How can viable states across Africa be ensured? This study by Princeton University suggests that state systems are the result of political calculations of extending power. A review of the trajectories of states is valuable because many of the fundamental features of African politics become more understandable. More importantly, a deep understanding of how states have progressed in Africa allows for the development of alternatives.
The African model – where states are born easily but do not die – is dramatically at odds with traditional western accounts of state building. There are important continuities and discontinuities in patterns of state consolidation in Africa across the centuries. The fundamental continuity is that leaders have had to deal with low population densities, which have made it expensive to control people as distance from the capital increases. The most important discontinuity is in the role of boundaries and the state system.
In the pre-colonial period, boundaries were defined according to how far a state could extend its power. Under colonialism, boundaries no longer reflected how far power could be broadcast but how far leaders believed their power should extend. The African successors to the colonialists created a new state system that was dedicated to reinforcing the viability of the colonial state boundaries. These boundaries are no longer a good reflection of state power, which tends to be fractured, weak and contested.
The contradiction of states with only incomplete control over the hinterlands, but full claims to sovereignty, has resulted in:
- Leaders who steal so much from the state that they kill off the productive sources of the economy.
- A bias in the delivery of services toward the small urban population and the absence of government in large parts of some countries.
- Weak central rule, which allows challengers to form large and sophisticated rebel armies.
- In some countries, state failure has meant that no one has been able to take charge.
Low population densities made the establishment of fixed territorial boundaries especially desirable to African leaders who would have faced difficulty in gaining sovereign control over their citizens. It is time to challenge the basic assumption held by African leaders and the international community that boundaries drawn haphazardly during the scramble for Africa should continue to be universally respected.
- Scholars, who have avoided non-European paths toward state consolidation, should take the African examples into account in order to develop a truly comparative account of how states develop.
- Leaders in Africa and elsewhere should accept that alternatives to some of the political arrangements that were initially demarcated by the Europeans must be considered, including the possibility of new states.
- The US should recognise that some states are not exercising physical control over parts of their country and thus cannot be considered sovereign. It should also consider the possibility of new sovereign states.
- More dynamism should be allowed in the creation of African states to underline the need for political control to be won not instituted by administrative fiat.
- Participation in international organisations by sub-national units, be they breakaway regions or areas abandoned by their central governments, should be encouraged.
