Fragility within stability: the state,the clan and political resilience in Somaliland

Abstract

Even in the context of a relatively flourishing state, fragility can be an enduring feature of a political system, particularly in the case of recently established or unrecognised states. This article examines the nature of state-building in a specific context to question the assumption that forms of hybrid governance or pre-existing forms of governance are a necessary evil to be tolerated but which needs ultimately to be overcome during state-building. It does this by adopting the language of resilience and focusing on the case of Somaliland to highlight the role of clan governance as a mechanism of political resilience and as a means of promoting the flexibility required for state-building. Yet, at the same time, the process of state-building often involves formalising governance and limiting the role of traditional social-political forms of governance such as clans, ignoring their role in legitimating and stabilising the political system. However, as this article argues, stability and fragility are inextricably linked; while the clan system has been an important force in stabilising the state, it has also become a pressure point for the state’s latent fragility. By contextualising fragility and stability within the language of resilience, though, this symbiotic relationship can be better analysed.     

Governing disorder: the Australian Federal Police and Australia's new regional frontier

Abstract

The Australian Federal Police has in recent years become an important actor in both the implementation and design of Australian-led state building interventions in Australia's near region of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The article focuses on the recent expansion of the Australian Federal Police as a way of understanding the emergence of a new partly (and strategically) deterritorialized, ‘regional’ frontier of the Australian state. Within this new frontier, whose fluctuating outlines the Australian Federal Police not only polices but also to a considerable extent shapes and reshapes, as one of the primary expert agencies on identifying and managing transnational security risks, Australian security is portrayed as contingent on the quality of the domestic governance of neighbouring states, thereby creating linkages between the hitherto domestic governing apparatus of the Australian state and those of other countries. This allows for the rearticulation of the problems affecting intervened states and societies – indeed, their very social and political structures – in the depoliticized terms of the breakdown of ‘law and order’ and the absence of ‘good governance’, which not only rationalizes emergency interventions to stabilize volatile situations, but also delegitimizes and potentially criminalizes oppositional politics. The Australian Federal Police, however, does more than merely provide justification for intrusive state transformation projects. Its transnational policing activities open up a field of governance within the apparatus of intervened states that exists in separation from international and domestic law. The constitution of such interventions ‘within’ the state leaves intact the legal distinction between the domestic and international spheres and therefore circumvents the difficult issue of sovereignty. As a result, police and other executive-administrative actors obtain discretionary ordering powers, without dislodging the sovereign governments of intervened countries.     

日本FTA战略论析

战后以来,日本曾长期奉行以"贸易立国"战略为指导、以多边贸易体制为框架的对外贸易政策,因为这一制度安排给日本带来了巨大的经济利益。但自20世纪90年代末起,日本对FTA和EPA的关注日渐升温,并逐步发展起一套系统、明确的FTA战略。从背景来看,其对外贸易政策的转向是国内外政治经济形势变化的产物。就性质而言,FTA战略是日本在新时代的"贸易立国"战略。处理好开放和保护的关系、克服多元官僚制的困境、重视日中FTA,是日本FTA战略不容回避的问题。     

Unintended Consequences of State-building Projects in Contested States: The EU in Palestine

ABSTRACT

The existing literature on state-building has focused mainly on post-conflict cases and ‘conventional’ examples of statehood, without taking into consideration the particularities of states that remain internally and/or externally contested. The EU’s engagement in Palestinian state-building through the deployment of EUPOL COPPS and EUBAM Rafah has generated various types of unintended consequences: anticipated and unanticipated, positive and negative, desirable and undesirable, some of which fulfill and some of which frustrate the initial intention. These have important reverberations for the EU’s conflict resolution strategies in Israel and Palestine, the most important being the strengthening of power imbalances and the enforcement of the status quo.     

Pre-colonial centralisation,traditional indirect rule,and state capacity in Africa

What explains contemporary variation in state capacity across African states? Recent research has focused on the possible role played by colonial and pre-colonial institutions. This paper investigates the way in which colonial and pre-colonial institutions interacted to affect the public legitimacy and coercive capacity of African states on independence. A coherent configuration of historical institutions, pre-colonial centralisation combined with colonial indirect rule through traditionally legitimate rulers, contrasts with the incoherent and comparatively illegitimate configurations of pre-colonial decentralisation with traditional rule and pre-colonial centralisation with colonial non-traditional or direct rule. The paper tests the theoretical expectations in a historical instrumental-variables framework.     

Modern at last? Variety of weak states in the post-Soviet world

Scholarly interest has recently shifted from issues of democratic transition to those of state formation and state viability. The paper reviews scholarly contributions to understanding state weakness and suggests criteria and indicators to capture stateness in the former Soviet region. It suggests a preliminary ranking of the post-Soviet states along dimensions of national order, economic efficiency and political viability. The paper hypothesizes a causal mechanism through which state development in the region may occur by incorporating both structural and policy-related factors. It concludes that most states in the region can only be characterized as weak, and their urge to become modern is therefore yet to materialize.     

Mitigating the Risk to Primitive Accumulation: State-building and the Logging Boom in Solomon Islands

Abstract

In recent years, various forms of inter/transnational state-building have become increasingly common as a way of managing the perceived risk posed by dysfunctional governance in so-called fragile states to Western security. In Solomon Islands, the Australian government has led a robust and expansive regional intervention, designed to build the capacity of the Solomon Islands government and bureaucracy to provide more effective governance. Dominant approaches to state-building link state failure with a failure of development and typically involve considerable efforts to promote economic development through the establishing of institutional structures seen to be supportive of liberal markets. Though economic activity has expanded considerably in Solomon Islands following the initial 2003 intervention, much of this has occurred in the unsustainable logging industry, whose expansion is reliant upon primitive accumulation. Therefore, to the extent that the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands' (RAMSI) state-building programmes have supported market-led growth, they have unwittingly acted to mitigate the risk to primitive accumulation. However, the logging boom occurring on RAMSI's watch is likely to lead to future social and political instability, either as a result of resource-depletion or due to bottom-up forms of social conflict around the destruction of local habitats.