ANTICIPATING STATE FAILURE A PAPER PREPARED FOR THE CONFERENCE ON “WHY STATES FAIL AND HOW TO RESUSCITATE THEM” JANUARY 19-21 2001 DAVID CARMENT BCSIA FELLOW WPF PROGRAM [email protected] http://www.carleton.ca/~dcarment/index.html http://www.carleton.ca/cifp Draft Version – Please Do Not Quote 1. Introduction The euphoria that came with the end of the Cold War has been dampened by the continuing outbreak of deadly conflict throughout the world. Some of these conflicts have resulted in the complete breakdown of governments, leading to what has been dubbed "failed states." As Michael Ignatieff argued in 1993, "huge sections of the world's population have won the right of self determination on the cruelest possible terms: they have been simply left to fend for themselves. Not surprisingly, their nation-states are collapsing".1 Robert Kaplan's highly influential 1994 Atlantic Monthly article on the "The Coming Anarchy" offered a more bleak assessment of state failure in Africa. In this neo-Malthusian perspective - the world - especially the South - is beset by increasing crises generated by fast-growing populations, demographic changes and weakening state capacity to regulate conflict.2 Somalia, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Bosnia are examples of state failure.3 In each of these cases, the central government ceased to function, was unable to provide for the common welfare of its population or protect it from internal and external threats.4 States fail when they are unable to provide basic functions for their citizens.5 The economy collapses. Education and health care are inadequate. Physical infrastructure deteriorates. Crime and violence run rampant. These conditions foster opposition groups which often turn to armed rebellion. More often than not, “the weapons of choice are small arms, light weapons and explosives because they are cheap, plentiful, durable, easily transported and simple to use”.6 Today's wars create huge population shifts and refugee crises, long-term food shortages, failing economies, and the death of large numbers of civilians due to disease, starvation and direct conflict.7 1 The pressure to anticipate and respond to state failure has increased. The international community’s track record, in this regard, is not good. The following developments over the last decade demonstrate this point:8 •The failure to prevent the relapse of “successful” consolidation processes (Cambodia, Angola); •The failure to prevent the slow collapse of states in Central and West Africa – despite clear understanding of when and where such events would occur and the availability of forecasts for predicting and explaining their causes and manifestations (Congo, Guinea); •The failure to anticipate the moral hazards that are generated by efforts to ameliorate the symptoms of state failure, such as refugee flows, ethnic cleansing and clan warfare (Rwanda, Somalia);9 •The failure to understand how biased interventions can accelerate conflict between combatants (Kosovo, Sierra Leone);10 •The failure of policy makers to understand how weak responses to warring factions can generate even greater conflict, and increase the likelihood of state failure (Rwanda, Bosnia); •The failure to understand how values promoting conflict reduction mechanisms such as democracy and human rights can lead to actions that might actually promote the risk of state failure (Bosnia, East Timor/Indonesia);11 In order to address these and related problems, this paper evaluates contending and complementary approaches to explaining and predicting state failure. It provides some 2 preliminary insights on what might be required to anticipate and possibly prevent future cases. The argument of this paper is three fold. First, most explanations of why states fail - including those that rely on comparative case study, historical trends, leading indicators, events-based data, field monitoring and expert opinion – are, in isolation, inadequate analytical tools for either risk assessment or early warning. This inadequacy exists for a variety of reasons. Many analyses point to fundamentally different causes of state failure; others rely on the monitoring of background factors and enabling conditions that are associated with the risk of conflict but do not themselves provide accurate information on the probability of specific events leading to failure. Still others do not distinguish between causality and correlation, while others are fixated on issue-specific problems that are symptomatic of state weakness and human insecurity– e.g. illicit gun flows, child soldiers, black market activity, aids – problems that are by themselves significant and important but are not necessarily associated with failure. Second, these disparate and often contending analytical approaches constitute a formidable and potentially useful tool kit for risk assessment and early warning but they do not always pass the basic litmus test required for policy-relevance. This is because to be policy relevant these tools must also be useful operationally, organizationally and strategically. The accumulation and integration of research findings is vital if theoretical insights are to generate important policy relevant implications, especially at a time when early warning research is being criticized for its failure to provide policy-relevant diagnosis. Synthesis should first address the significant gap between policy and theory. It should be noted that early warning is not just about facts, theory building and model 3 development. Early warning is also about anticipating and responding to specific events and preventing them from occurring. Early warning systems are not confined to analysing the potential for state failure, but also relate to the capacities and response strategies for dealing with them.12 Third, it is well understood that efforts to prevent states from failing is far more cost effective than it is restoring them after the fact. However if we are to improve the quality of prevention, future funding efforts should emphasize the integration of analytical findings and methodologies of various research programs as well as improving the quality of response. In this regard, models and frameworks that relate directly to decision making processes should be the highest priority. Their integration will set in motion a process of “creeping institutionalization” towards a “culture of prevention” through norm development, the enhancement of operational responses and the implementation and evaluation of cost effective structural and operational prevention strategies.13 2. Causes of State Failure: Contending or Complementary Analyses? In this section of the paper I review some of the contending claims on the causes of state failure.14 Most scholars who seek to explain state failure are confronted by three distinct sets of empirical puzzles. Each puzzle is drawn from the perspectives of systemic transformation, state-society relations and strategic interactions between factions (usually ethnic but not exclusively). The first perspective associates state failure with macro-level changes in the international system.15 The second emphasises intermediate state-society 4 relations and the third emphasises micro-level strategic interactions between groups at specific points in time. More generally: • Macro or long term processes associated with system wide transformations and the associated problems of the emergence of weak states; • Intermediate mechanisms associated with institutional viability and “state-society” relations in different regions of the world; and • Micro or short term selection processes and mechanisms that account for preferences of violence over pacific forms of conflict resolution and the subsequent escalation and/or duration of ethnic hatreds, violence and war at a particular point in time. Much of the literature addresses state failure from the perspective of the first two puzzles, while comparatively less time has been spent addressing micro questions about the timing, escalation and the duration of interactions leading to state failure. This empirical gap is, of course, understandable - long and medium term perspectives furnish a very useful overarching historical framework for studying system change and state transformation over relatively long periods of time, while explanations for specific choices, events or behaviours tend to focus on environmental stimuli in the context of standard social scientific models. Macro- level Perspectives – System and Structure The development of political capacity, legitimacy and authority, all essential features of state-building, is not a linear process.16 This is especially relevant to explaining state failure, since changing environmental conditions can reverse (in very 5 short periods of time – e.g. months and years) these essential features. For example, changes in system structure can reverse state-building in several non-mutually exclusive ways: through the creation of highly dependent weak states (and the subsequent withdrawal of powerful patron-states) on the one hand; and through processes of globalization and the strengthening of international norms of self-determination on the other. Chazan et. al argue that there have been four great waves of state building, each following the collapse of empires:17 South America in the 19th century (the Spanish Empire); Europe after World War I (Russia, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey); Asia and Africa after World II (Belgium, Holland, France, Britain and Portugal) and Central Asia and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s (the Soviet Union).18 Most of these systemic transitions were associated with the abrupt creation of new states in hostile environments involving conflicts over territory and identity.19 The post-Second World War phase of decolonisation and the break-up of the Soviet union introduced many more new and weak states into the international system.20 However, unlike the elites of the West European and Latin American nations; the leaders of these African, Asian and East European states were faced with three compounding problems which enhanced their perception of insecurity. The borders they had to defend were far more arbitrary; their societies were usually more diverse in composition; and few leaders had experience in building inclusive civic and democratic cultures. In essence, the security threats of these states were as much internal as external.21 In advancing his systemic argument, Holm argues that the new wave of weak states are a consequence of the way the international system has developed and they will 6 fail if unfavourable systemic circumstances prevail. Like Ignatieff, Holm believes that the Cold War ensured that most of these states survived but with its end most of these states have been left to “sink or swim.”22 Similarly, Rosh and Ayoob argue that state failure is largely a function of the withdrawal of outside support to weak states.23 To the extent that regional conflicts as well as the maintenance of state integrity were both key features of the international system during the Cold War there may be some validity to this claim. For the period after 1945, in which nuclear weapons prevented direct confrontation between the two blocs, the superpowers did involve themselves in proxy wars and propped up their allies and clients in geo-strategically salient and insecure regions.24 The net result, as Ayoob25 suggests, is the absence of effective statehood in the ' Third World,' or what some scholars have termed ' quasi-states.2' 6 Historical perspectives suggest that the political configuration of ethnic groups and the degree of constraint they exercise over the state and its decision makers is determined in part by colonial experience.27 In transitional societies, where demographics can largely determine changes in political power, the potential for conflict is high. This is particularly true when political power is not coterminous with economic power. A single ethnic group may dominate the policy-making process at the national level and be confronted by challenges from other groups.28 Consistent with this view, Zartman suggests that state collapse in Africa occurred in two waves – the first came toward the end of the second decade of independence and the second, a decade later and into the 1990s.29 Zartman notes that state collapse is usually marked by the loss of control not only of political space, but economic space as well. The two work in opposite directions with neighbouring states 7 encroaching on the collapsing state’s sovereignty by meddling in its politics thereby making the political space wider than the state’s boundary.30 As this happens, the economic space retracts with parts of the economic space captured by the neighbouring states and the informal economy dominating the rest.31 Alao provides empirical evidence for this argument through an examination of the causes of state failure in Africa during the post-independence and post-Cold War periods. He finds that most early failures were due to the way they were formed; colonialism brought people of different ethnic, political and religious affiliations together to form a state and forge a common sense of citizenship.32 In addition, most African economies were incorporated into the European capitalist framework which made most of these economies structurally weak to cope with the challenges of nation-building. In a similar vein, Herbst suggests that the ‘paradox of decolonisation’ in Africa stems from the formal colonization of Africa and the replacement of the continent’s diverse political systems with an artificial state system which was carried forward in post-independent Africa.33 The ‘façade of sovereignty’ was to be overturned only a few years after independence by pseudo-Marxist regimes, one party-states and patron-client fiefdoms. 34 Alger notes that the main problem was that most Western states failed to foresee that the self-determination of the 1960s, was most certainly going to be followed by collapse. Most Western powers failed to pay attention to developing viable institutions of governance which could support the independence of most of these new states As a consequence, the emergence of modern authoritarianism in Africa stemmed from a series of interrelated phenomenon that arose out of the colonial legacy (most states were conceived in violence, there was little transformation in the economy and, the local 8 ethnic elite' s commitment to the western imposed structures was low). The absence of confrontations and conflicts between classes prevented the growth of liberalism with its ideological and legal emphasis on individual rights and liberties. The European models of democracy dissolved quickly as alien arrangements. When there was a convergence of interests between the newly emergent classes it was to end colonization but these goals became fragmented by ethnic loyalties. The consequence of this was the formation of patron-client relations and the development of personal rule resulting in a state based on personal authority and coercion. The political system was structured not by institutions but by politicized ethnically-based patron-client relationships.35 In a few short years following independence, the African state become a non-autonomous arena for ethnic rivalries.36 A second set of related macro level perspectives trace state failure to processes associated with globalization and the development of international norms of self- determination.37 In particular the development of state structures within multi-ethnic authoritarian states usually results in a minority’s perceived sense of exclusion and failure in the social, economic and political domains.38 As a result minority groups recognize that internationalization of their demands can both simultaneously encourage internal mobilization and weaken the saliency and effectiveness of the state by creating international forums for sub-state grievances.39 This legitimization process is supported by the existence of supranational organizations and norms which provide a forum and focal point for sub-national claims.40 Specifically, international organizations promote sub-state mobilization to the extent that they provide human rights support and recognition which lends a legitimacy to self-determination claims.41 Allen has suggested that the patterns of violence and warfare in Africa as well as the characteristics of the 9