Linking elites, political orders and patterns of violence

The political marketplace framework attempts to provide a model of political governance dominated by militarised inter-elite bargaining to explain trajectories of conflict and state-building. It is concerned with a variegated class of politic elites motivated by self-enrichment, in which access to domestic and transnational rents increases the political budget, the price of loyalty, and regime dependence from intermediate elites. Whilst intended to tame and regulate conflict, the patronage-based network exposed in De Waal’s argument results in the emergence of a violence-ridden state hostile to development.

De Waal’s model, however, is dominated by a transactional logic of political bargaining that has not found universal application, even in states supposedly described as emblems of a militarised political marketplace like South Sudan (Watson 2016: 189). In its essence, the political marketplace argument is a revisited version of the ‘greed-not-grievance’

approach popularised by Collier (2000), which explains violence as a mere consequence of elite predation. Militarised political marketplaces are therefore the outcome of a corrupted form of state-building: this resonates with similar arguments that identify a sequential pattern in the development of political orders, which are set to improve their developmental credentials as they transition from limited to open access orders (North et al. 2013).

Despite these limitations, and a largely hazy vocabulary, the ‘political marketplaces’,

‘political orders’², ‘political environments’³, ‘political (un-)settlement’⁴ literatures

2 According to North et al. (2013), developing societies manage violence through the manipulation of economic interests by the political system and the creation of rents which discourage influential groups and individuals – the ‘elites’ – from using violence. These mechanisms define ‘limited access orders’, social arrangements that, in societies where violence is latent and a viable option for political groups, disincentivise the use of violence by elites. Paul Staniland formulates an alternative definition of political orders in civil war contexts, which “refers to the structure and distribution of authority between armed organizations: who rules, where, and through what understandings” (Staniland 2012: 247).

3 Political environments describe the state and dynamics of political power as it is expressed and experienced over locations across a country. In states under stress, environments are shaped by relationships between national and subnational elites. See Raleigh and Dowd (2018).

4 Political settlements are characterised by a balance of power underpinning political institutions, which is successful in managing violence and delivering some economic and political development (Khan 2010;

Rocha Menocal 2017). Akin to De Waal’s political marketplace, political unsettlement is characterised by

constitute a valid attempt to move beyond hierarchical and state-centred accounts of power and statehood, and ‘good governance’ agendas popular in policy circles (Pospisil and Rocha Menocal 2017; Polese and Santini 2018). These approaches refute both the binary distinction between formal and informal institutions suggested by the institutional and state-building literature, and the ‘hybrid order’ tradition that situates elites within an elusive, all-encompassing concept of informality (Phillips 2019). They are instead concerned with unpacking the ‘rules of the game’ that govern political orders to understand the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, the balkanisation of power and governance, and the subnational patterns of violence.

Existing scholarship has argued that political orders predicated on elite exclusion are more prone to civil war onset and often associated with widely shared authoritarian practices (Cederman, Gleditsch and Buhaug 2013). Contemporary regimes display high rates of inclusion, and tend to include most socio-political groups in the highest ranks of office (Raleigh, Wigmore-Shepherd and Maggio 2018). At the heart of these arguments is the idea that inclusive political settlements are key to preventing the onset of conflict and promoting long-term socio-political development (Acemoglu et al. 2012; Lindemann 2008; North et al. 2013). As a result, the recurrence of violence in seemingly inclusive political orders presents an apparent paradox.

The problem lies in the way that inclusion is defined. Inclusion is a multidimensional concept, which addresses both processes and outcomes. Measuring inclusion only in terms of processes – the degree of representation of decision-making institutions – obscures how developmental outcomes are shared across societal groups (Rocha Menocal 2017: 562). Policy efforts aimed at promoting stability often assume that designing broadly representative institutions, consensus or technocratic governments and elections may automatically deliver distributional outcomes or limit violence. In fact, these approaches ignore the fact that power is not a mere function of a group’s institutional presence (for instance, the number of ministries a group controls), and that institutional changes may not be sufficient to alter the actual practices of power. Recent examples from Libya and Yemen – partially discussed in the following chapters – show how ostensibly inclusive power-sharing agreements failed to avoid the recurrence of violence

violent political bargaining taking place in parallel with a political order that continues to exist within formal and informal institutions (Bell and Pospisil 2017: 581).

and transform existing power relations, resulting in further exacerbating hostilities and reproducing exclusionary political settlements.

In addition, the civil war literature has provided further insights into how the organisation and structure of domestic political orders dictates patterns of intrastate violence. Some arguments highlight the importance of state-insurgent relations. In civil war contexts, variations in territorial control and cooperation between states and armed groups shape the contours of the ‘wartime political orders’ in which violence is used (Staniland 2012).

In other words, violence is a function of the form of political competition and bargaining which occurs at the local level. Rather than conflict spaces characterised by all-out violence, civil wars see a range of bargains, deals and negotiations among political elites that shape patterns of violence and governance.

Notions of fragmentation and cohesion have also been applied to explain conflict duration and escalation, as well as regime breakdown. In particular, the proliferation of armed groups and elites is shown to increase the risks of conflict escalation through the multiplication of spoiler groups attempting to maximise their access to power and rents and the increasing difficulty of committing actors to stop violence (Cunningham 2013;

Driscoll 2012). Conversely, other authors highlight the stabilising effects of factional cohesion, which enhances cooperation and trust among elites. I apply these concepts to explain both the emergence of subnational geographies of violence and the outcomes of elite struggles in highly volatile political orders.

3. Research design and methodology