Attached please find an excellent and challenging paper by Alex. Below
are a few choice quotes which struck me, but you should read the whole
paper.

John

BEGIN

Alex de Waal

Protecting Civilians in Fragile States (attached)

Presentation to Oxfam-Novib, The Hague, 21 September 2009

Our starting point is that these countries [fragile states] ought to
resemble European model states, if not in economic development, at
least in the way that political competition is organized under the
authority of an autonomous, secular and civil state, and legitimacy
derives from an effort to represent all the people of the state.

I would like to argue that this approach is an error. Our starting
point ought to be to look at how these countries are actually
organized politically, and work from there. In failing to do so we are
making ourselves ineffective; condemning ourselves to endless
engagement with limited impact, and missing opportunities for making
things work better. This is not true everywhere, but holds in enough
places.

Scholars and policymakers concur that “states cannot be made to work
from the outside.” This is correct, but the corollary is rarely made
explicit: we also cannot try to make them work “from the inside” with
an outside template....

if we are going to take seriously the World Bank and UN approaches to
resolving problems in these countries, we are going to be there
indefinitely and, despite our efforts, we will have a very limited
impact on the problem....

Let’s define a fragile state as one in which the state institutions
are not sufficiently strong or autonomous to manage political
conflicts within society, and are unlikely to be so for the
foreseeable future. There’s a strong argument to be made that in fact
world historic conditions are unpropitious for the development of
states at the moment, so that it is unlikely that state building
efforts in countries like Congo and Afghanistan will succeed in the
foreseeable future.

Looking at the grand sweep of history this is not exceptional. In many
ways it is the modern Weberian state that is the exception. In most
places at most times, political conflicts have been managed by means
other than autonomous state authority. Instead, rulers have tried to
manage political conflicts within their domains by a combination of
three different techniques:

   1. Force;
   2. Custom (under which I include kinship affinity, sometimes called
tribalism, and religious authority);
   3. Patronage, chiefly money....

I contend that many countries are becoming more like political
marketplaces over time, not less. This does not mean that institutions
are absent—just that the institutions in question are hybrids of
custom and markets, rather than the law-bound autonomous states to
which we aspire.

This could be a depressing conclusion, suggesting that ethnic
organization, corruption, patrimony, buying elections, etc., are all
intrinsic to the ways these countries function and cannot easily be
stamped out. Alternatively, if we gain a better understanding of how
these countries actually function—what they are rather than what they
are not—we may be better able to achieve specific goals....

The Sudanese political game is an especially well-developed version,
but similar things happen elsewhere....

If we were focused on political outcomes, we could use our money much
more efficiently, by playing the system....

There’s an interesting twist to this that emerges in transitions from
conflict to post-conflict. The basic planning assumption is, that the
end of a conflict represents a reversion to normality, the end of an
aberrant period, and that there will be a transition—hopefully brief
and successful—before normal development and statehood can resume.
This overlooks the ways in which the end of conflict is a
politically-defined moment, which may be less meaningful for the
people involved. Violence may not decline but rather change in nature.
We may see less organized combat and more violence associated with
disarmament and demobilization programmes, both through the coercive
disarmament of those who don’t support the peace agreement, and the
switch to criminality of soldiers who have been demobilized but who
don’t have satisfactory alternative livelihoods. There’s an important
gender dimension to this also, as the reconfiguration of domestic
arrangements, marital partnerships etc., can be stressful and lead to
domestic violence. Unresolved trauma among ex-combatants may also lead
to violence against partners and children....

The notions of “war” and “peace” need to be revisited in the context
of a country that functions in this way...

My starting point is that we should listen more carefully to the
people in these countries, who have a more profound analysis and
understanding of their predicament than any outsiders. Much of the
resources currently spent on foreign technical expertise could be
profitably redirected to exercises in consultation with local people,
noting that the most important external skill required is facilitating
local discussion and sensitively translating local concepts into forms
that can be deployed by international institutions....

there is a perfectly serviceably vernacular definition of democracy in
Africa, which serves well enough in other fragile states. This is
democracy as fair shares, or, in the language of the “politics of the
belly”, everyone being seated at the dining table. It is an important
variation on democracy as the rule of the majority through a
legislature. Ironically, many transitional governments, chosen on the
basis of inclusiveness rather than elections, prove to be more
representative and in some ways more legitimate, than those chosen by
elections in which the winner takes all. These governments may require
former enemies to work together, but that surely is one of their
strengths....

END
______________________
John Ashworth
Regional Representative
IKV Pax Christi Horn of Africa Programme

ashworth.j...@gmail.com

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