This lean volume digs into the roots of African politics by exploring the foundations of political order. The author sees state formation as originating in rulers' political decisions about how to extract wealth from society. Specifically, do they use coercion—the defining attribute of state power—to protect their subjects or to prey on them? If rulers—whom he characterizes as “specialists in violence”—calculate that their own political and economic interests are best served by taxing production, they will establish the infrastructure of a bureaucratic state. If, however, they conclude that the costs of providing protection to society's producers outweigh the expected benefits, then they will be tempted to turn the state apparatus into an instrument of predation.
Robert Bates argues that rulers facing just such a dilemma in late-twentieth-century Africa succumbed to rapacity. The argument takes the form of a deductive analytic narrative (a “fable” supported by selected facts) with three main moving parts.
The first part is public revenues. Over three decades of independence, the typical African government incurred a crippling fiscal crisis. Public revenues declined as the combined result of changes in the global economy—such as oil price shocks in the early 1970s—and economic mismanagement on the home front, as leaders chose policies that systematically undermined trade. Slumping economies failed to generate sufficient resources for investments in state building, including the delivery of public services. Instead, leaders increasingly resorted to administrative fiat to extract revenue from society and concentrated consumption within ever-shrinking patronage machines. In reaction, producers sought to evade the commands of the state by ceasing to produce surpluses or smuggling them across international borders.
The second element is political reform. Again due to a convergence of international and domestic pressures—in this case the superpowers' abandonment of client regimes at the end of the Cold War and mass protests by African citizens demanding better governance—rulers were forced to accept multiparty political competition. The advent of open elections, which by 2005 had occurred in all but a handful of sub-Saharan Africa's nearly 50 states, rendered authoritarian leaders even more politically insecure than previously. Because they now risked defeat at the polls, former military and one-party presidents began deeply discounting the future. Instead of relying on prospective flows of taxes gradually extracted in return for public service, the erstwhile stewards of the state began to grab private property.
The third factor is natural resources. The ready availability of natural bounty in Africa boosts the rewards from predation. Incentives to resort to looting are particularly strong in countries where the economy is based on the production of such valuable primary commodities as oil and precious minerals. Like incumbent rulers, insurgent movements also seek control of strategic commodities, save that they target not only blood diamonds but also land. In an aside to the main argument, Bates proposes how population pressures on high-quality lands push agriculturalists into less fertile pastoral areas, thus generating parochial conflicts between communities that all too easily escalate into disputes of national significance.
The outcome of all these processes—but especially the politicians' switch to predation—is political disorder. When guardians turn into warlords, violence cascades from center to periphery, and in self-defense, peasants take up arms. As the rising incidence of African civil wars attests, late-twentieth-century Africa was an era of intensified conflict.
When Things Fell Apart is a notable intellectual achievement. Bates distills and integrates several themes explored earlier in his distinguished academic career. The book's ambitious synthetic sweep aims to reveal “the logic that systematically links” economic collapse, the resource curse, and democratization “to the political incentives that underlie state failure” (p. 29). As such, it casts fresh light on a range of important debates in the study of comparative politics. Take just three examples. Rather than repeating the commonplace wisdom that ethnic mobilization causes political instability, Bates attributes both to state failure. And rather than regarding asset stripping as a cause of political disorder, he reverses the causal arrow by seeing the exploitation of natural resources and the seizure of private property as products of elite decisions. And he arrives at a mixed position on the relationship between state building and democratization. In the short run, he sees competitive elections as destabilizing. But he holds open the long-run possibility that, because freely elected governments are less likely to impose a controlled economy and more likely to deliver public services, democratization could potentially contribute to a new form of order.
The author employs mixed methods with considerable analytic rigor. The presentation triangulates on a common question from several different perspectives: Why has disorder recently escalated in Africa? Chapter 2 describes an interactive game between “specialists in violence,” clients of a protective state, and opportunistic rebel movements. Chapters 3 through 6 offer broad-brush empirical accounts of postcolonial political and policy developments, supported by capsule case studies and facts stylized to generically fit most African countries. An extensive appendix draws together a series of statistical tests based on an original set of aggregate data for 46 countries (excluding South Africa) over 26 years (1970–95), compiled by the author and his graduate students. Given its theme and methods, this book constitutes a more formal and less polemical version of Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz's Africa Works: Disorder as a Political Instrument (Reference Chabal and Daloz1999).
The argument and results resonate well with empirical realities. I read this book while traveling on a research trip through Zimbabwe. Many of its observations gave me insight into the origins of the drastic downward trajectory of that once peaceful and prosperous country: the mismanagement of economic policy (manifest in hyperinflation and black markets in foreign currency), the disregard of property rights (the seizure of commercial farmland and the collapse of the agricultural economy), the unraveling of public services (outbreaks of cholera in the capital city), and the turn to coercion (a vindictive campaign to eliminate opposition, most recently after incumbent president Robert Mugabe lost a first-round election to challenger Morgan Tsvangirai in March 2008).
Each of the book's strengths also has a downside, however. This is a short manuscript that privileges parsimonious theory above extensive empirical documentation. It is written in terse sentences, whose very economy often forces the reader (at least this reader) to pause and parse for meaning. On the other hand, the author's decision to use multiple methods requires repeated restatements of the main thesis before and after each test, which sometimes gives the impression of repetition rather than accumulation of knowledge. And the author's quest for generalization sometimes makes the reader question how well the theory fits the full diversity of political developments in the sub-Saharan subregion. Is Zimbabwe a representative case, or is it a particularly perverse instance of the political dynamics that Bates lays out? Counterexamples of enduring electoral democracies in Africa—numbering 11 according to Freedom House's 2007 Survey of Freedom, some now embarked on a fourth electoral cycle—are conspicuous by their absence. Is their current stability illusory? Or is it destined to dissolve with the passage of time? I return to these questions at the end.
Indeed, Bates's impressive contribution raises several conceptual and theoretical questions. The first concerns state failure, a loosely defined concept that has recently gained currency in the comparative politics literature. How do we recognize a failed state when we see one? How can we distinguish failure—that is, a collapse in state authority—from mere decline in administrative capacity or poor policy performance? The author tells us that a state failure is a condition whereby disorder is the norm (so far so good). He measures it with a categorical indicator with “a value of ‘1’ if there was any report of an armed militia in a given country in a given year and a ‘0’ otherwise” (p. 148). But this operational criterion does not allow us to distinguish failed states from weak states. For every Somalia, a state entirely without central authority, there are multiple African cases like Nigeria, where a central authority coexists with pockets of militant resistance on the periphery. I am not ready to argue that Nigeria—or inter alia Kenya, Senegal, or Uganda—is a failed state so long as an organized coercive force at the center is capable of conducting a modicum of normal administration. The norm in Africa is not pervasive disorder but weak states, central states that enjoy an authoritative presence in the capital city and most rural areas, but with shaky or intermittent administrative and military control over certain corners of their territories.
This leads us to ask whether a “falling apart” model privileges centripetal forces at the expense of centrifugal ones. A comprehensive overview of African politics still has to take account of the informal dynamics of patronage politics. In this regard, Bates helps us see that, over time, rulers have tended to shift extraction from legitimate sources like taxes to illicit trade in strategic commodities. To be sure, private accumulation of this sort has weakened state institutions, even if it has not yet prompted their collapse in most places. What is missing in the model, however, is the distributive side of economic exchanges in which political elites make systematic payments to ensure their own survival in office. For example, rulers pump massive amounts of state and private resources into African economies in the runup to competitive elections in more or less explicit efforts to buy votes. And rulers are careful to ensure that the security forces are well paid and well equipped; their loyalty is always a better guarantee of political survival than resorting to the unreliable self-defense delivered by auxiliary militias. In short, the distribution of patronage, especially to institutions that control the means of coercion, can result in the maintenance of a substantial semblance of state capacity.
In addition, a game theory approach of the sort favored in this book inevitably oversimplifies motives, incentives, and actions. As with most studies of African politics, the study has more to say about the behavior of political elites than that of ordinary citizens. Yet a critical element in this version of the state failure game is that when preyed upon, citizens resort to rebellion. But do ordinary Africans always take up arms? In my view, exit from the political arena is a much more common popular response to state predation. For example, up to a quarter of Zimbabwe's population has chosen not to take to the streets but to decamp to Botswana and South Africa, a mass movement that reflects their assessment of the residual power of the state and that probably reduced the level of disorder in that country. Moreover, most Africans prefer a rule of law: In the latest (2005) Afrobarometer survey in Zimbabwe, three-quarters of all adults interviewed responded that citizens should always obey the government, seek lawful solutions to problems, and reject violence.
Finally, the relationship between democratization and state failure requires more attention. I believe that Bates is correct to distinguish any short-term destabilizing effects of competitive elections from prospective longer-term benefits. I accept that the establishment of political order is a precondition for democratization, having noted elsewhere that democracy (either electoral or liberal) has only ever been built in Africa on a foundation of relatively effective states (Bratton and Chang Reference Bratton and Chang2006). But the relationship between state building and democratization does not run in this one direction alone. Reciprocally, competitive elections help to ensure voluntary compliance among citizens, thus helping to legitimize the state. Central to these processes of political development is the attainment of a rule of law, an attribute of democracy (see Diamond and Morlino Reference Diamond and Morlino2005) that, at minimum, guarantees personal security. To capture prevalent trends in contemporary African politics, it is important to explain cases in which order is breaking down, a task that Bates executes skillfully, but equally important to attend to cases in which, through a sequence of regular elections, citizens are beginning to hold Africa's leaders accountable. To be sure, the forces of disorder are powerful—in many places even dominant—but they are not uncontested, most importantly by Africans themselves.
