Partial state construction and colonialism

Colonialism transplanted new administrative practices that intentionally changed the political dynamics among populations in the conquered territories. African kings were militarily overthrown, stripped of status, and made subservient to often corrupt and incompetent European administrators. Meanwhile, domestic commercial networks were stripped of their wealth and replaced by European trading houses. In colonial cities and regions considered “useful”, voluntary associations and trade unions became active while they were strictly controlled in those territories deemed “useless”. Urban centers were favored thus causing policy distortions that persisted long after independence.¹³

These inherited asymmetries contributed to legacies of flawed policies that denied post-independence leaders the latitude to adjust to market conditions because urban populations acted collectively whenever their interests came under threat. As a consequence, an overwhelming majority of African countries was under authoritarian rule within a decade of independence. Sometimes these countries were governed by the national leader European officials had identified as most amenable to honor post-colonial agreements.

The causes of Africa's shift toward authoritarianism are present in the legacies left by colonialism. European powers conquered kingdoms, demarcated borders, established bureaucracies, imposed currencies, collected taxes, ascribed identity, and their agents responded with brutality when the subjugated populations challenged their policies. Although the Europeans created administrations with many of the attributes of a bureaucratic state, Young has convincingly shown how the absence of sovereignty, national identity, or international standing discredited the colonial powers' claims of statehood.¹⁴

For certain, the European authorities could have hardly foreseen the extraordinary challenge posed by a mandate to administer the vast territories they had conquered in Africa. Herbst comments on this challenge: “European practices were largely congruent with existing pre-colonial politics that did not stress the control of territory.”¹⁵ As a result, populations in far flung territories never received the services provided those people who lived in colonial cities and regions of commercial interest. After independence, authoritarian leaders similarly focused their attentions on urban centers that provided the productivity and revenues necessary to maintain a regime.

A second impact of colonial rule that contributed to authoritarianism was an exclusion of substantial portions of the population from the rights of citizenship. In effect, a majority of the people living under colonial rule could hardly claim citizenship since “the concept of citizen was intended to be inclusive—to insist that all persons in a state, and not just some persons (a monarch, aristocrats) had the right to be included in the process of collective decision-making in the political arena and the right to receive the social benefits the state might distribute.”¹⁶

Colonial powers denied their subjects citizenship; instead, they allowed their administrators discretion to designate a select population as “evolved” subjects, and an even smaller number as citizens. What transpired in Africa has been condemned as an incomplete and imperfect process of state construction that failed to provide subjects experience in interest mediation.¹⁷ Hence, despite genuine efforts to construct a state after independence, many countries in Africa and Central Asia lacked an institutional legacy on which political leaders could construct new rules and norms.

Partial state construction was evident in authoritarian states that reflected historical continuities of oligarchy and repression. Colonial authorities anointed a small number of “evolved” individuals for leadership positions. These individuals had incentives to limit access to political offices; they allocated public goods strategically to protect and extend their tenure in office. In both Africa and Central Asia, post-colonial leaders similarly restricted electoral freedoms, hindered elite recruitment and circulation, and selectively delivered public goods. As a consequence, neopatrimonial arrangements reflected the preferences of a single leader who controlled access to power and wealth. These patterns of rule have shaped the dismal post-colonial outcomes in Africa and Central Asia.

In parts of Africa and Central Asia, people excluded from the centers of power established informal organizations to supply services unmet by the state. Countries as diverse as Armenia, Chad, Chechnya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Congo (former Zaire) experienced a steady deterioration of service delivery outside their administrative capitals. In the worst cases, parallel development occurred in regions where people established their own service organizations independent of predatory, corrupt politicians. Luong shows how elite politicians in Central Asia used their former positions in the Soviet coercive apparatus to retain office. In many transition economies, former politicians received insider information about plans to privatize state owned enterprises; they used that privileged information to capture economic assets.¹⁸

An effect was that an oligarchic system emerged that rewarded its members handsomely while blocking real and potential competitors.

Control of influence and wealth through seizure of the state was a common strategy among post-independence politicians. In Africa, flawed administrative arrangements often resulted in a concentration of power in one individual who ruled with extraordinary discretion. This pattern has been replicated in Central Asia where for example dynastic nepotism has become a practice in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Indeed, these practices suggest the neopatrimonial pattern that is evolving in Central Asia may be a precursor to the instability that followed African independence. While this question falls outside of most analyses presented by Central Asian specialists, its disturbing implications bode poorly for the region's development.

Partial state construction and violence

The links between state construction and warfare, military organization, and taxation have been demonstrated in European development.¹⁹

A desire to pursue wars forced Europe's monarchs to make concessions to a rising merchant class. Revenues that the monarchs needed to engage in war required credible commitments to specific policies and progressive concessions to citizens' demands.²⁰ Between 1689 and 1714, the commercial freedoms the English king granted in exchange for revenues encouraged a politically-motivated bourgeoisie to negotiate the concessions that set forth the preliminary institutions of parliamentary democracy.²¹ This process wherein the monarch conceded to stronger parliamentary rule has been absent in Africa and Central Asia. If the inter-state conflicts in Africa and Central Asia were more widespread, they might be perceived as the violent throes of nascent nation-states. However, inter-state conflicts are relatively few in Central Asia and Africa, while weak states are many.

As much as warfare was an integral part of state construction in Europe, Herbst has trenchantly observed that “a central feature of colonialism was violence.”²²

Colonial wars might have been expected to result in the hierarchy of military authority with its officers and soldiers, merit-based promotion, and routines that Hintze cites as an explanation for Europe's bureaucratic states.²³ However, the military organization that emerged in Europe was never replicated in Africa; after the defeat of African kingdoms, the Europeans forced local populations to submit to an inefficient and partial bureaucratic state. Imperial rule demanded tribute in the form of taxes that benefited urban centers that were profitable for metropolitan interests. Colonial policies visited a harsh brutality on the daily lives of colonial subjects through taxes and forced labor policies. Indigenous and European institutions uneasily co-existed while administrators favored a small proportion of colonial subjects.²⁴

People excluded from the colonial state developed informal networks to pursue their economic and political goals. After independence, these networks continued to operate as uneasy coalitions that people joined as a response to uncertainty that was later deepened by military coups and predatory regimes. In states with abundant natural resources, greedy political leaders captured lucrative sectors. These “stationary bandits” seized and consumed the rents and revenues available from national resources.²⁵

Individuals excluded from this capture of state resources were able to de-link from the formal economy into the parallel, informal sector. Some created independent blocs to seek aggressively some portion of the resource wealth. Their compatriots however had little choice but to survive as best they could under a dysfunctional and predatory state.

When states in Africa and Central Asia collapsed, warlords and their militia profited from the disintegration of order to amass relative fortunes through the capture of natural resources. These violent entrepreneurs used criminal practices reminiscent of a mafia without any of the stabilizing effects on property rights that Gambetta describes in Italy.²⁶

Volkov recognizes how violence affects criminal incentives in his study of “‘violent entrepreneurship’ [that] can be defined as a set of organizational solutions and action strategies enabling the conversion of organized force (or organized violence) into money or other market resources on a permanent basis.”²⁷ Reno similarly analyzes how violent entrepreneurs use war to capture and exploit natural resources.²⁸ His studies highlight the short-term strategies that criminals assembled in militias use to capture natural resources that they export through unscrupulous middlemen representing Western corporations. This work shows how unorganized violence may be as much an entrepreneurial activity in Africa as it is an organizing principle in the private armies of Central Asia. However, it is advisable to avoid over generalizing about the mayhem that is described in a small number of African and Central Asian states.

Partial state construction and service delivery

A willingness to extend political freedoms in the respective colonial territories was idiosyncratic and depended on each administrator's assessment of any risks nationalist subjects might pose to the empire. In some colonies, colonial authorities pitted regional leaders against each other to compete for political office. The effect was to divide the territory politically. In other colonies, selected national politicians collaborated with European administrators and excluded all competition. These collaborators' incentives were to protect their parochial interests. In Indochina, for example, an armed indigenous militia collaborated with the French to protect colonial assets that had been expropriated from indigenous merchants.²⁹

This militia protected Vietnamese administrators, many of whom belonged to the Cao Dai sect that sought to build a national identity apart from French colonialism.³⁰ These administrators made the “brutal political calculations about how it is possible to extend power within individual states” that Herbst has suggested essential to the development of state systems.³¹ Such brutal calculations in colonial societies led elite politicians to restrict competitors from voicing their political interests and pursuing autonomous economic goals.

Colonial authorities ascribed identity to African populations according to their assessment of economic utility. “Practitioners of British and French colonialism were well aware, often to the point of obsession, of just how meekly they had penetrated the vast parts of Africa they had suddenly committed themselves to ruling.”³²

An undercurrent of potential violence buttressed the weak administration's capacity to exercise power. After colonial rule, people in distant regions were ignored by politicians living in the capital cities. It was only when the size of an ethnic group attained a certain threshold relative to the political arena that ethnicity gained salience in domestic politics.³³ However, for the most part, colonialism in Africa provided neither a national identity for its inhabitants nor an administrative structure that could legitimate the emerging state. These administrative and political failures continue to vex the continent.

By contrast, identity was used in Central Asia “as conscious investments that Central Asian elites and masses alike made in response to the structural incentives created under Soviet rule”.³⁴

A capacity to deliver education as evidenced by high levels of literacy indicates an awareness of the political utility of a national identity. The development of a distinct national identity explains the outcomes that followed the Soviet Union's disintegration wherein states retained their colonial borders and administrative integrity. For example, Soviet rule in Uzbekistan reproduced precolonial relations: “institutions and policies transformed, reinforced, and politicized pre-existing identities based on territory rather than wholly constructing them”.³⁵ Despite insurgencies and violence in Central Asia, the states that govern these territories have encouraged national identity as a strategy to retain control over their colonial boundaries.

Partial state construction and territorial penetration

After independence, legacies of incomplete state construction in Africa were reflected in fiscal shortages that denied remote locations basic public services. Fiscal shortages prevented administrations from projecting their power throughout the territories under their jurisdiction. Herbst writes that “states are only viable if they are able to control the territory defined by their borders.”³⁶

Yet, African states have typically failed in this elementary function. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that some African states have entered a cycle of violence, failure, anarchy, collapse, and partial reconstruction as a consequence of their inability to administer the territory. Contemporary conflicts in Chechnya, Uzbekistan, and other Central Asian states raise questions as to whether an inability to project power within their borders might auger poorly for state construction.

Colonial borders in Africa have endured since independence. Whereas colonial laws ended property rights over people (slavery), European administrators imposed new economic institutions of contract law and private property through administrative units (bureaucracy) that were established for the convenience of colonial authorities.³⁷

Weak administrations partially governed the territories under their jurisdiction. It has been suggested that “state consolidation in Africa can be understood by examining three basic dynamics: the assessment of the costs of expansion by individual leaders; the nature of buffer mechanisms established by the state; and the nature of the regional state system”.³⁸ Leaders of independent African states inherited these imperfect administrations and had few incentives to correct the state's inherent weaknesses. As a consequence, weak African states evolved into juridical shells that interacted with the international community, but provided few services to their citizens.³⁹ Perhaps Herbst's greatest contribution is not in an explanation of the few failed and collapsed states in Africa, but rather a consideration of the many states that persist despite weak administrations, systemic corruption, and dismal economic performance.

As implied above, the failure of some African and Central Asian states to extend administrative control over their territory counts among the causes of state failure and collapse. Mbembe argues that a lack of territorial domination by the African state has fragmented boundaries and contributed to “sovereignty outside the state … based on a confusion between power and fact, between public affairs and private government.”⁴⁰

This perspective suggests that the emergence of violent non-state actors is a logical result of an imperfect control over the means of violence. Reno asserts that “shadow states” are indicative of a new “relationship between corruption and politics” in a conceptual space between “formal state institutions and private syndicates.”⁴¹ His argument that new political systems have emerged from the ruins of failed regimes in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Kinshasa, and Chechnya implies that an untested path exists for some developing countries. Tragically, this new path is traveled by warlords, child soldiers, AIDS, impoverished victims, and anarchy. The picture is quite bleak.

Delegitimation and state failure

The framework in the two Rotberg volumes uses a familiar dichotomy that distinguishes states as weak or strong. A strong state projects an administrative regime that guarantees the rule of law, defines efficient property rights, and provides equitable security. By contrast, a weak state imperfectly enforces administrative rules beyond its core cities. This framework recalls Migdal's analytic contributions of weak states and strong societies in which he depicts state strength as a function of “capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways.”⁴²

A state's strength is therefore indicative of its ability to provide citizens with security, public services, a regulatory framework, and prosperity.

Rotberg suggests that state weakness may be a predictor of failure. However, a proposition that weakness predicts failure and potential collapse neglects to analyze why a state is weak. For example, an unwillingness or incapacity to establish political space in which social groups articulate their interests may indicate a weak state. However, the absence of such a space may equally reflect persistent poverty that prevents genuine efforts to create an arena in which citizens may deliberate policies and articulate their interests. Factions and individuals excluded from policy deliberations may deny the legitimacy of laws that benefit only a small fraction of the population aligned with the centers of power. Whereas the causes of state weakness may lie in poor policy choices and fiscal uncertainty, state failure results from political de-linkage from society and a delegitimation of political processes.

Failed states are unable to deliver security efficiently. In his introduction to When States Fail, Rotberg proposes that “failed states are tense, deeply conflicted, dangerous, and bitterly contested”,⁴³

while collapsed states are at an extreme where security is provided by strength, and violence is the defining social behavior. Rotberg's spectrum analysis is seductive for its ease in assigning position. However, the analysis might be improved by stipulating a threshold at which a state under stress might be expected to fail. Instead, a problematic circularity exists in its argument that weak states fail because they are weak. This circular argument is unable to account for the numerous weak states in Africa and Central Asia that continue to provide their citizens minimal services in spite of numbing poverty and shortages of bureaucratic capacity. In many weak states, non-state actors assume official functions to provide services through clans, fictive clan ties, and ethnic affiliations.⁴⁴ Evidently, more than state weakness is needed to explain failure and collapse.

A delegitimation of politics is a structural flaw of states that suffer failure and collapse. In Warlord Politics and African States, Reno defines state collapse as “the total absence of bureaucratic state institutions” wherein non-state actors “take on a wider range of political roles conventionally reserved for state institutions, such as providing internal security for rulers and diplomatic relations with other outsiders”.⁴⁵

He presents a persuasive argument that “the failure of state institutions allows non-state organizations to take advantage of economic opportunity and create new political alliances. The disorder of collapsing elite accommodations opens new, unorthodox vectors for accumulation”.⁴⁶ For Reno, it is “the proliferation of alternative means to accumulate resources [that] holds a powerful attraction for strongmen and for rulers who face internal security woes. Thus, the presence of associated networks can significantly influence the political choices of rulers in modestly successful but struggling states”.⁴⁷ The “shadow state” builds on patronage networks that erode the state's authority and ultimately, its legitimacy. For Reno, a delegitimation of the state is therefore manifest in dysfunctional networks and associations.

Despite the evidence that Reno presents, it is unclear why networks and associations are so dysfunctional in one set of circumstances and not in others. Individuals join with other people to form voluntary associations and pursue mutually desirable outcomes. Factions composed of violent actors only emerge in unusual cases of social conflict and state failure. However, when societies commence the reconstruction of a collapsed state, various factions find that voluntary associations provide a means to express their interests. These factions participate in reconstructing a collapsed state, a process that is all but inevitable. Indeed, Reno's analysis of Abacha's Nigeria leaves unanswered questions of how the country succeeded in making a democratic transition to the Obasanjo administration.⁴⁸

Without question, the strong tradition of associational activity in Nigeria contributed to that country's transition from a relatively short period of extreme authoritarianism to a more democratic form of government. Nigeria is hardly a case where factions cause dictatorships; possibly because of its numerous associations the country avoided an entrenchment of authoritarian leadership. From this perspective, Reno's argument concerning dysfunctional networks ignores the positive effects of associational activity.

Nationalism and state failure

Nationalism unifies the sentiments of diverse groups and may direct those sentiments toward state construction. Few African neopatrimonial leaders built consciously nationalist movements. To the contrary, these dictators reduced political space and distributed benefits to a select circle of supporters. A lack of nationalism has prompted Clapham to observe that “the central domestic problems of state formation in much of tropical Africa have thus been ones of political culture and notably the difficulty of adapting cultures deeply attuned to their own environments to the very different challenges involved in managing states of the kind that were imposed on the continent through colonialism.”⁴⁹

Indeed, a culture of what J.P. Nettle has called “stateness” is absent in many African countries to an extent that their counterparts in Central Asia do not share.⁵⁰ This absence of “stateness” supports arguments that partial rule has been endemic in many African countries and accounts for the barriers to successful state construction.

Experiences show that nationalism may build an identity that legitimates political systems and their leaders. It is precisely this process of building nationalism and legitimacy that Luong traces in her study of electoral rules in Central Asia. The presidents of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan manipulated concepts of national identity to shape electoral outcomes, hold office, and deny real and potential rivals any influence. Although similar manipulations occurred among the African post-colonial politicians who manipulated their constitutions to consolidate neopatrimonial regimes, nationalist sentiments were minimized by populist leaders who governed through nepotism and routine violence. It is plausible that the populist neopatrimonial regimes in Central Asia may follow Africa's tragic experience of instability, coups, and progressive impoverishment of the population.

Political stability characterized by effective electoral rules is among several variables that might prevent Central Asia from mimicking Africa's nepotistic neopatrimonialism. The noteworthy stability among Central Asian states has reflected important continuities in electoral rules wherein “the persistence of old formulas produced new institutions”.⁵¹

Although democratization was far more problematic in Central Asia, Luong found that “while the establishment of electoral systems did not launch a full fledged transition to democracy in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, both the process by which these new electoral systems were designed and the outcome of that process provide several crucial insights into the nature of power and political change in Central Asia after independence”⁵². Hence, nationalist pride that finds expression in elections may encourage political participation even while post-colonial leaders are entrenching practices of nepotism and neopatrimonialism. However, events in 2005 in Kyrgystan suggest that a far less stable future awaits the states that Luong examines.

Economic mismanagement and state failure

Economic mismanagement is a common problem in low income countries. Its causes are found in the shortages of capable people in the bureaucracy and economy. Second, the waves of military coups in Africa brought rulers who governed through practices of neopatrimonialism, nepotism, and corruption. Where systemic corruption characterizes official behavior, citizens have few incentives to pay taxes or participate in government. The effect in Africa was a progressive degradation of economic performance, and by the 1990s, a majority of African states was under the tutelage of multilateral banks. Constraints on malfeasance have been exercised by international donors who impose norms of due diligence and accountability on funds they disburse in developing countries. However, these policies could not reverse years of economic mismanagement even when the multilateral banks imposed strict austerity programs and fiscal discipline.

Citizens governed by failed states commonly lived under a policy environment characterized by economic mismanagement and systemic corruption. Leaders of these states often lacked the skills or training that might have prepared them for the complex tasks of managing national economies. As a result, the country's economic performance declined. An absence of talented leadership is poignantly illustrated by Reno in his discussion of military officers who took power in Liberia (Doe), Sierra Leone (Strasser), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kabila).⁵³

These leaders consistently demonstrated a lack of knowledge or comprehension of economics that contributed to a cycle of inept policy formulation, poor implementation, and political instability as their economies experienced crisis after crisis.⁵⁴ Their policies reflected the fact that a ruler's primary motivation was to hold onto power. These leaders therefore evaluated any policy in terms of its impact on their own personal security. Despite the insolvency of their governments, such incompetent leaders diverted scarce revenues to an inner circle of supporters.

Inexperience and poor preparation left many African leaders dependent on advice provided by representatives of donor organizations. The World Bank and IMF have been paying increasing attention to post-conflict countries and the challenges of state reconstruction.⁵⁵

Despite the best of intentions, international financial institutions' policies often result in harmful outcomes.⁵⁶ For example, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia “the assistance regime that lay at the core of the efforts of international financial institutions (IFIs) and Western governments to facilitate economic and political reform actually had the reverse effect—helping to undermine state capacity and stunt legitimate economic performance”.⁵⁷ Collier has argued that an increasing reliance on international donor assistance has “worsened the credibility problem African governments now face: investors do not believe that policy change has been internalized by African governments.”⁵⁸ Hence, international investors and other donors look for signaling in the form of acceptance of conditionality included in IFI programs. In the worst cases, government officials simply lack the technical capacity to evaluate critically IFI programs that leave the state indebted whether the projects succeed or fail.

An unanticipated effect of multilateral lending, whether for projects or structural adjustment credits, has been to maintain the political status quo, even in the absence of development.⁵⁹

Aid packages that support neopatrimonial regimes create incentives for political leaders to freeze institutional development and foster a dependence on international donor support. This outcome results from multilateral development banks' articles of agreement that require lending decisions take only economic factors into account when contemplating eligibility for loans. Hence, multilateral donors have provided credits to ruthless dictators, corrupt oligarchs, and authoritarian cabals that systematically divert funds for their personal enrichment. Some regimes have received substantial sums that have enabled them to consolidate their rule and avoid either state construction or economic development. The effect has been both a delegitimation of political rule and economic instability since donor exigencies add a volatility to revenue flows in the poorest countries.

1. Reconstruct security

Without security, economic growth and political stability remain elusive. The absence of security reduces interactions among actors in a given territory to a function of strength. Hence, the re-establishment of security is a necessary precondition to state reconstruction. Few would deny that without a demilitarization of combatants, conflicts will continue. For example, in September 1995, the Abuja Accords to end the Liberian conflict began the task of disarming approximately 50,000 combatants, of whom 30–40% were younger than 15. However, unemployment and opportunities to use their “skills” in other conflicts has contributed to the spread of war to Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire. The intimidating problem of disarmament and demobilization of belligerents receives relatively little attention in the failed-states literature. This inattention perhaps reflects the extraordinary difficulty of making concrete proposals or conceiving sustainable responses to the problems of demobilization and demilitarization of collapsed states.

Among the obstacles facing demobilization and demilitarization is the establishment of a credible commitment to peace. Once groups demobilize and turn in their weapons, their bargaining leverage is significantly curtailed.⁶²

Yet, as experience has shown, a demilitarization of a post-conflict country is a necessary first step to begin the process of state reconstruction.⁶³ Challenges that confound efforts to reconstruct peace include the nature of conflict and the economic reintegration of belligerents. The provision of jobs is an essential element of reintegration; without work, demobilized soldiers turn to crime or mercenary employment. This requirement that people find some livelihood demonstrates that economic growth is absolutely crucial for state reconstruction. In order to foster conditions that improve economic performance, interventions are necessary to reestablish the rule of law, redefine electoral rules, and encourage civil society organizations to operate.

2. Reconstruct modes of conflict mediation and the rule of law

After the re-establishment of peace and security, any effort to reconstruct the state demands the effective methods of conflict resolution and the rule of law. Business actors respond negatively to high levels of uncertainty caused by an absence of the rule of law. In many African societies, for example, business actors create “growth coalitions” that minimize transaction costs by sharing information among themselves about other merchants and market conditions.⁶⁴

Such coalitions are essential building blocks of democracy. Business groups are crucial actors in an effort to reconstruct post-conflict states; they form coalitions that contribute to employment-generating investments that enable a country to escape a cycle of failure and collapse. These conditions obtain when the rule of law minimizes opportunism; it protects private property, contracts, investments, and economic institutions.

The rule of law is among the most important institutional arrangements to be reconstructed in a post-conflict state. Beyond the benefit of reducing uncertainty, the rule of law imposes rules and norms that form a foundation for economic growth. Without the rule of law, transactions lack predictability, which drives up their costs. Rose-Ackerman emphasizes the positive effects of legal guarantees on political, economic, and social actors.⁶⁵

Her perspective is that the rule of law prevents corruption and abuses of power. What Rose-Ackerman fails to emphasize is the centrality of an independent judiciary that limits discretion and imposes accountability on elected and appointed officials. While her essay recognizes that the reconstruction of judicial bodies including audit agencies, financial inspectorates, and courts is absolutely necessary for predictable contract law and efficient property rights, it fails to note that without independence, a judiciary is vulnerable to the caprices of authoritarian rule.

An independent judiciary is a critical enabling condition for economic growth since it constrains executive discretion; it thereby prevents the emergence of a predatory state and defines stable property rights. The work of Acemoglu et al. on Botswana confirms that institutions of private property “protect the property rights of actual and potential investors, provide political stability, and ensure that the political elites are constrained by the political system and the participation of a broad cross-section of the society.”⁶⁶

While Acemoglu et al. emphasize the crucial nature of stable economic institutions, they miss that a fundamental part of Botswana's success is judicial independence. Rules that provide for an autonomous judicial branch also protect private property, the rule of law, and an independent judiciary whose decisions legitimate those institutions.

Reconstruction of the rule of law in Africa confronts a history of stunted judicial development. Contemporary African judiciaries suffer from financial distress that has resulted in significant delays and widespread corruption. Ensuring the rule of law is an essential element of what Widner calls a condition “to foster the attitudes and behavior essential to compromise and cooperation in the political realm”.⁶⁷

The critical question for Widner is to build trust and community as preconditions for state reconstruction. She proposes a list of interventions and caveats that is impressive for its breadth; however, it leaves untreated the crucial problems of sequencing and prioritization for each policy area. The result is that where to start and how to proceed is left outside of her analysis. Hence, while Widner acknowledges that reconstructing the judiciary is absolutely essential, how to enact these reforms is identified only as a problem that post-conflict states must confront.

Although it is impossible to ensure the rule of law in conflict circumstances, it is a necessary first step in the reconstruction of legitimacy. When judicial decisions are deemed legitimate, business transactions gain predictability. With that predictability, investments for longer term capital formation are more probable. Any policymaker recognizes that investments and a reversal of capital flight are conditions necessary to rebuilding fiscal stability. The challenge is to foster consensus among political veto players in government as well as actors in business associations and other civil society organizations. Reforms that foster widespread consensus contribute to the political legitimacy that results from electoral rules crucial for reconstruction of the polity. Legitimacy is enhanced by the enactment of guarantees for judicial independence, judicial processes that are impartial and fair, and the introduction of free and fair elections predicated on widely agreed-upon electoral rules.

3. Reconstruct electoral rules

An undercurrent in this literature is the problem of legitimacy for politicians who abuse their offices and enact self-serving policies. The absence of political legitimacy causes businesses to evade taxes, people to avoid state offices, and citizens to fail to vote or participate in electoral contests. When political arrangements lack legitimacy, people have few reasons to participate in policy deliberations wherein they can mediate their interests. A cycle ensues of fiscal crises that lead to an expanding informal sector, declining tax revenues, and an absence of participation that together contribute to failure and collapse. Hence, state reconstruction depends largely on the establishment of inclusive electoral systems that build political efficacy. The reconstruction of electoral institutions in failed or collapsed states is therefore the third critical step to be undertaken to mediate interests and create a sense of ownership among citizens.

Electoral rules have a direct impact on policy outcomes, and ultimately, the distribution of economic and political power.⁶⁸

Yet, a striking omission in this literature has been a consideration of the origins of different electoral rules in pre-conflict states. Conceivably, flawed electoral rules contributed to the emergence of neopatrimonial, authoritarian regimes. Although authoritarianism need not always result in state failure, much less collapse, a number of African states experienced lengthy periods of authoritarian rule with a perversion of electoral rules that ensured a dictator's longevity in office. Reno shows how Sierra Leone was unable to overcome the legacies of authoritarian rule that preceded its failure and eventual collapse.⁶⁹ State reconstruction posed a challenge for Sierra Leonian leaders to redefine electoral rules that could guarantee electoral procedures that would result in representation and legitimacy.

Among the relatively small number of states at risk of failure or collapse, the legacies of corrupt electoral systems are persistent issues that affect political legitimacy. Luong demonstrates how old Soviet era electoral rules influenced state construction in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. She proposes a bargaining game that models how politicians' strategies stimulated the design of new electoral systems that served to their advantage. Luong notes that elite politicians negotiated over four issues: the structure of parliament, procedures governing the nomination of candidates, methods to supervise elections, and methods for determining the allocation of seats.⁷⁰

She observes that her analysis would “expect a greater degree of institutional continuity than change essentially because the elites designing institutions continue to view politics in much the same manner as they did in the previous institutional setting”.⁷¹ What she found confirmed her hypothesis of “pacted stability” wherein elite politicians used with some minor differences “old formulas for making political decisions and resolving political conflict effectively …. [to] achieve institutional change through continuity”.⁷² It is possible to adduce from the Central Asian cases that political leaders desired the mandate conferred by elections and were willing to manipulate electoral rules to acquire that legitimacy.

Luong's bargaining game explains the negotiations that resulted in post-colonial electoral rules: “individuals engaged in the process of designing new institutions utilize both the previous institutional setting (or the structural-historical context) and present circumstances (or the immediate strategic context) in order to assess the degree and direction in which their relative power is changing, and then to develop strategies of action based on what they expect their influence over the outcome to be vis-à-vis other actors”.⁷³

As in Africa, Central Asian political leaders built electoral systems on institutions transferred from the former colonial power that ensured regime continuity and constructed a viable state. The bargaining game that shaped the institutional arrangements in Central Asia holds value for explanations of success or failure in various reconstruction scenarios. What remains to be shown, however, is whether these institutions may contribute to corruption, misrule, and eventually the breakdown of electoral processes. This analytic gap highlights the importance of oversight that civil society organizations may contribute to state reconstruction.

4. Reconstruct civil society organizations

Civil society organizations are pivotal actors in the reconstruction of failed and collapsed states since they voice popular demands for oversight and accountability. Civil society organizations are often organic; they emerge from communal impulses that constitute a “reservoir of formal and informal organizations outside of state control”.⁷⁴

However, state failure and collapse result in “the atrophy” of civil society organizations, which renders them unable to enforce accountability on elected and appointed officials.⁷⁵ An uncertainty results from state collapse that blocks the emergence of civil society organizations and in such circumstances people fail to join together with like-minded individuals to pursue common goals. Without active organizations that are independent of the state, citizens lack a means to act collectively and impose accountability on their delegates. It is therefore essential to reconstruct civil society organizations after providing security, redefining the rule of law, and establishing effective electoral rules.

Experiences of numerous countries demonstrate that people spontaneously form voluntary associations sometimes to collaborate with political leaders and at other times to oppose or disengage from the state. In weak states that are unable to provide a minimum of public goods, civil society organizations emerge to meet demand. For example, in Benin's far-flung north “development associations” have hired doctors and teachers and built clinics and schools to satisfy unmet demand for services. In many poor African states, such voluntary associations are collaborators in development rather than independent networks run by warlords or criminals. Only warfare and unrestrained violence impedes civil society organizational activity. Hence, in post-conflict states, civil society organizations attain a critical role since the bureaucracy has not yet been fully reconstituted; responsibilities are therefore delegated to different associations by people who live in the localities.

Common practices in civil society organizations include elections whereby members articulate their preferences by selecting leaders. Associations may thereby have a role similar to business coalitions; they introduce norms of democratic processes into society. Unfortunately, many civil society organizations operate as nascent political parties established by politicians who use the associations to promote their particular agendas. These organizations often function through the logic of patron-client relations wherein politicians provide employment for individuals who serve as their supporters. As a consequence, many civil society organizations operate under complex mandates that obscure political agendas and efforts to influence policy outcomes. This ambiguous mandate affects the impact that civil society organizations may have on democratization and the state's efficiency.

To counter inefficient and corrupt administrations, some donors have encouraged the establishment of voluntary associations and community level development. The ostensible goal has been to render local officials more accountable by improving the collective means to accumulate information about appropriations and policies. However, in extremely poor countries, these strategies have achieved mixed results since communities are often atomized and voluntary organizations operate as patron-client networks. As a consequence, the idea that African civil society organizations are capable of leading social action has been strongly criticized; some observers doubt that voluntary associations can be viable in the absence of a middle class that differentiates between public and private sectors.⁷⁶

Similarly, it has been questioned whether civil society organizations can mediate interests in society when ethnicity is the primary social cleavage.⁷⁷ Indeed, in the absence of security and the stability created by the rule of law, civil society organizations cannot operate at all.⁷⁸ Hence, the effectiveness of civil society organizations is contingent on the other conditions of security, the rule of law, and efficient electoral procedures.

Despite the doubts expressed above, it is an empirical fact that voluntary associations have a lengthy tradition in Africa and Central Asia. Examples of such associations include trade unions, religious congregations, employers' syndicates, business associations, market women's associations, rural development groups, informal rotating savings and credit associations, and single-issue advocacy groups that work for women's or human rights. What is critical to acknowledge is that such organizations are indispensable actors in representing community interests and articulating demands for services.