This paper suggests that in Angola, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sudan there are important similarities in the projects ruling elites are pursuing. Their projects are statist and illiberal, even when engaging piecemeal with a costless mimetic liberalism. Their elites originate from narrow social bases and belong to relatively well-organised and politicised former liberation movements, ensuring tight links between political, military, and business constituencies. Having secured control of the state through violence, the MPLA, AlIngaz, TPLF and RPF have constructed an apparently effective political order that aims to be autonomous from internal and external threats, and builds on a sovereignist claim to absolute authority to conduct their domestic affairs as they please.
In their attempts at establishing hegemony, the elites in these countries seek to persuade a ‘substantial minority’ of their population of the benefits and legitimacy of their rule through statist, but not anti-capitalist, policies. High-modernist ideology underpins the belief that bureaucratic enclaves of excellence and huge infrastructure projects can qualitatively reconfigure domestic political-economic systems.
While radically criticising Africa’s traditional engagement with the international system, they have long had ambivalent relationships with the Great Powers. The TPLF, RPF, Al-Ingaz, and MPLA have also selectively deepened the integration of the countries they rule into the global economic and political order.
The study concludes that:
- In a number of African countries, state-building is not an anachronistic lens to analyse politics, but that, on the contrary, daring agendas are being pursued with the explicit aim of restructuring the political economy, reshaping society, and redefining Africa’s external relations.
- The normative, institutional and policy priorities that define political power and the logic of governance in these cases should be approached comparatively, with a view to better understanding a range of regimes that can neither be subsumed under the failed/fragile state category nor an assumed inevitable transition to electoral democracy and capitalism.
- The literature on non-liberal experiences remains small and often doesn’t go much beyond positively comparing so-called ‘local solutions’ with blundering foreign attempts to create order, whether it’s the Washington Consensus or the ‘stabilisation’ approach of liberal peace-building.
- African state-building projects continue to be superficially explored. Many perceive local projects as more credible than an internationally sponsored one carrying neo-colonial overtones, but they are seldom explicit about their authoritarianism. Furthermore, while most consequential processes of state reconstruction are happening at the macro-level, the literature tends to prefer mesa- and micro-level dynamics and sometimes extols the virtues of stateless order, resulting in the romanticising of ‘local solutions’ and the overstating of their rootedness. This also ‘over-Africanises’ African politics and underplays the extent of borrowing and external engagement – indeed, the cosmopolitan and modernist character – of African state-building agendas like that of the RPF, TPLF or Al-Ingaz.
