1.2 Putting the Thesis into Context
The Literature on State-Building…
Being at the bottom of the global order, ‘weak’, ‘fragile’ and ‘failing’ states have become a key concern for the international community (Torres/Anderson 2004:5; DfID 2009; World Bank 2011a).22 When this research project started in late 2007, one-tenth of the world’s states were considered to be ‘failing’ (Foreign Policy 2007; Böge et al. 2008:3), turning state-building into a central endeavor of the world community, because “weak or failed states are the source of many of the world’s most serious problems” (Fukuyama 2004:1). In a volte-face to earlier opinion which had seen the state as an obstacle to development in general and state-making more particularly in the 1980s and 1990s (Ferguson 1998:52), scholars and policymakers alike realized the need for ‘Bringing the State Back In’ (Evans et al. 1985), not least because the state played an “extensive role in strengthening and safeguarding human capabilities” (Sen 1999:5). Ever since, largely liberal interpretations of state-building, democratization, and governance have guided the international community’s handbooks on how to supposedly ‘fix’ fragile states (Ghani/Lockhart 2008).
Past conceptualizations of state-breaking can largely be classified into two groups, whereby both depart from neoclassical theory, according to which the state is an “organization which has the comparative advantage in violence” and is therefore “in the position to specify and enforce property rights” (North 1981:21). The first school of thought conceives of state failure in functional terms as the polities’ inability to provide certain services (e.g. Rotberg 2002, 2004; Zartman 1995). The second understands state failure in institutional terms as states’ incapacity to uphold their monopoly of violence (e.g. Jackson 1990; Krasner 1999; Ignatieff 2002). As both approaches take the Weberian ideal-type state as a benchmark, these approaches are not only normative and Eurocentric but perceive state fragility in terms of a ‘lack’. Such an understanding of fragile states as a “flawed imitation of a mature Western form” (Hansen/Stepputat 2001:6) lies in the tradition of modernization theory but does not contribute to improved analytical insight into how and why states fail.
I argue that one of the reasons why our knowledge regarding processes of state-making remains not only fragmented and incomplete (Cramer 2006:276), but also “undertheorized” (Chandler 2006:189) is that the strands of literature on state-breaking on the one side, and state-making on the other, have largely lost sight of each other. Explanations of state-breaking have frequently resorted to variables such as poor economic performance (World Bank 2003), environmental scarcity (Homer-Dixon 1999; Fairhead 2000), resource curse (Collier/Höffler 1998; Ross 2004), ethnic strife (Ignatieff 1998; Fearon/Laitin 2003) and greed and grievance (Berdal/Keen 1997). Yet, approaches to state-making appear generally disconnected from these debates, focusing by and large on ‘institution-building’ (Eade 1997), good governance (Kauffmann et al. 1999), taxation (Moore 2004; Bräutigam et al. 2008), security sector reform (Pouligny 2004), and elite bargains (CSRC 2005; Lindemann 2008). However, as state-breaking is an “unavoidable accompaniment of the state-making process” (Ayoob 2007:95) and because “[n]o state’s degree of fragility or failure is static” (Brinkerhoff 2007:3; Kulessa/Heinrich 2004:1), conceptualizing state trajectories as a continuum rather than in rigid dichotomies is analytically meaningful and promises to grasp the state-breaking-to-state-making continuities (CSRC 2005:1).
Consequently, the Crisis States Research Centre (CSRC) (2005) advanced the concept of ‘institutional multiplicity.’ Itself being based on a “framework that lies at the intersection between a Weberian understanding of the state and the political economy of state building” (ibid.:4), ‘institutional multiplicity’ valuably points out that a state’s degree of fragility or resilience largely hinges on the co-existence and frequently contradictory interrelationship of different sets of ‘rules of the game’ (North 1990) within a given territory. That institutional multiplicity poses a challenge to state-making is obvious in that it provides actors with the possibility to “[switch] strategically from one institutional universe to another” (CSRC 2005:8), thus defying the larger purpose of institutions, which is to “reduce uncertainty by providing a [clear] structure to everyday life” (North 1990:3). Despite this crucial insight and the conceptual value of this approach, its invariable reliance on ‘institutions’ reduces the process of state-making to state-building, thereby glossing over the equally crucial aspect of nation-building – a point to which we shall return later.
As the Weberian (1919) state concept has trouble dealing with cases where the lines between state and society, or formal and informal are blurred – a condition that applies to most cases of state-making – it fails to “anticipate new and diverse forms of state institutionalization” (Migdal/Schlichte 2005:3; Khan 2002:14). Aiming to overcome this limitation and the shortcoming that the Weberian state concept inherently supposes that the state constituted a rather homogenous entity with a monopoly on violence, Böge et al. (2008) introduce the concept of ‘hybrid political orders’ (HPOs). Whereas international state-building approaches suggest that locally derived political solutions are problematic (cf. Chandler 2007:71), the concept of HPOs counters that external efforts at state reconstruction suffer from a ‘nirvana fallacy’ (Coyne 2006:344) and those local solutions are the only viable ones. Drawing on the concept of ‘institutional multiplicity’, and sharing significant similarities with the concepts of ‘twilight’ institutions (Lund 2006) and the ‘negotiated state’ (Menkhaus 2006/07), Böge et al. (2008) suggest that a hybridity of ‘political orders’ is desirable for the advancement of developing states.
Not only does this conceptualization of state trajectories neglect the crucial component of nation-building for processes of state-making, but it also suffers from further fallacies. For one, the theoretical framework of HPOs remains inconclusive regarding the question under what conditions or what kinds of HPOs are constitutive of rather than inimical to state-making – where runs the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘too little’ and ‘too much’ hybridity? For another, in taking the monolithic view of the state as its contentious starting point, the concept aims to “overcome the notion of the state as being the superior and ultimate form of political order per se”, in order to “[free] the debate from its current state-centric bias” (Böge et al. 2009a:88). Although some questioned whether the ‘state’ constituted an appropriate analytical tool for analysis (Foucault 2000:123), a proposition particularly made for sub-Saharan Africa, the state is far from being political ‘scrap-iron’. While it might not be as ‘autonomous’ as suggested by Weber (1947) and his followers, the state remains the foremost political actor in today’s world (Howard 2002:103). Because “[s]tatemaking was essentially an internal undertaking” (Holsti 1996:44), the focus on the state is in order, as even in ‘stateless’ Somalia, “the coup of 1991 was more of an attack on a regime’s inequitable policies than a repudiation of the modern state” (Little 2003a:168).
Accordingly, I dispute the more general proposition that the state is obsolete in contemporary Africa. Ultimately, there is widespread understanding that the European experience of state- and nation-building was diffused to non-European societies through colonialism. Despite superficial symptoms of decline, I suggest that processes of state formation have not vanished from the African continent and that “[state] collapse is likely to inaugurate fresh or renewed processes of state formation” (Doornbos 2002b:798; Eisenstadt 1988). While acknowledging that different politico-economic environments “affect, in a multitude of ways, the evolution of all these patterns across the economic and political terrains” (CSRC 2005:7), and additionally increase “political and economic expectations” (Khan 2002:4; Debiel 2002:5) towards states, the project explores the assertion that even the most vulnerable political entities do not merely float in the currents of globalization, but still have ‘room for maneuver’ (Clay/Schaffer 1984; Duffield 2001).
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