Fragile states and the evolution of risk governance: intervention,prevention and extension

Following the plane crashes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, Ulrich Beck claimed that the West would need to pursue ‘border-transcending new beginnings’ towards a more cosmopolitan world. Rather than any radical transformation along cosmopolitan lines, however, this paper maps a process of incremental reform and policy bricolage, where the post-cold war politics of intervention, and the securitisation of development, have been extended to encompass international terrorism in three overlapping phases. Although these overlapping phases – intervention, prevention and extension – are reflexive moments, they constitute a strengthening of the prevailing rationalities and technologies of risk rather than a radical rupture.     

Pathological counterinsurgency: the failure of imposing legitimacy in El Salvador,Afghanistan, and Iraq

Many voices in the US policy community have suggested that El Salvador provided a model for US counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on the unsound contention that elections increased government legitimacy and effectiveness. The same flawed assessments were present in counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan – unfounded assumptions that elections would increase legitimacy and improve institutional performance and human rights records lead to inaccurate analysis and bad strategy. Indeed, the US experience calls into question the ability of even a great power to impose legitimacy on a partner in order to wage counterinsurgency. Assuming that elections will advance such legitimacy is a dangerous pathology.     

Beyond the nation: global democratisation in Uganda and the politics of dispensation

Global frameworks for democratic development today tend to remain within a comparative lens where each country is treated as a sovereign capsule. This portrait eludes the political structures that accompany contemporary globalisation and set the conditions for domestic development. Notably, the comparative perspective eschews the hierarchical nature of states and influential non-state actors that impact democracy movements. Merging international relations theory and comparative politics and using the example of Uganda to illustrate, I create ‘the politics of dispensation.’ Like a doctor dispensing a pill to a patient, Uganda shows how susceptible a country can be to forces beyond democratic control.     

Civil society in Mozambique: NGOs,religion, politics and witchcraft

Our aim is to problematise the dominant discourses and practices around civil society from a Southern perspective. We first examine critically, from a broadly Gramscian perspective, the way in which the concept of civil society has been deployed in development discourse. This highlights its highly normative and North-centric epistemology and perspectives. We also find it to be highly restrictive in a post-colonial Southern context insofar as it reads out much of the grassroots social interaction, deemed ‘uncivil’ and thus not part of duly recognised civil society. This is followed by a brief overview of some recent debates around civil society in Africa which emphasise the complexity of civil society and turn our attention to some of the broader issues surrounding state-society relations, democracy and representation in a Third World context, exemplified through our case study research in Mozambique, Inhassunge district (Zambézia Province). The privileging of Western-type Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as drivers of democracy and participatory development in Mozambique have considerable implications for current debates around good governance, civil society strengthening and social accountability programmes and strategies.     

Critical barriers to joint production: datu politics and insurgent fragmentation in Southern Philippines

Abstract

In understanding how groups overcome collective action problems of mass mobilisation in civil wars, a joint-production explanation was put forth in the civil war literature. According to this explanation, collective action can be successful when leaders at the centre tie the public good – violence towards the overall goal of the movement – inextricably to private interests of actors at the peripheral levels of the conflict. It is through this logic of joint production that we can understand the failures of the Islamic insurgencies in Southern Philippines and the spiralling levels of violence. Where other movements cohered under a common identity, the Islamist insurgency in Southern Philippines saw high degrees of fragmentation. In this paper, I argue that cleavages of regionalism created by colonial disruptions of land and social relations became a critical barrier for insurgent joint production. Furthermore, interactions between these identities and the state can pose further collective action problems. In Southern Philippines, insurgent leaders are unable to cut across these cleavages, resulting in increasingly fragmented movements and protracted conflict. Therefore, I argue that a joint-production approach to understanding civil wars can be especially promising when culturally and historically situated to explain why collective action often fails in civil war.