4. Typology of the African nation-state
4.1. Nature of the postcolonial African state: the deficient state
In the name of constructing theories or models as well as in the name of making a name for herself many an academic has handpicked or invented an attribute that serves as a prefix to the African state. In fact, the list of attributes (‘swollen’, ‘juridical’, ‘neopatrimonial’, ‘criminal’ to name but a few) is so long that the act of complaining about the multitude of adjectives has itself become a cliché of academic introductions to the study of the African state245. The terminological confusion is further increased when one author characterizes African states as both strong (a functioning police state) and weak (an inefficient bureaucracy)246 while another describes the African state as “both rational and absurd, violent and powerless”247. And this is before we include anthropological conceptions of the ‘imagined state’ where – building on Bourdieu’s ideas in a Theory of Practice248 – the state is presented as a wholly constructed entity whose essence differs according to the
perspective – local, national, transnational; peasant, middle class, elite – of those that speak of ‘the state’249.
At second glance, however, the varied analytical terms no longer seem that different altogether. One thing these characterizations have in common is that they all position the African state somewhere on a downward slope from state weakness over state decay to state failure: “The record of the independent African state has been abominable. It has tolerated little freedom, grossly violated human rights, applied excessive force, encouraged ethnic and regional divisions, and redistributed wealth from the African masses to a limited domestic and international elite”250. As Robert Fatton Jr.
observed in a strident critique, African studies in the post-war era, in spite of great ideological and intellectual rifts, did not “move beyond the talismatic concept of the ‘soft’ or non-institutionalized state”251. In other words, they are theories, models, ideas of décadence. African states have clearly not lived up to the standards of a successful state implicitly or explicitly posited by its judges.
Reconstructing (or constructing) the African postcolonial state with theoretical tissue of different texture and colour will therefore be the task of the following sections that make up the typology. It starts in 4.1.1 with the hybrid quasi state that lacks different forms of sovereignty and has to compete with various non-state actors and then turns in 4.1.2 to the illegitimate, i.e. undemocratic and non-delivering state. Section 4.1.3 addresses the privatized neo-patrimonial state structure before 4.1.4 discusses the swollen centralized state.
245 e.g. “We begin with the passage ‘the – African state’ and then proceed to insert an adjective that fits our philosophical disposition – or tickles our academic funny bone.” Dunn, Kevin C., “MadLib #32. The (Blank) African State: rethinking the sovereign state in international relations theory”, in Dunn, Kevin C. and Shaw, Timothy M. (eds.) Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory. Houndmills, New York: Palgrave, 2001, pp. 46-61, p. 46.
246 Tetzlaff and Jakobeit (2005), p. 124.
247 Eckert, Andreas. Kolonialismus. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2006, p. 97 [my translation].
248 Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [1977].
249 Gupta, Akhil, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State”, American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1995, pp. 375-402, pp. 389-90, 393.
250 Longman, Timothy, “Rwanda: Chaos from Above”, in Villalón, Leonardo Alfonso and Huxtable, Phillip A.
(eds.) The African state at a critical juncture: between disintegration and reconfiguration. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998, pp. 75-91, p. 86.
251 Fatton, Robert Jr., “The State of African Studies and Studies of the African State: The Theoretical Softness of the ‘Soft State’”, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 24, Nos. 3-4, 1989, pp. 170-187, p. 170.
52 4.1.1. The hybrid quasi state
The hybrid quasi state is a composite construction of two perspectives on the same aspect of statehood: provision of security and maintenance of a monopoly of violence on a state’s territory by that state’s government and recognition of that monopoly of legitimate use of violence by other actors both international and domestic. Whereas the idea of the quasi state focuses more on the inability of African states to exert control over territories that are nominally theirs, the notion of the hybrid state seeks to address the presence of various alternative non-state actors of violence on said territory. Yet, both point to the African postcolonial state’s inability to establish effective control. The following sections 4.1.1.1 on the quasi state and 4.1.1.2 on the hybrid state are meant to highlight and substantiate the idea that the hybrid quasi state is a prevalent feature of African states after decolonization.
4.1.1.1. The quasi state - a state in name only
The basis of the modern state is that it is sovereign, i.e. that the state is the only legitimate authority on its own soil and recognized as such by actors within and without. However, over the last two decades the concept of state sovereignty has come under assault and much ink has been spilled on the issue as the end of the Cold War has dealt a major blow to the principle of non-interference in a state’s domestic affairs. The concept of the quasi state, a term coined by Robert Jackson252,
postulates that most African states in fact rely mostly on the sovereignty granted to them by the international system. Quasi states are not apt to physically uphold the monopoly of violence against external aggression and largely lack domestic sovereignty altogether. Since African states do not fulfil the protective functions of a state, on the continent “sovereignty is an international right not of peoples but of rulers – their negative freedom from external intervention”253. African states stand at the centre of the debate over the changing nature of sovereignty as evidenced by the African Union which explicitly disavows the strict understanding of state sovereignty espoused by its predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, and endorses a “strong shift away from the principle of non-interference to the principle of non indifference”254.
The theoretical concept of the quasi state likewise hinges on a critique of state sovereignty as it is interpreted on the African continent. Disentangling the concept of state sovereignty, it can be said to consist of international sovereignty, Westphalian and domestic sovereignty, which, in an ideal-type state, should mutually reinforce each other255. Therefore, the question to be asked with regard to the African state is to what extent it possesses either of these forms of sovereignty: the ability to defend itself against external aggression and interference (international sovereignty), recognition by the international system as the sole legitimate source of violence on its territory (Westphalian
sovereignty) and internal control over and the ability to reach and protect its citizens throughout its territory (domestic sovereignty).
252 Jackson, Robert H. Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
253 Jackson and Rosberg (1985), p. 61.
254 African Union. African Union Commission Consultation with African Union Member States on Transitional Justice. Consultation Report, Cape Town, 12-13 September 2011, p. 15.
255 Krasner, Stephen, “Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States”, International Security, Vol. 29, No. 2, Autumn 2004, pp. 85-120, p. 88.
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Postcolonial African states inter alia lacked and still lack domestic sovereignty, i.e. they do not have control over their territories, fail to protect their citizens and are effectively unable to defend themselves against potential attacks from the outside. The sovereignty accorded by outside actors has been identified as the primary cause for this state of affairs and the ‘original sin’ of African statehood256. These quasi states are states in name only, kept afloat solely by the global powers’
unwillingness to consent to their demise257. “They are not allowed to disappear juridically – even if for all intents and purposes they have already fallen or been pulled down in fact”258. As the
international environment has been, for the most part, highly inimical to changes to the territorial status quo, secessions or border changes have been extremely rare since de-colonization259. Precolonial Africa, in contrast, had been akin to medieval Europe in possessing a state system without fiction, meaning that if you couldn’t physically control an area you laid claim to, no other member of the system would uphold your claim against a challenger capable of sustaining his claim by force260. A good example of the safety-net that more powerful states provide to their weaker African brethren261 is the case of Sierra Leone where “[s]tronger state reluctance to permit disorder ensures nominal support for territorial integrity”262.
In fact, a trade-off can be said to exist in postcolonial African states between the dual efforts at maintaining international and domestic sovereignty. Bangoura makes the case that the postcolonial state’s international sovereignty is compromised by the fact that the monopoly of violence does not rest with the state but with those in possession of political power and thus serves the purpose of maintaining domestic sovereignty to the detriment of the state’s capacity to defend itself against external threats263. Additionally, the inability to police their borders also poses a security threat to African states as not only nomadic tribes like the Tuareg or Massai but also refugees, migrant workers, smugglers and guerrilla fighters are able to ignore and cross borders largely unimpeded264. Given this mutual sense that one’s borders and territory cannot be properly protected from outside attack, it is not a coincidence that inter-state conflict in Africa has only very rarely resulted in direct military confrontation but has more typically taken the form of support for opposition or rebel movements in the respective country265. And in those few instances where inter-state wars have been fought, for instance between Tanzania and Uganda, territorial conquest has not been the aim.
256 Englebert, Pierre. Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow. Boulder, Co. and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009, p. 204.
257 Jackson and Rosberg (1982), p. 21.
258 Jackson, Robert H. (1996), pp. 23-24.
259 It is also possible to draw an inverse conclusion from the lack of secessions to the lack of democracy in Africa. Based on a model of the optimal number of nations under various circumstances, Alesina and Spoalore come to the conclusion that democratization leads to secessions and we should hence observe fewer countries in a non-democratic world than in a democratic one. Alesina, Alberto and Spolaore, Enrico. On the Number and Size of Nations. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 5050, March 1995, p. 2.
260 Herbst (2000), p. 56.
261 Sørensen (1997), p. 256.
262 Reno, William, “Sierra Leone: Weak States and the New Sovereignty Game”, in Villalón, Leonardo Alfonso and Huxtable, Phillip A. (eds.) The African state at a critical juncture: between disintegration and
reconfiguration. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998, pp. 93-108, p. 108.
263 Bangoura (1996), p. 42.
264 Anderson, Malcolm. Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, pp. 83-85.
265 Ayoob incisively observes that intra-state wars played largely the same key role in postcolonial African state-making that inter-state wars did in Europe. Ayoob, Mohammed, “Inequality and Theorizing in International
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Another component of the quasi-stateness and the lack of sovereignty of the postcolonial African state is that these states’ leaders recognize and are aware of their lack of domestic as well as genuine international sovereignty. The most common remedy sought to rectify the state’s sovereignty deficit is, however, not substantive reform but exercises in public relations and make-believe. What gives credence to and substantiates the claim to stateness in the absence of substantial facets of statehood are performative acts of statehood. Inventing and celebrating ceremonies, rituals and other public spectacles are all part of shaping the state’s image266. “Military parades, custom checks, tax collections, national press conferences are examples of actions – or performativity – that help reify ‘stateness’. States that are able to perform these everyday attributes of stateness are
considered solid, strong, substantial states”267. However, such ceremonies and performative acts can also backfire. On the 50th anniversary of Benin’s independence from France, a power cut interrupted the official parade, which triggered widespread ridicule on the streets and in the press268.
As states and regimes rely on a continued interpretation of sovereignty in their favour, i.e. a continued ascription of statehood, states have learned to simulate sovereignty for the sake of survival269. As shown above, the failed state discourse has become so influential as to directly impact actions by governments both in the West and in Africa. African leaders therefore ascribe great importance to fulfilling the functions deemed characteristic of a ‘proper’ state by the dominant discourse and, if they are unable to, take to a ‘politics of pretending’: “the model of the modern state, though being far from an actual description of how these states really are, still profoundly shapes them, both because their formal institutions are based on this model and because they must strive to emulate this model (or at least pretend to do so)”270.
The overall lack of substantive physical control over state territory is compounded and made apparent by the presence of alternative actors and sources of violence and – in some rare cases – alternative actors and sources of security.
4.1.1.2. The hybrid state: informal non-state actors, non-state spaces In the African setting, the hybridity of the state in many areas of life – both territorially and
thematically – is a phenomenon of postcolonial statehood because “a greater proportion of Africans are now experiencing political life with no minimally viable state presence”271. Thus, it is crucial to look at the realities of power-relations and to discern the actual places where authority is being exercised as well as who is exercising it over whom. The characteristic hybridity of African states consists in the typically large and diverse group of informal actors of violence that exist alongside the Relations: The Case for Subaltern Realism”, International Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 3, Autumn 2002, pp. 27-48, pp. 43-44.
266 Migdal, Joel S. and Schlichte, Klaus, “Rethinking the State”, in Schlichte, Klaus (ed.) The dynamics of states:
the formation and crises of state domination. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, pp. 1-40, p. 23.
267 Dunn (2001), p. 58.
268 Mauer, Maximilian. Das Cinquantenaire in Benin: Konflikte und Risiken eines politischen Rituals. Working Paper No. 144, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 2014, pp. 89-104.
269 Weber, Cynthia. Simulating Sovereignty. Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
270 Eriksen, Stein Sundstøl (2010), p. 34.
271 Forrest, Joshua Bernard, “State Inversion and Nonstate Politics”, in Villalón, Leonardo Alfonso and Huxtable, Phillip A. (eds.) The African state at a critical juncture: between disintegration and reconfiguration. Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner, 1998, pp. 45-56, p. 45.
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formal state272. On a territorial level, state power and state authority vary according to location.
Relatively privileged areas where the state is present are connected by corridors of very limited state presence where a kaleidoscope of actors, institutions and jurisdictions vie for control: armed gangs, local communities, irregular soldiers, militias, paramilitary forces273.
Due to the weakness of post-independence states, ‘deterritorialisation’ is taking place in
contemporary Africa as “authority in Africa is increasingly exercised beyond the state”274. Thus, state organs compete with traditional institutions (sometimes strengthened by official recognition) and new institutions and actors for influence among citizens275. Moving beyond the purely domestic horizon, international actors also play a part in filling the void left by the state. In some countries like Côte d’Ivoire, the government relies on foreign mercenaries instead of the army to fight
insurgents276. Donors increasingly tie aid to a commitment to good governance and the Millennium Development Goals, and foreign investors impact events on the ground as African economies, for good and bad, are no longer insulated from the global economy277. In addition to civil society groups and private security companies, the United Nations, the EU, international organizations and
international NGOs interfere with and circumscribe government power to the point that the established view of the state’s spatiality as being both above society and encompassing all its localities is no longer tenable278.
Another way to analyze the state’s retreat or invisibility is in its rapport with society. Thus, Migdal’s
‘state-in-society’ approach recognizes that the state in Africa only represents one amongst many forces that struggle to maintain a monopoly over the legitimate use of force279. Arguably, this conception of state and society does not accurately represent African countries because positing the two, state and society, as separate entities is empirically untenable280. “The state is in fact so poorly institutionalized, so weakly emancipated from society, that there is very little scope for
conceptualizing politics in Africa as a contest between a functionally strong state and a homogenously coherent civil society”281. As a result, relations between state and society are characterized by a high degree of informality and a concomitant lack of institutionalized forms of
272 Dunn (2001).
273Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L., “Law and disorder in the postcolony: an introduction”, in Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L. (eds.) Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 1-56, p. 9.
274 Engel, Ulf and Olsen, Gorm Rye. Authority, sovereignty and Africa’s changing regimes of territorialisation.
Leipzig: Working Paper Series of the Graduate Centre Humanities and Social Sciences of the Research Academy Leipzig, No. 7, 2010, p. 3.
275 Lund, Christian, “Twilight institutions: public authority and local politics in Africa”, Development and Change, Vol. 37, No. 4, 2006, pp. 685-705.
276 Banégas, Richard, “Génération ‘guerriers’? Violence et subjectivation politique des jeunes miliciens en Côte d’Ivoire”, in Duclos, Nathalie (ed.) L’Adieu aux armes? Trajectoires d’anciens combattants. Paris: Karthala, 2010, pp. 359-397, p. 361.
277 Hyden, Göran, “Introduction: The African State in a Changing Global Context”, in Tarrósy, István; Szabó, Loránd and Hyden, Göran (eds.) The African state in a changing global context: breakdowns and
transformations. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011, pp. 7-15.
278 Ferguson, James and Gupta, Akhil, “Spatializing states: toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality”, American Ethnologist, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2002, pp. 981-1002.
279 Migdal, Joel S. State in society. Studying how states and societies transform and constitute one another.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
280 Söderbaum and Taylor (2010), p. 46.
281 Chabal, Patrick and Daloz, Jean-Pascal. Africa works: disorder as political instrument. Oxford: Currey, 1999, p. 21.
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engaging with citizens or the state. Informality is the pervasive trait of African states not because of the institutional make-up but because social formations themselves are highly fluid and prone to change282. Hence, in order to understand and fully grasp the working of politics in African countries one has to look beyond the classical loci of state and civil society “towards socio-political groups based on ethnicity, religion, generation, and gender”283.
One explanation for the state’s aloofness can be found in the disconnection between urban and rural. While there was urban bias right from the beginning as anti-colonial movements were largely urban, the budgetary crisis of the 1970s magnified the issue, with the state no longer able to project power over territory nominally under its control284. Thus, to borrow and transpose Frederick Jackson Turner’s concept of the frontier from the United States to Africa, contemporary African states contain inner frontiers where various actors and various norms and systems of authority compete and interact in an uneasy equilibrium. Much like in the 19th century United States, this African frontier is populated by gangs of young men that use violence or the threat of violence to get by while clouding their greed in the semi-respectable language of particularist claims285.
What is important to note, however, is that the existence of competing authorities has not meant a
What is important to note, however, is that the existence of competing authorities has not meant a