"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know" - St Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, circa 397.
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| Hatfield College, April/May 2014 - getting to grips with the dilemmas of State-Building. |
by Kudakwashe Kanhutu
Use examples to outline challenges and dilemmas of international statebuilding. How can these challenges be dealt with?
Introduction:
Statebuilding is defined as “actions undertaken by international or national actors to establish, reform, or strengthen the institutions of the state and their relation to society” (Call, 2008: 5). The logic that underpins international statebuilding is a very sound one: for peace to be consolidated after conflict there needs to be an effective central state in the given territory. The devil is in the detail however, since usually; the causes of the conflict were a competition as to who should control the state in the first place. The first generic challenge, then, is that the intervener will be trying to reconcile disparate armed groups who are violently opposed to each other – a balancing act. The other challenges and dilemmas relate to the fact that once involved, the intervener becomes implicated, by act or omission, in whatever ill or good effects that will ensure from this process.
The challenges are all the difficulties involved such as; reconciling combatants, lack of resources and expertise, legitimacy, coordination and coherence, dependency, and the destabilizing effects of economic and political reform (Paris and Sisk, 2007). The dilemmas are all those Catch-22 situations that arise once outsiders intervene such as; the footprint, duration, participation, and dependency dilemmas (Paris and Sisk, 2007). This paper will use the United States in Afghanistan as an example to outline the challenges and dilemmas that arise where an intervening statebuilder has vital interests that conflict with the core tenets of statebuilding. Also, as even those actors who can be argued to be without vital interests in the target state are not immune to these dilemmas, some United Nations’ sanctioned statebuilding interventions will also be mentioned to highlight this.
In terms of how these challenges can be dealt with, it will always be a continuous learning process. This is why authors such as David Lake and Roland Paris see succeeding generations of statebuilding, each capable of learning from the mistakes of the past.
International Statebuilding:
There is a consensus that functioning and legitimate states are the only way to consolidate peace, while ungoverned spaces create security threats in the given territory as well as for the international community (Paris and Sisk, 2007: 1; Fearon and Laitin, 2004: 6; Lake and Fariss, 2014: 2). The primary reason for international intervention to do statebuilding then, relates to state fragility and failure, insofar as failed states are seen to threaten international peace and security. This is the theme that informed the United States intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. This kind of intervention creates its own challenges and dilemmas. Secondarily, some actors intervene driven largely by humanitarian impulses. In this bracket falls Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO), the United Nations (UN) and states such as the Nordic countries. This second kind of intervention faces challenges and dilemmas as well, but may be the better kind of intervention as the resentment towards it is not as instant as that which faces those who intervene with force. Indeed, the United States’ intervention in Iraq was even the cause of state failure in the first place.
Interventions to rebuild the state then tend to get accused of being neo-colonial/imperial projects, as there is a direct lineage between statebuilding today and colonial projects in the past, though with some marked differences. The key similarity is that it is outsiders intervening in a state’s territory to build institutional capacity for governing that territory, and as well, an aggregation of those intervening states’ interests and their proposed models, to an extent, supports the view that this is neo-colonialism/imperialism. To this effect Lake and Fariss (2014: 3) sees all statebuilding involving an element of trusteeship whereby, when states fail, the international community has had to step in to govern. Although unlike classic colonialism in the type of actors involved, goals, and envisaged endpoints, there still is a “remarkable degree of control of domestic authority and basic economic functions by foreign countries” (Fearon and Laitin: 7). This fact tends to be a source of resentment for some local actors and does raise the question of legitimacy – with implications for the statebuilding effort’s success or failure – which will be discussed below in this paper as a challenge.
Despite this possible accusation of neo-colonialism, outside intervention to rebuild a failed or failing state is absolutely necessary as there will be a lack of resources, expertise, and trust among the local groups in the target state. The outsiders are then best placed to bring in the required building blocks which Rubin (2008: 28) lists as coercion, capital, and legitimacy. Coercion refers to the security aspect of the intervention whereby foreign military forces provide physical security and assist in the Demobilization, Disarmament, and Reintegration (DDR) as well as Security Sector Reform (SSR) in the failed state (Rubin, 2008: 28). Capital is the international financial assistance for recovery and development, while legitimacy means the intervener’s legitimacy and the internal/external legitimacy of the state they will help build (Rubin, 2008: 28).
These building blocks are then deployed in what Barnett and Zurcher (2010: 23) have termed complex peacebuilding operations, aimed at ending violence as well as removing the root causes of conflict. From the same authors we then get a taste of the difficulty of the task of statebuilding when they write that: “peacebuilders are expecting to achieve the impossible dream, attempting to engineer in years what took centuries for Western European states and doing so under very unfavourable conditions” (Barnett and Zurcher, 2010: 23).
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| Seized with the matter of State-Building at home, Gilesgate Moor, Durham May 2014. |
The Liberal Template:
Germany and Japan have been touted by Krasner (2011: 69) as two examples that inform the possibility that post-conflict statebuilding can be a success. This paper will not have the space to interrogate all the combination of factors that helped in those two cases except to note the one common feature that the United States military and post-war recovery aid were involved in both countries. This was predicated on the fact that these countries would embrace the tenets of liberalism. From this template it is inevitable that the donor state will try to build the target state in its image, or at least in a manner that will benefit the donor. All current statebuilding projects are aimed at achieving the liberal state which subscribes to the tenets of free and globalised markets, democracy, rule of law, constitutional limitations on government power and respect for civil liberties (Richmond and Franks, 2009: 4; Paris, 2004: 5). There are no serious rivals to the liberal template as a large number of the United Nations’ members are or claim to be liberal states.
The expectation is that democracy will make competition between groups peaceful in the form of elections, while marketization will foster sustainable economic development (Paris, 2004: 5). The overarching theme employed here is the democratic/liberal peace thesis which avers that “liberally constituted states tend to be more peaceful both domestically and in their dealings with other countries” (Paris, 2004: 6). Questions have been raised as to the validity of this thesis with regards interstate war but still, according to Paris (2004: 6); there is substantial evidence that supports the postulate that well established market democracies are internally pacific. It is at this stage that we encounter the question posed by Krasner (2011: 66) that how did Denmark get to be Denmark? A question that is meant to highlight the major differences in how the established democracies achieved their statehood in contrast to the current attempts to, as it were, engineer liberal states through statebuilding.
The Liberal State:
Drawing on the widely accepted Weberian conception, the state is the “collection of institutions that successfully claims the monopoly on legitimate authority and use of force over a given territory” (Call, 2008: 7). Authoritarian states, while able to claim a monopoly on the use of force, sow the seeds of future conflict because there is neither accountability nor redress for grievances. The liberal state, in contrast, is founded on the social contract between rulers and the population whereby the state fulfils the core functions of providing security, welfare and representation (Krause and Jutersonke, 2005: 450). For these same authors, this too is the sequence of how the state developed; first there was a violent struggle to establish a monopoly on the use of force, which once attained then allowed the political, economic, and social aspects to evolve normally (Krause and Jutersonke, 2005: 450). The statebuilding projects in existence are trying to achieve this endstate of a liberal state while disregarding the time it took the established liberal democracies to achieve this. A social engineering venture fraught with difficulties as it “assumes that the international community can unpack the historical process by which contemporary states were built, determine how a stable and secure domestic order was created, and apply the ‘recipe’ – with appropriate adaptation to local circumstance – to post-conflict environments” (Krause and Jutersonke, 2005: 451).
Krasner (2011: 66) sees any such attempts that assume a final full Weberian endstate, to be unrealizable because of a variety of intervening variables such as local leaders’ incentives to impede better governance. This possibility is also accepted by Barnett and Zurcher (2010: 23) when they argue that what is most likely to be achieved is a compromised peacebuilding outcome where the peacebuilders get some stability and the local elites protect their power base from any reforms. Hardly the liberal state all the effort will have been expended towards in the first place. Krasner (2011: 66) however, goes further and says that the whole statebuilding consensus that the important task is creation of effective institutions and external actors’ role is to enhance institutional capacity is flawed. He even thinks “contemporary statebuilding is an exercise in organised hypocrisy” (Krasner, 2011: 71). His criticisms of the statebuilding consensus are valid but his prescriptions are untenable as he advocates a formalisation of external control of these target states. If classic colonialism met with armed resistance, there is no reason to think Krasner’s rebranding of it as “shared sovereignty” will make it palatable for local groups. Creating effective and legitimate local institutions in the target state is still the best possible course of action despite envisaged difficulties.
The Challenges and Dilemmas of Statebuilding:
Having established that international statebuilding is necessary, what it aims at, and also having briefly touched on how it is done, we can now turn to the challenges and dilemmas before proposing how they can be mitigated. All through our discussion, it is important to remember that all these attempts at statebuilding will be happening in an atmosphere of recently ended, threatened or continuing violence. The first challenge that arises is that of the legitimacy of the intervener which also impacts on whether the state they build will enjoy legitimacy with the local population.
Legitimacy:
The starting point then is to interrogate the nature of the intervention and the intervening state’s interests and how this may create challenges and dilemmas in its own right. David Lake (2013) argues that the reason why the United States has made limited achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq despite spending billions is due to the statebuilder’s dilemma whereby loyal leaders are preferred over legitimate ones in the target state. He says this is due to the fact that any state that is willing to commit substantial resources to statebuilding will have interests in that state so will seek to install a pliant leader (Lake, 2013). This then works at cross purposes with the attempt to create a legitimate liberal state. A loyal leader so instituted will then “divert resources from building state capacity to building his political coalition and the statebuilder will acquiesce in this diversion, even while recognizing that it undermines legitimacy…. net effect is statebuilding fails to create capable or durable states” (Lake, 2013).
This is certainly the case with Afghanistan where Hamid Karzai was installed as leader in a statebuilding enterprise whose foundation was a foreign military intervention (Suhrke, 2010: 229). The result was that the Afghan leader was thus tarnished and, further, it did not help that NATO war-fighting strategy sometimes empowered local “warlords” to the detriment of the central state any statebuilding project seeks to strengthen (Suhrke, 2010: 230). What, in this instance, will be happening is that the intervener’s actions will be undermining any chances of them reaching their goals. Suhrke (2010: 227) argues that the intervention and all the efforts expended in Afghanistan have only managed to create a rentier “state that has weak legitimacy and limited capacity to utilize aid.”
The bottom line for Lake and Fariss (2014: 6) is that if the statebuilder is viewed as illegitimate this also taints the project and the society will reject it. United Nations mandated statebuilding projects would then be more acceptable interventions. Still, these will also suffer from difficulties of establishing legitimacy for the state owing to the incentives for local actors to resist better governance or, their competition to be in control of the state (Barnett and Zurcher, 2010: 23; Krasner, 2011: 66; Lake and Fariss, 2014: 7). This was the case in East Timor where a UN sanctioned legitimacy building project was hijacked by Mari Alkatiri’s Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (Fretilin) thus sowing the seeds for continual power struggles (Richmond and Franks, 2011: 96). This feeds into the next challenges of statebuilding.
Liberal Intervention Shocks on Target State:
Even the most well-intentioned, well-structured and benevolent intervention may not necessarily result in a positive outcome. According to Barnett and Zurcher (2010: 23), “shock therapy, peacebuilding style, undermines the construction of the very institutions that are instrumental for a stable peace.” The shocks Barnett and Zurcher have in mind here are the destabilizing effects of liberal economic policies as witnessed in Rwanda and other places that have experienced IMF or World Bank administered Structural Administered Programmes. In Afghanistan, attempts to introduce economic reform have faced a different but related problem. The availability of financial resources introduced by the United States, belatedly, for stimulating economic and developing capacity has spurred corruption among the elites whose interests lie in preserving their power and not state capacity (Lake and Fariss, 2014: 11; Dodge, 2013: 1208). This then leads to the challenge of dependency, whereby because the state has no capacity to collect taxes or generate any revenue otherwise, they depend on foreign aid (Suhrke, 2010: 230), with implications for legitimacy of the Afghan state. The fact that Afghanistan lacks resources and expertise is a given, but to fully draw out what this implies, a comparison with Iraq suffices. The de-Baathification of Iraq is said by Dodge (2013: 1206) to have deprived the Iraq state of around 120 000 capable civil servants which then forced the United States to expend $200.4 billion in attempting to re-establish that expertise.
There is also a consensus in the literature that, with the end of the Cold War, there was a multiplicity of actors who became involved in statebuilding; coordination and coherence therefore becomes a concern for the integrity of the project. Also, as the number of activities multiplied, timing and sequencing would also be factors to consider. These factors apply to multilateral as well as unilateral interventions as even statebuilding institutions of the same country can find themselves at cross purposes. Generally, IMF recommendations such as streamlining the civil service and fiscal restraint clashes with the UN or NGOs’ desire to get ex-combatants into government employment as part of the conflict resolution tools (Paris, 2010: 55). In Afghanistan the United States strategic imperatives which necessitated co-optation of warlords is said by Durch (2012: 89) to have undermined the multilateral efforts at statebuilding contained in the Bonn Agreement. The challenge of timing and sequencing is better viewed in Angola where the United Nations hastily introduced elections before other state capacities had been consolidated which led to renewed fighting (Call, 2008: 1). In Afghanistan it was a case of installing elections rapidly but without the accompanying accountability and legitimacy (Collier, 2008: 113).
The Dilemmas Proper:
The Afghanistan case throws up the dilemmas which are equally true in other settings. The first dilemma is the duration dilemma whereby the statebuilder needs time to complete their work but the longer they stay the more they are seen as an occupier and possible target of a violent response (Paris and Sisk, 2007: 6). The second is the footprint dilemma where a larger footprint will be viewed as intolerable intrusion by local actors while a light footprint would not be able to provide security or any other services to the whole country (Edelstein, 2010: 82). The third dilemma is that of dependency whereby because there is no expertise, the more the intervener does the more the local population become dependent on her and unable to develop their own capacity (Paris and Sisk, 2007: 6). Lastly, the participation dilemma refers to the fact the intervener will be forced to include the agents of insecurity as partners otherwise they will become spoilers (Paris and Sisk, 2007: 6).
Conclusion: A Conflict Sensitive Intervention
The thread running through this essay is that there are really no easy ways to deal with the challenges and dilemmas of statebuilding as they are inherent to the process. The only safeguards are to follow the guidelines espoused in OECD Conflict Sensitive intervention protocols such as Do No Harm. The intervener has to understand local conflict dynamics and understand that their involvement is a possible incentive for continued conflict (OECD, 2010: 10) and thus act in a manner that mitigates their effects. The do no harm principle also extends to the “before picture,” whereby the statebuilder should not be the reason the state failed in the first place. The Afghanistan military intervention while defensible; the Iraq intervention was, by Petraeus’s admission, questionable (RUSI, 2013: 82). Regardless of all the problems highlighted above, this essay has argued that the liberal statebuilding template is both necessary and the only viable option. It will remain a continuous learning process with succeeding generations attempting to correct the manifest defects of current efforts.
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| The "Notebook" |
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