TOPIC FOR READING FROM AFRO GROUP 26 January 2015 Armed Groups in Africa and their Impact on Regional and International Security BY Alex de Waal Executive Director, the World Peace Foundation In this paper, I seek to provide an explanation for the proliferation of armed groups in contemporary Africa and the greater Middle East, and to explain also why the nature of armed conflict has shifted into a hybrid of political and criminal violence on the margins of states. The analysis applies principally to the Saharan and Sahelean regions, the Nile Valley and the Horn of Africa, and is also relevant to Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. This group of countries is often called the “arc of instability” by western security theorists, who identify a mixture of political Islam and failing states as the basis for the insecurity that prevails. I would prefer to argue that the origin of the instability in these countries lies in the manner in which they are integrated, politically and economically, into a global order. The account I will give is a story in three chapters: the “old order” of the early independence period, the financial collapse of many of these countries in the 1980s, and then the subsequent recovery. This recovery, I submit, did not lead to a reconstruction of states along the lines previously existing, and still less did it lead to the emergence of “modern” or “capable” states, but rather it resulted in patronage-based political systems, integrated into the world order through rental incomes. In the “old style” states prevailing half a century ago, there were four forms of resource flow available to a government. The first was taxation. This emerged historically as a form of exchange between a ruler, who controls the means of violence, and an agrarian or artisanal population. The ruler makes a deal with the population to levy taxes in return for providing security. A traditional variant form is tribute: a provincial elite of local lords provides gifts to the ruler in the form of tribute while the ruler provides authority and legitimacy, and also enforces his rule. The second form of income was rent from petroleum or other minerals, which was until the 1970s, relatively modest. The third was aid, which was also modest. Lastly, governments obtained a security rent from former colonial powers and Cold War patrons, who gave military and financial assistance to their clients. These systems were quite cheap to run. Primary commodity production (agriculture) was profitable, the security apparatus was cheap because the population was not armed, the currencies of politics were controlled (everything was contained within national borders), and most of the leaders enjoyed political legitimacy on account of their role in securing national independence. As a consequence, the political budget (that part of the revenue accruing to the state that needed to be used for buying clients and building the enforcement capacity of the ruler) could be kept low, and national resources could be devoted to public good: institutions, development, and culture. In the next stage of our story, a crisis enveloped Africa starting in the late 1970s and continuing for a decade. This had four elements. First was a decline in that elusive element of political systems: legitimacy. Post-colonial rulers had promised much but were delivering little. The second was a financial squeeze. There was a succession of massive financial shocks: the debt crisis, oil price hikes, and austerity packages. The international response to the crisis of the African state was built on two errors. First, the “Washington Consensus” assumed that the African state could be cut down to size, and this would change it from being a predatory state that consumed resources and distorted economic incentives, into one that would promote a market economy and stimulate growth. To some extent, the imposed reforms worked: notably in the agricultural sector. However, the principal problem was the nature of the state, not its size. The smaller state remained predatory. In fact it often became more so, as privatization of state-owned assets entailed transfer to the private ownership of the ruler and oligarchs. The second error was that removing distortions in economic incentives would make African primary commodity production profitable. It certainly made it less unprofitable and increased national food production, but the rebound was modest: essentially, Africa cannot compete with Europe and the United States in producing cereals, and cannot compete with Asia in manufacturing. The third element was militarization. Partly this was an external factor, as the legacy of the Cold war meant that Africa and the greater Middle East were awash with weaponry. Partly it was internal: When the ruler cannot extract enough resources from taxation to sustain the protective/coercive apparatus that apparatus turns instead to primary accumulation or asset transfer. The results we have seen include the direct involvement of the military in civilian commerce and industry, and the creation of militia, party youth wings, vigilante groups and other forms of armed society. The consequences of this militarization include a further emasculation of the productive base, and the decentralization of the organization of violence. The state lost its monopoly on violence, and those provincial elites that used to pay tribute, now had the means to refuse to pay, and the means to run their own localized protection rackets, collecting taxes, or robbing their neighbors. And fourthly, in Africa the Cold War began to wind down in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took over the leadership of the Soviet Union and made it clear that he would no longer prop up client regimes in the Third World. The U.S. similarly lost interest in backing anti-Communists just because they were anti-Communist. Just as societal militarization was intensifying, the means of centrally controlling military apparatuses began to disappear. By the mid-1980s, many African states no longer possessed the financial basics of governance at all. Regimes survived by asset transfer, also known as looting. In the mid-1990s, the African economy began to recover, partly through the domestic growth of the service sector and the minerals sector, and partly because new aid orthodoxy focused on increasing aid and channeling it through governments. There was a rebound: but the political system that rebounded was very different. It was low in political capital: whatever legitimacy that had existed by the time of the great crash was further eroded. And with low levels of legitimacy, rulers used cash to rent the loyalties of those intermediate elites whom they could neither command nor coerce. The system of patronage was becoming run almost exclusively on financial reward. We can now return to the sources of state income mentioned above. First is taxation or tribute: “protection rent.” The basic transaction is an exchange of agrarian resources for security. During crisis of the 1980s, taxation had dwindled, if not been abandoned entirely. Protection rent-collection was now localized: control over the means of violence had been delegated to provincial elites. Local elites could raise their own taxes and central tax revenues remained small. More importantly: these provincial elites could now extort money from their rulers. By this stage in Africa’s history, mineral rent had become a big factor. As well as the traditional oil-exporting countries (Algeria, Libya, Nigeria, Angola), there were a host of countries becoming oil producers, and many others also became major producers of gold, diamonds, Colton and uranium. Aid rents increased an important factor for a lot of countries but increasingly tied down with conditionality’s. Aid became a poor means of increasing the ruler’s political budget, though often crucial at a local level. Security rents, having dwindled in the 1990s, rebounded after 2001. A fine example of this is Yemen, where the government of Ali Abdalla Sahel ably used military and intelligence assistance from the U.S., ostensibly to fight al Qaida, as a means of acquiring sufficient resources to manage a volatile political system. In Uganda, Yoweri Museveni had been able to use an inflated defense budget, justified by the war against the Lord’s Resistance Army, to acquire funds that need not be accounted for. Two additional forms of rental income to governments also became more important. The first is sovereign rent: simply possessing state power is an asset in the international order. This is what makes some small countries useful, for example Djibouti and the Central African Republic. This is a new feature: in the past governments weren’t ready to rent out their countries for cash, now some of them do so. The second is criminal rent: governments found themselves able to profit from illicit trafficking. Mali and Guinea Bissau are examples. We need to understand armed groups as products of this new system: they emerge from this history. Each one has its own particularities but they have this common historical origin. We can see this entire system as a “political marketplace.” It is marked by the following features. First, the major resources are rents derived from external sources: minerals, aid, security rents, criminal rents. Second, control over violence is dispersed among provincial elites: we can call them militia leaders, tribal leaders, administrators, rebels, military entrepreneurs or any other label. These run local protection rackets but their major source of income is extortion rackets against the state. Terms like “rebel” or “warlord” may not capture their logic. A rebel is commonly a local leader trying to get a payoff from national intelligence and the ruling party, while a militia leader is a leader who has succeeded in getting that payoff. Third, the provincial elite have gained some important advantages consequent on globalization. The communications revolution mean that a local commander has much better information and can bargain much more quickly. Regionalization means that he can bargain with multiple patrons. Dollarization means that he can demand convertible currency. Access to portable artisanal minerals such as gold, diamonds, or Colton can mean that he can have direct access to international markets and funds. And small arms and rapid movement mean that he can respond much more quickly than the state. In this context, one of the best means of bargaining over political power is using violence. This is not necessarily large scale war, but just enough of a rebellion to cause a problem for the state. The violence is asymmetric: the provincial leader wants to make the state hurt and make his presence felt: the ruler wants to cut the provincial leader down to size. We should note that when violence is the means of political bargaining, the chance of civic change, a non-violent change to pursue political ideals, has gone. We should also note that as the interstate order gets reconfigured along these lines: some states become patrons, others clients. This in turn means that when a dominant state changes or implodes, the regional order shifts. This is what we have seen in the Saharan countries following the collapse of the old order in Libya. The departure of Colonel Muamar Gaddafi and the collapse of his patronage and criminal networks created a power vacuum, which formed subordinate players rushed to fill, creating armed conflict in Mali. In conclusion, I argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a widespread phenomenon of armed political bargaining in countries that are poor and dependent on rents derived from minerals, security cooperation with the U.S. and Europe, and crime. The proliferation of armed groups is an outcome of the political and economic logic of armed political bargaining. And the problem of armed groups will be overcome only when these wider global issues are addressed.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 09:08:48 +0000
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