Why Congo Persists: Sovereignty, Globalization and the Violent Reproduction of a Weak State

Wherever one looks, many elements conspire to suggest that the Democratic Republic of Congo should have collapsed some time ago under the multiple assaults of its own inadequacies as a state, the extreme heterogeneity and polarization of its populations, and the dislocations of globalization and foreign occupation. Yet, Congo has gone on defying such expectations and has continued to display a stunning propensity for resilience. This paper tries to explain why Congo persists amid these overwhelming structural obstacles. It focuses particularly on the more recent period when state weakness, foreign invasions, the exploitation of its natural resources by transnational and informal networks, and the multiplicity of domestic rebellions linked to foreign interests have not managed to dent, however slightly, the generalized support that exists for the reproduction of the Congolese state among its elites and regular citizens, foreign political and economic interests, and the international community at large. Observing that, in many parts of Congo, local grievances against the state and the greed of political elites have been magnified by the circumstances of post -Cold War Africa, it takes as paradoxical the continued broadly unchallenged existence of Congo

Compliance and defiance to national integration in Barotseland and Casamance

'Das Modell der Elitenfusion wird im allgemeinen zur Erklärung des postkolonialen 'nation-building' herangezogen. Warum sind aber einige regionale Eliten an der Peripherie bereit, dieses Projekt mitzutragen, während andere nach Autonomie oder Sezession streben? Die Frage wird anhand eines Vergleichs zwischen Barotseland in Sambia und der Casamance in Senegal untersucht. Hier wird die These vertreten, dass Eliten in beiden Fällen um Zugang zu den lokalen 'benefits' des souveränen Staates ringen. So lange sie den post-kolonialen Staat für ihre 'lokalen' Kämpfe um politische Herrschaft und Ressourcen erfolgreich nutzen können, stellen regionale Eliten den Zentralstaat nicht in Frage, selbst wenn sie an den distributiven Mechanismen der Elitenfusion auf der nationalen Ebene nicht partizipieren.' (Autorenreferat)'What determines whether peripheral regions in Africa comply with the national integration project? Why do some regional elites, outside the core 'fusion of elites', willingly partake in the state while others promote separate paths for their communities? This paper suggests some answers, based on a comparison between Barotseland - where the Lozi leadership has chosen not to challenge the Zambian project - and Casamance - where local particularism has resulted in active separatist defiance towards the Senegalese state among many Diola elites. It argues that the contrast between the two regions is more apparent than real, and that elites in both cases strive for access to the local benefits of sovereign statehood. Provided they can use the post-colonial state in their local strategies of domination and access to resources, regional elites are unlikely to challenge it, even if they are kept at a distance from resource-sharing arrangements at the national level. A broader model of African state formation, including the benefits of sovereignty for local elites, is needed to make sense of the resilience of African states and of the compliance of loser groups with their authority.' (author's abstract)

Trends in social indicators and social sector financing

Over the past three decades, per capita GDP has increased worldwide. The authors examine whether this has resulted in better quality of life in developing countries. This paper documents the evolution of social indicators (health, education, nutrition), private consumption, and government expenditure on the social sectors. They conclude that developing countries made uneven progress in the quality of life in the period under study. Key findings include: (a) health indicators showed stable improvements in all regions, but Africa's rates were the slowest; (b) of all social indicators, education made the greatest gains, however, net enrollment ratios actually decreased in Africa in the 1980s; (c) while developing nations as a group enjoyed improved indices of undernutrition in 1965-85, the degree of undernutrition worsened in more than one-third of sub-Saharan African countries; (d) Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean also saw declines in average per capita private consumption during the 1980s; and (e) the share of total government expenditure on health remained stable in all regions, but that of education declined in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors also note that any effort to assess trends is severely hampered by lack of information. The quality of existing data is not systematically trustworthy, and there are many gaps.Health Economics&Finance,Early Childhood Development,Demographics,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Early Child and Children's Health

The war on terror in context: domestic dimensions of Ethiopia and Kenya’s policies towards Somalia

17 USC 105 interim-entered record; under review.The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2022.2057292What explains variations in how African countries respond to security threats? How can we explain situations in which countries face a similar regional threat environment and yet respond very differently? In this article we take advantage of a natural experiment offered by instability in Somalia, which has given rise to terrorist threats to neighbours Ethiopia and Kenya. Analysing Ethiopian and Kenyan responses to insta- bility coming from Somalia since 2000 shows that these countries differ in both the nature and timing of their responses to a common set of Somali challenges. The key to understanding their varied responses, we argue, lies not in the objective threat itself, but in how the threat affects the political calculations of the state. These calculations are shaped by fundamental political and economic dynamics such as the presence or absence of a founding myth, the ways that elites access and maintain their hold on power, and the political economy underpinning the state.The authors thank the Minerva Research Initiative (Office of the Secretary of Defense) for supporting the work of this project through the University Grants programme (award number W911NF).The authors thank the Minerva Research Initiative (Office of the Secretary of Defense) for supporting the work of this project through the University Grants programme (award number W911NF)

A Developmental State Without Growth? Explaining the Paradox of Burkina Faso in a Comparative Perspective

For scholars of Africa\u27s political economy, an important problem has been explaining and understanding how a country escapes rule by criminals and warlords and instead comes to be directed by a set of lower-key kleptocrats who operate within a set of institutions which on the whole promote incentives and preferences for good governance . In this paper, we look at how a state has emerged in Burkina Faso which has overall been benevolent and developmental, at least by Sahelian standards. We argue that a host of factors have spared the modern state a substantial social challenge and have allowed for relatively efficient institutions. A second problem, however, is that escaping the Hobbesian state of nature and generating good governance and state capacity may be necessary but not sufficient conditions to foster sustained growth and a developmental take-off. We look again at Burkina, this time as an embodiment of such a paradoxical situation of a developmental state without growth. The case of Burkina leads us to hypothesize that a second condition, beyond developmental statehood, must be fulfilled for sustained growth: namely, there must exist the conditions for an entrepreneurial class of sufficient size, whether domestic or international, to create wealth. The sense in which we use the label entrepreneurial class is not the usual one of individuals able and willing to break with tradition and see opportunities and profit from them, but rather a narrower one: of individuals who are able to create organizations that as entities seek and profit from new and continuing opportunities. The entrepreneur hires employees and establishes a firm. Relative shortages in this factor, and constraints that prevent the flourishing of entrepreneurship are, we believe, responsible for slow growth in Burkina

Depletion-limited Kerr solitons in singly-resonant optical parametric oscillators

We analyze the impact of pump depletion in the generation of cavity solitons in a singly-resonant parametrical oscillator that includes a $\chi^{(3)}$ nonlinear section. We find an analytical expression that provides the soliton existence region using variational methods, study the efficiency of energy conversion, and compare it to a driven Kerr resonator modeled by the Lugiato-Lefever equation. At high walk-off, solitons in singly-resonant optical parametric oscillators are more efficient than those formed in a Kerr resonator driven through a linear coupler.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Parties in chains: do ethnic party bans in Africa promote peace?

Since the sweeping (re)introduction of multiparty systems in the early 1990s, almost all sub-Saharan countries have introduced legal provisions to ban ethnic or other identity-based particularistic parties. Altogether, 12 countries have actually banned political parties on these grounds. In theoretical terms, such bans can exclude particularism from politics but - contrary to public discourse - also run the risk of forcing groups to resort to violent means or of becoming an object of conflict themselves. Empirically speaking, hardly any general patterns in the effects of bans can be detected. A closer look at 12 politically relevant bans in six countries reveals an initially stabilizing impact in one case (Rwanda in 1994). A ban on a religious party in Kenya in 1993 triggered violent conflict. In cases such as Equatorial Guinea (1994) and Rwanda (2001, 2003), this regulatory measure, allegedly designed to promote peace, seems to be part of the 'menu of manipulation' and is abused to suppress the opposition

The Dualism of Contemporary Traditional Governance and the State

In many parts of the world, people live in “dual polities”: they are governed by the state and organize collective decision making within their ethnic community according to traditional rules. We examine the substantial body of works on the traditional–state dualism, focusing on the internal organization of traditional polities, their interaction with the state, and the political consequences of the dualism. We find the descriptions of the internal organization of traditional polities scattered and lacking comparative perspective. The literature on the interaction provides a good starting point for theorizing the strategic role of traditional leaders as intermediaries, but large potentials for inference remain underexploited. Studies on the consequences of “dual polities” for democracy, conflict, and development are promising in their explanatory endeavor, but they do not yet allow for robust conclusions. We therefore propose an institutionalist research agenda addressing the need for theory and for systematic data collection and explanatory approaches