State reconstruction in Africa: the relevance of Claude Ake's political thought

Studies on post‐conflict reconstruction in Africa have glossed over the need for state transformation as a prerequisite for sustainable peacebuilding in post‐conflict societies. This article fills this gap and discusses the relevance of Claude Ake's political thought for state reconstruction in post‐conflict Africa. It underscores the need for the autochthonous transformation of the state as a central component of peacebuilding and post‐conflict transition in the continent as Ake had suggested. Drawing on Sierra Leone, it theorizes Ake's works on the state in Africa against the backdrop of externally driven state reconstruction projects hinged on hegemonic discourses of ‘nation‐building’ in post‐conflict situations. It presents Ake's corpus as a basis for critiquing ongoing state rehabilitation attempts and urges a return to endogenous initiatives of rebuilding the state from below as a condition for achieving a sustainable democratic reconstruction of the state in post‐conflict Africa.     

The state and internal conflict

Research into the causes of contemporary international conflict faces a number of conceptual limitations, which in turn limits the effectiveness of international conflict resolution efforts. Typically, today's internal conflicts are conceived of as irrational outbursts of 'ethnic' hatred, or the breakdown of normally peaceful political systems. In this paper, I argue that the causes of internal conflicts are, in fact, located in the structures of weak states and the actions of weak state elites, who may deliberately engender conflict as a rational response to the internal and external demands brought on by the intrusive processes of globalisation. In this sense, internal conflict is a 'normal' aspect of weak state politics. The weak state framework not only provides a more satisfying explanation of internal conflict, but it has profound implications for conflict resolution. It suggests that conflict resolution must be focused on state reconstruction activities, rather than on saving failing states. It also suggests that there are likely to be many more internal conflicts which demand international action in the future.     

State Failure and the Clash of Civilisations: An Examination of the Magnitude and Extent of Domestic Civilisational Conflict from 1950 to 1996

This study quantitatively examines Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' theory using data from the State Failure dataset which focuses on intense and violent internal conflicts between 1950 and 1996. The proportion of state failures which are civilisational has remained mostly constant since 1965. The absolute amount of civilisational conflict has dropped considerably since the end of the Cold War. There is no clear evidence that the overall intensity of civilisational state failures is increasing in proportion to non-civilisational state failures. Also, the predictions of Islam's 'bloody borders' and the Confucian/Sinic-Islamic alliance against the West have not yet occurred. In fact, Islamic groups 'clash' mostly with other Islamic groups. However, the majority of the West's civilisational conflicts, during the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, are with the Islamic civilisation. Thus it is arguable that Huntington's prediction that the Islamic civilisation is a potential threat to the West is probably more due to the end of the relevance of the Cold War paradigm than any post-Cold War changes in the nature of conflict. This highlights the potential influence of paradigms on policy and should serve as a caution to academics and policy makers to be more aware of the assumptions they make based on any paradigm.     

‘Your work is of no use to us…’: Administrative interests in ethnographic research (West New Guinea, 1950–1962)

Abstract

The extent of customary land in Samoa and the laws pertaining to its protection create a presumption of state dependence on the regulation of custom in effecting state policies within local contexts. The principal means of regulating custom in Samoa has been and continues to be through state court adjudication of conflicts over customary land and chiefly titles. The transitive nature of ‘custom’ and conceptions of ‘custom’ in Samoa created an opening for court influence in the construction of custom, if not custom's partial reinvention through the agency of the courts. This occurred principally through the courts’ privileging principles of English common law in confirming asserted land rights generally considered unenforceable at the time of Samoa's political partition. The courts re‐interpreted as customary, conceptions of land rights the colonial state's influence attempted to effect within Samoan society. But the source of the changes, and the courts’ role in promoting them, tended not to be equally reflected upon. To the extent such influence is ignored in analyses of Samoan land tenure and customary law, and reproduced within state policies and court adjudication of conflict, custom's social construction is left unexamined, assumed to be more general than it is, and likely to exacerbate tensions and conflict within Samoan society rather than reduce them.     

Ephemeral geopolitics: Tracing the role of refugees in Syria's transnational opposition

It has become common to read that Syria's conflict has become a “globalized civil war,” with the understanding that states have become the key actors shaping its dynamics. While in great part true, such an understanding overlooks the significance of transnational networks in shaping the conflict and, more importantly, how these networks and states have been intimately connected from its early stages. This paper explores how a network of Syrian refugees that I dub the “coordinating class” performed the work of binding together the heterogeneous assemblage that was Syria's opposition movement. Drawing on assemblage theory and two years of multi-sited fieldwork, the paper explores three practices through which this emergent network linked the spaces of exile to the warzone of Syria's opposition-held “Liberated Territories.” In doing so, the paper argues that in Syria's conflict, refugees' geopolitical agency was highly layered, provisional, and ephemeral, yet still shaped the wider geopolitics of the war.     

Team Arab: al‐Jazeera and the flagging of everyday Arabism during the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The linking of living rooms across state borders by al‐Jazeera and other pan‐Arab satellite television channels has prompted claims that a ‘new Arabism’ that undermines state nationalism is emerging. Until now, analysts have mostly focused on the ‘hot’ Arabism in the news coverage of politicised events such as the Israel–Palestine conflict. This article offers a new dimension by suggesting that as important to satellite television's construction and reproduction of Arab identity is the everyday discourse found in less overtly political programmes such as sport. To demonstrate this, it offers an analysis of al‐Jazeera's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics showing how the broadcasts address viewers as a common Arab audience who are simultaneously encouraged to be nationalistic towards their separate nation‐states within a given ‘Arab arena’ of states with whom they should primarily compete. This suggests that new Arabism should in fact be considered a ‘supranationalism’, not a revived Arab nationalism as it simultaneously promotes Arab and state identities in tandem. Finally, it aims to expand our understanding of ‘everyday nationalism’ by adapting Michael Billig's theory and methodology of ‘banal nationalism’ in British newspapers to facilitate the study of sport on supranational Arab identity on satellite television.     

Popular culture in seventeenth-century England

Carl Schmitt emphatically rejected intermediate formations between peace and war. Analysing Schmitt's oscillation between the domestic and the international, the article suggests that the notion of ‘intermediate state’ provides a vital route to the core of Schmitt's political theory. The concept emerges in Schmitt's analysis of the Rhineland crisis, recurs in his vehement critique of Weimar pluralism, and, finally, reappears in his theory of modern war from the Third Reich to the Cold War. ‘Intermediate state’ has both qualitative and temporal aspects; it connotes not only categorical confusion and impurity but also instability and limited duration. Despite his criticism, Schmitt himself utilised the ambiguity, polysemy, and normative ambivalence of the intermediate state in his argumentation, finally giving it an open theological reinterpretation in his later work. Schmitt's theory of political conflict, consequently, is problematically bound to the vague intermediate state of perpetual conflict that he sought to avoid, and to the metaphorical aspects of the notion of battle that he explicitly rejected.     

International relations and the Himalaya: connecting ecologies,cultures and geopolitics

ABSTRACT

This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a mosaic of ethnic groups, many of whom speak threatened languages. Its ice-deposits feed most of Asia's large rivers. In recent years, India and China have pursued large-scale infrastructure development in the region, enabling greater militarisation and extraction, and a tourist rush. These threats are amplified by climate change, which is occurring in the Himalaya at twice global averages, contributing to landslides, flooding, and droughts. However, the region's complexity is not matched by IR's theorisations, which overwhelmingly focus on the possibility of violent conflict between state actors. We argue that IR's analysis of the region must go beyond a states-and-security, Delhi-Beijing-Islamabad centred approach, to look at the numerous interconnections between its geopolitics, cultures and ecologies. We suggest this can be accomplished through incorporating more interdisciplinary analysis, and through focusing on the interaction between the organisation of political authority and the region's environment.     

From ethnic outbidding to ethnic conflict: the institutional bases for Sri Lanka's separatist war1

Abstract. Beginning in the mid‐1950s Sri Lanka's politicians from the majority Sinhalese community resorted to ethnic outbidding as a means to attain power and in doing so systematically marginalised the country's minority Tamils. This article consequently argues that institutional decay, which was produced by the dialectic between majority rule and ethnic outbidding, was what led to Tamil mobilisation and an ethnic conflict that has killed nearly 70,000 people over the past twenty years. It also analyses the influence informal societal pressures exerted on formal state institutions and how this contributed to institutional decay. Evaluating the relations that ensued between social organisations and the Sri Lankan state shows how institutions can prescribe actions and fashion motives even as it will make clear how the island's varied institutions generated a deadly political dynamic that eventually unleashed the ongoing civil war.     

The role of the state in resource use decision-making: the case of the Moomba-Sydney gas pipeline

The development of a 1300 km natural gas pipeline in Australia in late 1976 is used to unravel some of the more important determinants of state action. The analysis highlights the contradictory position of the state in democratic capitalist societies. The separate actions taken by the state in support of the developer, the environmentalists, or to put into effect political ideals reflect a complex set of determinants of the state's behaviour. It is this fact which makes it difficult always to predict the state's response to individual incidents of conflict over resource use. The analysis also illustrates how time and place influenced the action and reaction of the participants in the debate over the location of the pipeline.     

Challenging the ‘absent state’: Neoliberal extractivist governance and state effects in the northwest Peruvian Amazon

Natural resource extraction has been the base of Peruvian economic growth, notably since the neoliberalization of the economy in recent decades. Academic and media accounts portray Peru as an absent state – one of weak institutions to exert environmental control and guarantee citizens' rights – particularly in remote resource extraction areas. This article scrutinizes this idea of absence in the context of neoliberal extractivist governance, via the case of a mining conflict surrounding the creation of the Ichigkat Muja National Park (PNIM) in the Cordillera del Cóndor, in the northwest Peruvian Amazon. We argue that the state is not absent: it is the outcome of contested and re-negotiated relations, institutions, and ideologies. We posit that the goal of guaranteeing private investment shapes state agents' attitudes and interventions to address conflicts. Based on key informant interviews and the review of official social conflict reports, we examine two roles of the state: as a protector of rights and a provider of basic services. We find that, in this case, the regional government's recognition of citizens' rights appears ambiguous, and in general, the state's role as a provider of basic services is deployed to mitigate conflicts that affect significant extractive projects or involve intense social protest. Thus, the neoliberal project of the Peruvian state is mediated in complex relations, constituting a particular and evolving form of neo-extractivism, where social investment is functional to guarantee mining.     

A contested legacy: the Kennedy Committee revisited

The Kennedy Committee Report on Ireland's reformatory and industrial schools, published in 1970, is an important, though contested, milestone in the history of Ireland's childcare policy. The Committee found its genesis in Church/state conflict and conducted much of its work in the teeth of state and religious opposition. Its published report was watered down on the understanding that the state would act to curb the worst excesses of the system without the need for some of the more damaging discoveries reaching the public realm. Notwithstanding this the published report became the focus of political manoeuvring that stifled its potential effectiveness. Its legacy, therefore, is mixed, marking the beginning of the slow painful modernisation of the Irish childcare system whilst being an opportunity lost in terms of its potential to ameliorate the suffering of children detained in the system for a further three decades.     

Establishing the Bougainville Mining Workers' Union, 1969–1976

Bougainville Copper Limited's Panguna mine was a huge and complex undertaking that, despite its potential for creating social disruption, operated successfully for two decades before the outbreak of armed conflict in 1988. One source of conflict, common in mining but neglected in previous research on Bougainville, is labour relations and, in particular, how a local workforce was integrated into a system of negotiation that facilitated the operation of the mine by limiting the level and intensity of workplace conflict. Between 1969 and 1988, the Bougainville Mining Workers’ Union (BMWU) played a key role in this structure of accommodation of conflicting interests. This paper uncovers the history of how the BMWU developed the capacity to represent its members' interests successfully and play a positive role in conflict resolution.     

Not suitable for children: the politicisation of conflict-affected children in post-2001 Afghanistan

The 2001 conflict in Afghanistan has attracted a great deal of international controversy. The impact of the conflict on Afghanistan's children has been no exception. The research conducted by the United Nations and child protection organisations on the experiences of Afghan children throughout the conflict paints a bleak picture. Accounts of children being directly targeted, accidently killed, abducted, actively fighting in armed groups, denied humanitarian assistance or simply struggling to be healthy, happy, educated and secure amid this conflict are a reminder that conflict devastates children's lives. However, while this research demonstrates that children are often war's innocent victims, the ways in which this research is narrated, particularly by belligerent parties to the conflict, are far from innocent. This article examines the political manipulation of research on Afghan children affected by armed conflict. It argues that Afghan children and their experiences have become a powerful moral symbol that is used by belligerents to advance political, military and strategic agendas.     

Why the Homeless Rebel: Housing Struggles in post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Post-apartheid housing struggles urgently need to be addressed in order to consolidate the inclusivist democracy in South Africa. Former white minority governments restricted housing in order to control the movement of Africans and their labour. This paper analyses aspects of post-apartheid housing protest. The argument is that such protests are rooted in a problematic rights discourse of the anti-apartheid struggle, and in the new constitution's recognition of the right of access to adequate housing, which is nonetheless, subjected to fiscal constraints. The article's second focus is on a legacy of land dispossession, which also hinders housing delivery. Failure to realise the right to housing fuels some of the most important conflict that will shape future organisation of state institutions and relations between the state and society.     

An Empire of the Scholars: Transnational Lawyers and the Rule of Opinio Juris

The eternal conflict between justice and violence is the theme of director John Ford's last great film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the world of the American West where Ford's story is set, justice does not just happen; it is a work of manly courage that encompasses a willingness—in extreme cases—to kill those men, such as Liberty Valance, who challenge law and order. Justice will require, as Plato said, a rightly ordered soul, but it will be a soul that must do violence to realize justice in a world that too often resembles a Hobbesian state of nature. In Ford's view, the truth of these violent origins of justice are more likely to be obscured than illuminated by the civilized historian's account of this truth. And we do violence not merely to justice but also to truth itself if we fail to respect the hard reality that civilization requires such measures.     

Trade and peace: the EU and Gaddafi's final decade

This article examines the effectiveness of the EU's use of trade to induce peace in Libya during Gaddafi's final ten years in power, between 2001 and 2011. During this period, the EU implored and reiterated through rhetoric, policy and the exchange of goods and services that trade was to be used as a tool to maintain peace and prevent conflict. Indeed, this peace‐through‐trade assumption is at the heart of the EU, which was founded on the notion that economic interdependence ameliorates potential causes of conflict. Initially, this article embeds its argument in the theory concerned with the relationship between trade and peace, followed by tracking the development of the EU's policy. The main body of the article then provides evidence which goes against the assumption that the trade–peace relationship is positively correlated. Specifically, it is argued that the EU's peace‐through‐trade policy failed in this instance due to the fact that it failed to take into account the Libyan context: namely, the Middle Eastern state's ethnographic and historical makeup; the weapons of mass‐destruction programme and the subsequently induced sanctions; Gaddafi's rule and attempts at reform; as well as the 2011 conflict. All these factors amalgamated to ongoing conflict in Libya during Gaddafi's final decade in power despite EU–Libyan trade continuing to take place during this timeframe.     

Nation-building from (below) the grassroots: Everyday nationalism in Ukraine's bomb shelters

Life has profoundly changed for Ukrainian citizens since the beginning of the Russia–Ukraine war. While millions have fled Ukraine as refugees and displaced persons, others have remained in their cities to take up arms, volunteer, and/or shield for safety. Despite the devastation at all levels of society caused by Russia's ongoing attacks, Ukrainians' expressions and practices of nationhood have endured and even evolved in light of their country's war-torn reality, as is especially evident in the country's bomb shelters. As hegemonic theorising in nationalism studies often centres on the territorial state and its institutions, this paper instead considers the experiences of ordinary individuals who hold important colloquial and vernacular knowledge. Specifically, the project examines the everyday lives of Ukrainians at—or below—the grassroots within bomb shelters in the heavily attacked cities of Chernihiv, Kyiv, and Kharkiv to reveal how Ukrainian nationalism has manifested and even been (re)produced amidst the conflict. In demonstrating that nationalism has served as both a sentiment and expression of self, the findings emphasise its significance in the current conflict as a motivating and unifying force in Ukrainians' everyday lives.     

Negotiating Statehood in a Hybrid Political Order: The Case of Somaliland

This article investigates the negotiation of statehood in Somaliland, a non‐recognized de facto state which emerged from Somalia's conflict and state collapse. The negotiation process centres on the continuing transformation of a hybrid political order, involving ‘formal’ as well as ‘informal’ spheres, both in existing institutions (as ‘rules of the game’) and in the bodies or agents enforcing these rules. The negotiation processes considered take place at the national and local level respectively, as well as between the two. These negotiations are heterogeneous, non‐linear and ongoing. The article demonstrates how the polity's tolerance for heterogeneous negotiations and different forms of statehood allowed local political actors to establish peace in their own local settings first. Although it did not produce uniform statehood, it provided the basis for communities to explore the scope for common statehood. On the national level, hybrid elements initially allowed for a healthy adaptation of statehood to local needs, and for legitimate, productive instruments of negotiation. This responsiveness was not maintained, and current hybrid elements threaten to undermine the polity's stability.     

The Murder of James Leslie Starkey near Lachish

On 10 January 1938, the British archaeologist James Leslie Starkey was murdered on his way from Lachish to Jerusalem. From that time onwards, the murder has been presented as just one more of the insurgency episodes that were so common in those days. There was, however, a conflict at Lachish with the local landowners regarding the excavation of the site's summit, the expedition's preferred area. An amicable resolution of this conflict was never reached between the two sides, and only legal expropriation of this land by the Mandatory Government of Palestine enabled the excavation of the upper part of the site. The landowners never received full compensation for the expropriated land, undoubtedly a strong motive for revenge.