Mark Baur's Blog

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to swing across town to the not uncontroversial U.S. Africa Command for a lecture given by Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and someone who understands substantially more about African governance and economic arrangements than most of us ever will.  I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but considering the criticisms that have been directed at American foreign policy, and particularly its militarization, it deserves to be noted that some folks know things and others have plenty of room to catch up.  The talk was particularly intriguing considering its setting, and — at least for me — generated more questions than immediate answers.  I’ll trust that is a good thing.

Major themes, if I can try to summarize, were:

1. the certain growth in resource extraction across the continent in the coming decade(s)
2. the primacy of economic factors for addressing insecurity
3. the appropriate state of government-controlled force in developing and war-torn nations

Specifically, Collier challenged the notion that political solutions should be sought as a first resort to governance problems.  The electoral process is not necessarily associated with legitimacy, accountability, or security, but may in fact exacerbate conflicts by tying electoral victory and defeat to the agendas of warring parties and making constructive political discourse a virtual impossibility.  We should be wary of over-investing in the “magic potion” of elections — a realization towards which the devout liberal democrat may perhaps feel revulsion, I think, but which is crucial to understanding the entanglements of security, economic growth, and political legitimacy.

In order to overcome the “zero-sum” mentality that pervades conflict-prone societies, mechanisms of legitimacy must be made viable prior to the emergence of a healthy political culture.  This is where Collier’s emphasis on economic growth comes into play (particularly considering the possibilities and risks of the coming African resource boom).  Although I would have liked to hear more about what specific measures are most significant in this regard — public health, mortality, and literacy, for example, were not discussed — a key insight was that “institutions are not events, they are processes.”  Thus, insofar as legitimate commerce, leading to expanded employment of otherwise marginalized demographics (namely: young, impressionable men) — can be enabled regardless of political arrangements, significant steps can still be taken toward reducing conflict and associated traumas inflicted upon civilian populations.

A key signal of a government’s willingness to engage internal politics in good-faith, so Collier, is achieved by significantly cutting military expenditures post-conflict in order to avoid further marginalizing past rivals and reigniting tensions.  While resources can be made available for more constructive purposes in this manner, matters of security initially become the responsibility of external peacekeepers…whose exit strategy, it follows from the above, should be guided by economic rather than political milestones.  Responding to a question on the issue of human rights, Collier was reluctant to accommodate for any more than basic protections.  Using the example of Afghanistan, he warned against imposing too much of an external agenda that is unrealizable and can even be counter-productive: “human rights is our discourse.”  I did not take this to be a surrender to relativism as much as a recognition that certain fundamental rights, as we prefer to understand them, depend on such a variety of factors for their realization that they can hardly be aspired toward independent of the robust institutional mechanisms previously discussed.

At any rate, the extent to which these lessons will inform policy “on the ground” remains to be seen.  Indeed, how much leeway can actually exist within the dense bureaucracy of military programs, operations, missions, and exercises to address decidedly non-military issues?  And more to the point: If legitimacy has a corollary relationship with demilitarization, as Collier seems to have implied, what is the place for such cooperative military endeavors as this American command?  To quote Collier, the pursuit of “gesture politics” is insufficient.  We’ve heard that security comes first, but the experiences of military activism over the last decade alone are reason enough to be wary.  The stated intentions of Africa Command encompass both military and civil-society matters, but the efficacy of the means have yet to prove out against the ends…nor will they be able to in the near term.