by ALEX DEWAAL
Introduction
In this posting, I sketch an approach for understanding Somalia,
based on the framework of the “rentier political marketplace,” which is a
political-economic analysis structured around the dynamics of bargaining over
rental resources by intermediate elites, both inside and outside the state. I
outline how this may also help in understanding patterns of violence over the
last thirty years.
My main argument is that the Somali state, along with a number of
other countries in Africa and the greater Middle East, underwent a profound
structural transformation in the 1980s, and that we have been living with the
under-recognized consequences ever since. At the time, this change had two
particularly striking features. One was economic crisis, which meant that—in the
words of Bob Bates—meant that “things fell apart.”
The levels of finance
available to governments meant that they simply could not sustain the basic
functions of government, let alone build institutional states. The second was
the beginning of the end of the Cold War, which meant that—as David Laitin
observed—that the coup maker could not count on automatic security backing from
one or other superpower. Common to both of these changes was a sharp reduction
in the discretionary budgets that rulers used to pay their armies and security
services and to pay off intermediate elites. I suggest that this (unmeasured)
collapse in the “political budget” (the term is Sudanese political vernacular)
was the cause of state crisis in many African countries, of which Somalia was
an extreme and illuminating case.
The cashflow to the political budget is the heartbeat of a rentier
patronage state. It is this top-down flow of resources, managed by the ruler in
accordance with a political-business plan, that determines regime survival or
otherwise. Moreover, under a patronage-based regime, the army is not a
rule-bound institution loyal only to the state, but rather a patrimonial
hierarchy in which orders are not dutifully enforced, but are negotiated. In
the 1980s, Somalia was a security rentier state, and because guns were more
plentiful than cash, Mohamed Siyad Barre’s business plan leaned more to using
violence than financial incentives.
The classic Tillyean model for European statebuilding consists of
a ruler, who controls (most of) the means of violence bargaining with agrarian
and commercial elites who control (most of) the resources. In Africa’s rentier
systems—a characteristic accentuated as the continent began its economic
recovery, initially imperceptibly, in the 1990s and 2000s—the ruler commands
most of the resources. Also, as provincial elites (tribal leaders, militia and
rebel commanders) often control extensive armaments, and as national armies and
security services are themselves fragmented with a high degree of command and
financial autonomy at lower levels, the ruler does not possess anything close
to a monopoly of control over the means of violence. This stands the Tillyean
model on its head. Rather than the state as a protection racket, negotiating
the terms of taxation, governance became an extortion racket, with armed
intermediate elites bargaining for a share of the rents, and commonly using
violence as a tool of bargaining.
The “Rentier Political
Marketplace”
The rentier political marketplace is an organizing principle to
describe and explain how political power functions in these orders. This is
specified by four main characteristics.
First, the ruler enjoys and disposes sufficient income from rents
that he is the principal economic actor. Some rents derive from facto control
of resources and territory, but most accrue to him by virtue of sovereignty.
The main forms of rent are from minerals, aid, security cooperation with
foreign powers, sovereign privileges, and criminal activities. All the forms of
rent mentioned escape, at least partially, formal regulation: they all have
discretionary political budgets. Aid is the most regulated, security much less
so, and criminal rents of course escape any regulation.
Second, the ruler does not have a monopoly over the machinery of
war-making or coercion within the national territory. He has to bargain with
rebels, with armed formations in society, and with his own army commanders and
security chiefs. As a political tool, violence is cheap and therefore
attractive. But in a situation without guaranteed loyalty, violence is also
dangerous.
Third, the country is integrated into the global financial,
institutional and technological order, on generally subordinate terms, but is
in a position to exploit sufficient niches in that global order to establish a
viable political order. The states in question are on the margins of Europe,
the Gulf and Asia, and are in some respects an outer periphery of these
regions.
Lastly, this system is characterized by ongoing political
bargaining over allegiances at both national and international levels. Earlier
international political orders were determined by imperial orders and the Cold
War, and were relatively slow-moving. In the current system, complexity,
mobility and facility of communication mean that subordinate actors have the
opportunity for negotiating the terms on which they engage with patrons and
paymasters. While earlier inter-state systems were anarchic in the limited
sense that major sovereign nation-states were ready and willing to violate
supposed norms of international conduct when it suited them, the current system
has a profusion of regulation but also a shadow order of unregulated bargaining
within an internationalized patronage system.
The results of this bargaining are fluid and generate perpetual
instability. I call this “turbulence,” in the sense (borrowed from fluid
dynamics) that it is a system that changes in an unpredictable manner over
short periods of time, but which remains structurally constant over long
periods. Thus, the politics of these countries changes from week to week
(recurrently encouraging the diplomatic ingénue) but look much the same a
decade on.
Somalia in the Late 1980s and
Early 1990s
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I suggest that Somalia
represented an interesting variant of this model. The element of particular
relevance was the expectation among the political elites that some form of
security rentier state was the norm and would be re-established in due course.
The main challenges to Mohamed Siyad Barre arose either from
within the army, or from former army officers wanting to replace him as
dictator. This began with the SSDF, and continued with the SNM (whose very name
is revealing, mirroring so closely the SNA), the USC-Aidid and the SPM. Especially
in the aftermath of the 1988 war in the north-west, both the army and the
opposition came to resemble clans in arms. The militarization of politics and
the growth of clan-based organization went hand in hand. The driving factor in
this was, I suggest, the organizational and financial difficulties faced by
those trying to fight the war, on both sides. Not only was clan-based
mobilization, alongside the often-linked strategy of divide-and-rule, an easier
route than the arduous tasks of sustaining a professional national army or a
building politicized and disciplined people’s army, but once one faction had
taken the clan route, those who did not follow would have been at immediate
military disadvantage.
Although the military dynamics were more pronounced, the financial
stratagems of the Siyad regime demand scrutiny. As the challenges multiplied,
the rulers looted the state, both for personal enrichment anticipating future
exile, and also to pay for a patronage-based war machine. The cheapest way to
pay a militia is in kind, giving its leaders and foot-soldiers a license to
loot.
I further suggest—and here I have a different emphasis to Lidwien
Kapteijns—that these same organizational imperatives were the driving factor in
General Aidid’s use of clan, pillage and violence against civilians in his dash
for power in January 1991. Aidid was, I believe, a putchist and he was thwarted
when the Saleban militia, allied to Ali Mahdi, seized control of Radio Mogadishu
before his forces got there. He was ruthless in using clan identities as an
instrument for building a power base and trying to destroy the power base of
others, in doing so fuelling a Darood-Hawiye divide that had disastrous
repercussions for ordinary residents of Mogadishu and beyond. He licensed his
fighters to loot, pillage, rape and kill, with particularly damaging
consequences in the context of mobilizing clan identities and demonizing the
Darood. The key incidents in 1991-92 that led to the worst fighting in the city
were all associated with the two rival USC leaders’ respective attempts to
claim key symbols of sovereignty and the associated powers. Clan-based
mobilization reached new heights.
However, in a political marketplace system, as was emerging in
Somalia at that time, the instrumental calculations of political entrepreneurs
trump any ideological or ethnic allegiances. Thus, despite the horrific
episodes “clan cleansing” of the years 1988-92, reaching depths in 1991,
coalitions were regularly reshuffled during and after these years. After
Aidid’s failure to take power in January 1991, and his subsequent failure to
dislodge Ali Mahdi in November that year, the focus of political contestation
shifted from state power to control over ports, airports and riverine farmland,
and political alignments were reconfigured in accordance with circumstance.
Many clan militia leaders switched sides, some of them several times. The U.S.
Operation Restore Hope and the subsequent UNOSOM II recentralized politics,
briefly reviving the dream of a centralized state with generous international
support.
Somalia Since the mid-1990s
After the collapse of the U.S.-U.N. intervention in 1993-94, even
without a state, the concept of a state and the mechanisms for state-based rent
still cast a deep shadow over Somali politics. The same rents that have
sustained other “political marketplace” states such as Chad, Sudan and Yemen,
are also present in Somalia—rents for security cooperation with the U.S. and
neighboring states, criminal rents, aid rents and some (reduced) sovereign
rents, in this case mostly associated with participation in international
negotiations.
What explains Somaliland? I suggest that its economics dictated
cooperation more than competition among both the business and political elite.
The key elements included the much smaller anticipated state rents and the
structure of the livestock export trade, which was the main source of finance
for the regime at its critical moment of establishment in 1993, and the speed
and comprehensiveness with which the SNM had fragmented over the previous two
years. This made for an unusually benign elite bargain in 1993. However, what
has resulted is not a traditional polity or a democracy, but rather a
well-regulated political marketplace that allows for the production of limited
public goods. Somaliland is prone to the same pressures as its neighbors, and
is just as likely to succumb to the logic of rentierism and armed bargaining
over the price of loyalty, as it is to develop a mature institutionalized
democracy.
In southern Somalia, I suggest, the major change over the last
twenty years has been the gradual intensification of Somalia’s integration into
African and global economic, political and security orders. Somalia’s patronage
networks are now thoroughly regionalized and globalized.
In the mid-2000s the Mogadishu merchants recognized the necessity
of collaboration across factional lines. This was facilitated by the growth in
the commercial sector, though important issues of urban and rural land
ownership remained unresolved from fifteen years earlier. Another factor was
the apparently-final collapse of the rentier-security order associated with the
factional leaders of the Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism,
aligned with Kenya, Ethiopia and the U.S., who had so outraged ordinary
citizens that it was not difficult to mobilize public opinion against them. In
contrast to the Taliban in Afghanistan, with whom they were sometimes compared,
the UIC’s economic base was an international trading and financial system.
However, rather than utilizing Somalia’s societal and economic globalization as
a starting point for engagement, the regional and international response was
driven by security concerns—Ethiopia’s paranoia over the presence of Eritrean
elements and the U.S.’s militarized counter-terrorism strategy.
The African-international coalition against al Shabaab and its
dependent Federal Government has led to a rentier marketplace regime in
Somalia. Governance in Somalia is now thoroughly internationalized. Security is
provided by troops from African nations backed by the U.S. The state is mostly
funded by European and Middle Eastern donors. Services are provided by
international NGOs. The legitimacy of the government with its international
sponsors is little more than its readiness to comply with foreign demands in
these areas: it is a latter day form of indirect rule. Among some Somalis,
similarly, state legitimacy is bound up with its role in facilitating international
service provision. But the patrons do not hold all the cards: Somali leaders
can dupe them, obstruct them and prevaricate, or play them off against one
other. The idea that a state suspended in this way, perpetually bargaining at
all levels, will create public goods including institutions, development and
the rule of law, is fanciful. But if such a governance regime is indeed the
future for Somalia, we should study in carefully so as to understand how it
can, at least, do the minimum of harm to the prospects for Somalis.
Source: sites.tufts.edu
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