This is the thesis I submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Science, Defence, Development & Diplomacy in the School of Government & International Affairs at Durham University. In writing this paper, I was motivated by the need to understand why my brother ended up fighting so far away from home in the DRC. Fully understanding all the mistakes that were made in the decision to get involved in the DRC war means these historic mistakes will not be repeated, and the Republic of Zimbabwe would never again expend its meagre resources in wars of choice.
I had initially meant to dedicate my thesis to my brother and his comrades from 1 Commando, for their courage and unwavering loyalty to the Republic of Zimbabwe, but having read more about the DRC and its cyclical civil wars, I decided that a better body to dedicate my thesis to, is all the people of Zimbabwe: may our country never find itself in civil strife.
Dedication
To the people of Zimbabwe, may
our peaceful polity long continue!
Kudakwashe Kanhutu, Durham University,
School of Government & International Affairs, September 2014.
Abbreviations
DRC - Democratic Republic of Congo
FAR
- Rwandan Armed Forces
HDI
- Human Development Index
HDR - Human Development Report
ICC
- International Criminal Court
ICISS - International Commission on
Intervention and State Sovereignty
IMF
- International Monetary Fund
R2P
- Responsibility to Protect
UN
- United Nations
UNDP - United Nations Development
Programme
UNGA - United Nations General Assembly
UNSC - United Nations Security Council
Abstract
The recurring civil wars and deaths of civilians
from preventable causes in the DRC forms the puzzle for this paper: why has the
state remained so weak over such a long period? This paper has cast the
inability by the state's institutions to provide human security as state
weakness. Human security is then used as a lens to interrogate where the
international community and the local elites, through commission or omission,
have been culpable for state weakness in the DRC. Human security is argued to
be achievable under conditions where the state is legitimate and has a monopoly
on the use of force - a strong state. This point necessitates a comparison
between conditions faced by the consolidated European states in their creation
and those which now confront the post-colonial states. The reasons for state
weakness here are then argued to be on two levels: the international level and
the state level. At the international level, the continued extractive
relationship with the global North and the actions of the DRC's neighbours are inimical
to the state's ability to maintain a monopoly on the use of force. At the state
level, the most significant cause is the self-defeating short term strategies
adopted by post-colonial elites to consolidate their power at independence.
This paper argues that the ideal Weberian state with its impersonal
institutions is the best possible way of achieving human security in the DRC
and other post-colonial states. Human security provision would then be the
remedy to legitimacy crises that arise due to the colonial legacy.
List of Contents
Dedication.....................................................................................................1
Abbreviations................................................................................................2
Abstract.........................................................................................................3
Chapter One
Introduction………………………………………….
..................................6
A Brief History of the DRC……………………...............................6
The State of the DRC Today……………………..............................7
Relevance and Significance………………………............................9
Literature Review…………………………………….....................10
Chapter Two
The
State………………………………………………………….13
Introduction…………………………………………………13
The State of Nature………………………………………..14
The Modern State………………………………………18
Statehood…………………………………………………21
The Weberian State………………………………………23
State Making……………………………………………….25
The Post-Colonial State……………………………………26
Conclusion…………………………………………………28
Chapter Three
Human
Security…………………………………………….29
Introduction……………………………………………29
What is Human Security?......................................................30
Human Security: A Contested Concept……………………33
Adoption by Practitioners………………………………………….38
An Integrative Concept…………………………………………….40
Conclusion…………………………………………………………42
Chapter Four
A
Multi-Causal Analysis of State Weakness in the DRC…………44
Introduction.......................................................................................44
The International Level………………………………………..44
A Bad Neighbourhood…………………………………………47
The Resource Curse…………………………………………..49
The State Level………………………………………………..50
Colonial Legacy and the 'Lame Leviathan'……………………...51
Conclusion………………………………………………………55
Chapter Five
Conclusion:
The Centrality of the State in the Provision of Human Security …………………………………………………………………57
Bibliography………………………………………………………………60
Chapter One
Introduction:
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been
described as a ‘geological scandal’ on account of the fact that it has vast
mineral wealth yet its people live in abject poverty and have been continually
brutalised by recurring civil wars (Turner, 2007: 49). The failure of the
international community to help the DRC state achieve a semblance of order and
stability raises this question; why has there been this failure to bring order
and stability here? The claim has been made that there are local elites, as
well as states such as the United States,
Belgium, Rwanda, and Uganda who benefit from the DRC’s
weakness and thus prefer the status quo. The United
States and Belgium
were certainly implicated in the destabilization just after independence and
then over the 31 years they supported the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko
which eviscerated the state institutions of the Congo (Weissman, 2014). To
understand state weakness in the DRC today then requires us to take a look back
to the history of the formation of its modern state.
A Brief History of the DRC
Indeed, a look at the history of the Congo reflects
that human security has never been central to the calculations of the elites.
The Congo Free State from 1885 – 1908 was when this territory was controlled as
personal property by King Leopold II of Belgium; “whose single purpose was the
extraction of wealth without regard to human cost” (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2011: 2).
In the 23 years King Leopold II owned the Congo, “economic exploitation under
conditions akin to slavery during the ‘red rubber’ campaign resulted in nearly
ten million deaths and gave rise to the first international human rights
movement of the twentieth century, the Congo Reform Association”
(Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2011: 2; Kisangani, 2012: 13). When it became the Belgian
Congo from 1908 – 1960, the state worked but on the basis of the same brutal
practices as under King Leopold II where native workers were driven by the whip
to achieve their targets (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2011: 2). When colonialism ended
and events led to Mobutu ascending to power, he renamed the country Zaire from 1971
– 1997 and under his rule; corruption and neo-patrimonialism decimated state
institutions and made the state so weak it could not even collect taxes
required for its continuity (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2011: 2). From 1997 to 2001, the
country was renamed DRC and under Laurent Kabila the rot continued as tribalism
and corruption meant the institutions remained weak, culminating in the six
million deaths of the Second Congo War of 1998 – 2002 (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2011:
2). After Laurent Kabila’s assassination in 2001, his son Joseph Kabila took
over power and has been President to this date.
The
State of the DRC Today:
As it exists today, the state is still unable to carry
out its basic functions of maintaining law and order which, in turn, has
debilitating consequences for the other aspects of human life in the DRC. It is
this situation of continued state weakness which forms the puzzle for this
paper. Thus, my research questions are; what explains state weakness in the Congo over
time? What is the nature of the challenges that have prevented the DRC state
from becoming fully capable of providing security to its citizens? What does
the notion of human security mean in the context of the DRC and under what
conditions is it possible to achieve human security?
To answer these questions this essay has cast state
weakness as the inability of the state’s institutions to carry out their tasks
effectively. It will also be argued that, in the 21st century, the
state’s role is to provide human security. As there is also a concern that
perhaps some of these imported concepts cannot work in Africa,
this paper will also defend the universal applicability of these concepts. It
is this author's view that these two main concepts under discussion in this
paper – the state and human security – when explained properly, are such as any
concepts that anyone standing behind Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ would want to
have in the society they will belong to. So, Chapter 2 justifies the
Weberian/Westphalian state as necessary for maintenance of law and order
without which all the other aspects of human endeavour cannot take place.
Granted, colonialism was certainly the wrong vector for diffusion of the state
to Africa, but Africanists must also acknowledge that the organisation in Africa as scattered kingdoms failed to provide Africans
with protection against this external aggression.
Chapter 3 engages with the human security debate so as
to establish whether it has any utility for the academic or the policymaker.
Human security has been accused of being utopian insofar as there are not
enough resources to allocate for every single issue it raises,
but still, a concern with human security can identify where resources are being
withheld or diverted. For example, even if we privilege military spending for
national security, the nature of defence acquisition at the moment, according
to IHS (2014), is such that the buyer can get ‘indirect offsets’ from the
manufacturer. So the type of ‘offsets’ the elites make may show us if they have
human security in mind. Malaysia’s ‘indirect offset’ for purchasing 18 Russian
Sukhoi fighter jets was such that they got their first Astronaut into space - a
venture which was worth US$25 million (IHS, 2014). A developing country
concerned with human security would use the ‘indirect offset’ for hospitals or
food security.
Chapter 4 is the discussion chapter which seeks to
show what has caused the DRC state to remain weak. The most significant factor
is Mobutu’s rule but the international community is also implicated. This
Chapter also relies on Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence and
structural theory of imperialism to point out the international community’s
hand in the weakness of the DRC state.
Relevance
and Significance:
This study will attempt to establish whether the
concept of human security has any academic and policy utility or whether it is
just a fashionable label that has entered the international relations
discourse. To that end, the question posed in this paper will be: how useful is
human security in assessing the security challenges in the DRC? Human
security’s great contribution to international relations is that it reflects
the current security realities on the globe, where citizens can be equally
threatened by disease, hunger, poverty, or natural disasters as by military
invasion by other states. The state-centric view of international relations which
was very capable in explaining the threat environment during the Cold War may
no longer capture all the threats to humanity in the 21st century. So
for this paper, the human security lens should be useful in critiquing more
acts of commission or omission by the DRC as well as identifying where the
international community is the source of the problem of state weakness there. This
paper will also argue that human security can only be achieved where the state
is strong. For the concerned policymaker, the takeaway point from this essay
will be that they should strengthen state institutions not undermine them. This
insight will be relevant to the local elites as well as to the international
donor community.
Literature
Review:
What follows here is a very brief literature review
reflecting the three main discussion chapters as the same points are expanded
upon in the main body of this essay. The
first chapter’s main discussion points concerns how people leave the ‘state of
nature’ and create a ‘public power’ that will protect their collective
interests. The literature on the state, in this regard, tends to be settled
insofar as most of the authors on this subject, even today, must take Thomas
Hobbes as their starting point then contrast his views with that of John Locke
or Rousseau. When it comes to the modern state too, Max Weber’s work is where
the field draws its theoretical inspiration and definitions from. These
thinkers’ works will be discussed in Chapter 2 where I defend the idea that the
state is central to human security.
With regards the relationship between human security
and the state in the Congo
itself, a survey yields that even now the state is woefully inadequate in the
provision of security. The coping mechanisms described in Trefon’s Reinventing
Order in the Congo makes it abundantly clear that life without the state
would be unbearable. He says that “the order that is being reinvented by Kinois
is a people’s initiative with nothing to do with Weberian political order with
its functioning bureaucracy, democratically elected representatives, tax
collectors, law and enforcement agents and impartial judicial system” (Trefon,
2004: 2). Having opened with this hopeful line, the picture he and his
contributors paint is one which actually makes it urgent that the Weberian
state be helped to take root in the DRC. He writes that “parents are not only
forced to decide which children will be able to go to school in a given year,
they also have to decide who shall eat one day and who shall eat the next”
(Trefon, 2004: 4). The same gloomy prospects are repeated across all the other
sectors where human security is absent by the other contributors in this
volume. It is in response to these kinds of hopeless living conditions,
especially in a country of DRC’s natural resource endowment, that this essay
argues for the order that ensures from a consolidated Weberian state.
Martin (2010: 55) also records that an “estimated 1
200 people are dying daily from illness and malnutrition aggravated by civil
war.” This has happened despite the fact that the EU has been involved in the
DRC on a mission premised on the provision of human security. Martin (2010: 55)
then notes the criticism that the top down initiatives of the EU have limited
impact on the ordinary populations as the corrupt state just diverts resources
for its own purposes. A criticism that was also shared by Marriage (2011: 1892)
who thought that these top down interventions tend to have the effect of being
premised on the security requirements of the donor states and not those of the
ordinary people in the DRC.
While these concerns are valid, this author thinks it
is unavoidable having to deal with the state, because human security is best
achieved when the state has the monopoly on the use of force. Where the state
is absent as in the DRC, the problems can be reduced to what was called the
‘vicious cycle’ by Stewart (2004: 278), whereby lack of development leads to
conflict which leads to lack of development. She contrasted this with the
‘virtuous cycle’ where high levels of security lead to development and
development then promotes security (Stewart, 2004: 279). Stewart’s work is the
one that is closest to the argument of this paper as she raises failure of the
social contract as a potent cause of insecurity (Stewart, 2004: 273). This
paper’s further premise is that legitimacy can be attained if elites honour the
social contract and work for the equitable provision of social goods. Of course
this author is also aware that there have been elites who attempted to honour
their social contract with the population, such as Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso,
but who got eliminated if this ran contrary to powerful outside forces’
interests. I now turn first to the defence of my central thesis: that the state
is central to the provision of human security.
Chapter Two
The State
Introduction:
The question is often asked in the social sciences as
to whether the concepts that the field has to deal with – the state, democracy,
human rights, and rule of law – are universally applicable. This is a debate
between the claims of relativism and those of universalism. The question arises
because the field is conscious of the pitfalls of parochialism. There is a need
to refrain from taking it for granted that the way things are done in one place
is how things are, or should be done everywhere. Still, there are some concepts
which can be argued to be held in common by all of humanity. Some concepts,
indeed, transcend geographical location, cultural predilections and time
periods. One such concept is that law and order needs an enforcer. This chapter
contends that “the normative state, equipped with a Weberian self-image as a rational
– legal essence,” embodies the concept of an optimal enforcer of law and order
and is capable of “exportability irrespective of the cultural specificities of
receiving societies” (Young, 2012: 33). It then briefly outlines why the
Sub-Saharan post-colonial states have failed to adopt this model successfully.
The state, when defined as the abstract idea of an
enforcer of law and order, does satisfy the above notion of universal
applicability. It being logical that wherever a group of people have continuous
intercourse, there is a need for there to be an authority to provide order and
settle the disputes that will inevitably arise. This chapter will argue that
the state is necessary for the management of relations between people as, in
its absence, chaos and insecurity will ensure. The chapter begins with a look
at the conditions that are likely to subsist among people in the absence of an
arbiter vested with powers to coerce compliance with the law. It then turns to
the idea of the modern state and, further, an explanation of how the state is
to be understood in this paper. The focus here will be on the efficacy of state
institutions. Reflecting the current reality in international relations, the
paper then discusses the main features of the consolidated ‘Weberian’ state
before contrasting it with the, seemingly, malformed post-colonial state. All
this will help in beginning to think about what the state’s raison d'être
in the 21st Century ought to be. In this thesis, this will be argued
to be provision of human security, as will be expanded upon in Chapter 3.
Chapters 2 and 3 thus serve as a foundation for the discussion – in Chapter 4 –
why post-colonial states, such as that of the DRC, have been found wanting in
the provision of human security.
The
State of Nature:
Nozick (2006: 3) posed the question that “if the state
did not exist would it be necessary to invent it?” To this question, the answer
seems to be that the state, defined as enforcer of law and order, is the
corollary to human existence. Plato recognised that as individuals were not
self-sufficient, they formed associations so as to meet their different needs,
resulting in the formation of societies living together in what today are
called states (Plato, 1955: 55 – 56). Further, he recognised that these
societies though they had their farmers, weavers, blacksmiths and various other
artisans, they would still need imports, giving rise – of necessity – to
interaction with other societies similarly instituted abroad (Plato, 1955: 57). Plato was writing in the 5th
Century, but his thoughts resonate with the way human affairs are conducted in
the 21st Century. The human condition is such that individuals and
communities can only satisfy their needs in contact with each other. Our
knowledge that scarcity tends to lead to conflictual relations in society then
means that an arbiter is necessary. This arbiter takes the form of a ‘common’
or ‘public power’ vested with physical force so as to be effective (Vincent,
1987: 218; Held’ 1989: 19). One of the most important thinkers on this matter –
Thomas Hobbes – used the ‘state of nature’ metaphor to show that life quickly
becomes intolerable if a society does not have a ‘public power’ to enforce law
and order (Hampsher-Monk, 1992: 27).
In his ‘state of nature’ metaphor, Hobbes took a very
pessimistic view of human nature if left unrestrained by the threat of
punishment by a sovereign power. He argued that because people are generally of
equal ability, they would all hope to achieve their goals through using force
against each other (Hobbes, 1996: 83). Such that “if any two men desired the
same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies”
(Hobbes, 1996: 83). So, for him, it
followed that “where an invader hath no more to fear, than another man’s single
power; if one plant, sow, build, or possess a convenient seat, others may
probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to dispossess, and
deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or
liberty” (Hobbes, 1996: 83). Under these conditions, there would be mutual
distrust among members of society as people would seek to secure themselves by
any means possible (Hobbes, 1996: 83).
He concluded that “hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without
a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is
called war”
The
full extent of his ‘state of nature’ metaphor then holds that;
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war,
where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time,
wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and
their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no
place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no
culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be
imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing
such things as require much force; no knowledge of the of the face of the
earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst
of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man,
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Hobbes, 1996: 85).
The above passage presciently captures the conditions
of life faced in the DRC, especially the way lack of physical security impacts
negatively on all the other aspects of human endeavour. To gently dissuade
Hobbes’s critics, who proposed different versions of the original condition of
mankind, Hampsher-Monk (1992: 26) notes that Hobbes never claimed this had
actually happened in a “generalised
historical epoch,” he only meant to show what would happen if political
authority was absent.
The way out of this ‘state of nature’ predicament for
Hobbes is to create conditions whereby mutual distrust among the people is
eliminated through a ‘social contract’ which transfers people’s rights to a
powerful authority – the ‘Leviathan’ (Held, 1989: 16). This common power will
have to wield absolute coercive power as “covenants, without the sword, are but
words, and of no strength to secure a man at all” (Held, 1989: 16). Another
facet of this ‘common power’ that is salient for this thesis is that it goes
beyond merely providing physical security for its subjects but also protecting
their property, family, wealth, and means of livelihood (Held, 1989: 17). These
same features translated to the parlance of our age are, indeed, the concept of
human security.
However, Hobbes’ view of the ‘state of nature’ is
contested by other thinkers such as John Locke and Jean Jacques-Rousseau who
both took a less pessimistic view while relying on the same metaphor. Locke
rejected both Hobbes’s view of the state of nature as a condition of ‘war of
all against all,’ as well as his solution of a great Leviathan wielding
absolute power (Held, 1989: 19). To the notion of the great Leviathan with
absolute power, he said “this is to think than Men are so foolish that they
take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done to them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes,
but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by Lions” (Held, 1989:
19). In the 20th and 21st centuries, this argument has
been used by people who observe the potent dangers authoritarian sovereigns can
pose to their own subjects – the Holocaust under Hitler is an often cited
example.
Where the actual ‘state of nature’ was concerned Locke
thought that “to understand power aright, and derive it from its original, we
must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect
freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as
they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or
depending upon the will of any other man” (Locke, 1998: 118). Disagreements and
injuries will surely arise, but not at the dystopian scale proposed by Hobbes.
When these injuries happen, men in a state of nature can “punish the
transgressors of that law to such a degree as may hinder its violation”
(Nozick, 2006: 10). But for the ‘inconveniences of the state of nature,’ Locke
proposed civil government (Nozick, 2006: 10). The inconveniences of the ‘state
of nature’ are listed as; “men who judge in their own case will always give
themselves the benefit of the doubt…. personal enforcement of rights leads to
feuds…. and a person may lack the power to enforce his rights” (Nozick, 2006:
11; Held, 1989: 20). So, for these reasons, people would cede their rights to a
‘common power’ but this consent could be withdrawn if that power failed in
living up to its task (Held, 1989: 19).
The important thing to note here is that these two
thinkers, Hobbes and Locke, who had different starting points with regards
their views of human nature, both agree that law and order needs an enforcer.
Their only difference is that Hobbes proposed an absolute sovereign while Locke
proposed what today is called a liberal democracy. This enforcer of law and
order today is called the state and its raison d'être is “maintenance of
law and order at home and protection against aggression from abroad” (Held,
1989: 22). The different kinds of ‘public power’ proposed by Hobbes and Locke
have in themselves a bearing on whether transfer of power will be peaceful or
whether it becomes a source of conflict. The hope at this stage, however, is
that this paper has sketched out the philosophical ideas undergirding the idea
of the state. It now turns to the modern
state’s features, starting with the ideal Weberian state as reflected – to a
great extent – by countries with control over their territories, before
introducing the extant features of the post-colonial state.
The
Modern State
A trenchant definition of the modern state can be
found in Max Weber’s works at the turn of the last century. He defined it as;
a state is a human community that (successfully)
claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a
given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the
state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is
ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which
the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to
use violence. Hence, ‘politics’ for us means striving to share power or
striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among
groups within a state (Weber, 1948: 78).
He further argued that “if no social institutions
existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be
eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’
in the specific sense of the word” (Weber, 1948: 78). His definition has four
key attributes that identifies the modern state; coercion, monopoly, territory
and legitimacy. Although monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is highlighted
in the above definition, it is difficult to place these attributes
hierarchically as they, indeed, interact in such a manner that strength in one
reinforces the others, while weakness in one will also undermine the others.
For example, the ability to coerce – forcing compliance with the state’s
laws – relies on the fact that the population within the state’s territory
have to recognise the laws as having been made by a legitimate authority
and the state must, in turn, possess a monopoly on the means of violence
so as to successfully dissuade unreasonable dissension. Obversely, as has been
the case in the DRC, a state that does not enjoy a monopoly on the use
of violence will fail to coerce compliance with its laws and hence have
its legitimacy to rule challenged by other actors within the given territory.
Vincent (1987: 218) saw the above attributes more as
indicators of statehood as he argued that the state itself should be thought of
as a “public power above both ruler and ruled which provides order and
continuity to the polity.” A view shared by Held (1989: 11) who holds that the
modern state is the “notion of an impersonal and privileged legal or
constitutional order with the capability of administering and controlling a
given territory.” This ‘public power’ was also argued by John Locke to be “a
right of making laws, with penalties of death, and consequently all less
penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the
force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the
commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good”
(Locke, 1988: 118).
Where this ‘public power’ is to be located and the
different forms it takes can then be identified through recourse to
corresponding theories of the state such as absolutist theory, constitutional
theory, and class theory (Vincent, 1987: 218 – 223). For example, the
absolutist theory describes this power as residing in the hands of one
individual as happens in a dictatorship or the Enlightened Despot of Frederick
the Great’s proposition, while constitutional theory describes the separation
of powers between the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature as espoused
by liberal democracies (Vincent, 1987: 218 – 223). The absolutist and constitutional
theories correspond, respectively, to the different final positions arrived at,
above, by Hobbes and Locke when they theorised about the need for a ‘public
power’ in society.
According to Held (1989: 2) to understand the state we
“must consider its spatial and temporal dimensions – the horizontal stretch of
the state across territory, the depth of the state intervention in social and
economic life and the changing form of all these over time.” He then noted that
“it is important to consider the state as a cluster of agencies, departments,
tiers and levels, each with their own rules and resources and often with
varying purposes and objectives” (Held, 1989: 2). From Held’s statements we can
take away the fact that the tasks the modern state assumes for itself are such
as those which can only be carried out by institutions. So, while aware of the
other salient features and definitions of the state that exist, this paper will
mainly be interested in the state insofar as it is this ‘public power’ and the
institutions that it employs in carrying out its function. So far, for the sake
of conceptual clarity, the functions of this ‘public power’ have been cast as
provision of law and order, but will below be expanded to provision of human
security as is this thesis’s central argument. Indeed, the need for law and
order has been argued above to be the initial reason why mankind eschewed the
‘state of nature’ to live under the state.
Statehood:
While the concept of law and order needing an enforcer
has been argued in this thesis to be held in common by all humanity, the fact
that some communities have succeeded in instituting an effective ‘public power’
while others have utterly failed, requires us to take a closer look at why this
is the case. The differences that arise between those who have succeeded and
those who have so far failed were said by Ayoob (2007: 96) to augment “the
impression that there are actually two distinct zones in the international
system – the zone of peace in the North and the zone of turmoil in the South –
and that the two work according to different logics, a Lockean one in the
former and a Hobbesian one in the latter.” This casting of the North and South
by reference to Locke and Hobbes’s versions of the ‘state of nature’ metaphor is
self-evident when you compare conditions that subsist in Norway with
those of the DRC.
Although this paper’s focus is specifically on the
efficacy of the institutions of the state, the question of statehood is
unavoidable. To be a ‘public power’ that enjoys sovereignty, and its attendant
rights, requires recognition by the international community of states. The most
common way this recognition manifests itself is by being admitted to the United
Nations General Assembly (UNGA). In this context, statehood is synonymous with
being a nation-state where all the people in the territory are thought to be
knit “together in terms of historical memories, legal codes, language, and
religion,” under a central authority (Ayoob, 2007: 97). This is possibly what
was meant by Anderson
(2006: 6) when he defined the nation as “an imagined political community,”
maintaining that; “it is imagined because the members of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or
even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their
communion.” Statehood or being a nation-state then is really a fusion of the
notion of a political community with a collective identity (nation) and that of
a legitimate ‘public power’ (state) that then represents the territorial
community at international fora. People who are united in this manner tend to
be strong against hostile foreign forces whatever form those forces may take.
Those without this communion actively invite foreign forces to disrupt their communities
as they struggle for primacy against each other.
The concept of statehood has two faces which can help
us in further thinking about the differences between strong and weak states;
empirical and juridical sovereignty. The empirical face refers to de facto sovereignty
whereby, as in Weber’s definition above, the state is “a corporate group that
has compulsory jurisdiction, exercises continuous organization, and claims a
monopoly of force over a territory and its population” (Jackson and Rosberg,
1982: 2). The juridical face is de jure sovereignty whereby the state is
described as “a legal person, recognised by international law, with the
following attributes: (a) a defined territory, (b) a permanent population, (c)
an effective government, and (d) independence, or the rights to enter into
relations with other states” (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982: 3). What these authors
then argue is that states such as the DRC are quasi-states in that they do not
satisfy the empirical definition and only exist insofar as they are protected
by the international norms of self-determination and sovereign equality
(Jackson and Rosberg, 1982: 3).
The
Weberian State
The concept of statehood, insofar as it means people
with the same collective identity in a defined territory, works to reinforce
the criteria set by Weber for empirical statehood. Strong states essentially
exhibit the positive interplay and reinforcement of Weber’s criteria of
coercion, legitimacy, and monopoly of legitimate violence in a defined
territory. While in those states where any of these criteria is compromised,
dystopian conditions subsist and the states only continue to exist because
international norms do not allow states to cease to exist (Jackson and Rosberg,
1982: 1). There are important differences between these consolidated states and
the ineffective ones to such an extent that a comparison, even as fleeting as
the one made above between Norway
and the DRC, is unfair. Ayoob (2007: 96) thinks that the current situation in
the Third World should not be compared “with that prevailing within and among
the industrial democracies today, but with the situation from the sixteenth and
eighteenth century in Western Europe, when the earliest of the modern sovereign
states were at a stage of state making that correspond with the stage where
most Third World states find themselves today.” This is to alert us to the fact
that the ‘social contract’ creating an authoritative ‘public power’ should not
be thought to be an overnight occurrence.
It took a long time for the states of the North to
achieve the internal pacification that helped in creating the conditions that
exist there today; Switzerland
celebrated its 723rd anniversary this year (2014) while
post-colonial states such as the DRC have only existed for about 50 years.
Beyond this obvious difference there are much more profound differences in
state making in Europe and that of the
post-colonial states which can help explain why consolidation has so far been
elusive in the South. Still, it is this author’s contention that the Weberian
state is the ideal unit for providing law and order, and the current state
system is also the optimal organizing principle on the globe. Other models such
as hunter-gatherer communities, tribal communities, city states, and empires
have existed but were supplanted by current states because of their various
deficiencies. A brief look at how state making occurred in Europe
will help us start to see the challenges faced by the post-colonial state in
this endeavour.
State
Making
Although the ‘social contract’ has been mentioned
above as if people willingly met in a public square and agreed to have a
‘public power’ that would adjudicate over them, the reality of state making is
argued to have been steeped in violence. Tilly’s argument, that war making made
states, is often quoted as definitive of the fact that state making involved a
violent co-optation of contenders for authority as states emerged (Dannreuther,
2007: 311). A view supported by Job (1992: 25) who also wrote that “the typical
Western European experience most always involved the painful transition from
state to nation (rather than the reverse, as often assumed), within a bloody
history of elimination of political contenders, forced assimilation, and
repressive consolidation of authority in the hands of the most efficient.”
State making defined as this “primitive central power
accumulation” then involves these three integral features;
the expansion and consolidation of the territorial and
demographic domain under a political authority, including the imposition of
order on contested territorial and demographic space (war); the maintenance of
order in the territory where, and over the population on whom, such order has
already been imposed (policing); and, the extraction of resources from the
territory and population under the control of the state, resources essential
not only to support the war-making and policing activities but also to maintain
the apparatuses of state necessary to carry on routine administration, deepen the
state’s penetration of society, and serve symbolic purposes (taxation) (Ayoob,
2007: 96).
Success at all three broad activities is reflected in
the continuity of European states as strong entities. There is unanimity in the
literature that in Europe, state making was
first achieved before the political communities could be defined as nation
states (Ayoob, 2007: 97; Jackson and Rosberg, 1982: 23). The post-colonial
state, on the other hand, finds itself in different circumstances. The first
important difference is that in the consolidated democracies, their state
making was an organic development, while in the Third
World it was conferred by outsiders (Keller, 1991: 138). This should not be taken to necessarily mean
that the ‘imported state’ is to be rejected in the post-colonial context, if
anything; it is a reflection on the dynamics and length of time it takes to
arrive at a functioning ‘social contract.’ Secondly, while the ‘unilinear
development’ – which avers that post-colonial states are at the early stages of
the European experience – has its merits, Smith (2013: 47) views it as
fallacious since it “understates a very fundamental difference: that the
history of the advanced societies does not include colonization by more
powerful countries.” This has often been referred to by the short hand
“colonial legacy,” and will be expanded upon further in Chapter 4 as this
author contends that it is an important factor in state weakness. Thirdly, the
current conditions under globalization also mean that state making meets some
constraints European states never encountered.
The
Post-Colonial State:
The Sub-Saharan post-colonial states were depicted by
Callaghy as ‘lame Leviathans,’ in recognition “of the powerful imbalance
between the state’s claims to govern the entire social order and the actual
weakness of its performance” (Badie, 2000: 14). All the four aspects gleaned
from Weber’s definition of the state, interact in such a manner that they
confound the best efforts at creating a strong state. The territories these
states occupy were drawn arbitrarily by colonial powers and thus put people who
were loyal to different centres of authority and, often antagonistic towards
each other, in one territory (Ayoob, 1992: 70). Therefore, in each country,
there are competing centres of authority and some with, perhaps, even stronger
claims in terms of legitimacy to rule within these territories (Ayoob, 1992:
66). The monopoly on the use of force that was enjoyed by the colonial state
was also eroded by the dynamics of the Cold War which saw outside forces arming
different groups to fight their proxy wars. The other fact to consider in terms
of weakness is the unavailability of resources to the nascent post-colonial
states as the extractive configuration of the colonial state underdeveloped
these territories.
So, instead of having power, authority, and legitimacy
at birth the post-colonial has been locked in a struggle to establish its right
to rule (Keller, 1991: 138). This struggle has produced the common features
that are associated with the post-colonial state, which are in fact short term
survival strategies for actors without authority, legitimacy and resources.
Villalon (1998: 11) identified the five faces of these ‘lame Leviathans’ as; “a
client state, a personalised identity, a centralized or overdeveloped
morphology, a prebendal or rentier nature, and an extractive impulse.” These
strategies are self-defeating as they create the conditions for state failure
over the long run. The interaction between them and how they contribute to
state weakness and, also, the other factors at the international level will be
discussed in Chapter 4 under the rubric of a multi-causal analysis of state
weakness in the DRC.
Conclusion:
This section has advanced the idea that law and order
needs an enforcer. It presented an image of chaos as forewarned against by
Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’ metaphor. I have also argued that the need for a
state, insofar as it is an impersonal power to maintain order at home and
defend against invasion, is a concept that all humanity holds in common. The
normative state which is seen in countries such as Norway
or Switzerland
is accepted in this thesis as capable of working in all cultures. I have also
highlighted the dysfunctions and special conditions that impede the
post-colonial states from achieving this ideal state they are also aiming at.
The challenges seem insurmountable but there is a way out of some of the
challenges such as a lack of legitimacy. It is encouraging for this thesis’s
central claim that, according to Ayoob (2007: 111), “the root cause of disorder
in the Third World is linked to the inadequacy
of state authority and not the excessive use of state power.” From this
postulate then, it follows that strengthening the state could lead to a situation
where it may be able to perform its tasks and be able to create conditions
conducive to human security. Legitimacy then could be established if the state
achieves human security for its population. Human security itself is a
contested concept, so this paper now turns to what it means and how it can help
identify the areas and nature of failures by both the international community
as well the DRC state.
Chapter Three
Human Security
Introduction:
A concept that entered the lexicon of international
relations in the post-Cold War era is human security. As is the nature of the
social sciences, the concept has been a subject of debate as to what it
precisely means and whether it is at all useful as a tool for academic
analysis, or as a guide for policymakers. Regardless of this debate, human
security is a concept that is congruous with the concerns of its era. During
the Cold War, national security was the dominant concern as the Soviet bloc and
the West were pitted against each other in a bipolar contest which threatened
the world with nuclear annihilation. The greatest threat to humanity at the
time was interstate warfare that could escalate to a nuclear exchange between
the superpowers. So, justifiably, the concern with national security dominated
academia and policy discourse.
With the end of the Cold War, however, the national
security as state security lens no longer fully explained the threats to
states, so a different lens was needed. Human security thus appeared as the
alternative or, as is this paper’s view, complementary lens to national
security. This chapter will start by defining what human security means, then
it will turn to the academic debates on whether it is useful and what policy
impact it is likely to have. It is this author’s view that if, adopted and
implemented in earnest, human security could solve the DRC and other
postcolonial states’ legitimacy crises. This chapter also sets the stage for
the analysis, in Chapter 4, of the many factors that have led to the absence of
human security in the DRC.
What
is Human Security?
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is
credited with coining the term ‘human security’ in its current form in 1994,
although the notion itself can be traced to earlier times. Authors such as
Smith (2005: 32) see the notion’s genealogy in earlier works such as Barry
Buzan’s 1983 book – People, States, and Fear – which added
non-traditional security threats from the political, economic, societal, and
ecological domains as subjects of concern for security studies. However, all
the earlier attempts at a broadening of security to include more than just
military threats to territorial integrity still had the state and national
security as referent objects because, during the Cold War, the greatest threat
to mankind was nuclear war that could be brought on by the interaction between
sovereign states. The security threats from the political or economic domains
were only factored in insofar as they were seen as capable of weakening the
military, thereby making the state susceptible to external military threats.
The UNDP was the first organisation to coin the term ‘human security,’ in 1994,
with the important difference from the notion’s predecessors that the
individual (everywhere) would be the referent object of security and not
states.
In
its Human Development Report (HDR) 1994 the UNDP proposed that,
With the dark shadows of the cold war receding, one
can now see that many conflicts are within nations rather than between nations.
For most people, a feeling of insecurity arises more from worries about daily
life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event. Will they and their
families have enough to eat? Will they lose their jobs? Will their streets and
neighbourhoods be safe from crime? Will they be tortured by a repressive state?
Will they become a victim of violence because of their gender? Will their
religion or ethnic origin target them for persecution? In the final analysis,
human security is a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, a job
that was not cut, an ethnic tension that did not explode in violence, a
dissident who was not silenced. Human security is not a concern with weapons –
it is a concern with human life and dignity (UNDP, 1994: 22).
The UNDP, in describing the new threats to mankind
after the Cold War, thus coined the term human security. According to Thomas
and Tow (2002: 178) this highlighted the fact that; “a ‘secure state’
untroubled by contested territorial boundaries could still be inhabited by
insecure people.” The central argument put forward by the UNDP was that as the
advent of nuclear weapons had demanded a new way of thinking for mankind to
survive that threat; the end of the Cold War was also a watershed moment of
equal magnitude which called for a new way of thinking about what security now
meant (UNDP, 1994: 22). Indeed, in terms of describing the realities of
insecurity in the immediate post-Cold War era, the HDR characterization was
accurate. The conception of security that had dominated during the Cold War could
no longer fully capture the threats to humanity. Where the traditional
conception of security emphasized territorial invasion as the source of danger
to the population, environmental degradation or, the state itself could pose
equally potent danger to its own population.
To criticisms that theirs is not a rigorous
definition, the UNDP has countered by saying that just sketching out this
concept is a good starting point as “like other fundamental concepts, such as
human freedom, human security is more easily identified through its absence
than its presence” (UNDP, 1994: 23). It then lists the threats to human
security under seven main categories: Economic security, Food security, Health
security, Environmental security, Personal security, Community security, and
Political security (UNDP, 1994: 24). Being insecure in any of these categories
endangers people’s lives in much the same way that armed conflict does. For
example, under one of the categories, the HDR states that;
Food security means that all people at all times have
both physical and economic access to basic food. This requires not just enough
food to go round. It requires that people have ready access to food – that they
have an "entitlement" to food, by growing it for themselves, by buying
it or by taking advantage of a public food distribution system. The
availability of food is thus a necessary condition of security – but not a
sufficient one. People can still starve even when enough food is available – as
has happened during many famines (UNDP, 1994: 27).
This one category alone shows the interrelatedness
there is between the seven categories, as for people to be able to buy food
they have to be economically secure as well as empowered by the prevailing
political atmosphere. It can be taken for granted that malnourished people are
easily susceptible to a lot of health problems that would otherwise not afflict
them. This holistic approach by the UNDP is as if in response to Aristotle’s
age old philosophical proposition that no two people can agree what exactly
happiness is, since – “often even the same man identifies it with different
things, with health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor; but conscious
of their ignorance, they admire those who proclaim some great ideal that is
beyond their comprehension” (Aristotle, 1999: 6). The UNDP conception attempts
to show that to be able to live happy and secure lives people should be
empowered against ignorance, disease, hunger and environmental disasters. There
are disputes as to who is the proper authority to empower the people thus, but
this essay places that task on the state, as has been argued for in Chapter
3.
The HDR then also highlighted the fact that human
security has two components; freedom from fear and freedom from want.
Freedom from fear corresponds more with physical security while freedom from
want refers to security from poverty and deprivation. These two components were
recognised since the foundation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 but Cold War
dynamics meant that emphasis was only put on freedom from fear at the expense
of freedom from want (UNDP, 1994: 24). This is how the concept of human
security has been articulated by its authors. The question that has arisen is
whether this concept, as it has been articulated, has any utility for the
policy maker or analytical value for academics. The main point of contention
seems to be between those who want the conception of security to remain
narrowly conceived, focusing only on military threats, and those who accept the
UNDP’s broadening of the security agenda to include non-traditional threats.
The fault-line in this debate corresponds roughly with the worldviews in
international relations of realism on the one hand and critical security
studies on the other.
Human
Security: A Contested Concept
In the contest between those who support the new
notion of human security and those who want to retain the narrow traditional
conception of security, human security is treated as an alternative to national
security, but this paper instead thinks of it as complementary to national
security. Although non-realist thinkers can take issue with the precepts of
human security, this thesis only highlights the debates by reference to realist
conceptions of security and the counter-arguments to it from critical security
studies.
In international relations, the realist worldview
makes assumptions which give primacy to sovereign states as the referent object
of security. This theoretical tradition has various branches which differ on
some aspects such as whether emphasis should be placed on human nature or
systemic causes in the attempt to explain foreign policy behaviour in
international affairs. Despite this, what is common in the realism worldview
are these assumptions; (1) a focus on threats to the nation-state rather than populations as states are
the key actors; (2) that states are unitary actors whose choices are based on
the national interest; and (3) an anarchic international system where all
states rely on military power to ensure their survival (Dougherty and
Pfaltzgraff Jr., 2001: 64; Booth, 2005: 5). Liotta (2002: 475) said talking about security
assumes three basic questions; security from what, security by whom and
security achieved through which means? Traditional conceptions of security premised
on the realist worldview would answer those questions with; security from
military attack by others states, security by states, and achieved through
being militarily strong or balancing.
Where the widening of the security agenda to focus on
individuals and non-traditional threats is concerned, proponents of realism
would argue as Walt did that this is untenable. He argued that security studies
is about “the study of the threat, use, and control of military forces” and,
widening the agenda of security outside of the military domain would destroy
the field’s “intellectual coherence and make it more difficult to devise
solutions to any of these important problems” (Buzan et. al., 1998: 3). Another
criticism is that given the political function of the word ‘security,’ this
widening may be counterproductive in some sectors and, further, that
securitization is not necessarily a universal good thing (Buzan et. al. 4). The
securitization of migration in the Global North, for example, has seen migrants
from the Global South treated not as the population at risk but as agents who
will threaten human security in the North and thus to be excluded, in the
process increasing their plight (Ibrahim, 2005: 169).
A more sustained criticism of human security’s utility
for policy and academic analysis can be found in Paris’s work. Paris (2001: 88) writes that “existing
definitions of human security tend to be expansive and vague… which provides
policymakers with little guidance in the prioritization of competing policy
goals and academics little sense of what, exactly, is to be studied.” Human
security’s purported strength in highlighting that a holistic approach is vital
as all the aspects it highlights are interrelated, is dismissed as a truism
which “does not provide a convincing justification for treating all needs,
values, and policy objectives as equally important” (Paris, 2001: 92). Thus,
for him, human security “is too broad and vague a concept to be meaningful for
policymakers, as it has come to entail such a wide range of different threats
on one hand, while prescribing a diverse and sometimes incompatible set of
policy solutions to resolve them on the other” (Paris, 2001: 92). The exclusion
from the global North of migrants from conflict in the global South – caused by
the securitization of migration discourse – is instructive on this count.
Buzan, Waever and De Wilde (1998: 4) also note the liberal argument that “too
much economic security is destructive to workings of a market economy.”
With regards human security’s utility as an analytical
tool Paris
(2001: 93) says that it “seems capable of supporting virtually any hypothesis –
along with its opposite – depending on the prejudices and interests of the
particular researcher.” He further thinks that, by encompassing physical
security and the more general notions such as social and economic well-being,
the concept lacks a degree of analytical separation that would help the
academic to study causal relationship between independent and dependent
variables (Paris,
2001: 93). He, instead, thinks the only reason why the term has found traction
among various actors is because its vagueness unites various actors who see “an
opportunity to capture some of the more substantial political interest and
superior resources associated with more traditional, military conceptions of
security” (Paris, 2001: 95). In this view, those who have adopted the term are
driven by vested interests rather than a desire to achieve good for the
ordinary populations. He then proposes
that human security should be thought of as a “label for a broad
category of research in the field of security studies that is primarily
concerned with non-military threats to the safety of societies, groups and
individuals” (Paris,
2001: 96). He believes this then obviates the need for the researcher to derive
clear hypotheses from the concept of human security itself (Paris, 2001: 101).
Regardless of these criticisms, the concept of human
security appeals to a lot of scholars who feel that the traditional security
conception articulated by the realist worldview no longer captures the complex
realities of the post-Cold War era. These scholars take, as their departure
point, the concern that was raised by Robert Cox when he made the distinction,
in 1981, between problem solving and critical theory. Realism is a problem
solving theory which takes existing political relations as givens and tries to
solve any problems that arise without altering the order of the day, whereas
critical theory questions how these relations came about and seeks to change
the prevailing order (Smith, 2005: 41). Critical security studies claim that
the important attributes in their approach to security are the broadening, and
deepening of the field which then leads to an emancipatory praxis. In this
case, broadening refers to the inclusion of non-traditional threats to the
concept of security, while deepening implies a questioning of the power
structures behind our assumptions about security, and emancipatory praxis
refers to the emancipation of individuals (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2010:
17).
This is what proponents of human security have, in
essence, done. The most outstanding contribution of human security to security
matters is that it has introduced non-traditional threats as a subject for
discussion, and the state is no longer the referent object in that discussion.
Whether this has actually led to the emancipation of individuals, as the third
prong of critical security studies articulates, is still an open question.
Thakur (2004: 348) has observed that “to insist on national security at the
expense of human security would be to trivialize security to the point of
sterility, bereft of any practical meaning.” He reiterates the view that is
accepted by the UNDP that lives can be threatened by external aggression as
well as by forces within the country (Thakur, 2004: 347). He challenges one of
the realist assumptions that states are unitary actors who represent the
objective national interest, by pointing out that “in many countries, the state
is a tool of a narrow family group, clique or sect” (Thakur, 2004: 374). He
accuses proponents of the narrow security, as does Ken Booth, of falsifying the
policy process so as to privilege the military sector in the competition for
state resources at the expense of citizens, who will not have protection from
chronic insecurities such as those posed by hunger and disease (Thakur, 2010:
348; Booth, 2005: 4).
Other scholars and practitioners have weighed-in in
favour of the broadening of the security agenda by saying that when the
security of the individual is threatened, so too is international security, and
that national security and human security should really be seen as two sides of
the same coin (Hampson, 2004: 350; Axworthy, 2004: 349). Having discussed the
definition and debates around it, I now turn to whether the concept has been
adopted by policymakers and what impact it has made in world politics since its
inception.
Adoption
by Practitioners:
It would be remiss if this paper does not ask why there
is a need for a new term when a look at human security shows us it is very
contiguous with terms that have been in existence for longer and which seek to
achieve the same goals as it does. These terms are human development and human
rights. With regards human development, the UNDP (1994: 23) argued that it is a
“broader concept – defined in previous Human Development Reports as a
process of widening people’s range of choices. Human security means that people
can exercise these choices safely and freely – and that they can be relatively
confident that the opportunities they have today are not totally lost
tomorrow.” The important link between the two concepts is then said to be that:
“progress in one area enhances the chances of progress in the other. But
failure in one area also heightens the risk of failure in the other” (UNDP,
1994: 23).
Human rights also can be conceived differently insofar
as their implementation have been exclusively the domain of the state since any
other actors are not allowed to interfere in matters of national sovereignty
(Donnelly, 2013: 32; Beitz, 2009: 123). Donnelly (2013: 33) notes that all the
international rights
covenants creates obligations only for states… foreign
states have no internationally recognised human rights obligations – or even a
right – to protect nationals abroad. They are not even at liberty to use more
than persuasive means on behalf of foreign victims. Current norms of state
sovereignty prohibit states from acting coercively abroad against virtually all
violations of human rights – genocide being the exception that proves the
rule.
Indeed, this supports the view discussed above that
traditional concepts of security had privileged the state in such a manner that
individuals had no redress if their life or other rights are threatened by the
state. According to Beitz (2009: 3) the problem is also that there is no
standing capacity to enforce human rights and, even if the capacity was there,
he wonders; “what, for example, would it mean to enforce the right to an
adequate standard of living?” Human rights discussions thus inevitably run into
the tensions between state sovereignty as articulated in Article 2 (7) of the
United Nations (UN) Charter and the need to protect them everywhere enshrined
in Article 55 of the same Charter.
An Integrative Concept:
Human security has been touted by its framers as an
integrative concept which allows the domains of security, development and human
rights to be able to talk about issues in ways that were previously not possible
(Christie, 2010: 170; Thomas, 2004: 354). Its vagueness and malleability, which
has been critiqued above, is said by Christie (2010: 176) to have “allowed
policymakers to fit a range of programmes within its framework. It provides an
effective framework that tells policymakers where to look (at people inside of
the state) to understand sources of conflict and what to look for in broad
terms (things that threaten, risk or impoverish people).”
In any case, silo-thinking must lead to suboptimal
results for any endeavour where effects in one silo can demonstrably impact the
other silos. This logic then has seen the concept of human security adopted by
states, and agencies such as the World Bank, IMF and the various bodies of the
UN who have found it useful as a rationale for intervening and deciding how to
intervene in at risk communities (Christie, 2008: 5). By all objective
measures, the DRC satisfies the at-risk-community criteria, as human security
is absent there. The DRC is ranked 186th out of 187 countries on the
Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP, 2013).
Kaldor (2007: 183) sees the concept of human security
as adopted by Canada and Norway logically
leading to the precepts of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) as it
emphasised security against political violence. Canada was at the forefront of the
effort that saw R2P articulated in the outcome document of the International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). While the Canadian
government’s approach is thought of as being narrower than the UNDP approach,
as has been outlined above, both these approaches can find common ground in the
“responsibility to protect” as a policy choice despite their ‘narrow’ and
‘wide’ orientations. The most cited example of positive policy impact by human
security proponents is the Ottawa Convention of 1997 banning landmines, and the
Rome Statute that brought the International Criminal Court (ICC) into existence
in 2002 (Hubert, 2004: 351; Thomas, 2004: 354). Of course, it does not
necessarily follow that this has enhanced human security. For example, former
South African President, Thabo Mbeki, avers in reference to his mediation work
in Sudan that justice cannot trump peace – as he views the United Nations
Security Council (UNSC) referral of the Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir to
the ICC as counter-productive to the achievement of peace there (Al Jazeera,
2013).
The term human security then has been adopted by
policymakers to intervene in the domestic affairs of other states, even though
not necessarily with military force. Even if the term was just a label, as
suggested by Paris
above, it still allows us to look at these policymakers’ actions so as to
establish if they are enhancing or hindering human security. The DRC state
itself by being a signatory to UN and African Union programmes and documents
premised on human security, lends its actions to be analysed the same way. The
elites in the DRC’s relationship with the international order as well as with
their domestic population can thus be interrogated using the human security
lens.
The other factor worth restating here is that because
of development asymmetries in the world, the global South is on the receiving
end of any interventions premised on human security. These interventions are
premised on the principles of a liberal world order. Inevitably, there will be
situations when policies designed to advance human security end up achieving
the opposite effect. There are also structural features of the liberal world
order which are inimical to human security. Human security therefore, will thus
allow us, in Chapter 4, to look at what effects the international community’s
interventions have had for the DRC population, as well as to identify where the
DRC state is culpable for insecurity.
Conclusion:
In summary then, human security is the attempt by the
international community to integrate the fields of development and security so
as to secure mankind against the threats of the 21st Century. Human
security’s great contribution to international relations is that it reflects
the current security realities on the globe, where citizens are equally
threatened by disease, hunger, poverty, and natural disasters as by military
invasion by other states. It has introduced the individual as the referent
object, unlike the traditional concept of security which privileged state
sovereignty. As the dangers of invasion are still valid in some parts of the
world, such as on the Korean
Peninsula, this essay
sees human security as a constitutive part of national security and not as an
alternative. For this paper, the human security lens should be useful in
critiquing more acts of commission or omission by the international community
as well as by the DRC State, whereas a state-centric view of security would
only have found fault if the state failed to defend the nation against military
invasion.
Chapter Four
A Multi-Causal Analysis of State Weakness
in the Democratic Republic
of Congo
Introduction:
This paper has so far endeavoured to show that the
ideas of a state and that of human security are universally applicable and
exportable regardless of the cultures of receiving societies. Taking the fact
that the states in existence have signed on to the tenets of human security as
my departure point, I can now interrogate where, by acts of commission or
omission, the international community and the DRC’s elites have contributed to
state weakness and thus hindered human security there. This section will first
discuss the international factors that have been inimical to human security. As
it may not be so easy to discern where the international community is causing
harm, the analysis on the international level will be guided by Johan Galtung’s
structural theory of imperialism as well as by his theory of structural violence.
The value of these two theories is that they can help us identify victim and
assailant where there may not be identifiable actors or obvious harmful
actions. The paper then turns to the state level to look at what actions, those
entrusted with power in the DRC, have taken or not taken that have resulted in
state weakness. State weakness has been argued to be the inability to provide
human security as institutions of the state lack the resources and capacity to
be effective.
The
International Level:
The first theory that helps in trying to identify
where the international community may be implicated in human insecurity in the
DRC is the structural violence theory which was coined by Johan Galtung. For
Galtung (1969: 168), “violence is present when human beings are being
influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their
potential realizations.” He rejected
“the narrow concept of violence - according to which violence is somatic incapacitation,
or deprivation of health, alone (with killing as the extreme form), at the
hands of an actor who intends this to be the consequence” (Galtung, 1969: 168).
Further, he circumscribed his concept to what is avoidable, such that; “if a
person died from tuberculosis in the eighteenth century it would be hard to
conceive of this as violence since it might have been quite unavoidable, but if
he dies from it today, despite all the medical resources in the world, then
violence is present according to our definition” (Galtung, 1969: 168).
For Galtung (1969: 169), this is indirect violence
because people are being prevented from reaching their full potential as
“resources are monopolized by a group or class or are used for other purposes.”
The important takeaway from his concept is that he makes a distinction between
personal or direct violence where an actor who commits the violence
is present, and structural or indirect violence where there is no
such actor (Galtung, 1969: 170). Structural violence then “shows up as unequal
power and consequently as unequal life chances” (Galtung, 1969: 171). According
to this conception then, we can find fault with the international system
insofar as there is global inequality which can be attributed to the global
North. But to make the point much clearer, especially where relations between
the global North and global South are concerned, another concept must be
introduced which links the ideas being explored here together. The concept is
that of a structural theory of imperialism.
Galtung’s structural theory of imperialism was
concerned with explaining the levels of inequality between countries and within
countries, as well as the difficulty in eradicating this inequality (Galtung,
1971: 82). According to him, this was due to imperialism which he defined as “a
dominance relations between collectivities, particularly between nations”
(Galtung, 1971: 82). Further noting that “it is a sophisticated type of
dominance relation which cuts across nations, basing itself on a bridgehead
which the centre in the Centre nation establishes in the centre of the periphery
nation, for the joint benefit of both” (Galtung, 1971: 82). In this view,
elites who would be allowed to assume power in the postcolonial states are
those who could be trusted to protect the continued exploitative relationship
whereby the postcolonial state would remain a provider of raw materials to the
metropolitan centres (Galtung, 1971: 82). This view was shared by Hoogvelt
(1997: 30) who saw the colonial period as the time when postcolonial states’ fates
were decided as it was then that “the internationally imposed division of
labour relegated colonial areas to the status of producers and exporters of
primary, unprocessed goods.”
Therefore, the postcolonial state was inserted into
the global economy in the same way it had been inserted during colonialism, a
significant continuity where its underdevelopment is concerned (Kisangani, 2012: 213). If
this relationship was ever threatened, then to protect it, the former
colonizers were willing to use direct violence instead of the usual structural
violence outlined above (Galtung, 1971: 85). The French policy called Francafrique
exemplifies this type of willingness by the former colonial powers to use
force to remove postcolonial elites who threatened this status quo. In the DRC,
Lumumba was assassinated by the United States
and Belgium
for wanting to break free from this neo-colonial arrangement (Weissman, 2014).
Since colonialism was instituted to benefit metropolitan centres through
extraction of resources required to develop the metropolitan centres at the
expense of the colonies, any continuation of that relationship must contribute
to state weakness. Closer to home, the region the DRC is located in also works
to confound any attempts at strengthening the DRC state.
A
Bad Neighbourhood:
At the regional level, the bad neighbourhood argument
proposed by Collier suffices for the DRC on both counts. Collier (2008: 54)
first accepts Sachs's proposal that being landlocked affects a country’s growth
rate due to high transportation costs. Anticipating the criticism that would
come as to why countries like Switzerland
have developed nonetheless, he argues that neighbours matter (Collier, 2008: 54
- 55). Thus if a country is landlocked and its neighbours have no viable
transport infrastructure, then that country could not even dream of being
involved in manufacturing as it would be impossible to move the goods to global
markets (Collier, 2008: 55). A good transport infrastructure is also an
indicator of developed economies, such that for Collier (2008: 55) Switzerland is not blocked from its global
markets but, in Germany, France, and Italy; it is actually surrounded by
its market. For all intents and purposes, the DRC is landlocked and surrounded
by underdeveloped countries such as Uganda,
Central African Republic, Angola, Rwanda,
and Sudan.
So, some of its underdevelopment can be described in those terms of reference.
The most important way the bad neighbourhood arguments
manifest themselves for this paper pertains to how the DRC is surrounded by
conflict ridden neighbours. This means it finds itself at the frontline of all
the negative aspects such as smuggling, proliferation of small arms and refugee
flows. Below, the paper discusses the aspects that made Mobutu Sese Seko’s rule
untenable, but at this stage it is necessary to note that the First Congo War
of 1996 – 7 which unseated him, as well as the Second Congo War of 1998 – 2002,
had their origins in the Rwanda Genocide of 1994 (Turner, 2007). The aftermath
of the Rwandan genocide saw the genocidaires cross into Eastern Congo
and with them the defeated Hutu dominated Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) who
continued to plot and destabilise the new Tutsi government in Rwanda (Stearns,
2011: 15). Rwanda, Angola and Uganda
then backed Laurent Kabila’s bid to overthrow Mobutu in what became the First
Congo War (Stearns, 2011: 8; Kisangani,
2012: 28). While the Second Congo War is attributed to a falling out between
the Rwandese and Laurent Kabila who they had helped install in Kinshasa. The Rwandan and Ugandan internal
conflicts can also be traced to the same colonial legacy causes, as will be
discussed below, such that if this paper was discussing conflict issues in Rwanda or Uganda, it would not be
unreasonable to view the DRC itself as the bad neighbour.
This is also a situation where human security as a
policy prescription may be found to lead to a deadlock. For example, to
dissuade Rwanda or Uganda from
destabilising the DRC it may be necessary to impose economic sanctions on these
countries, but the effects of sanctions are such that they are detrimental to
human security in the target country. So, the international community would
find itself with no tools to punish malfeasance if the tenets of human security
are pursued to their logical conclusion. The only solution would have to be for
the DRC state’s institutions to have been strong enough in the first place so
as not to tempt bad neighbours into thinking of gaining access to its resources
through force.
The
Resource Curse:
There are two other factors which contribute to state
weakness in the DRC. The first factor is that of size dysfunction where by
virtue of the DRC’s size – as large as Western Europe
but sparsely populated – it is difficult and expensive for the central state to
effectively project power (Herbst and Mills, 2009). Nothing much can be done
about that. The second factor is that of the ‘resource curse.’ The resource
curse was described by Collier (2008: 38) as referring to the fact that “the
surplus from natural resource exports significantly reduces growth” since when
a country has “enough natural resources it can forget about normal economic
activity.” Where the state is in control as in Saudi Arabia then this curse is
manageable, but where state authority does not exist it becomes a source of
conflict. Stiglitz (2007: 135) explains the scenario that ensures where state
authority is absent as; resources become “both the object of the conflict and
the source of the financial wherewithal that enables the conflict to go on.” He
also noted that resource rich countries tend to breed bad governance because
the elites need not be accountable to the populace but only need to rely on
resource rents to buy arms and to co-opt other elites (Stiglitz, 2007: 136).
This second factor implicates the international community in structural
violence as Wenar (2013) sees the international community as drivers of the
resource curse since they are the market for these natural resources. So, for
all the factors under discussion here, it is possible to see where the
international community is implicated, and also where the DRC state is
implicated though no direct violence may be present.
The
State Level:
At the state level, this author sees state weakness to
ensure from the self-defeating short-term survival strategies adopted by
postcolonial states to deal with their lack of legitimacy at independence.
These strategies led to the decimation of any institutional capacity that had
been bequeathed to them by colonialism. Kisangani (2012: 1), surveying the
civil wars between 1960 and 2010, contends that “the politics of exclusion is
the major trigger of most civil wars in Congo rather than the tensions over
resources, basic needs, or identity.” The value to be extracted from Kisangani’s work is that there are ‘politics of exclusion’
in the DRC and, also that once these excluded elites assume power, they
tragically, “continue the same system of predation as their predecessors,
setting an unending cycle of predation and conflict” (Kisangani, 2012: 2).
The cycles of predation have been seen, in Chapter 1,
to have been repeated from Leopold II’s rule through to the current rule under
Joseph Kabila. For the purposes of this paper, the seeds of state weakness in
the DRC state can be seen to have been sown at independence and then, further
nourished under Mobutu’s rule. In Chapter 2, it was noted that in response to a
lack of legitimacy and lack of resources, the postcolonial elites adopted these
five strategies; “a client state, a personalised identity, a centralized or
overdeveloped morphology, a prebendal or rentier nature, and an extractive
impulse” (Villalon, 1998: 11). This paper now expands on these factors so as to
show how they have led to the continued weakness of the DRC state.
Colonial Legacy and the 'Lame Leviathan':
Colonial legacy refers to how colonialism bequeathed
their successor states with dysfunctional elements such as the arbitrarily
drawn colonial borders which put people with different allegiances in the same
territorial unit. The post-colonial state also inherited an underdeveloped
economy where the state bureaucracy was the only viable employment sector. As
it turned out, these legacies meant that the postcolonial states would adopt
very similar strategies to deal with the dysfunctions they inherited from the
departing colonial rulers (Villalon, 1998: 11). A lack of legitimate authority
to rule is the most important crisis that seized the attention of postcolonial
elites. The strategies they adopted were functional in the short term but
proved to be detrimental to the development of the institutions of the state in
the long run. Where the state should have been an impersonal ‘public power,’ it
became, of necessity, personalised. Thus the important factors as to why the
DRC state continues to be weak can be found in these survival strategies
instituted by the elites at independence.
Nationalism and the struggle against colonialism
managed to unite people within the postcolonial states, but once independence
was achieved the ethnic and tribal cleavages became obvious. On 4 July 1960,
four days after independence, the DRC experienced a mutiny in the Force
Publique over the fact that promotions to senior positions were not open to
black Congolese soldiers (Kisangani,
2012: 17). The effect of this mutiny was that the nascent postcolonial state in
the DRC lost its monopoly on the use of force and, as well, the exodus of
Belgian civil servants due to the violence meant their places would be filled
by inexperienced Congolese (Kisangani,
2012: 17). If we agree that the colonial state did not prepare the Africans for
takeover of the state administration, then a degree of incompetence has to be
admitted as a reason for some of the poor performance of the state
institutions. But to the question whether everything that ensured henceforth
was due to ineptitude, the answer from the extensive literature on the DRC is
no. Instead, various authors see what happened under Mobutu’s rule, and
elsewhere in postcolonial Africa, to be a
rational strategy for people who lacked legitimacy and resources on assuming
power. In the DRC, proof that there were competing centres of legitimate
authority can be seen in the fact that Katanga seceded on 11 July 1960, albeit
with Belgian encouragement and support, followed by South Kasai on 8 August
1960 (Kisangani, 2012: 17). Lumumba’s turning to the Soviet Union for military
help in quelling these rebellions then led the United States to sanction his
assassination, and as suggested above, this is evidence of how the West could
only tolerate a leader who would serve their interests. These secessionist
demands and ensuring legitimacy crisis led to Mobutu coming to power on 24
November 1965.
Mobutu’s response to his own lack of legitimacy,
defined by Kisangani
(2012: 20) as the “belief by the ruled that the ruler has a right to exercise
authority” then led him to adopt the strategies which define the nature of the
DRC state today. The first face of the DRC, under Mobutu, precipitant from
these strategies was that of becoming a client of the United States
in the East – West Cold War rivalry. This provided him with strategic rents and
military protection when his authority was challenged as happened in the
invasion of Katanga in 1977
and 1978 by Katangan forces based in Angola (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982:
11).
The second face is that of personalised rule which was
best described by Sandbrook and Barker (1985: 90) when they wrote that;
the strongman, usually the president, occupies the
centre of political life, front and centre stage, he is the centrifugal force
around which all else revolves. Not only the ceremonial head of state, the
president is also the Chief political, military and cultural figure: head of
government, Commander in Chief of the armed forces, head of the governing party
(if there is one) and even Chancellor of the local University. His aim is
typically to identify his person with the nation.
In a speech to the Ghanaian Parliament in 2009,
President Barack Obama was lauded for voicing that “Africa doesn't need strongmen, it needs strong
institutions” (White House, 2009); however, the value of
his observations have since diminished as he invited leaders such as Joseph
Kabila and Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea to the US-Africa Summit of 2014.
Indeed, this configuration of power is inimical to the development of an
impersonal public power’s institutions since the strongman has to fill key
positions with personally loyal individuals (Sandbrook and Barker, 1985: 90;
Young, 1985: 24).
The second face of a personalised rule is linked to
the third face in that the state in Congo became overdeveloped when the
public sector, by virtue of being the only viable employment sector was made to
absorb more people as a way of buying loyalty (Villalon, 1998: 13). This has
been described as the ‘burden of co-optation’ and its limit is that “the state
itself becomes a massive consumer of resources, is highly inefficient, and
fails to promote any significant degree of economic development, thus leading
eventually to its own political weakness and failure” (Villalon, 1998: 13).
The fourth and fifth faces are that of the prebendal
or rentier state, and that of the extractive state whose dynamics are closely
related to what has been said above under the subheading resource curse, but
worth restating here as a way of showing how the local elites are implicated in
the curse. Prebendalism, also referred to as neo-patrimonialism, refers to the
way in which Mobutu rewarded loyal
clients with positions which could then be used as sources of private wealth
accumulation, to the detriment of resource availability for the state’s
institutions (Villalon, 1998: 13). The extractive impulse refers to how the
state in the Congo
throughout its colonial and postcolonial times has served primarily the role of
extracting resources for the benefit of the elites (Villalon, 1998: 13). The
difference highlighted between Mobutu and the colonial times is that at least
the colonial state re-invested some of its revenue back into maintaining the
infrastructure; while under Mobutu neither hospitals were built nor
reinvestment in transport infrastructure was made (Turner, 2007: 44; Kisangani,
2012: 32). As recorded by Kisangani (2012: 211),
Congo
had 145 213 kilometres of road in 1960 but by 2010 it only had 57 000
kilometres mostly in the urban areas. In sum, the institutions that matter
where deinstitutionalized while patronage was institutionalized whereby “those
in power developed clientelist networks to gain support from the elites, not
the masses” (Kisangani,
2012: 32). These systems were replicated under both Laurent Kabila and Joseph
Kabila.
The result from these five short-term strategies is a
decay of state institutions and a feebleness which was lamented by
Nzongola-Ntalaja when he wrote that;
the major determinant of the present conflict and
instability is the decay of the state and its instrument of rule in Congo.
For it is this decay that has made it possible for Lilliputian states the size
of Congo’s smallest province, such as Uganda, or even that of a district, such
as Rwanda to take it upon themselves to impose rulers in Kinshasa and to
invade, occupy, and loot the territory of their giant neighbour (Turner, 2004:
11).
State crisis and failure can then be identified by the
lack of capacity to carry out the core functions of the state across the
domains described in this paper as constituting human security.
Conclusion:
This chapter has relied on the notions of structural
violence and structural theory of imperialism so as to identify where human
security is being hindered by actors whose declared intention may not be to
hinder it. On the international level it has been argued that colonialism and
its continuation as neo-colonialism is a factor for state weakness in the DRC.
The actions of the DRC’s neighbours have also been said to impact negatively on
human security. The most important factors for state weakness have been
identified as the type of rule that was instituted under Mobutu. The strategies
he employed to consolidate his rule were inimical to the creation of strong
state institutions as evinced by their inability to defend the country from
external aggression or to pacify the internal population.
Chapter Five
Conclusion: The Centrality of the State in the Provision
of Human Security
This paper’s has argued that the Westphalian/Weberian
state is central in the provision of human security. This Weberian state has
been taken here to be “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly
of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber,
1948: 78). As this is already the organising principle on the globe, my task
was to establish why some communities manage this while others do not. To
establish this I used the Democratic Republic of Congo as my case study and the
implied comparison was against the consolidated European states. I also relied
on the concept of human security as a lens which can help best describe what
strong and weak statehood means in the 21st century. It has been
accepted in this paper that these concepts – that of the Weberian state and
human security – are capable of “exportability irrespective of the cultural
specificities of receiving societies” (Young, 2012: 33).
The first task in a project that tries to claim
universal applicability of any concept is to try and show why this should be
the case. I have attempted to justify the Weberian state as a concept that is
universally applicable by relying on the state of nature metaphor as it was
conceived by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes has been argued to have said
that absent a power to enforce law and order life quickly becomes unbearable.
Locke, too, felt that it is necessary to have an enforcer of law and order.
Stateless societies may have existed in the past but once the modern state was
instituted it managed to, in the main, supplant all these other forms of
organising society. The important thing here is that even though these forms of
organisation, prior to the Weberian state, may have managed to provide law and
order in their respective societies, the failure to protect their members
against external aggression should be taken to mean a ‘strategic inflection
point’ occurred – their way of organising affairs was no longer viable (Grove,
1998). This is particularly true in the
case of Africa where the form of organisation
as scattered kingdoms and not nation-states did not protect members of the
community from being taken away as slaves by outsiders nor did it stop forced
labour and the exploitation of the resources by foreigners.
The task of this enforcer of law and order is not just
to provide defence against external aggression, but to create opportunities and
conditions that allow the community under its control to live happy fulfilling
lives. Having justified the state thus, the puzzle became why some communities
have managed to institute states that are capable of providing human security
while others have not. The distinction was then made between the older
consolidated Western liberal democracies and the nascent postcolonial states.
The human security concept has been argued to be a
theory insofar as it is capable of describing the main threats that face the
population in the DRC and elsewhere in postcolonial states. An analysis of the
causes of human insecurity in the DRC has yielded that at the international
level there is a continuity of the exploitative relationship between the DRC
and the West so underdevelopment and its concomitants continue to plague the
state here. Bad neighbourhood as well as the resource curse are also important
factors for the continued weakness of the state. All these factors are however
possible because the elites in the DRC have not been able to achieve a monopoly
on the use of force within their territory. Human security thus, is not an
alternative to national security. The ability of Rwanda
and Uganda
to destabilise the DRC can only be seen as possible because it cannot repel or
punish this aggression. To be sure,
these problems also arise because of the colonial legacy such that authors like
Ayoob are hopeful that, in time, consolidation may still happen.
The most significant factor for the continued weakness
of the state in the DRC has been argued to be the self-defeating short-term
strategies that were adopted by Mobutu when he came to power. His policies of
neo-patrimonialism and impunity for corruption, weakened the institutions to
the extent that the DRC became easily susceptible to foreign invasion, and the
monopoly on the use of force was compromised. Stewart’s concept of the “vicious
cycles of lack of development leading to conflict leading to lack of
development” finds its full expression in the Democratic Republic of Congo
(Stewart, 2004: 278).
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