1.5 The political settlement and Exclusion
Despite Somaliland’s success at resolving civil war through bottom-up peace processes, subsequent developments saw power consolidated through greater centralization and increasing political and economic exclusion. What began as an unusually insular political process became significantly more outward-looking when, after the consolidation of peace, elites became fixated on international recognition.
In the period after the Hargeisa Conference (which concluded in early 1997), President Egal and his administration increasingly drew on the already popular idea that Somaliland both deserved and required international sovereign recognition and in so doing reinforced the salience of that narrative. While helping to consolidate a broader sense of a Somaliland national identity, the desire for recognition also required a more outward political focus than had existed while Somaliland’s civil wars were being fought and the peace-settlements negotiated.
As President Egal succeeded in consolidating greater power at the political center of the fledgling ‘state’ he consciously adopted the notions and language of good governance that resonate with Western donors – such as decentralization, regular elections, universal suffrage, and the transition to a multi-party system – as further justification for international recognition.
The ‘Good-Governance’ agenda, within which the government of Somaliland now so consciously frames its objectives (the Republic of Somaliland, Ministry of National Planning and Development, 2011), is in part a reflection of donor expectations. However, it was also implemented in response to local political objectives, particularly Egal’s desire to marginalize his political competitors within the House of Elders (Guurti) – the actors most responsible for negotiating Somaliland’s peace settlements in the 1990s. The shift from a predominantly internal to a more external political focus thus coincided with that towards greater exclusion, patrimonialism based on clan networks, and the further entrenchment of elite economic monopolies.
1.6 State Formation and agency
Human agency, beliefs, trust-networks, and a diverse range of interests, forms of power and incentives, all drive politics. They work their way through institutional arrangements to bring about different forms of politics, governance, and policy. This may seem obvious but it tends to be overlooked by providers of international development assistance in favor of more measurable structural reforms such as the establishment of anti-corruption agencies, legal reforms, peaceful elections, or improved health and education statistics. But which comes first?
Most state-building assistance is founded on an implicit assumption that institutions bear behavioral properties, and sometimes they do. If this assumption is taken at face value, however, it follows that modifying institutions necessarily alters the incentives (and thus the behavior) of those operating within them and that, if done right, institutional reform will create predictable change and liberal political outcomes. However, the process of transforming incentives tells us nothing about how actors respond to such transformations because they are invariably mediated by processes of individual and collective interpretation, and by structural constraints.
Orthodox development assistance attributes tremendous power to the notion of institutional reform but fails to account for the complex structural and agential dynamics that will ultimately determine the success of such reforms. Furthermore, it is coupled with another implicit assumption: that those providing the assistance are – unlike those whose behavior they are trying to reform – free from self-interest.
Somaliland’s unusual structural context – which renders it ineligible for direct financial assistance – offers a helpful means of exploring some of the DLP’s core concerns, in particular: the role of agency, critical junctures, external actors, and political settlements between local elites in shaping locally appropriate institutions. This paper will attempt to tease out the implications of these concerns for development/state-building assistance that works with the fluidity, contingency, perceptions, and trust networks that are essential to politics – the processes by which ‘who gets what, when, how’ is determined (Laswell, 1936) – anywhere.
Sue Unsworth argues that economic and human development indicators improve when the rules that guide political behavior generate incentives for resources to be used productively (Unsworth, 2009: 890). Robert Bates expands this to suggest that such rules emerge when ruling elites have incentives to use their coercive capacity to protect the conditions in which economic activity can grow (Bates, 2009: 5). This paper takes these as starting points for its investigation but seeks also to understand the factors that facilitate the emergence of such incentives to cooperate.
The work of Max Weber remains influential in framing contemporary conceptions of effective and legitimate statehood. In the ideal-Weberian model, statehood is defined as a unified entity that exercises a monopoly over the legitimate use of force, and that has control over a given territory and population (Weber, 1919/1946). The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933) gives the only definition of a state in international law, stipulating that statehood requires only: a permanent population; a specified territory; a government that is both capable of controlling that territory and that maintains the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
Other than the recognition factors, these are very structural conceptions of the state, with little to say about the role of the players who negotiate the ‘rules of the game’ within the state, or the mechanisms, balances of power, ideas, and beliefs that sustain the political community. The role of agency tends to be overlooked by mainstream political science and development literature, which reflects instead a tendency to work backwards from the Weberian ideal model to understand state effectiveness, weakness, or failure (Zartman, 2005; Chesterman, Ignatieff, and Thakur, 2004; Ghani and Lockhart. 2008; Rotberg, 2004; World Bank 2007; Fukuyama, 2004; Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, 1985).
The international response to state weakness/failure is also overwhelmingly structural and is characterized by efforts to strengthen the institutional capacity of the state to provide the services that effective states should provide. For example, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States and Situations (2007: 2) advises the international community to: ‘Focus on state-building as the central objective: States are fragile when state structures lack political will and/or capacity to provide the basic functions needed for poverty reduction, development and to safeguard the security and human rights of their populations’ [emphasis added].
This advice – which provides the foundation for state-building programs in ‘fragile’ and post-conflict states – frames the provision of security and inclusive development in quite technical terms. It suggests that unwillingness to provide security and inclusive development can be overcome by building the administrative capacity of state institutions. Such reference to ‘unwillingness’ however begs the question of who or what precisely is being unwilling? Should this be seen as the ‘Government’? The Head of State? The elite? Or is unwillingness a product of more complex constraints, such as a collective action problem between diverse interest groups and the interplay between constraining variables?
This emphasis on the structure has been used by some to argue for greater international intervention in the politics – but really the structures – of developing states as a means of achieving greater stability. For example, the development economist Paul Collier argues a case for a highly interventionist approach to development by suggesting that ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ states have: ‘structural characteristics which gravely impede… the provision of public goods’, and particularly ‘security’ and ‘accountability’. He understands state failure to be a function of a state’s structural inability to provide these key public goods: ‘Where [security and accountability] could not be provided, states failed’.
The key to turning the situation around he argues, therefore: ‘lie[s] partly in a phase of the international provision of the key public goods, partly in enhanced regional pooling of sovereignty, and partly in institutional innovation to make the domestic provision of public goods less demanding of the state’ (Collier, 2009: 220). Collier draws a distinction between the levels of influence exercised by the international community vis-à-vis governments in post-conflict states – ‘where the international community often intervenes and thereby has some power’ (Collier, 2009: 221) – and other ‘failing’ states, where there has been no direct intervention.
His argument assumes, however, that the states in question would nevertheless be governed by leaders that are either powerless to impede the ‘international provision of key public goods’ (which are also assumed to be both locally appropriate and benevolent), or by leaders that are already inclined to provide these goods – even if only to fulfill their own interest in self-preservation.
Collier’s argument is therefore problematic in two important ways. First, it lacks explanatory power in situations where a state’s power brokers have no desire to deliver better services. This is particularly relevant where brokers perceive that the provision of certain public goods such as inclusive security and accountability would weaken their influence – something that is so often the case in states described as ‘failed’ or ‘failing’.
Second, Collier does little to justify the assertion that altering structural conditions necessarily alters behavior in any predictable manner. As David Hudson and Adrian Leftwich argue, were this possible ‘individuals [would] consistently and predictably respond to external changes in their environment, similar to the way reeds move together with changes in the direction of the wind. This view strips away individuality and entrepreneurial creativity’ (Hudson and Leftwich, 2013; 122).
An alternative, though less influential, way of understanding state failure is to view states as largely the outcomes of more agential processes. Bates, Grief and Singh (2002: 600) argue that the state ‘holds no monopoly of violence; rather, people retain control over the means of coercion’ [emphasis added]. For them, state failure is not about the demise of state structures so much as it is about people’s ability to choose to punish leaders who choose to act in a predatory or collusive manner. They argue that it goes both ways: leaders can choose to act in the best interests of their citizens or they can choose to use their coercive power to prey on their citizens, stealing their wealth and undermining their capacity to challenge them. Likewise, private citizens can choose to arm themselves against the state or other groups of citizens or choose to live peacefully.
Robert Bates later argues (2009: 3-29) that states do not fail because they are unable (or unwilling) to provide essential services but that they fail because there is a breakdown in (or absence of) the incentives for key power brokers to cooperate instead of punishing one another. Bates essentially suggests that state effectiveness and state failure are symptoms of agential dynamics located deeper within the body politic than those that simply form its more visible structural shell.
If we conceive of effective states as those possessing leaderships that have the ability and incentives to forge institutions that balance the different interests and aspirations of domestic constituencies, policy prescriptions might look quite different to the raft of institutional capacity-building projects that currently predominate. Bates does not, however, unpack what constitutes an incentive and it is important to note that those agents do not necessarily respond to them rationally or predictably. Jealousy, incomplete knowledge, incorrect information, or a lack of capacity to enact a rational desire, can all impede an actor responding predictably to incentives.
1.7 Methodology
This is a primarily qualitative study based on data gained during interviews with Somaliland’s political and business elite about negotiations to establish the ‘rules of the game’. Participants included people from the House of Representatives; Guurti (upper house of appointed clan elders); the Ministry of Finance; the Ministry of Planning; the Somali National Movement (SNM); political parties; clan elites; telecommunications companies; the business community; academics; diplomats; journalists; civil society groups; international/non-governmental organizations (I/NGOs); UN agencies; and security services.
The research used a flexible grounded methodology approach that drew primarily on in-country observation and interviews that were arranged through a series of referrals from willing participants to others within political circles and the business community. While criticism can be made of the ‘chain-referral’ method due to the potential for sample bias, this was mitigated in two ways. First, I was able to talk to a reasonable selection (n=57) of relevant actors and observers. Second, opportunities for more informal interviews with sources throughout Somaliland and Westgate Mall siege in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2013. In recent weeks, they have carried out a spate of attacks in Kenya enriched and bolstered the validity of findings through the triangulation of interview data.
The interview-based material was further supplemented by a quantitative component that captured key biographical details (such as the educational, geographical, and traditional backgrounds) of the country’s 150 or so most influential political and economic actors – although it remains important to recognize the element of subjectiveness inherent to the creation of any such list.
This provided an empirical basis for understanding the pre-existing networks of trust that invariably influence the setting within which political negotiations occur. In the interests of participant confidentiality, most interviews are cited without specific reference to the interviewee’s name although care was given to provide sufficient information about their position and level of access to information.
About Sarah Phillips
Sarah Phillips is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney’s Department of Government and International Relations. She has a particular focus on the politics of state-building. She spent several years living and working in Yemen and has advised numerous Western governments and aid agencies on matters relating to Yemen and the Middle East. Her most recent book, ‘Yemen and the Politics of Permanent Crisis’ analyses the nature of the country’s informal institutions amid rapid political and social change.
Her broad research interests include the securitization of development, the politics of contemporary state-building, the management of violence beyond the state, and informal institutions. The primary geographic scope of her work in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, with a specific focus on Yemen and Somalia/Somaliland.
