Responding to State Failure in Africa

I Failed states in Liberia and Somalia have already caused millions of people to suffer grievously, and there is every indication that the central government apparatus is collapsing in other African countries.The international response to these failed states has focused mainly on how to resurrect them, while limiting the number of people harmed. However, the human tragedies caused by the failure of central institutions and the opportunities provided by profound economic and political changes now occurring throughout the global system compel investigation of other responses to state failure in Africa. The article suggests some alternative strategies to deal with failure in Africa, and elsewhere, that would involve significant changes in international legal and diplomatic practices. The goal is to develop a set of responses to state failure that would be more appropriate to the circumstances of a particular state’s demise, and thereby move away from the current fixation on maintaining existing units. The Paradox of Decolonization In precolonial Africa, a wide variety of political organizations-villages, citystates , nation-states, empires-rose and fell. However, the formal colonization of Africa and the demarcation of the continentinto national statesbetween 1885 and 1902 replaced that diversity of forms with the European model of the national state.’ After independence, Africa’s heterogeneous political heritage was brushed aside in the rush by nationalists to seize the reins of power of the nation-states as defined politically and geographicallyby their European colonizers . Ironically, even as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Sekou Tour6 were proclaiming a break with Europe and the West, they uniformly seized upon that most western of political organizations-the nation-state-to rule. ]@ey Herbst is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. This research was part of a project on ”Sovereignty and Self-Determinationin the PostKold War World” based at Princeton’s Center of International Studies and funded by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. I am grateful to Henry Bienen, Walter Clarke, Robert Gosende, Steve Stedman, John Thomson, and two referees for helpful comments. 1. SeeI.M. Lewis, ”Pre- and Post-Colonial Formsof Polity in Africa,” in I.M. Lewis,ed., Nationalism and Self Determination in the Horn of Africa (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), p. 74. International Security, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Winter 1996/97), pp. 120-144 0 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 120 Responding to State Failure in Africa I 221 The African embrace of the nation-state as theorized, designed, and demarcated by Europeans was propelled by several forces. First, many Africans were glad to be rid of the confused mixture of political institutions that characterized the precolonial period. Even as trenchant a critic of colonialism as Professor A. Adu Boahen noted that one of the positive aspects of European rule was the creation of new stateswith clearly defined (albeitinappropriate)boundaries in place of ”the existing innumerable lineage and clan groups, city-states, kingdoms, and empires without any fixed boundaries.”2 Even as they borrowed the names of great states from Africa’s past such as Benin, Ghana, and Mali, ”the educated elites in West Africa-for a long time, it would be much the same in South Africa-saw Africa’s own history as irrelevant and useless . . . .when it came down to brass tacks, to the question of who should take over from the British when the British withdrew, they demanded a more or less complete flattening of the ethnic land~cape.”~ Of course, the leaders themselves had a profound interest in maintaining the nation-states they inherited from the Europeans because there was no guarantee, if they began to experiment with different types of political organization, that they would continue to be in power. Immediately upon decolonization, the United Nations General Assemblythe gatekeeper to statehood-immediately declared the new countries to be sovereign and ratified their borders. The General Assembly was encouraged to do so by the new states who soon constituted a large percentage of that body, by the excitementgenerated worldwide as so many states gained their freedom largely through non-violentmeans and the determination to support those new experiments, and by the considerable anxiety worldwide to avoid...