All posts in category State-building

Legitimacy Revisited…and Still Found Wanting

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that “legitimacy” is a solution to a theoretical puzzle that isn’t really so puzzling.

One of the central concerns of contemporary political science is political development—that is, understanding how and why different systems of government emerge, survive, and change.  Many of the theories we’ve crafted to address this topic start by assuming that those dynamics depend, in no small part, on the consent of the governed. Yes, all states sometimes coerce subjects into obedience, but coercion alone can’t explain why people don’t more often ignore or overthrow governments that fail to make them as happy as they could be. Taxes are costly, there are always some laws we don’t like, and subjects usually outnumber state security forces by a large margin.

Legitimacy is the idea we’ve concocted to fill that space between the amount of cooperation we think we can explain with coercion and the amount of cooperation we actually see. In its contemporary form, legitimacy has two layers. The first and supposedly deeper layer is a moral judgment about the justice of the current form of government; the second, surface layer is an instrumental judgment about the utility that government is providing. If we imagine the relationship between a state and its subjects as a marriage of sorts, we might think of the two layers of legitimacy as answers to two different questions: “Do you deserve my love?” and “What have you done for me lately?”

This two-layered notion of legitimacy is made clearest in contemporary thinking about the origins and survival of democratic regimes. According to Larry Diamond, Juan Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset in Politics in Developing Countries (p. 9, emphasis mine),

All governments rest on some mixture of coercion and consent, but democracies are unique in the degree to which their stability depends on the consent of a majority of those governed…Democratic stability requires a widespread belief among elites and masses in the legitimacy of the democratic system: that it is the best form of government (or the “least evil”), “that in spite of shortcomings and failures, the existing political institutions are better than any others that might be established,” and hence that the democratic regime is morally entitled to demand obedience—to tax and draft, to make laws and enforce them, even “if necessary, by the use of force.”

Democratic legitimacy derives, when it is most stable and secure, from an intrinsic value commitment rooted in the political culture at all levels of society, but it is also shaped (particularly in the early years of democracy) by the performance of the democratic regime, both economically and politically (through the “maintenance of civil order, personal security, adjudication and arbitration of conflicts, and a minimum of predictability in the making and implementing of decisions”). Historically, the more successful a regime has been in providing what people want, the greater and more deeply rooted tends to be its legitimacy. A long record of successful performance tends to build a large reservoir of legitimacy, enabling the system better to endure crises and challenges.

So, to recap, legitimacy is a common answer to a question about the roots of consent, and this question about consent, in turn, emerges from a particular understanding of the relationship between governments and subjects. We think that forms of government only survive so long as subjects choose to keep cooperating, and we expect that subjects will only choose to keep cooperating as long as their moral beliefs and evaluations of regime performance tell them it is in their interest to do so. The math is a bit fuzzy, but the two layers of legitimacy are basically additive. As long as the sum of the moral and instrumental judgments is above some threshold, people will cooperate.

But what if this underlying model isn’t true? What if people actually don’t scan the world that way and actively choose between cooperation and rebellion on a regular basis? What if most of us are just busy getting on with our lives, operating on something more like autopilot, unconcerned with this world of high politics as long as it doesn’t disrupt our local routines and compel us to attend to it?

The more I read about how we as humans actually think—and the more I reflect on my own lived experience—the more convinced I become that the “active optimizer” assumption on which the puzzle of consent depends is bunk. As Daniel Kahneman describes in Thinking, Fast and Slow (pp. 394-395),

Our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, and we are normally focused on our current activity and immediate environment. There are exceptions, where the quality of subjective experience is dominated by recurrent thoughts rather than by the events of the moment. When happily in love, we may feel joy even when caught in traffic, and if grieving, we may remain depressed when watching a funny movie. In normal circumstances, however, we draw pleasure and pain from what is happening at the moment, if we attend to it.

One big reason “we are normally focused on our current activity and immediate environment” is that we are creatures of habit and routine with limited cognitive resources. Most of the time, most of us don’t have the energy or the impetus to attend to big, hard, abstract questions about the morality of the current form of government, the available alternatives, and ways to get from one to the other. As Kahneman surmises (p. 354),

We normally experience life in the between-subjects mode, in which contrasting alternatives that might change your mind are absent, and of course [what you see is all there is]. As a consequence, the beliefs that you endorse when you reflect about morality do not necessarily govern your emotional reactions, and the moral intuitions that come to your mind in different situations are not internally consistent.

Put all of this together, and it looks like the active assessments of moral and instrumental value on which “legitimacy” supposedly depends are rarely made, and when they are made, they’re highly contingent. We mostly take things as they come and add the stories and meaning when prompted to do so. A lot of what looks like consent is just people going about their local business in a highly path-dependent world. If you ask us questions about various forms of government, we’ll offer answers, but those answers aren’t very reliable indicators of what’s actually guiding our behavior before or after you asked.

Put another way, I’m saying that the survival of political regimes depends not only on coercion and consent, but also, in large part, on inattention and indifference.

I think we find this hard to accept because (when we bother to think about it) we’ve bought the Hobbesian idea that, without a sovereign state, there would be no order. Hobbes’ State of Nature is philosophically useful, but empirically it’s absurd. As James Scott observes (p. 3) in The Art of Not Being Governed,

Until shortly before the common era, the very last 1 percent of human history, the social landscape consisted of elementary, self-governing, kinship units that might, occasionally, cooperate in hunting, feasting, skirmishing, trading, and peacemaking. It did not contain anything that one could call a state. In other words, living in the absence of state structures has been the standard human condition.

Clearly, nation-states aren’t the “natural” condition of the human animal, and they certainly aren’t a prerequisite for cooperation. Instead, they are a specific social technology that has emerged very recently and has so far proven highly effective at organizing coercive power and, in some cases, at helping to solve certain dilemmas of coordination and cooperation. But that doesn’t mean that we need to refer to national political regimes to explain all coordination and cooperation that happens within their territorial boundaries.

The irrelevance of legitimacy is the other side of that coin. We don’t need to refer to states to explain most of the cooperation that occurs among their putative subjects. Likewise, we don’t need a whole lot of consent to explain why those subjects don’t spend more time trying to change the forms of the nation-states they inhabit. We’ve concocted legitimacy to explain why people seemingly choose to go along with governments that don’t meet their expectations, when really most of the time people are just stumbling from immediate task to task, largely indifferent to the state-level politics on which we focus in our theories of regime survival and change. “Legitimacy” is a hypothesis in response to a question predicated on the false belief that we’re routinely more attentive to, and active in, this arena than we really are.

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by dartthrowingchimp on March 25, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on March 25, 2013

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Of Subservient Peasants and Economic Booms

Here is a sentence I never thought I would see in 2013:

Peasants, many of whom still long for absolute rule, remain remarkably subservient.

That’s from a new bit in Foreign Affairs called “Booming Bhutan,” part of a five-part series looking at the fastest-growing economies in the world in 2012.

I know only the vaguest outlines of Bhutan’s recent history, but I’m instantly suspicious of any claim that a large group of people longs for absolutism. As the article describes, Bhutan has experienced a lot of political and socioeconomic disruptions in the past decade, and many of those changes have directly not benefited the small farmers who comprise a substantial share of the country’s population:

Karga Lama, a journalist who has covered Bhutan, wrote to me that he wonders whether “people at the grassroots [are] really enjoying and benefitting from the process of democracy, or [if] the few people at the upper echelon of political structure [are] taking the cream.” Indeed, 40 percent of the population are still subsistence farmers, crowded on the country’s small portion of arable land. Seeking better opportunities, many young Bhutanese are moving to Thimpu, the capital, but few are finding gainful employment. Cheaply constructed commercial and residential buildings have been erected to house new inhabitants and the city is losing its unique architectural character. Traffic jams and petty crimes have also become more frequent.

I read that passage and I think: Maybe it’s not “absolute rule” these “peasants” long for but the relative assurance of the life that came before these developmental push of the past 10 years. I think of pensioners in the former Soviet Union who are often described as yearning for tyranny because they vote for the Communist Party and talk wistfully about the benefits they enjoyed in the old days. A distaste for uncertainty about one’s ability to produce or afford food and shelter should not be conflated with an affirmation of all aspects of an old order that predictably delivered those things. Maybe it isn’t absolutism these farmers want so much as freedom from the intrusions of the developmental state those “few people at the upper echelon of political structure” are attempting to construct for their own aggrandizement.

More generally, I wonder about the premise of the series of which this essay is a part. You see this kind of “best practices” logic a lot in writing about development—find the cases that are doing something you’d like, see what’s making them tick so you can try to replicate or emulate it elsewhere. In the case of economic growth, though, this approach is almost always going to be misleading. Economic growth is measured as a percentage, and as Charles Wheelan writes in Naked Statistics,

Percentages don’t lie—but they can exaggerate. One way to make growth look explosive is to use percentage change to describe some change relative to a very low starting point.

The countries at the top of the IMF’s 2012 list nicely illustrate this principle in action. According to the IMF, the five fastest-growing economies in 2012 were Sao Tome and Principe, South Sudan, Guinea, Bhutan, and Mongolia. What does that set of cases tell us about the causes of exceptionally rapid economic growth? Just start from a low baseline—in other words, be poor—and possess copious natural resources that are currently in high demand! (In Bhutan’s case, that natural resource is hydropower,which it sells to its power-hungry neighbor, India). Or, if you’re not especially poor now, you can always knock output down and set yourself up for a nice rebound effect with a civil war and state collapse, like #8 Libya did. Lessons learned, indeed.

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by dartthrowingchimp on February 2, 2013  •  Permalink
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Egypt’s Constitution as a “Used Future”

Leaning on the musings of artist John Powers, I wrote a post a couple of days ago about states as political manifestations of what John called a “used future”—a world that shows its provenance. Drawing on John’s discussion of the used future George Lucas self-consciously constructed for Star Wars, I suggested that states are more like the Millennium Falcon in their guided but messy assembly of disparate elements than they are like the Death Star and the grandiose Modernist ideals it represented.

Egypt’s draft constitution nicely encapsulates this idea of states, and constitutions in particular, as used futures. Constitutions are schemata for the future practice of politics within states, and political scientists and policy-makers often lade the drafting of these schemes with heavy expectations. The rewriting of basic rules is seen as an opportunity to reboot whole societies—to end old conflicts, to prevent new ones from emerging, and to channel officials’ and citizens’ behavior in more fruitful directions. If we just get the rules right, the thinking goes, we can knock a previously troubled society onto a new and more desirable equilibrium path.

As Egypt is reminding us, though, real-world constitutions are not elegant constructs that have been meticulously designed to guide the development of a harmonious new society. More often, they are collages composed of disparate elements, each with its own historical provenance. A constitution is meant to embody a specific vision of the future, but that document can’t escape the pasts and presents of the people who actually draft it. Constitutional provisions aren’t produced by actuaries armed with formulae whose elements and solutions are objectively known. Instead, they are haggled over by human beings who arrive at the negotiating table with their own interests and prejudices and who fear what the uncertainties of the future they are crafting may bring for themselves and their families and friends.

Partly because they are written by committee, constitutions often contain inconsistencies and even contradictions. In a recent press release, Human Rights Watch identifies several of these in Egypt’s draft constitution. For example, on the question of free speech:

Article 45 protects freedom of expression without stating what legitimate limitations are permissible and how to balance this right against article 31, which states that, “The individual person may not be insulted,” and article 44 prohibiting “the insulting of prophets.” Articles 31 and 44 are not legitimate limitations on freedom of expression under human rights law, and they would appear to make difficult, if not impossible, any meaningful reform to existing penal code provisions that criminalize “insult” and defamation, provisions frequently used in the past to prosecute critics of the government.

And on the inviolability of citizens’ rights:

Article 81 states that no law may limit the essence of the rights and freedoms set out in the constitution but goes on to say that, “These rights and freedoms shall be exercised insofar as they do not contradict the principles set out in the Chapter on State and Society in this constitution.” The provisions in that chapter include article 10, which states that, “The state and society shall commit to preserving the true nature of the Egyptian family,” and article 11, which states that, “The state shall protect ethics and morals and public order.” The language in both these provisions is overly broad, open to interpretation, and available to justify wide-ranging limitations on key rights, Human Rights Watch said. It appears to place the “true nature of the family” and morals and public orders above fundamental rights.

Philosophically, I’m a liberal, so I believe HRW is right to suggest that Egypt would be better off if its constitution-writers resolved those inconsistencies now in a liberal direction. Still, as a purely analytical matter, it’s fascinating to see liberalism, Islamism, and other forms of traditionalism colliding so awkwardly in a single document. Different chunks of this text clearly signify distinct streams of Egyptian and world history. Instead of the Modernist ideal of an urban machine built from the ground up, we get the architecture of an old city in which buildings from many eras stand side by side.

Actually, Americans should be more familiar with this conundrum than we are. More than 200 years after our founding documents were written, we’re still arguing over what they mean, often phrase by phrase, sometimes even word by word. Curiously, in spite of this unending and intense debate, we’ve constructed a national myth in which the rules of American politics were delivered unto us like sacred texts by a cabal of farsighted and public-minded men. In the construction and repetition of that myth, we gloss over the diverse historical origins of those texts, the profound disagreements they elided, and the many messes they have since failed to prevent or even created.

Maybe Egyptians today can learn from our mistakes—not just in the wording of the constitution they adopt (or don’t) now, but also in acknowledging the inevitability of ambiguities in that document and recognizing that the future will keep delivering opportunities to haggle over them anew.

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by dartthrowingchimp on December 4, 2012  •  Permalink
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States Are Like the Millennium Falcon

Last week, artist John Powers wrote a wonderful blog post on how the original Star Wars movie pioneered American cinematic representations of a “used future”—that is, “a future with a past.”

The visual program of Star Wars is unique because it was chronologically stratified. Lucas borrowed from real machine age periods to give his cinematic future an immediately recognizable depth of time. We [are] meant to see that the oldest elements of the film, like Obi Wan Kenobi with his Samurai robes, and Darth Vader…were hold-overs from an older order…Luke’s Landspeeder and C3PO stood in for what was clearly an entire machine age…Luke and his rebel cohorts were flying into battle in the Star Wars equivalent of an old WWII surplus.

I’m a fan of Star Wars—well, of the first two and a half movies, anyway—but I’m also a political scientist, and John’s post got me thinking again about how political scientists think about states.

In American political science, the conventional (Modernist) view of states and their origins are embodied in Lucas’ Death Star. Hierarchically organized communities draw up and execute elaborate plans for a system that performs a clear set of functions. Everything in the whole serves a unique purpose, and each component was presumably built just for that purpose. The engineered system is complicated, but it is not complex. The whole is the sum of its modular parts.  Like Le Corbusier’s radiant city as described by James Scott, the ideal Modernist state is “a lyrical marriage between Cartesian pure forms and the implacable requirements of the machine.”

death star power trench plans

In fact, states are more the Millennium Falcon. States are not built de novo to fill political vacuums. Instead, like the hot rods Lucas celebrates in American Graffiti, states are motley assemblages of formal and informal institutions cobbled together on the go. Many of those parts were designed at some time for some purpose, but not necessarily the one for which they’re actually being used. Change often occurs at the margins in response to specific problems that are solved imperfectly. Instead of a spacecraft carefully designed to execute of series of specific tasks, we get a mostly functional “hunk of junk.”

Millennium Falcon

The builders of these assemblages are more craftsmen than engineers. They don’t have the luxury of time, the know-how, or the resources to build a new ship from the ground up, so they tinker at the margins as they go and hope the whole thing doesn’t disintegrate out from under them. Not trivially, they also have some attachment to the idiosyncrasies and imperfections of the system they’ve cobbled together. Even if they could scrap it for a newer and cleaner model, they probably wouldn’t want to. The Millennium Falcon may be a hunk of junk, but to its pilot, it’s “the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.”

The aesthetic of a “used future” George Lucas pioneered for American moviegoers in Star Wars is echoed in Paul Pierson’s call for social scientists to situate politics in time:

Contemporary social scientists typically take a snapshot view of political life, but there is often a strong case to be made for shifting from snapshots to moving pictures. This means systematically situating particular moments (including the present) in a temporal sequence of events and processes stretching over extended periods.

Moving pictures of the Hollywood kind often help us see the world differently. Lucas’ vision of a “used future” reminds us that the present is really an accretion of many pasts, and we shouldn’t ignore those origins in our theories of political development.

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by dartthrowingchimp on December 2, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on December 2, 2012

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Libya Revisited

Since the collapse of the Gaddafi regime a little more than a year ago, Libya has served as a Rorschach test for American and European observers of international relations—a complex and disorderly swirl of political events onto which we typically project our prior beliefs about the circumstances under which military intervention in other country’s conflicts is smart and just. Where observers whose biases tilt toward the “justice” part of that equation tend to see averted atrocities and nascent democracy, self-described “realists” usually spotlight the persistence of militia-fed violence and the secondary effects of Libya’s collapse on its neighbors in the Sahel as grounds for arguing that NATO should never have stepped in.

A recent article in the Economist offers fresh support for proponents of that intervention. In a dispatch entitled “Rising from the Ruins,” a magazine not known for its bleeding heart informs us that,

Since the colonel’s death in October last year at the hands of rebel fighters, Libya has not only held national elections, followed a fortnight ago by the presentation of a diverse government, albeit that not all of its members have been endorsed. It has also started to build a new system of civil administration that may one day form the backbone of a law-abiding and prosperous society.

The piece nods in the direction of last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the fears of terrorism and religious extremism that were amplified by that assault, but it goes on to suggest that those fears may be misplaced.

On the ground, the picture, though far from uniformly rosy, is more hopeful. Many of the new state structures and services…are being created from the bottom up rather than handed down by a central government that is still only embryonic. The new powers in the land are council leaders, a sort of cross between mayors and regional governors. Some are doing well.

By “doing well,” the author seems to mean “doing what governments are supposed to do,” namely, providing order and delivering basic public goods:

Regional structures are taking shape. Rickety they may be, but they increasingly trump those in the capital, where political rivalries and the fear of being accused of corruption have led ministers to duck hard decisions. Some cities are creating their own economic links with the outside world…Dynamic local leaders have improved services. The streets of a range of coastal towns are far cleaner than in Cairo or Tunis. Rubbish-collecting lorries and street sweepers in tidy overalls are out every morning. Hospitals have reopened. Most important for ordinary Libyans, services such as tap water and electricity—disrupted during the rebellion—are working just about everywhere. Children are back at school.

I’m not a Libya pro, and I can’t offer any first-hand accounts of developments there from my desk in suburban Maryland. What I can bring to the table is the perspective of a longtime observer of democratization and state collapse. From that perch, I think the skeptics are mostly wrong. Critics of NATO’s intervention are right to bemoan the violence and injustice and spillover that Libya’s collapse has brought. The mistake they make, I think, lies in their failure to consider a realistic set of alternatives to NATO intervention and where they would have led.

My sense of the plausible alternatives starts from the observation that the Libyan state under Gaddafi was a personalist regime—a system in which political authority is almost wholly concentrated in the hands of single individual—and all personalist regimes collapse eventually. As Barbara Geddes has shown in her excellent work on authoritarian breakdown, personalist regimes rarely survive the death of their “big man,” and the ensuing breakdowns are often bloody.

Given these facts, the idea that would-be interveners were choosing between fomenting instability or returning to authoritarian stability is false. Without any nudge from NATO forces, Libya in 2011 had already slipped into civil war. At that point, its possible futures included a quick and brutal restoration of order under Gaddafi, a quick rebel victory, or a protracted civil war. Absent foreign intervention, either brutal repression or a protracted civil war appeared to be the most likely trajectories, while a quick rebel victory seemed highly unlikely.

It’s easy to see that every one of these scenarios would have been bloody. What’s more often overlooked, I think, is that every one of these scenarios would also have led to state collapse followed by a long and messy period of state-building. The only real difference is in the timing. Even if the Gadaffi regime had managed to restore control in 2011, Geddes’ research suggests that it would merely have postponed its day of reckoning; the factional scrambles we’re seeing today would have occurred eventually, only after another episode of brutal repression and probably after another eruption of civil war. Meanwhile, a prolonged version of the conflict that started in 2011 would have entailed its own form of state collapse, de facto partition, that would have produced many of the same negative repercussions we’re now lamenting (militia justice, spillover effects) while merely delaying the arrival of the positive ones. By helping to hasten the rebels’ victory in a fight that started without them, NATO’s intervention merely accelerated the arrival of a tumultuous but inevitable period of political transformation.

Some critics of the NATO intervention are comfortable with the decision to intrude in Libya’s civil war but critical of the hands-off approach the United States and Europe have taken to state-building. What I think we’re seeing in dispatches like the one in this week’s Economist, however, is that the absence of a heavy foreign footprint in post-Gaddafi Libyan politics is actually serving the country pretty well. Rather than weakly empowering a favored cadre and encouraging massive rent-seeking, the less intrusive posture the United States and Europe have adopted in Libya is allowing state-building to proceed of its own accord.

Now, instead of swinging away at a foreign-funded piñata, Libya’s regional factions have to choose between swinging at each other or working out ways to get along. Because none of those regional factions enjoys a significant coercive advantage over its rivals, there are strong incentives to refrain from the former, and that seems to be helping push the latter along. As James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10, it’s impossible to remove the causes of factionalism, so the best we can do is to try to control its effects. The crazy-quilt character of post-Gaddafi politics may be hindering the emergence of a powerful central government, but it also naturally protects against one alternative that Madison saw as a graver threat than faction, namely, a tyranny of the majority. We’ll never know for sure, of course, but my hunch is that the state produced by this halting process will ultimately prove more durable than any construct we would have gotten from another foreign-funded, “high modernist” state-building binge. If Afghanistan and Iraq are any guide, that’s actually not a very high bar to clear.

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by dartthrowingchimp on November 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Authoritarian Breakdown, Democratization, International Relations, Revolutions, State Collapse, State-building
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on November 19, 2012

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Democracy and Development Revisited…Again

Over the weekend, I started reading Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, a book that attempts to reinterpret the whole of economics through the lens of complexity theory. I’m only a couple of chapters in at this point, but the most striking thing in the book so far is a chart that shows how absurdly uneven the growth in human wealth has been over time. As he describes (pp. 9-11, emphasis added),

If we use the appearance of the first tools as our starting point, it took about 2,485,000 years, or 99.4 percent, of our economic history to go from the first tools to the hunter-gatherer level of economic and social sophistication… The economic journey between the hunter-gatherer world and the modern world was also very slow over most of the 15,000-year period, and then progress exploded in the last 250 years… To summarize 2.5 million years of economic history in brief: for a very, very, very long time not much happened; then all of a sudden, all hell broke loose.

Just a few days after I read that passage, political scientist Xavier Marquez dropped a tremendous blog post on the global diffusion of democracy over the past two centuries. Marquez opens the post this way (again, emphasis added):

People sometimes do not realize how total has been the normative triumph of some of the ideas typically associated with democracy, even if one thinks that democracy itself has not succeeded quite as spectacularly. Take, for instance, the norm that rulers of states should be selected through some process that involves voting by all adults in society (I’m being deliberately vague here) rather than, say, inheriting their position by succeeding their fathers. In 1788 there were only a couple of countries in the world that could even claim to publicly recognize something remotely like this norm. Most people could not vote, and voting was not generally recognized as something that needed to happen before rulers could rule; rulers could and did claim to have authority to rule on other grounds. Norms of hereditary selection structured the symbolic universe in which political competition took place, and defined its ultimate boundaries for most people (at least those who lived in state spaces). Yet by 2008 there were only four or five countries in the world that did not publicly acknowledge universal voting rights.

If you consider the timing, pace, and character of those two trends side by side, it’s very hard to believe that they aren’t interrelated. Take a look at this figure below. The red line replicates a portion of Beinhocker’s aforementioned plot, using world GDP estimates produced by economist Brad De Long (PDF) to show the exponential growth in human wealth over the past 200 years. The blue line plots the spread of universal suffrage across states in the international political system, as recorded in the Political Institutions and Political Events (PIPE) data set Marquez used in his blog post.

I do not read this chart as evidence in favor of modernization theory, which posits a causal arrow running from economic development to democracy and envisions that changes within specific nation-states unfold in a particular sequence: industrialization –> urbanization + education –> value changes –> democratization. In fact, the chart of long-term global trends masks lots of short-term churn in the status of specific countries and regions. Many countries have diverged sharply from the developmental sequence posited by modernization theory, and that’s a serious problem for a theory of change.

Instead, I see the chart as evidence that human society at the global level has become a complex adaptive system that is currently experiencing a period of radical transformation, or “state shift.” These trends in wealth and governance aren’t cause and effect in the traditional sense, nor are they spuriously correlated. Instead, they are twin streams of single evolutionary process that is driven, in part, by the creation, selection, and modification of a rapidly widening array of physical and social technologies. Economic complexity is simultaneously a product and a catalyst of this process, and political institutions—including the ones we use to select national rule-makers—are among the most influential social technologies also involved in this “reciprocal dance,” as Beinhocker calls it. (N.B. Weapons are one of the more influential physical technologies in this system that economists often ignore, and their interplay with the evolution of political institutions is a crucial part of this wider story, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Why would democracy and wealth grow hand in hand? On this point, I take my cues from Owen Barder, Henry Farrell, and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi. In a brilliant online talk, Barder follows Beinhocker’s lead and argues that economic development is an evolutionary process which depends heavily on processes of innovation and selection. Farrell and Shalizi describe why democracy is generally better than other forms of government at supporting those processes:

Democracy has unique benefits as a form of collective problem solving in that it potentially allows people with highly diverse perspectives to come together in order collectively to solve problems. Democracy can do this better than either markets and hierarchies, because it brings these diverse perceptions into direct contact with each other, allowing forms of learning that are unlikely either through the price mechanism of markets or the hierarchical arrangements of bureaucracy. Furthermore, democracy can, by experimenting, take advantage of novel forms of collective cognition that are facilitated by new media.

One point I would like to amplify in this line of thinking is that democracy isn’t really a specific “thing” so much as the label we stick on a cluster of seemingly similar things. Like human “races,” political regime types are a set of concepts we’ve developed to organize our thinking about similarities and differences in forms of the social technology we call government. These concepts are neither natural nor inevitable, and they often obscure a tremendous diversity within the categories they establish. Our decision to classify something as a “democracy” depends on many different features, each of which can take a wide variety of forms without violating our mental classification scheme. On electoral systems alone, you’ll be hard pressed to find two cases that look exactly alike, and that’s just one of many relevant attributes. And, of course, even in cases we might consider archetypal, these rules are constantly evolving.

One practical implication of this point is the political version of Owen Barder’s advice to purveyors of foreign aid: instead of searching for “best practices” we can copy from one context and paste onto another, we should think about how to facilitate appropriate experimentation, feedback, and learning within societies we wish to assist, and about what kinds of changes we might make in our own rules and organizations that will further support those processes. These institutions are not modular, and we cannot control the systems in which they’re embedded. We don’t build states, we perturb them, and we should never lose sight of that difference.

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by dartthrowingchimp on September 12, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on September 12, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/democracy-and-development-revisited-again/

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Burma

Over the past year or so, Burma’s authoritarian government has implemented significant, albeit limited, political reforms. This partial liberalization has won guarded praise from Aung San Suu Kyi, the nation’s leading dissident who is now set to run for parliament in by-elections this spring, as well as Western governments who support her cause. At the same time, the country’s military has intensified its vicious fight against the autonomy-seeking Kachin people of northern Burma. In its efforts to snuff out that uprising, the Burmese military has “committed serious abuses” against civilians, including killing them, using them as forced labor, and pillaging their homes. And the Kachin conflict is just one of several long-running ethnic insurgencies in Burma, none of which is yet resolved.

These seemingly schizophrenic responses to popular demands for reform–releasing prisoners one minute, literally smashing villages the next–has a lot of people wondering: Which of these approaches shows us the real Burmese government? Is the country being run by budding democrats who haven’t quite figured out how break their atrocious habits in the north, or is it being run by tyrannical genocidaires who are using piecemeal reforms as a tactic to trick the rest of the world into ending painful sanctions? In a post on his always-thoughtful Securing Rights blog, Georgetown University student Daniel Solomon put it this way:

The release of Burma’s political prisoners is a symbolically significant effort, essential to effective political reconciliation between Burma’s civilian government and the pro-democracy opposition. However, the real challenge to Burma’s democratization will stem from the regime’s effort to negotiate a political settlement with Burma’s ethnic minority groups. The Karen conflict is a microcosm of a wider issue–Burma’s central government, interested in consolidating political authority and access to the border regions’ natural resource wealth, prefers a Naypyidaw-based, centralized government, while minority opposition groups prefer a federalized system.

From that passage, I inferred that Dan sees the ethnic wars in northern Burma as more fundamental to the country’s future than its constitutional changes, and therefore the government’s counterinsurgency efforts as somehow more revealing of its true nature. That order of priority was echoed in a recent tweet from former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who linked to the New York Times story on the Kachin war with this commentary: “New military action against the Kachin reminds how far Burma has to go to achieve genuine reform. Not there yet.” Meanwhile, Burmese journalist Zin Linn noted for the Asian Correspondent that President Thein Sein had twice instructed the military commander-in-chief to stop the Kachin offensive, but those instructions have apparently been ignored. From that fact, he concluded that the president’s commands are a “deceitful tactic,” “worthless statements intended to satisfy the international community” so it will lift long-standing sanctions.

I wonder, though, if attempts to view these two streams of behavior through a single lens obscure more than they clarify. Burma’s reform process will inevitably be multidimensional, because governance is multidimensional. Democratization lies on one dimension, centralization lies on another, and ethno-nationalism arguably on yet another. Democratization is about the expansion of a government’s accountability to its citizens. Democratic states vary widely in the extent to which they centralize power, from the genuine federalism of the United States to the highly centralized administration of the French Republic, and one end of that spectrum is not obviously more liberal or democratic than the other. Existing democracies also vary widely in the extent to which they recognize ethnic “communities” as rights-bearing groups and provide legal opportunities to advance demands for national self-determination. These three dimensions are interrelated in their concern for popular sovereignty, but they do not and need not move in lock step.

If that’s right, then I’m not sure it’s helpful to presume that decentralization represents the only just and liberal outcome to Burma’s ethnic wars. Without question, it is deeply illiberal to respond to demands for autonomy or even independence with mass atrocities, where punishment is collective, disproportionate, and indiscriminate. It is not inherently illiberal, however, to reject demands for decentralization or autonomy, and it is arguably more liberal in the classical sense of that word to reject attempts to link citizenship to ethnicity than it is to accept them.

I also agree that it’s reasonable to look to the government’s treatment of the communities entangled in these insurgencies for clues to that government’s direction and intentions. That said, I don’t think it is sensible or even particularly helpful to presume that both streams of behavior flow from a single “character,” or even a common strategy.

What if these seemingly contradictory tracks are the twin results a house divided? It’s quite possible that actions on these different fronts are being led by different factions within the Burmese government. Maybe civilian leaders intent on liberalization are driving reforms at the center while military leaders committed to maintaining the country’s territorial integrity retain control over counterinsurgency. Maybe civilian and military elites have both split into “soft-liner” and “hard-liner” camps, and the two are wrestling for control while we scratch our heads over their seemingly incoherent behavior. I don’t know which of these is true, and I get the sense that very few people do. Based on my knowledge of other reformist episodes in recent history, however, either of these scenarios seems more plausible to me than a narrative in which a ruthless and unified cadre outfoxes the world.

This question isn’t academic. On the one hand, foreign governments and international activists have every right and reason to demand that Burmese forces immediately stop committing atrocities. On the other hand, if the Burmese government is internally divided, then conditioning rewards for political reform on specific responses to the country’s ethnic insurgencies could push liberalizers into a confrontation with their internal rivals before they’re strong enough to win that fight. If soft-liners are competing with hard-liners for the upper hand in this process, they will gain powerful allies over the next several months as political parties and civic groups mobilize in response to reforms at the center and even, hopefully, win seats in parliament. I don’t see any simple answers to this moral dilemma, but I do believe we’ll grope our way toward more effective responses by avoiding policies that tightly link conditions on the two dimensions and the assumptions of organizational and strategic coherence on which those policies would be based.

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by dartthrowingchimp on January 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratization, State-building, Transitions to Democracy, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 23, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-in-burma/

Surprise! Anthropologists Give Western State-Building in Afghanistan Poor Marks

Coburn does not romanticize the ways of Istalif–the quiet the town has enjoyed since the end of the Taliban regime is highly tenuous, and largely the result of tacit agreements among bitter rivals over what to forget and ignore. Whatever the fragility of such an arrangement, Coburn implies that it is preferable to the modernizing plans of even the most thoughtful state-builders. The attempt to create impersonal, merit-oriented bureaucracies and to spread liberal beliefs about gender, religion or criminal punishment is as likely to exacerbate conflict as to resolve it. Stability is created with the resources at hand, not from on high or far away (“The state does not live here,” Istalifis like to say).

That’s from a thought-provoking review in Sunday’s New York Times of three new books on Afghanistan, two written by Boston University anthropologists Noah Coburn and Thomas Barfield and one by the now-uncategorizable Rory Stewart and co-author Gerald Knaus. Here’s another bit of the review, by senior editor Alexander Star, on Barfield’s book:

With some irony, Barfield shows that Afghan rulers of the last 150 years anticipated Karzai in their combination of anti-foreign rhetoric with a reliance on outside assistance; one king after another cast himself as the essential preserver of Afghan independence and tradition while depending on British subsidies. Meanwhile, life in the countryside was little affected: the most successful rulers “declared their governments all-powerful but rarely risked testing their claim by implementing controversial policies.” After the Taliban’s departure, “the enthusiasm for restoring a highly centralized government was confined to the international community and the Kabul elite that ran it.”

The review also addresses the claim that the whole state-building endeavor in Afghanistan could have gone much better, if only Western agents of modernization had arrived with deeper “local knowledge.”

Understanding Afghanistan’s social and cultural diversity has proven little easier than mastering it…The trouble, it seems, is that a little local knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Western soldiers meet with village councils, or shuras, and work to strike deals with local elders; and the methods of counterinsurgency may well give them a greater capacity to do so. But what if the shura is largely ceremonial, with real power exercised behind the scenes? And what if the elders are not all they seem? What if they exaggerate their own authority, or seek to establish that authority through prominent meetings with easily impressed outsiders? What if the elders, like everyone else, are anxiously hoarding their power, refusing to take risks, and preparing for an unpredictable future in which it’s equally plausible that mullahs, militias or Kabul bureaucrats might each gain more power? What then is to be done?

I said my piece on Western state-building efforts in Afghanistan on this blog a few months ago, and I’m sure I found this review so appealing, in part, because I already agreed with the conclusions the authors and reviewer have reached. I’m not an Afghanistan expert, so I don’t expect my thoughts on the subject to move many readers.

That said, I wish everyone calling for MOAR STATE-BUILDING as a way to end the war in Afghanistan, or to stabilize “fragile” and “failed” states anywhere else, would engage more seriously with these deep, first-hand accounts of how and why the most intensive (and expensive) attempts to do so in recently history have fundamentally failed. If you’re going to argue that externally motivated and funded programs can build functioning states while making peace and advancing liberal values, you can’t just wave your hands at these kinds of failures or claim they can be overcome with another twist of some knob (More local knowledge! More stakeholder involvement! Faster training!). The failure is systemic, and MOAR STATE-BUILDING is part of that system.

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by dartthrowingchimp on November 21, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Foreign Policy, State-building
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on November 21, 2011

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/surprise-anthropologists-give-western-state-building-in-afghanistan-poor-marks/

Libya’s Chicken-and-Egg Problem

Just over a week ago, Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC) declared the country liberated and the transition to a post-Gaddafi state officially underway. This week, we’ve started to see the first of what I expect will be a raft of stories about tensions and conflict among the groups over whom the TNC is claiming authority. Here’s the opening to one from the Washington Post:

Libya has emerged from its civil war with more than 300 militias and no political consensus on forming a national army, raising concerns that irregular, gun-toting groups could become entrenched and pose a long-term challenge to the government, officials here said. On Monday, Libyan leaders began to establish a new interim government with the authority to create the armed forces, choosing the technocratic Abdurrahim el-Keib as prime minister. But the militiamen who won the eight-month war have made it clear that they will not submit meekly to the new civilian authorities.

In the Guardian, we hear from a reporter who tagged along with rebel militias to Abu Salim, a neighborhood in Tripoli, about the mistrust among those militias:

The plan was simple, Essam said. Gaddafi had distributed a lot of guns to the people of this neighbourhood. The rebels would go from house to house, search for weapons and detain wanted fugitives. Three units were to conduct this operation, one from Misrata, one from Essam’s Freemen of Libya unit, and the local rebel military council of Abu Salim. The Misratans, experienced and well-equipped, had a reputation as ruthless fighters who didn’t trust anyone else. Essam’s unit respected them but didn’t really like them, and both the Misratans and the Freemen mistrusted the local rebels of Abu Salim. “They became rebels after Tripoli was liberated,” said one of Essam’s men, smirking.

In some cases, the mistrust has erupted into open fighting. Here’s a snippet from today’s Telegraph:

Two people died from bullet wounds and at least seven fighters were injured during a battle that started when militia from the town of Zintan were stopped by guards from the Tripoli Brigade from entering the city’s Central Hospital to kill a patient.

These stories illustrate the massive governance problem Libya now confronts. Libya is a collapsed state. It has no functioning central authority. The TNC has proclaimed itself to be the country’s national government, and the international community has endorsed that claim, but that claim is only now starting to get tested. The conventional view is that internal authority and external endorsement are intertwined, but that’s an international legal fiction, not real politics. As places like Afghanistan and Somalia remind us, international endorsement does not magically cause domestic factions to fall in line behind the anointed party.

There’s a chicken-and-egg quality to the state-building problem. To establish itself as a functioning national government, Libya’s TNC needs to build up trust in its authority. To build that trust, the TNC needs to get the country’s disparate militias to start obeying its writ and, in so doing, to demonstrate that it deserves their trust. Those militias are going to be reluctant to follow the TNC’s writ, however, as long as they are worried that the TNC or other rival factions might take advantage of them if they do. So which comes first: obedience, or trust?

I know very little about Libyan politics and society, and I certainly don’t know how this situation will evolve. As a scholar with experience studying state collapse, though, I have to say that I’m pessimistic. In some collapsed states, one faction holds a preponderance of coercive power, and that imbalance can encourage other factions to start falling in line behind it. When coercive power is distributed broadly and more evenly, however, it’s more difficult to get that kind of bandwagoning started. I would be surprised to see another organization make a competing claim to national authority; foreign powers’ endorsement of, and investment in, the TNC should succeed in discouraging that. I would not be surprised to see emerging local governments and the militias that back or control them adopt a “wait and see” attitude, occasionally clashing with the TNC or each other when they step on each others’ political or economic toes. Hopefully, Libya’s factions will manage to negotiate their way out of this dilemma soon, but that outcome would be an exceptional one.

UPDATE: From this New York Times story, published later in the day this post went up, it sounds like mistrust is winning and obedience is going to be a very hard sell:

Many of the local militia leaders who helped topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi are abandoning a pledge to give up their weapons and now say they intend to preserve their autonomy and influence political decisions as “guardians of the revolution”…“Nobody wants to give up arms now, and many tribes and cities are accumulating arms ‘just in case,’ ” said Mahmoud Shammam, a spokesman for the council’s executive board…Many members of military councils insist that they need to stay armed until a new constitution is ratified because they do not trust the weak provisional government to steer Libya to democracy on its own. “We are the ones who are holding the power there — the people with the force on the ground — and we are not going to give that up until we have a legitimate government that will emerge from free and fair elections,” said Anwar Fekini, a French-Libyan lawyer who is a leader of the armed groups in the western mountains and is also close to top leaders of the transitional council. “We will make sure we are going to bring the country to a civil constitution and democratic system,” he added, “and we will use all available means — first of all our might on the ground.”

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by dartthrowingchimp on November 1, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in State Collapse, State-building
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on November 1, 2011

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/libyas-chicken-and-egg-problem/

All Good Things Do Not Always Go Together

A story in today’s New York Times describes how the site of a massacre of dozens of alleged Gaddafi loyalists in Surt was scrubbed before evidence required for a careful investigation could be collected.

It appeared to be one of the worst massacres of the eight-month conflict, but days after it occurred, no one from Libya’s new government had come to investigate. The interim leaders, who declared the country liberated on Sunday, may simply have their hands full with the responsibilities that come with running a state. But throughout the Libyan conflict, they have also shown themselves to be unwilling or incapable of looking into accusations of atrocities by their fighters, despite repeated pledges not to tolerate abuse.

There’s a sharp tension in Libya right now between demands from external forces for the NTC to police rights violations and the NTC’s own need to expand its circle of loyalty. The NTC just isn’t powerful enough to impose its authority across Libyan territory, so it will have to try to induce compliance from disparate militias by offering gains from cooperation. Even where clearly warranted, investigations and trials of rival militias’ members are more likely to push those groups away than pull them in.

In short, the NTC simply can’t please both constituencies–foreign patrons calling for instant hierarchy and domestic militias seeking a share of power–at the same time. Unfortunately, all good things do not always go together.

2 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on October 25, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Revolutions, State Collapse, State-building, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on October 25, 2011

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/all-good-things-do-not-always-go-together/

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