The hard-bought election in Afghanistan was a reality check for the United
States and its allies, compelling them to look again at their promise of
building a modern state in that country. After overthrowing the Taliban,
Afghan exiles and their foreign backers assumed that they would put the
aberration of the past thirty years behind them and resume the natural
ascent towards democracy and development. Building a state was the key. The
rule of law and institutions would replace the disorder of the past;
reconstruction and prosperity would supplant the underground economy that
had flourished during the years of war and misrule. Eight years on, it’s not
happening. Concern over the military resurgence of the Taliban has obscured
a bigger failure: Afghanistan is not sticking to the reconstruction script.
Graciana del Castillo is not surprised. A former senior economist in the UN
Secretary General’s office and expert on crisis and post-conflict countries,
she is deeply frustrated at the failure of the UN, World Bank and the
leading governments to take the challenge of building peace with sufficient
seriousness – not just in Afghanistan but around the world. The root of the
failure is intellectual. “Unfortunately”, del Castillo writes, “contrary to
what happened following the two world wars, no serious debate among
policymakers, scholars, and practitioners has taken place since the end of
the Cold War concerning post-conflict economic reconstruction. As a result,
efforts to prepare these countries to become more competitive in a
globalized world economy have followed a misplaced ‘business as usual’
approach, as if economic development were not constrained by the
consequences of war”. Del Castillo’s fundamental point is that post-conflict
reconstruction is first and foremost a political exercise, and that post-war
economic policies should be subordinated to that goal. A successful recovery
from war entails multiple simultaneous transitions: from conflict to peace,
from authoritarianism to democracy, from bitter social division to
reconciliation, and from war economies dominated by rent-seeking to economic
growth that is driven by the productive sector. Any one of these transitions
on its own would be challenging enough for a well-run government: doing them
all while also building the mechanisms of governance at the same time is a
near-impossible challenge, which becomes unrealizable if the dimensions of
the task are not recognized to begin with. The idea that a country could
achieve all these goals in just two or three years – the typical attention
span of the international community – is wishful thinking.
Designing and implementing government policy in the wake of an internal war
requires emergency programmes which distort the structure of the economy.
Injunctions to balance the budget – optimal in peacetime – can be disastrous
when it requires a government to demobilize soldiers without being able to
offer them gainful employment. Spending on non-productive projects such as
sports stadiums or national monuments can deliver important but unmeasurable
social goods. Political ethics demand that investment be preferentially
targeted at those most affected by the war rather than the sectors that will
give the best return – typically people who have been shielded from the
destruction or who may even have profited during the conflict. Post-conflict
countries typically receive increased foreign assistance, which brings with
it problems of absorbing the aid, exchange rate management, and economic
distortions as aid agency salaries attract the best talent. There may also
be foreign peacekeepers and police, while powerful donors impose alien
standards and practices of governance, sometimes in very intrusive ways, to
the puzzlement of locals.
Del Castillo picks apart the reasons why orthodox approaches to rebuilding
postconflict countries have not succeeded, and recommends alternatives. Her
approach is both thorough and practical. One of her opening premisses is
that the transition to peace is a “development-plus challenge”. Economists,
who are the most powerful individuals in the decision-making hierarchy of
international financial institutions (IFIs), see reconstruction as
development at its simplest, whereas it is in reality a much more complex
development task requiring special skills. When the UN belatedly recognized
this, it set in motion a long process which culminated in the creation of
the Peace-Building Commission. Del Castillo, like many others, likes the
idea in principle, but not the way it has turned out.
Her second premiss is therefore that the political objective should prevail at
all times. The dangers of failed post-conflict transitions have become very
clear, with far too many countries stalling or reverting to war. Fragile
political systems are unable to carry the weight of multiple simultaneous
transitions, especially when they are forced to move too fast.
Once there is a return to conflict, all the effort and investment in
reconstruction is rendered worthless, and so it follows that keeping the
politics on track must trump all else. Related to this is del Castillo’s
third premiss: namely that lack of leadership legitimacy limits policymaking
choices. There is, however, no short cut to legitimacy. Elections are
universally recognized as the sine qua non for a legitimate government, but
elections can also push economic reconstruction off course by diverting
political energies into campaigning, or resources into programmes that will
generate short-term popular support. Del Castillo makes clear that we should
be modest in our expectations of the speed and vigour with which national
political leaders can enact change.
Economists can measure growth, and increasingly, development assistance
agencies are measuring good governance. We have a fair appreciation of what
it means to be at peace, but we have no good indices for reconciliation and
social healing. Del Castillo argues that multilateral institutions need to
develop a better yardstick for measuring success in these areas. Indicators
such as economic growth will mislead, not only because the most important
investments in a post-conflict period may not have an appreciable impact on
GDP, but also because rapid post-conflict growth rates may reflect only the
bounce back after a crisis, and not a sustainable growth pattern. From this
follows her final premiss: development institutions should not lead
reconstruction, as their mandates and working methods are ill-suited to the
demands of such politically complex environments. She is against any forms
of aid conditionality in these circumstances: economic institutions don’t
have the expertise to judge and monitor political conditions after peace
agreements, and simple and sustained economic programmes are essential to
any successful transition to peace, implying that any interruption following
from a government’s failure to meet policy conditionalities is likely to
have disproportionately negative impacts.
This is not only sound, but an expression of common sense. Like many of the
best ideas, it is obvious once stated in this manner and prompts the
question of why the bright minds in the World Bank and the UN Development
Programme did not think of it before. But while it is surely correct to put
the politics first, this leaves unanswered the question of what to do when
the politics remain in thrall to the kind of criminalized or rent-seeking
economies that typically flourish during a protracted war. Del Castillo
writes In Afghanistan, most political figures saw the state as a
redistributive instrument, funded by foreign donors, to build power through
patronage networks. Only a few members of the government shared the vision
of the NDF \[National Development Framework\] for a small effective state,
regulating a market economy, with the private sector as the driving force
for development. Similarly, the government’s updated plan for economic
reconstruction, entitled Securing Afghanistan’s Future (SAF), lacked
broad-based support (and like the NDF, was not translated into Dari).
Thus although the strategy designed by the economic authorities, supported by
the international financial institutions, may have been appropriate for a
different country in a different context, it did not build upon the history
and culture of Afghanistan. Nor did it reflect the many political and
security constraints that any economic reconstruction plan had to address in
order to be effective.
Without doubt, if the international donors and financial bodies had followed
del Castillo’s advice, they would have done a better job. But would the
reordering of priorities, attention to history, culture and security, and
translation into national languages, have been sufficient? The conception of
a state she describes, dedicated to extracting resources from the external
world and using them to dominate the interior through dispensing patronage,
is no mere aberration. In one form or another it is the norm in many parts
of the world. Historically, feudal states, trading and territorial empires
have bought loyalty using material and symbolic reward, using force to
regulate the price of loyalty in a political marketplace. As a form of
government it is no less sustainable than the institutionalized Weberian
state we consider the modern norm, and it is well suited to those
borderlands of the global system where local resources are too scarce to
sustain a state based on a domestic tax base. Del Castillo’s point is more
damning than she may realize.
In her other three case studies – El Salvador, Kosovo and Iraq – the prospects
of success for her framework are undoubtedly much greater. The key
distinction does not (pace Samuel Huntington) rest on kinds of government
but on degrees of governance, specifically whether states are strong enough
to manage domestic conflicts without the government itself becoming no more
than one party to internal dispute. In many African countries, where the
state is weak and rent-seeking dominates the economy, the elites share their
Afghan counterparts’ view of government as an exercise in translating
sovereign rent into domestic patronage.
Jean-François Bayart’s now-classic The State in Africa: The politics of the
belly was first published twenty years ago. It attempted a revolution in
Africanist political science by arguing that contemporary African states had
inherited their most important characteristics from their precolonial
forebears, and should not be seen as anything other than decayed versions of
European transplant. Bayart cast aside all normative concern with
development, democracy, or human rights, and sought to see the African state
as it actually performed. One of the key features of the African state,
precolonial and modern, he suggested, involves “extraversion” – the skill in
exploiting an (unequal) relationship to external powers in order to dominate
domestic politics. Another is the “reciprocal assimilation of elites” – the
fusion of traditional and educated elites into a single class, highly
factionalized, competing for the state’s patronage.
Arguing that lineage or ethnic politics and state organization are in fact
compatible, and two elements of the same mechanism for government, Bayart
preferred to see the African state as a “rhizome” that sends up multiple
parallel shoots from the same root, rather than a “tree” in which the
branches of government grow from a single trunk.
For the analyst who is also a foreign sponsor of democracy and development,
Bayart’s “grammar of extraversion” is particularly pertinent: it is an
account of the means whereby African rulers and subjects manage their
relations with the outside work. An integral part of this is trickery:
learning the moral language of the foreign power so as to satisfy the
latter’s demands, while using the resources thereby gleaned and sovereign
space thereby earned to pursue “the politics of the belly”: the everyday
neighbourhood politics of reward written on a national political canvass.
The publication date of the first edition of The State in Africa (1989;
English translation, 1993) might seem singularly inopportune: at that very
moment, African states embarked upon a vast experiment in electoral
democracy and “good governance”. Would Bayart’s fatalistic thesis not be
proven wrong by subsequent events? The new edition of his book contains an
extended preface (superbly translated by Mary Harper) which is both a long
“I told you so” to Bayart’s critics, and an examination of why everything
that subsequently happened is ample vindication of his hypothesis.
Democracy, he thinks, merely reconfigured the existing political vernacular.
He develops his arguments with studious and refreshing indifference to
political correctness: “One might summarize by saying that democracy, or
more precisely the discourse of democracy, is no more than yet another
source of economic rents, comparable to earlier discourses such as the
denunciation of communism or of imperialism in the time of the Cold War, but
better adapted to the spirit of the age. It is, as it were, a form of pidgin
language that various native princes use in their communication with Western
sovereigns and financiers”.
Bayartian critique of del Castillo’s framework transferred to Congo or Côte
d’Ivoire would see reconstruction aid as no more than another external asset
to be converted into the political currency of patronage. As automatic
weapons weaken the customary rules that regulate patrimony, politics comes
to resemble a marketplace in which provincial elites auction their
allegiance to the highest bidder, while the national ruler turns to the
international political marketplace to bargain for the maximum resources he
can use to pay for domestic loyalties. It is a pessimistic view, but one
that remains to be disproven by events.
Bayart has many insights relevant to post-conflict reconstruction. Among them
is the observation that power-holders in states dependent on conditional
external aid, find that armed conflict and the associated state of emergency
is a valuable opportunity for recovering a space to exercise political
sovereignty. In other words, keeping conflict going can be useful because of
the opportunities it provides for exercising patronage in an unconstrained,
and more effective, manner.
Del Castillo and Bayart unexpectedly converge in their critiques of
multilateral institutions. Del Castillo observes that it took surprisingly
long for Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General, to recommend changes
to international peacekeeping, leading ultimately to the establishment of
the UN’s Peace-Building Commission. She endorses the idea in principle, but
is sceptical about whether it will work. “The issue now is whether his
recommendation would strengthen the capacity of the organization, or be just
another layer of bureaucracy, duplication, expense, and delays in the
support the UN should provide to countries coming out of war.” Evaluating
the repeated efforts at UN reform in this field, such as the carving out of
the UN Department of Field Support from the Department of Peace-Keeping
Operations, she argues that if such an initiative functions within existing
resources and expertise, it cannot make a difference. “The UN’s leadership
does not seem to understand that, in the absence of new expertise and talent
to address the pressing issues that the UN is facing, the same problems will
reappear, regardless of where the existing human resources are located.” Del
Castillo understands well enough the record of multilateral institutions in
being less than confident that they can rise above their own shackled
governance. Rather like African rulers faced with the imposed reform, UN
institutions have a tremendous capacity to absorb critique and make just
sufficient adjustments to keep the funds flowing.
From his sharply different theoretical perspective, Bayart describes how the
same institutions have become enmeshed with African governance. His argument
is correct, but underplays how African countries – Senegal is the finest
example – have strategically placed their candidates within international
agencies with the precise intent of influencing the external flows of
recognition and resources at source. Reciprocal assimilation into
multilateral agencies provides opportunities for African elites to manage
their dependence in ways that were not possible in earlier eras. As a
consequence, governance of patrimonial states has been internationalized in
a hybrid fashion. Long-term dependence on international finance, technical
assistance and peacekeeping is becoming functional for ruling elites.
As a result, some international state-building missions have no prospects of
completing their task, and some peacekeeping operations have no exit
strategy. We saw this dramatically in the Democratic Republic of Congo
where, with misplaced self-confidence, the UN Mission in Congo (MONUC) was
mandated to begin its withdrawal the day after the elections in 2006. To
apply Castillo’s analysis, the elections were a “graduation ceremony” which
distracted attention from the more serious underlying and pending issues –
which remained unresolved. Bayart would have been unsurprised by what
happened next: the losing candidate in the winner-takes-all contest staked
his claim to a share in power by a show of force, and Congolese politics
settled into a phase of violent disruption in which MONUC demanded more
troops, not fewer. We can expect something similar in Sudan, where the UN
mission’s mandate purportedly expires with the vote on selfdetermination for
southern Sudan in 2011, or in Afghanistan, should NATO set a withdrawal date
based on reaching some arbitrary state-building milestone.
In short, the likely result of today’s international state-building efforts,
at least in countries run as a marketplace of loyalties, is an unending
process of “reconstruction” and reform, in which the rewards of the status
quo support a patrimonial system marked by unceasing factionalism and (at
best) managed disorder. Del Castillo provides a thoroughly sensible policy
framework for countries in which a state-based order is in prospect,
provoking an overdue debate. But an additional leap of analysis –
surmounting another intellectual challenge – is needed to grapple with the
toughest cases such as Congo and Afghanistan. International agencies will be
there a long time.
Graciana del Castillo
REBUILDING WAR-TORN STATES
The challenge of post-conflict economic reconstruction
436pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $49.95).
978 0 19 923773 9
Jean-François Bayart
THE STATE IN AFRICA
The politics of the belly
370pp. Polity. Paperback, £19.99.
978 0 7456 4437 0
Alex de Waal is the author (with Julie Flint) of Darfur: A new history
of a long war, 2008. He is a program director at the Social Science Research
Council in New York City and a fellow of Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
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