Panel 2: Donor Responses to Hybrid Political Orders
Saturday, 19/7/2008, 9:00-10:30 | Room HOGC 03.101
Hybrid political orders (see panel #1) are not only governed by a particular internal logic, their relationship to development and peace is ambiguous. While such orders can sometimes act as stabilizing institutions, development policy has a hard time coming to grips with these political formations. The questions that this panel will address are mostly empirical in nature: How have donors reacted to hybrid political orders? Have they adapted, broken off contact or are they turning a blind eye to these institutions? The panel particularly welcomes contributions that analyse the micro-level interaction between donor and recipient actors.
Chair: Tobias Debiel
Discussant: Volker Boege
‘Trust us - we are Peacebuilders!': How the International Community is Engaging in ‘Post-War' Nepal
With a rocky peace process currently unfolding and the announcement of elections for April, Nepal may not be regarded as a space for hybrid political orders at first sight. However, this paper argues that the role of the international donor community throughout the violent conflict and in the immediate ‘post-conflict' period was to some extent driven by a commitment not to let complex, hybrid or alternative orders emerge. Sticking to official peace, governance and security labels from naming Maoist rebels ‘terrorists' to considering the conflict a diversion from the ‘normal' path of development and liberal peace helped the donor community to make sense of the situation and to justify their aid strategies. Connecting the ‘post-conflict' situation to the root causes of the conflict - poverty, social exclusion and an insular Kathmandu-based governing elite - and the existing development model of Western donors has not taken place and a vibrant peacebuilding industry is now flourishing in and around Kathmandu.
Ethnographic field research in the donor community of Kathmandu gives insights into the mindsets of the peacebuilders and their organisations that are guided by powerful international post-war discourses (from transitional justice to civil society empowerment and multi-party elections) and how any form of ‘hybridness' is sacrificed for an outdated vision of a ‘peaceful' and ‘governmentable' Himalayan state.
Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africa: Flawed Ideas about Failed States
Post-conflict state reconstruction has become a priority of donors in Africa. Yet, externally sponsored reconstruction efforts have met with limited achievements in the region. This is partly due to three flawed assumptions on which reconstruction efforts are predicated. The first is that Western state institutions can be transferred to Africa. The poor record of past external efforts to construct and reshape African political and economic institutions casts doubts on the overly ambitious objectives of failed state reconstruction. The second flawed assumption is the mistaken belief in a shared understanding by donors and African leaders of failure and reconstruction. Donors typically misread the nature of African politics. For local elites, reconstruction is the continuation of war and competition for resources by new means. Thus their strategies are often inimical to the construction of strong public institutions. The third flawed assumption is that donors are capable of rebuilding African states. Their ambitious goals are inconsistent with their financial, military and symbolic means. Yet, African societies are capable of recovery, as Somaliland and Uganda illustrate. Encouraging indigenous state
formation efforts and constructive bargaining between social forces and governments might prove a more fruitful approach for donors to the problem of Africa's failed states.
The Dilemmas of External State-Building in Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands state has long struggled to provide security, essential services, and prudent economic management. Government corruption is a major problem and closely linked to the largely unregulated logging industry. Uneven development has generated resentment of the centralised state in many rural areas, as well as encouraging substantial internal migration. This, in turn, has resulted in ‘ethnic tensions' between local landowners and migrant settlers. These factors lay behind the recent ethnic conflict on the main island of Guadalcanal in 1999 and the subsequent takeover of the national capital by an ethnic militia in 2000. Subsequent deterioration in the security and economic situation led to the deployment of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) in 2003. RAMSI has been successful on many fronts but has run into difficulties with its more ambitious and long-term state-building objectives. This paper analyses the challenges of state-building in SI and argues that a significant weakness of current efforts lies in the failure to understand the particular character of the crisis of the post-colonial state. It argues that introduced institutions have been progressively indigenised in their interactions with local social forces. This has resulted in a hybridised form of politics that fuses elements drawn from both Western and indigenous political traditions. External efforts to achieve ‘good governance' and sustainable reform are ultimately doomed to fail without simultaneous attempts to understand the complex character of political development in SI and the need to adapt reform to local realities.