Notwithstanding the weak, fragile condition of the state in much of Africa, notably in the Horn, there has been a relative dearth of efforts to examine carefully what the process of state building, or rebuilding needs to be in Africa and perhaps elsewhere in the developing world. Clearly, the question of how to build, or rebuild, strong states in the Horn of Africa, as well as elsewhere Africa is an issue of on-going immediacy, as everyone realizes.
There has been no shortage of literature on the properties a strong states would possess and that weak and fragile ones lack: stability, a government that commands the allegiance of its people and generally maintains civil order throughout its internationally recognized borders, a government that is reasonably effective in discharging its tasks including upholding property rights and other requirements for a functioning economy, and a general prevalent sense that the state is in some basic sense legitimate.
The issue of what makes for a viable, strong state gets complicated by those who suggest that a state must be democratic to be strong and, conversely, that a democratic political order is by definition a strong state. The 2014 Mo Ibrahim Index, for example, finds half the countries of the Horn (Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Egypt) to be average for the continent on human rights and political participation, and the rest below average, and all but Kenya, Uganda, and Djibouti to be below average on the rule of law and public safety.
A similar and nearly universal tendency in the academic literature as well as in policy arenas has been to equate state and government, that is, to presume that a strong government is by definition a strong state. The World Bank global measures of governance implicitly seem to commit this elision. By this measure, the Bank survey has found every state in the Horn to be below even the African average. Finally, others link the conception of a strong state to social and economic prerequisites for its existence, as distinct from the properties of a strong state itself. For example, the Fund for Peace publishes an annual survey of state weakness throughout the world constructed on the basis of twelve sets of criteria that include many of these social and economic requisites as though they were elements themselves of a strong state, rather than prerequisites for its existence. Thus, the Fund focuses on such indicators as food and water scarcity, IDP and refugee camps, ethnic and sectarian violence, slum populations, unemployment, and illicit trade. By the totality of these measures, the Fund finds every state in the Horn to be below average even for Africa, with the exception of Djibouti which is average for the continent. Whatever the limitations of the methodologies behind these surveys may be, few would be likely to deny that they capture reality at some level, and that citizen living conditions are a fundamental measure of state strength or its absence.
I have long thought that the problem of weak states, at least in sub-Saharan Africa, fundamentally has been conceptual as well as, quite evidently, existential. Simply put, I believe we lack agreement on a working conception of the meaning of state strength in sub-Saharan Africa and how it is to be achieved. Academics and policy analysts have tacitly relied upon two venerable theories for their insights into European state building, while, at the same time, their applicability to sub-Saharan Africa has rarely been questioned other then obliquely. Early 20th Century German scholar Max Weber defined the state as a compulsory community within territory boundaries and possessed of a monopoly of the means of coercion. More recently, the acknowledged authoritative work on European state building, by the late Charles Tilly, held that the European state was essentially a product of war making and war preparation.
In my reading, neither Weber’s nor Tilly’s authoritative formulations with respect to European states have supplied an adequate vision of what a strong African state would look like, let alone viable pathways to realizing this objective. To be fair to both scholars, Tilly quite explicitly declined to extend his findings beyond the European context and Weber wrote early in the colonial era, decades before independent African states were in prospect. Nonetheless, both within the academy and in policy arenas, there has been a pervasive tendency to presume that one conception of the state, more or less as Weber and Tilly have understood it, has fit all times and locations.
So, the key questions have become what is it about the received model of the state that may be responsible, at least in part, for what has remained state weakness throughout most of the continent since independence, if not before. And what amendments to this model, if not wholesale replacements for it, would establish Africa-appropriate designs for strong, viable states and illuminate pathways to their realization?
At the risk of committing the error of equating state and democracy that I just identified, I do think that the root of the problem may lie in an over-reliance on would-be rulers to be the creators of states, a tendency that the theories of both Weber and Tilly invite.
For one thing, that over-reliance lends a patina of authenticity to the imposition of state like structures that colonial authorities imposed, at least approximated maintaining a monopoly of coercive power during their era, and successfully jostled with each other to establish their boundaries. But that confuses things, because, in rejecting colonial rule, African nationalist leaders and their movements largely left unexamined what aspects of colonially imposed governance structures they chose to maintain and which they wished to discard, as distinct from the question of simply substituting Africans for colonial officials as users of those structures.
In any event, over half a century of African independence has clearly established that capable rulers are a necessary but by no means sufficient element in establishing viable, effective states. Thus, I am inclined to agree with the Fund for Peace that foundations of viable states must include viable socioeconomic and political living conditions for the citizens who will in those states and, by extension their consent to terms for living with each other under those conditions. This also implies a conception of democracy that is somewhat broader than the conventional usage: Democracy as participatory consensus building on terms for sharing membership in a state as well competition for the authority to rule within it.
A related dimension of a more Africa-appropriate conception of viable state building would shift the emphasis away from state building as boundary maintenance more toward state building as political community building and intercommunity comity. The porousness of boundaries in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere in Africa as well as their arbitrary delineation are well recognized. What would it take, in Kenya for example, frankly to take these realities as givens rather than as problems, and to go beyond ethnic conflict mediation, to focus substantively upon how land, water and sub-service mineral resources can be equitably shared instead of contested?
Would this be a more difficult but more realistic approach to African state strengthening?.
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