significant warfare as the UN withdrew, including regular bombings of the capital

Bujumbura. In Liberia, the UN noted “slow progress in strengthening the security

sector” at the same time as it called for troop withdrawal. 104 In Sierra Leone, Baker and

May noted that the “aid programme currently being implemented is not effectively

addressing the underlying factors predisposing Sierra Leone to internal conflict” and

concluded that it is a “mistake to assume that Sierra Leone is a post-conflict society.” 105

In the DR Congo, violence actually increased after the 2006 elections in the Kivu

provinces where most UN troops were stationed. In sum, Figure 2 indicates the extent to

which elections are equated with successful reconstruction and the end of the

international mandate. That this vision is erroneously and dangerously narrow has been

well documented elsewhere. 106

DONOR HOMOGENEITY AND LEGITIMACY

The idea of multilateral assistance to domestic state reconstruction paints as benign a

view of Western donors as it does of domestic forces. International sponsors of

transitions present themselves as homogeneous benevolent international actors, intent on

maximizing the welfare and security of African societies at large and presumably

welcomed by the latter. Such a view calls for a reality check, as they are inevitably

divided on the reconstruction agenda and in their support for local political forces.

Although backing one faction is not necessarily a bad thing, it can threaten the legitimacy

of the reconstruction exercise among other factions. Moreover, it may not always be in

every Western power’s advantage to promote the construction of stronger states in Africa

or the greater representation of certain groups in politics. Africans are not oblivious to

104
“Liberia: Drawdown for Peacekeeping Mission On Track, Says Ban Ki-Moon”, UN News Service, 16
August 2007.
105
Baker and May, “Reconstructing Sierra Leone,” pp. 53-55.
106
See, among an increasing number of other voices, Paris, At War’s End.
 41

these mixed motives and the legitimacy of several foreign interventions has suffered as a

consequence.

In the DR Congo, the International Committee for the Accompaniment of the

Transition (CIAT by its French acronym), which included the main foreign supporters of

the transition, regularly proclaimed its neutrality and its attachment to the

democratization process. Yet, several important Congolese social constituencies, such as

students and residents of the opposition-friendly Kasai provinces and the capital Kinshasa,

believed not without cause that CIAT’s main power-brokers—the United States, France,

the EU and Angola—were actually intent on promoting a Kabila victory. As a result,

there was much skepticism of the actions of CIAT and acts of hostility against foreigners

and MONUC were not uncommon. Before the landmark elections of July 30, 2006, the

head of the EU observation mission to Congo felt obliged to publicly note that the

elections were “not a masquerade preordained to legitimate one of the candidates’

rights.” 107 In Côte d’Ivoire, the main wedge among foreign actors was between France

and South Africa, with the latter perceived as on the side of President Gbagbo and

inimical to what it saw as France’s neo-colonial presence. While President Gbagbo

benefited from South Africa’s mediation, he and his supporters in the south were deeply

suspicious of the French and the UN, which they deemed partial to the rebels. In January

2006, after the International Working Group called for an end to the mandate of the pro-

Gbagbo parliament, pro-government youth militias destroyed UN offices and vehicles

and forced some peacekeepers to withdraw under army escort. 108 Gbagbo then called the

107
http://www.monuc.org/news.aspx?newsID=11810.
108
See Africa Research Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural Series, Vol. 43, No. 1 (January 2006), pp.
16487-16489.
 42

UN an occupation force. Similarly, the ruling National Islamic Front in Sudan angrily

resisted the deployment of UN forces in the Darfur region until 2007 and threatened

“jihad” if Western peace-keepers were deployed. 109

There are, of course, instances where local populations appear to perceive foreign

actors as legitimate promoters of reconstruction. The case of the United Kingdom in

Sierra Leone comes to mind. The United States also benefited from a stock of goodwill

capital in Liberia in 2003. Yet, ambiguous relations between certain groups in society

and peace-keepers are more common and can prevent mission effectiveness. Such

legitimacy deficits also hint at the difficulties that longer-lasting neo-trusteeships could

run into.

Conclusions and Policy Recommendations

We have identified three explicit or implicit assumptions underpinning state building

efforts in Africa and shown them to be deeply flawed. Recognizing these flaws points to

the limits of what outside-sponsored institutional engineering can realistically achieve.

State building generally suffers from an outsider bias. The very nature of

international reconstruction efforts suggests indeed that the knowledge, capacity,

strategies and resources of external actors are crucial ingredients for success. Local

institutions, on the other hand, are presumed to have been wiped out by conflict and

disorder, with war-torn societies unable to rebuild them on their own. The World Bank

109
Africa Research Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural Series, Vol. 43, No. 3 (March 2006), pp. 16589.
 43

explicitly states that “fragile states lack the capacity for autonomous recovery.” 110 As a

result, externally-led reconstruction policies, which tend to follow the “best practices”

that have been successful elsewhere, are “not necessarily perceived by local actors as the

answers to their problems.” 111 Best practices as panacea include the early introduction of

democratic elements, in particular elections. In the absence of functioning state

institutions or foreign sponsored security safeguards early elections have sometimes

spurred even more violence or have at best ratified war time institutions and leaders (e.g.

Liberia in 1997, Rwanda 1994, Angola in 1992). 112

Yet, post-conflict countries such as Uganda and Somaliland have demonstrated

the possibility of successful resurgence of relatively strong indigenous state institutions

by African standards. Although they are by no means unmitigated successes, they have

by and large fared better than their externally-sponsored counterparts. At the very least,

they have involved elements of social contracting which are absent in the latter and which

provide their public institutions with more substantive—albeit not necessarily more

democratic—foundations. These countries hardly ever figure in current state building

debates, however, probably because they were not subject to the extensive international

peacekeeping and state building efforts that we see today. 113 But this is precisely the

point. The state reconstruction outsider bias tends to neglect local agency and indigenous

110
The citation is taken from the overview section of the Bank’s website “Fragile States: the LICUS
Initiative. See www.worldbank.org/licus (accessed 27 August 2007).
111
Marina Ottaway, “Rebuilding State Institutions in Collapsed States,” Development and Change, Vol. 33,
No. 5 (2002), pp. 1004-1005; Barnett R. Rubin, “Constructing Sovereignty for Security,” Survival, Vol.
47, No. 4 (2005), p. 104. See also Carrie Manning, “Local Level Challenges to Post-Conflict
Peacebuilding,” International Peacekeeping, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn 2003), pp. 25-43.
112
For the general argument about premature democratization see Paris, At War’s End; on elections as one
element see Terrence Lyons, “Transforming the Institutions of War: Postconflict Elections and the
Reconstruction of Failed States,” in Rotberg, ed., When States Fail, pp. 269-301.
113
See Doyle and Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace; Paris, At War’s End.
 44

capacities for institution building. In contrast, we call for recognizing the potential for

indigenous recovery in Africa (and elsewhere) and question whether extensive and

intrusive external approaches might be as much part of the problem as of the solution.

Western policy-makers seem to assume that the chances of successful state

building increase with the intensity of outsiders’ inputs such as per capita assistance or

the strength and mandate of UN peacekeeping missions. 114 Taking the point to its logical

conclusion, the most intrusive forms of intervention, such as transitional administrations

and neotrusteeships, would offer the best approach to resurrect state institutions in the

wake of war. 115 Our analysis suggests otherwise. Similarly, in a comparative survey of

the effects of external intrusiveness on state building which does not include cases of

indigenous state building, Christoph Zuercher finds only slightly better but non robust

results for intrusive missions, finding both intrusive and non-intrusive missions “not very

successful at facilitating absolute progress in aspects of state-hood other than

security.” 116

The case for intrusive intervention is further thrown in doubt when considering

instances of indigenous state reconstruction in Africa. While Eritrea, Ethiopia and

Uganda all experienced devastating conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s, the international

114
See, for example, James Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building. From Germany to Iraq
(Santa Monica, Cal.: RAND, 2003). That the assumption that more state building is better state building
underpins actual policy is evident from patterns of resource allocation to particular states, at least as
concerns the top level in the hierarchy of importance. Failed states that are deemed to be important
(Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo) receive much more outside “inputs” than peripheral states.
115
Krasner, “Sharing Sovereignty”; Ellis, “How to Rebuild Africa”.
116
Christoph Zuercher, Is More Better? Evaluating External-Led State Building After 1989, Center on
Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Working Paper No. 54 (Stanford: Stanford University,
2006), p. 20, 23, emphasis added.
 45

community was not the driving force behind their post-conflict reconstruction efforts. 117

In Uganda, for example, the government of President Museveni was firmly in charge of

the reconstruction of the country in the wake of the civil war that ended in 1986. This

included the formation and particular shape of political institutions, notably the

“Movement Political System”. The government bitterly and successfully opposed

outside calls for the introduction of multiparty politics and installed instead its own

peculiar brand of one-party system. 118 Yet, the government’s seeming adoption of

market economics earned it funds from donors. Although providing substantial support,

outsiders refrained, and indeed were refrained by Uganda’s post-conflict government,

from taking the lead in the establishment of political order—a marked contrast with

current state building. 119 Outsiders were relegated to donor roles under terms formulated

by the national government or else the government has pretended to carry out reforms

which it only partially implemented, instead building fairly effective patronage networks

that have enhanced state power. 120

Jeremy Weinstein argues persuasively that effective national leadership and

outsiders’ subsidiarity tend to emerge in situations where well organized insurgencies

claim victory in wars whose outcome is not negotiated by outsiders. 121 If one subscribes,

117
See, for example, the chapters on Ethiopia and Uganda in Shantayanan Devarajan, David Dollar and
Torgny Holmgren, eds., Aid and Reform in Africa. Lessons From Ten Case Studies (Washington, D.C.,
2001) and the contributions on Uganda and Ethiopia in I. William Zartman, ed., Collapsed States: The
Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 1995).
118
Clapham, “Governmentality and Economic Policy”, p. 816f.
119
A point also advanced by Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Autonomous Recovery and International Intervention
in Comparative Perspective”. Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American
Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 2005.
120
Gilbert M. Khadiagala, “State Collapse and Reconstruction in Uganda”, in Zartman, ed., Collapsed
States, p. 47; p. 142; Torgny Holmgren et al., “Uganda” in Devarajan, Dollar and Holmgren, eds., Aid and
Reform in Africa, p. 142f..
121
Weinstein, “Autonomous Recovery and International Intervention”.
 46

as we do, to Weinstein’s view, the role of the international community in post-conflict

reconstruction might be seen as fundamentally problematic. The prevailing high level of

outsiders’ intrusiveness may produce a crowding-out effect, stifling the rise of indigenous

state builders rather than filling a hypothetical institutional vacuum.

The case of Somaliland, where the international community was not involved at

all, is even more potent as it suggests that outside support may not even be necessary for

successful state building. The dynamics in Somaliland differ significantly from Uganda.

Although it finds it origins in a liberation movement that dates back to 1981, its

government did not emerge from a successful insurgency. Instead, political and business

leaders located in the former British colony part of the country effectively seceded from

Somalia after it collapsed in 1991. After demobilizing and reinserting their combatants

on their own, they developed public structures of basic stability and order, enabling the

resumption of commercial activities. They have also organized a constitutional

succession and several credible local and national elections. 122 Perhaps the most

successful recent instance of state building in Africa, Somaliland has benefited from next

to no external support and remains diplomatically unrecognized. 123 In contrast, the state

has bargained with powerful local interests such as businessmen and clan elders. Relying

on businesses for revenue, William Reno explains, authorities “are forced to take into

account business interests in promoting economically efficient policies and in limiting

122
Ken Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, Adelphi Paper No. 364, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 17, 22.
123
A former part of Somalia, Somaliland declared its independence in 1991. On the relative success of state
building in Somaliland, see William Reno, “Somalia: State Failure and Self-Determination in the Shadow
of the Global Economy” in Valpy Fitzgerald, Frances Stewart and Rajesh Venugopal, eds., Globalization,
Self-Determination and Global Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 147-178; Martin Doornbos,
“Somalia: Alternative Scenarios for Political Reconstruction,” African Affairs, Vol. 101, No. 402 (2002),
pp. 93-107.
 47

commercial risk within Somaliland. Thus unlike southern political actors, Somaliland’s

authorities have an immediate interest in imposing uniform order and controlling

coercion.” 124

We do not suggest that externally led state building is always doomed to failure,

or that outsiders should always refrain from intervening. As Sierra Leone and Liberia

indicate, intrusion can achieve a modicum of success, although the mid- and long-term

trajectory of these two countries remains in question. However, Liberia also suggests

that a national leadership with a credible agenda for political change is a prerequisite for

success, whether this agenda is in accord with donors or not. In Sierra Leone, in contrast,

the government of President Kabbah seemed only committed to reconstruction on a

rhetorical level and did not push for any significant changes, trying instead to strike a

balance between pre-war patronage politics and a very limited dose of reforms urged by

donors. Both countries are also fairly small, a fact that has no doubt allowed donors to

engage in intrusive intervention with more immediate results than in a place like Congo.

The international community is better equipped for ending violence than for

creating effective state institutions, regardless of the scale and intensity of its

involvement. Expansive and highly intrusive state building operations are not necessarily

more successful than less intrusive ones. In both Uganda and Somaliland, relatively

strong state institutions emerged despite—or because of?—the absence of state building

operations of the kind currently deployed to the DRC and Côte d’Ivoire. The hard truth

is that outsiders are not necessarily more proficient than locals at building political

institutions, no matter how many experts and resources they may send into a failed state.

124
Reno, “Somalia: State Failure and Self-Determination”, p. 170.
 48

Thus, local context – including social relations, institutional history, specific

actors and interests –will largely determine the odds of state resurgence or continued

failure. The experiences of Uganda and Somaliland show that some measure of

institution building can occur if local interest groups are leading the process. It may take

time and outcomes may not necessarily correspond to Western normative expectations

about democracy or the rule of law. Yet, international actors should resist the temptation

always to step in and offer comprehensive fixes in failed states, for they may instead

stifle promising local initiatives. At once more modest and more important is the task of

identifying and supporting internal dynamics of reconstruction, which may not always

come from political elites. The essence of state building in Africa is thus not to construct

state structures per se, but to foster state formation, that is, interaction and bargaining

processes between government and society. Doing so would be a key element in the

promotion of local ownership and the construction of a viable political order in post-

conflict countries. In this respect, support for businesses and their associations might be

productive, as they have a vested interest in political order. Their capacity to pay taxes is

in turn crucial to building states and to rolling back aid dependency. Given the

propensity of democratic institutions to only emerge in later phases of state building,

assisting groups such as local media, conflict resolution bodies or human rights

watchdogs, would contribute to promoting state accountability. This involves a

balancing act of at once supporting local actors and leaving them enough political space

to develop their own institutional solutions for constraining state rulers. In contrast, deep

interventions, whether political or financial, undermine local attempts to hold state

officials accountable. They create distorting incentive structures whereby the

governments of failed states implement superficial policies according to external

preferences in return for more assistance, resulting in half-baked outcomes that are

neither in the interests of local society nor of the international community.