What I learned about fragility

While in Bangui a couple of months ago I participated in a workshop organized by the World Bank assessing the factors that make CAR “fragile.”

[An aside: The previous terminology to describe state dysfunctionality (failed/collapsed/failing) seems to have fallen out of favor with all but the gang at Foreign Policy. In addition to sounding rather, ahem, judgmental to development “partners,” “failed” isn't a very useful analytical category because it describes nothing about the ways in which politics work and only what they lack (see this Alex de Waal lecture for a typically erudite explanation of how this impoverishes analysis). But always the critic, I'm afraid I have a bone to pick with the new “fragility” lens as well. This is because many of those states labeled “fragile,” such as CAR, are in fact quite durable in their weakness. They remain mired in a position of low functionality, receiving just enough aid to prop up the status quo; their negative (externally-granted) sovereignty makes revolutionary, democratic change difficult if not impossible to achieve. For a much more eloquent and detailed explanation, see Pierre Englebert's latest book, in which he shows the surprising resilience of the state form in Africa.]

The workshop gathered Bangui 'intellectuals' (I use the term in the broad Francophone African way to refer to people with a level of education that differentiates them from those in the fields). In more and less heated tones, participants decried and celebrated aspects of sociality in their country. Occasionally, thanks to having spent a fair amount of time in provincial towns and villages, I knew that the statements of these cadres, who themselves rarely leave the capital, carried only partial truth.

One man finally highlighted the Bangui-centric nature of their polity. In Cameroon, he said, Douala and Yaounde are weekend ghost towns – all the well-off return to the village to seek the benediction of their communities. In contrast, in CAR, those who have left the village almost never return. Whether a university student or a minister, all fear the “jealousy” of their compatriots. The villages are home to strong powers of witchcraft. (The country's terrible road network and lack of transport options don't exactly facilitate travel, either.) Some in the audience chuckled at this statement. But a friend who lectures in geology at the University of Bangui became exercised – “People might say they don't fear sorcery, but they're lying! Everyone fears it!” She went on to relate several famous cases, and I saw heads nod in acknowledgment.

While in Ndele, I got to know a Chef de Quartier whose son had been Minister of Defense a decade previously; he lived in the same kind of house as all his neighbors and wore the same beat-up flip-flops. What about “wealth in people” – the idea that wealth in Africa is determined by the number of people you support – I wondered? Few to no traces of elite beneficence grace CAR's hinterlands (unless you count the villa the disarmament co-president is building himself, or the monument to his mother the president constructed – both, incidentally, paid for with DDR monies, now used up before the program could even start...but I digress). But elsewhere on the continent, scholars have shown how the return of the successful to the village is perhaps the main means of city/village redistribution.

Claudine Vidal analyzed city-village relationships in Côte d'Ivoire in her Sociologie des Passions (1991). Her perspective spans several decades, which lets her show how these relationships change through time, partly as a function of economic fluctuations and partly due to the changing nature of honor and shame. In something of a reversal of the current CAR dynamic, she found that in the post-independence decade rural relatives begged their city-successful offspring not to build them new villas for fear of neighbors' jealousy, which would manifest through sorcery.

In the following years, displays of wealth became more lavish. Funerals, a kind of theater for enacting relations of dependence and power, are one of the main occasions for such displays. And because people are buried where they were born, these often take place in the village. The increasing need for ostentatious displays went hand in hand with growing feelings of shame attached to coming from a village deemed backward. Qualifying someone's village became a way of describing the person him/herself. For instance, a village (and its progeny) could be described as “pretty” or “have everything one could need”, but it could also be “disgusting” or “have nothing at all”; it was understood that the descriptor held for the person as well. As a result, ministers worked harder to fix up their villages, sometimes even against residents' wishes. (Ivoirian President Houphouët-Boigny's build-your-village campaign, of which his own village, Yamoussoukro, was the never-imitable example, probably contributed as well.)

Vidal's argument reminded me of Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book, The Honor Code. I've only read the op-ed versions of it that he published around the time the book came out, but in those he argued that “moral revolutions” occur when people's ideas of what constitutes “honorable” behavior changes. From the op-eds, I got the sense that Appiah views moral revolutions as generally progressive, and he seems to think that it is possible to push the evolution of the concept of honor (for instance, he discusses the possibilities for approaching the eradication of “honor killings” in Pakistan). Would shaming CAR's intellectuals about their villages' appearance, an economic upturn and better roads lead them to transform their communities of origin with no consideration of jealousy and sorcery? I'm not sure human relations are that rational-functional. Still, even if not so predictable, I'd be curious to see the results.

p.s. I've heard that the magnitude of urban-rural redistribution by elites has been quantified in Côte d'Ivoire but haven't found the citation. If anyone knows the details of these studies, I'd be obliged if you could pass them on.

Surprising ways of fulfilling the responsibility to protect?

One of the highlights of attending the Law and Society Association annual meeting was having the chance to catch up with my friend and fellow Duke cultural anthropology grad student Jatin Dua. Jatin, one of the most brilliant people I know, is studying piracy in the Horn of Africa, and he specifically looks at how the region's modes of governance turn on the fusion of protection and profit. As he writes (in an abstract of his research),

“Western Indian Ocean piracy may be seen as an attempt to produce protection from global poaching and dumping and from the surveillance of regulators more generally, and signals a shift from the purchase of protection through taxes, tariffs and bribes to collecting rents through a form of capital-intensive armed entrepreneurship. As such, piracy as a system of protection competes with a variety of state and non-state forms of protection in this area.”

Both the pirate-cum-coast guard (the Somali Coast Guard has apparently renamed itself the Somali Sovereignty Protection Unit; shape-shifters with much in common with the the highway bandits/rebels in Central Africa, these armed Somali seafarers often play both pirate and coast guard roles) and the maritime insurance agent at Lloyd's describe their actions as important forms of protection. A form of coerced rent collection has taken on an important role in the region's political economy, similarly to the way that Charles Tilly described the history of the state as a the evolution of organized protection rackets. Jatin will soon start fieldwork on the Kenya coast, in Somaliland, and in London, and as he learns more the synopsis I've just offered here will prove increasingly simplistic, but it at least outlines certain contours of what he will be looking at.

Jatin's analysis fascinates me for several reasons. For one thing, through the R2P doctrine (Responsibility to Protect) “protection” has become the organizing principle of humanitarianism, and the main fault assigned to places like CAR (or Somalia) is their failure to protect their citizens. I have myself had a hand in perpetuating this line of analysis through publications with titles like “Still Waiting for Justice and Protection.” And, maybe especially on a visceral level, such accounts have a high degree of explanatory power. As Achille Mbembe pointed out in his contribution to Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, in parts of Africa government forces and the rebel groups that oppose them more often attack civilians than their putative enemies. Upon meeting peasants who have recently been racketed by highway robbers or cattle thieves or poachers or “rebels” or soldiers or any of the other kinds of militarized entrepreneurs, the lack of protection does indeed appear a defining feature of the region's politics.

And yet, as an anthropologist, I find this analysis deeply unsatisfying. Anthropologists have long been in the business of countering/completing the analyses that identify how people and places fail to measure up to certain theoretical principles derived from the intellectual history of the West by instead studying social systems as they actually work. (For a contemporary incarnation of this argument, Alex de Waal, himself an anthropologist by training, made an impassioned case in his Christen Michelsen lecture last year.)

This is partly why I found Jatin's description of the existing Horn of Africa protection regimes, which turns the aspirational humanitarian vision of the term upside down, so stimulating. Given the similarities between piracy and highway banditry and the like in Central Africa, I wonder in what ways the model of protection that Jatin describes might be working here. In my simplified model of his reasoning, it could possibly be distilled as

rent-based mode of governance + profits/entrepreneurship = protection

The CAR is also home to a profitable, rent-centric mode of governance. But where and how might protection enter into the equation? What kinds of protection (rackets) do we see here? I'm finding it hard to get out from under the humanitarian model of lack.

Chabal and de Waal...and me(?)

In Alex de Waal's recent two-part review of Patrick Chabal's “Africa: The Politics of Smiling and Suffering,” he argues that the north of Equatorial Africa belt that Chabal excludes from his analysis in fact offers rich insights to corroborate and expand his argument. Rather than delving into the particularities of Chabal's points, which seem heartfelt and frustrated enough to make good fodder for an African Studies class, though perhaps at the risk of encouraging a bit of hubris on the part of students (he might inspire them to do things differently, and better, without realizing that his critiques sometimes verge on caricature), I'd like to discuss some of the material de Waal presents, because in a way it describes what I am hoping to do with my own research. His writing was thus both an inspiration and a reminder to get down to work – I have much to go before I pretend to comprehend these kinds of processes and mentalities.

De Waal draws attention to the ways that the areas north of Equatorial Africa were drawn into the world economy through integration into largely Muslim raiding empires. He writes:

“The characteristic form of successful Sudanic states was an assimilatory empire, managed through clientelism and organized violence. The trans-Saharan links enabled the states in the Sudanic belt to adopt organizational technologies that could allow clientilistic political models to function on a far larger scale. Paramount among these was Islam...At their zenith, the Sudanic and Ethiopian empires ruled their domains as three concentric circles. The inner circle was the fully administered territory, where a centralized patrimony controlled political life. In the second circle loyalty was bargained, with local chiefs enjoying a degree of autonomy, and negotiating their obligations to the centre. The outer circle was a zone of influence, where power was exercised by the intermittent use of force. The nature of patron-client relations varied according to the circle.”

In the outer circle, where force was used, the raiding party ruled. However, even in these outer regions the raiders would establish zariba – outposts for trading and pilgrimage pit-stops.

“In summary, pre-colonial chiefly administration in the Sudanic states was more instrumental in support of a power hierarchy than the world of reciprocal obligation described by Chabal for elsewhere in Africa.”

However, this is where I – who has yet to be able to access Chabal's book and so am relying on the reviews I've found to form my analysis – would tweak both Chabal's and de Waal's points. The world of reciprocal obligation “perverted” (yes, Chabal uses this word) by colonial command-and-control may once have existed, but in many places it had already been profoundly re-shaped by the kinds of raiding and integration that de Waal describes by the time the Europeans set up a physical presence on the continent. Across Africa in the late 19^th century, raiders transformed the political, economic and social landscape. From Tippu Tip, who traded and raided from his base on Zanzibar far into Central Africa to Senoussi, sultan of Dar-al-Kuti (where I'm doing my research, in the north of modern-day CAR) to the Chamba expansion in Nigeria, these transformations, which in some instances represented a form of colonialism and in others terror, have, in my opinion, been neglected in the midst of the contemporary emphasis on the lasting effects of European colonialism. I'm curious to see the ways in which this raiding colonialism, which in CAR coexisted with French colonialism for a couple of decades, has affected the political repertoire of current leaders and the expectations of the governed. CAR is an ideal place to carry out this project because the colonial administration was so half-hearted, victim of continual budget cuts, and the French even ruled through the raiding sultans for several decades.

As a part-time historian at best, I find it challenging to delineate precisely how the political life of a century ago has influenced the reality today. One could argue, for instance, that the CAR state fits the model of three circles rule: the elite form the first circle; urban residents – because of their potential for disorder – the second; and the hinterlands, whose residents are generally ignored except when they are attacked, the third. But that seems possibly too facile. On top of that, educated people tend to be sufficiently familiar with the anodyne “good governance” platitudes hammered home by UN and other aid programming that they stick to that script instead of delving into the actual workings of the political system here.

In any event, if anyone has any tips or reading suggestions, I'm all ears.

Privatization of the state

Alex de Waal has just finished up his five-part critical review of Jean-Francois Bayart's The State in Africa. (For those without the time or inclination to read the full five-part series, I'll serve up the punchline here: despite critiquing the lines of analysis Bayart does and does not pursue, de Waal concludes by giving the book the highest praise an academic work can hope for – that it's “useful.”) Part Two looks at the idea of extraversion, which I discussed in a previous post. De Waal uses the Sudan/Chad/CAR context to illustrate his critique of extraversion, and in so doing he lays out the broader context of the raiding dynamics I'm studying ethnographically in CAR.

In another of Bayart's books, The Criminalization of the State in Africa, the author argues that the state in Africa has become privatized. The public/private distinctions associated with the Habermasian democratic ideal are inoperative and political institutions represent means of private enrichment. The political position is coterminous with its holder, rather than existing as a set of theoretical ideals of service apart from the “kota zo” (big person) inhabiting it.

I have mentioned in earlier posts how the French leased pretty much the entirety of CAR's territory to concessionary companies. Any administration was a by-product of the quest for private profit. That kind of privatized state is pretty straightforward to imagine. It is similar to contemporary enclaves like mining operations. But what does it really mean to talk of the privatization of the whole state today? I heard a story yesterday that provides an excellent illustration, if also a tragic one.

Armed men, believed to be members of the Lord's Resistance Army, attacked a truck carrying humanitarian and development supplies for an NGO working in the southeastern part of the country. Two of the people in the truck were killed, and one was gravely injured. The injured man suffered a bullet in his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, and he was airlifted to the hospital in Bangui. There, his condition worsened and his body wasted as the doctors waited, apparently unsure whether they had the expertise to treat him. Finally, two weeks after his arrival in the capital, the doctors issued their verdict: he should been flown to Cameroon and operated upon immediately.

The NGO employees launched into making this happen. Foreigners here generally have health insurance and so can be evacuated with relatively little red tape, but CAR nationals do not, and airlifting them requires a signature from the minister of health. Following many frantic phone calls and intervention by the UN humanitarian chief and various other high-placed people, the minister of health signed the paperwork at 11am on Tuesday. The once-weekly plane would depart just three hours later. One of the NGO employees called the doctor needed to accompany the injured man. For various reasons, only this one doctor could accompany the patient – it is a state hospital, and the patient was his responsibility.

The doctor was at home when he received the call. Perhaps he expected that it would take longer to obtain the minister's signature than it did. But he flat-out refused to get on the plane. He said he didn't want to. It didn't suit his schedule. He didn't elaborate and didn't seem at all ashamed that he was so flagrantly neglecting the responsibilities of his post. Obstinate, the doctor continued stalling. Soon the plane would depart, and he wouldn't have to leave for another week, if at all.

In the end, the NGO employees prevailed, and the wounded, quite possibly dying man made it on the plane to Cameroon at the last possible minute.

In this situation, the doctor's position in the civil service position represented little more than a bundle of his individual interests. It could almost seem like to the doctor, the patient was somehow less than human – otherwise, how to explain the lack of empathy for the dying man under his care?

This question reminds me of Peter Singer's recent book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End Poverty. In it, Singer argues against valuing the lives of those proximate to us over the lives of those far away. Thousands of people die of water-borne illness and worms and other scourges, and all of these would be easily treatable if only the world's wealthy people would open their pocketbooks. Moreover, our dollars go further in poor countries than they do in rich ones. Singer asks readers to picture a starving person, or a worm-ridden person, standing in front of them: shouldn't you give a few bucks to save that person's life? It shouldn't matter that in reality the person lives thousands of miles away. Singer, in other words, argues that we all face the doctor's choice on a daily basis, and most of us respond as the doctor did.

I don't think the situations are as analogous as I imagine Singer might, but they do raise the issue of the relationship between responsibility and proximity when it comes to helping those in need. Still, I find the privatization of the state especially troubling because it means that the structures intended to ensure some kind of generalized responsibility for fellow humans are just a front for personally-determined interests. It is such an insidious problem it's difficult to know how it will ever change.

But then, perhaps from the perspective of people like the doctor, there isn't really a problem. Perhaps from his perspective, responsibility does not lie with him, but rather with the NGOs that have stepped in to fill the need created in the wake of the neglect of people like him and the officials who preceded him. If so, the doctor and Singer would be making strangely similar arguments, both placing private charity above public responsibility.

Either that or private charity has become the new public responsibility. But in that case what's the value of the vestigial state structures?

Alex de Waal on Jean-Francois Bayart

I recently posted a few thoughts about Jean-Francois Bayart's idea of extraversion. Now, on the occasion of the republication of Bayart's opus _The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly_, Alex de Waal has started a five-part series on his blog reflecting on the book and its resonances with the Sudanese situation. Part one is available here.