Fictional States & Atomized Public Spheres: - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Fictional States & Atomized Public Spheres:
A Non-Western Approach to Fragility

William Reno

Abstract: This essay explains why political order in some places gives way to especially persistent conflict
and prolonged state institutional collapse. State failure is rooted in decades of personalist rule, as leaders
have sought to fragment and disorganize institutions and social groups that they thought would be possi-
ble bases of opposition. This problem was considered particular to sub-Saharan Africa, but now parts of
the Middle East and Central Asia exhibit this connection between a particular type of authoritarian rule
and state failure. State failure in these countries produces multisided warfare that reflects the fragmenta-
tion upon which prewar regimes relied for their protection. Policy-makers are thus faced with the dilem-
ma of propping up personalist regimes that present themselves as bulwarks against disorder at the same
time that their domestic strategies of governance play a central role in creating the conditions of protracted
multisided warfare in the event that they fail.

Fifty years ago, many experts believed that countries

like Liberia, Somalia, and the Congo faced promising
futures. A World Bank mission sent to assess Liberia’s
economic record reported: “The Liberia we found was
strikingly different from that of only a dozen years
ago. Development is now widespread and there is a
genuine commitment to it on the part of the govern-
ment.”1 Somalia’s Supreme Revolutionary Council,
installed in a 1969 coup, impressed an experienced
observer who found extensive infrastructure devel-
opment and improved state service provision. “The
most important thing to note about the new military
regime is that it appears to be honest and public spir-
ited,” he advised.2 One scholar praised the Congo’s
rapid development and newfound political stability.
“The Mobutu regime’s emphasis on economic ratio-
nality has produced positive results,” he wrote. “Since
the enactment of the 1967 plan for monetary stabili-
zation, the Congo seems to have entered a period of
unprecedented prosperity.”3

139

WILLIAM RENO is Professor of
Political Science and Director of
the Program of African Studies at
Northwestern University. He is the
author of Warfare in Independent Af-
rica (2011), Warlord Politics and Afri-
can States (1998), and Corruption and
State Politics in Sierra Leone (1995).

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Fifty years on, the situation in these coun-
tries is bleak. Liberia’s public health system
collapsed in the face of the 2014 Ebola epi-
demic, despite more than a decade of inten-
sive international assistance that followed
the country’s fourteen-year civil war. Sys-
temic failure in Liberia should not be con-
fused with disorganized and corrupt ad-
ministration. For example, Nigeria’s pub-
lic health service demonstrated the sort of
capacity to participate in the shared global
processes that Paul Wise and Michele Bar-
ry identify as critical for dealing with pan-
demic threats.4 The service was able to lim-
it the virus’s spread to nineteen confirmed
cases (the first being a Liberian diplomat
fleeing the epidemic in his home country),
despite the government’s overall poor repu-
tation for inefficiency and corruption.5 So-
malia, perhaps Africa’s most ethnically ho-
mogenous country, has not had an effective
central government since 1991. The Fund
for Peace’s Fragile States Index (previous-
ly the Failed States Index) labeled Somalia
the world’s most failed state for seven of its
twelve rankings from 2005 to 2016.6 The
Congo, host to the world’s largest peace-
keeping mission after a deal in 2002 that
was supposed to end a six-year civil war,
was described as exercising “minimal cen-
tral government control over large parts of
the national territory, poor transportation
and electricity infrastructure, challenging
terrain, and protracted local conflicts.”7

The conflicts that accompany these col-
lapses of state administration do not fit
classic twentieth-century conceptions of
rebel wars in which rebels devote consid-
erable attention and resources to build-
ing a “liberated zone” controlled by their
alternative government while they fight
their way from the periphery of the coun-
try to the capital. These three failed states
and a growing list of others would seem to
be easy targets for rebels who wanted to es-
tablish their own zones of governance. At
least it seems that it would not be difficult

for rebels to push aside and out-govern the
fragmented and weak incumbent regimes.
But actually, the condition of state failure
produces a distinct type of persistent war-
fare in which many armed groups fight one
another, focusing more on controlling so-
cial and commercial networks than on just
ruling particular territories. The armies
of these failed states dissolve into militias
that behave very much like the fragmented
rebel forces. Usually there is a prominent
role for roving armed groups that plunder
resources. Various external nonstate ac-
tors, including in illicit commercial net-
works, play important roles in the strate-
gies of competing armed groups. Civilians
are exposed to violence from these multi-
ple sources, usually resulting in mass dis-
placement.

This essay explains how and why polit-
ical order in some places gives way to es-
pecially persistent conflict and prolonged
state institutional collapse. This explana-
tion focuses on the domestic factors that
lead some states to break down. Break-
down is rooted in decades of personalist
rule and the failure of mid-twentieth-cen-
tury state-building projects, long consid-
ered particular to sub-Saharan Africa. De-
velopments in parts of the Middle East and
Central Asia, however, show that this con-
nection between a particular type of author-
itarian rule and state failure that produces a
particular type of warfare are not exclusive
to Africa. These conflicts are outgrowths of
the failure of high-modernist state-building
projects as rulers turned away from the ear-
lier institutional bases of political order, re-
lying instead on personalist networks that
would play critical roles in the character of
the warfare to come.

Most rulers, particularly those govern-

ing divided populations with legacies of
political violence, readily understand the
simple paradox of civil-military relations.
They realize that creating an armed force

140

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesFictional States & Atomized Public Spheres

protects against outside armed challenges,
but that the ambitions of the members of
this armed force also represent a threat.8
Through the second half of the twentieth
century, rulers of independent states in
sub-Saharan Africa experienced the reali-
ties of this risk. Between 1956 and 2001, all
but six of the region’s forty-eight countries
had experienced military interventions into
politics. Successful coups occurred in thir-
ty countries (62.5 percent of the total), and
eighteen (37.5 percent) experienced multi-
ple successful coups.9 Economist Paul Col-
lier has noted that coups tend to legitimate
further coups, and that “societies can col-
lapse into political black holes of repeated
regime change generated from within the
army.”10 Since coups, whether successful
or not, often result in the death of the in-
cumbent leader, this risk tends to be taken
seriously indeed.

Prudent rulers recognize that their own
survival might require them to undermine
the formal institutions of the military that
they also need for protection. This fear of
the ambitions of skillful subordinates may
extend to other state institutions, particu-
larly ones that are critical to providing ser-
vices to citizens. Determined politicians
and civil servants might use these resourc-
es to build their own powerbases from
which to launch challenges against the in-
cumbent leadership. In short, the state in-
stitutions that the ruler requires to further
the process of what one used to call mod-
ernization can become the most immedi-
ate threats to the ruler’s political and even
physical survival. Some rulers ignored or
minimized this risk, preferring instead to
focus on building state capacities in a bet
that efficient state institutions and grow-
ing prosperity would translate into popu-
lar legitimacy soon enough to protect the
regime. But the shock of a coup or uprising
that nearly topples the regime often marks
a decisive shift from building state institu-
tions to undermining them. One such criti-

cal juncture occurred in Somalia in 1978 af-
ter the country’s president survived a coup
attempt among officers embittered by the
Somali army’s defeat in a failed irredentist
effort to unite all ethnic Somalis in a single
state. The president cast aside the pretens-
es of a socialist-inspired development proj-
ect and a strong army that would unite all
Somalis, doubling down instead on build-
ing patronage networks that he would pit
against each other as they competed for
his favor.

Bonds of dependence via personal or fam-
ily ties and shady business offer rulers less
risky means to manage the ambitions of
military officers, state officials, and other
important individuals. State institutions
are still needed, but more as a façade to
draw in foreign aid, loans, and the support
of diplomatic partners, and as platforms to
launch and shield insider deals, as Stephen
Biddle observes in his essay in this volume.11
Skillful manipulation of these prerogatives
of state sovereignty generates the resourc-
es that the ruler needs to buy the support
of those whose cooperation is necessary,
such as individuals who control resources
in their own right or who have powerbases
within their own communities. The status
as leader of a sovereign state gives the rul-
er the capacity to enforce laws selectively,
to label those who fall out of favor as cor-
rupt and subject them to prosecution while
shielding those who were more favored
from prosecution. Governments that are
run in this manner can become a focus of
concern from foreign security officials,
such as when rulers go so far as to provide
international criminals with passports and
shield financial transactions. This can al-
low them to garner more resources and ex-
tend control of economic opportunities to
include those in the illicit realm in an ef-
fort to limit the options and increase the
dependence of political clients.

By the 1980s, Liberia’s system of per-
sonalist rule had become the center of

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146 (4) Fall 2017William Reno

a crime-conflict international disorder
nexus of the sort described in Vanda Fel-
bab-Brown’s contribution to this volume.12
The distinctions between those who were
state officials and those who were mem-
bers of criminal syndicates were becom-
ing blurred. In a report of a task force set
up in 1985 to recover arrears of $150 mil-
lion owed to government corporations, in-
vestigators found that most of the debtors
were government officials, including two
heads of then-President Samuel Doe’s se-
curity services.13 Some U.S. government of-
ficials concluded that Liberia’s entire sys-
tem of governance rested on a dense sys-
tem of misappropriated funds, insider
scams, and illicit commercial activity un-
der the protection of the country’s politi-
cal leaders, up to and including the presi-
dent.14 Even after a massive internationally
backed reconstruction program following
the country’s 1989–2003 civil war, un in-
vestigators pointed to a growing problem
of cocaine and heroin trafficking through
Liberia. In 2014, they reported that “a con-
siderable number of those individuals in-
volved in this trafficking as couriers were
former combatants and currently serving
personnel of the military and police forc-
es.”15 Reports that South American traf-
fickers have used Liberia as a transit point
and tried to bribe Liberian officials sug-
gest that these international criminal syn-
dicates viewed corrupt politicians in Libe-
ria as potential partners.16

This exercise of power behind the façade
of formal state institutions plays a signifi-
cant role in shaping the distinctive charac-
ter of fragmented patterns of violent com-
petition in failed states. Individuals who
hold high offices, from the president down-
ward, are often involved in these networks
of patronage that are connected to under-
hand deals and illicit commercial activities.
These networks of patronage serve to fore-
close cooperation among members of the
country’s elite, their dependence and in-

security forcing them instead to compete
among one another for presidential favor.
This system of governance through the ma-
nipulation of an alternate noninstitutional
realm of personal networks and tight con-
trol over other people’s access to econom-
ic opportunities is terrible for the overall
economy and commonly attracts wide-
spread popular disdain. But this system
works to maintain a sullen political stabil-
ity so long as the ruler asserts tight person-
al discretion over access to these networks.
On occasion, this system of personal
control breaks down, as in a coup d’état in
Guinea-Bissau in 2012. Prior to the coup,
foreign officials insisted that an upcoming
electoral process had to allow opposition
candidates to compete freely, given wide-
spread concerns that the country’s highest
officials were using introductions to Lat-
in American drug traffickers to buy the al-
legiance of key figures in the military and
government.17 The prospect that a reform-
er would be elected threatened to upset this
arrangement and led instead to the coup.
Persisting suspicions that Guinea-Bissau
officials were implicated in drug traffick-
ing led to a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
(dea) offshore sting operation that netted
a former head of the navy who stood trial in
a U.S. federal court. “They are probably the
worst narco-state that’s out there on the
continent,” explained a senior dea offi-
cial in Washington shortly after the coup.18
Guinea-Bissau shows how the process
of institutional state failure is linked to re-
gime survival strategies. But if the alterna-
tive personalist basis of domestic political
order falters for any reason, political cli-
ents are unleashed from the domination
of their patron and they begin to struggle
with one another to claim more exclusive
control over resources. The people who are
best positioned in this struggle are those
who are able to use their connections to
commercial networks, often illicit, to re-
cruit and arm supporters. It is unsurpris-

142

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesFictional States & Atomized Public Spheres

ing in this light that many of the leaders
of armed groups in Somalia, the Congo,
and Liberia in the 1990s had previous ca-
reers as government ministers and busi-
ness partners of former presidents. They
are not rebels in the old sense of fighting
to construct alternative systems of gover-
nance to challenge the state. The focus of
their fighting is the control of the networks
of power that sustained the old personalist
regime. In this regard, the conflicts that ac-
company state failure are more violent ver-
sions of the politics that preceded the col-
lapse of a centralized personalist order. The
patterns of violence in these conflicts also
reflect the distinctive exercise of authori-
ty in these precollapse political systems.19
Patron-client politics is not enough to en-

sure political survival, particularly in poor
countries where governments do not have
enough resources to buy off supporters.
Selective applications of violence and di-
vide-and-rule tactics help to drive down the
costs of patronage. Paradoxically, this vio-
lence does not have to come from the top
of the political hierarchy to be effective.
It is even more effective if the ruler’s sub-
ordinates are allowed to exercise violence
for their own purposes. The delegation of
the exercise of violence in this manner is
very different from using effective securi-
ty forces to forcefully repress challengers.
The critical benefit to the ruler is that this
alternative political strategy undermines
the capacity for those who wield violence
to cooperate among themselves. This po-
litical strategy also atomizes the wider soci-
ety, which undermines the ability of leaders
from outside of this political establishment
to mobilize social movements or build an
armed alternative political force.

Violence in these settings often takes the
form of politician partnerships with crim-
inal gangs. Gangs that politicians use as
vigilante forces to defend their supporters
and to assert claims against local rivals can

double as enforcers and operatives in their
bosses’ shady illicit commercial pursuits.
In most cases, this threat of violence across
broad political and economic dimensions
that intrude into people’s everyday lives
makes everyone less secure and prompts
them to appeal to elements of these same
personalist networks for protection. This
parochialization of political contention and
the intentional fostering of insecurity offer
rulers opportunities to turn what normal-
ly would be private and even personal ten-
sions of limited concern to a bureaucratic
state into a powerful tool to disrupt societal
capacities to act collectively. This is a crucial
paradox of failed and failing states: Their
political systems are very bad at perform-
ing tasks conventionally associated with the
state, such as providing security and basic
services. At the same time, these political
systems are very good at interfering in even
minor details of people’s lives. They sweep
up otherwise private or intensely local rival-
ries and disputes, turning them into points
of tension that rulers manipulate to under-
mine cooperation. These parochial divides,
along with the flow of resources in person-
alist networks, poison efforts to organize
peaceful and violent political opposition
alike, as they are intended to do. This po-
litical context also helps to further explain
why the armed groups in conflicts associat-
ed with state collapse appear to be so frag-
mented.

This instrumental use of privatized vio-
lence appeared in Sierra Leone through the
1970s. Paramilitary groups under the con-
trol of politicians emerged in force in allu-
vial diamond mining areas of that coun-
try. These politicians enjoyed the protec-
tion of then-President Siaka Stevens to set
up mining operations in partnership with
Lebanese merchants in defiance of official
regulations and to smuggle diamonds with
impunity. The president expected these
politicians to use these paramilitaries,
which doubled as diamond-digging gangs,

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146 (4) Fall 2017William Reno

as political muscle against his political op-
ponents. By the early 1980s, membership in
these paramilitaries, which were “encour-
aged from a high level,” outnumbered the
national army four to one.20 This decen-
tralization and privatization of the exercise
of violence, what two political scientists
have called “disorder as political instru-
ment,”21 was a terrible strategy from the
point of view of building a state with strong
institutions that could provide security to
its citizens. But it made sense for Sierra
Leone’s president, given that he had sur-
vived two coups d’état, one of which actu-
ally succeeded until a countercoup a year
later restored him to power. He survived
the second coup d’état only after inviting
soldiers from Guinea to help secure his
hold on power. A decade later, politicians’
armed gangs played important roles in sup-
pressing a 1982 rebellion among supporters
of an outlawed opposition party.22

Democratic reforms leading to compet-
itive elections do not necessarily remedy
this privatization violence and instrumen-
tal exploitation of disorder, even if these
tactics are highly unpopular among the
electorate. Rulers have their own counter-
measures: When faced with prodemocra-
cy activists, Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s presi-
dent from his 1993 coup until his mysteri-
ous nocturnal demise in 1998, popularly
thought to have been the combined re-
sult of an overdose of Viagra and the at-
tentions of acrobatic prostitutes, promot-
ed an explosion of armed groups. These
included what Nigerians called “cam-
pus cults,” heavily armed gangs that were
immune from law enforcement. These
gangs even moved into campus dormi-
tories, teaming up with politically ambi-
tious proregime students to attack stu-
dents and academic staff who were active
in prodemocracy campaigns. Students at
the Obafemi Awolowo University, one of
Nigeria’s most prestigious institutions of
higher learning, alleged that violent cam-

pus cults received support from the uni-
versity’s administration to attack and kill
students who discussed political issues.23
Violent gangs continued to act as political
muscle after Abacha’s death and the 1999
transition to democratic multiparty poli-
tics. The violent deaths of six students at
the University of Ibadan in 2004 prompted
an editorialist to write that “intra-campus
groups are being infiltrated by politicians
who perceive the members cheap sourc-
es for recruiting thugs for their selfish
ends.”24 The “selfish ends” included us-
ing these armed groups as muscle to fight
violent electoral campaigns on behalf of
their politician patrons.25

Developments after the introduction of
multiparty elections in Kenya in 1992 high-
light how political competition in person-
alist systems of rule can lead to greater vio-
lence and instability. In the prelude to Ken-
ya’s reforms, an observer noted that “after
the incidents of July 7th [1990], the gov-
ernment felt threatened by the existence
of these shanties. It saw in slum dwellers
a vulnerable and ready tool in the hands
of crafty revolutionaries who might offer
a better deal. . . . The government dreaded
facing an organized people with common
grievances.”26 The incumbent ruler, Pres-
ident Daniel arap Moi, encouraged poli-
ticians to recruit local youth gangs in the
communities that these politicians feared
might otherwise support opposition candi-
dates. Recruits were enlisted to join “trib-
al militias” and “cultural associations” that
disrupted the organizing efforts of the op-
position candidates. At the same time, these
youth and their local patrons were allowed
to use violence for private purposes, such
as seizing properties and setting up local
protection rackets. This merging of politi-
cal and personal uses of violence looked to
casual observers like the reemergence of
deep-rooted ethnic tensions. It is more ac-
curate to describe this development as the
creation of neotraditional armed groups as

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesFictional States & Atomized Public Spheres

instruments to fragment otherwise threat-
ening political environments.27

Violence during Kenya’s 2007 election
led to the deaths of more than one thou-
sand people in the Rift Valley area and dis-
placed up to half a million people, adding
to the estimated three hundred fifty thou-
sand people who were still displaced from
earlier violence.28 An official inquiry into
these events noted that the “gangs are de-
void of ideology and operate on a willing
seller basis. Given the hierarchical nature
of gangs and the upward mobile hopes of
their members to become as well off as their
leaders, youth can be mobilized for a vari-
ety of reasons.”29 Subsequent investigation
points to deeper and more durable effects
of this political strategy on Kenyans. The
cycle of electoral ordeals reduces Kenyans’
desire to hold elections, makes them more
likely to identify in ethnic terms, and more
likely to accept the use of violence in sup-
port of what one considers a just cause.30
These findings suggest that particular polit-
ical strategies, rather than degrees of pover-
ty or latent hatreds, are drivers of conflict,
and that ethnic fragmentation is a conse-
quence rather than a cause of this violence
in the first instance.

This fragmented exercise of violence
on the part of multiple competing armed
groups that participate in Africa’s conflicts
is a by-product of the strategies of precon-
flict personalist authority. Gone are the
classic rebels who fight the incumbent
government while administering “liberat-
ed zones,” in which rebel leaders are able to
build their social control of civilians, co-opt
local notables, discipline their own fighters,
and chase away or kill their armed rivals.
That model of rebel governance is difficult
to organize in the contemporary fragment-
ed environment. Agents of conflict now in-
clude many more competing armed gangs
attached to various politician-patrons,
communal militias, vigilantes, and armed
illicit commercial actors. The pervasive

nature of this fragmentation is reflected in
the finding that conflict agents other than
government and rebel forces accounted for
about 25 to 30 percent of violent acts in Af-
rica’s conflicts in the mid- to late 1990s–
already a significant proportion–and in-
creased to about half of all violent acts two
decades later.31

The reality of the failing and failed state
political environment is one of multitudes
of violent local tensions that poison larger
political organizations from within. This is
manifest in the proliferation of a series of
segmented and competing armed groups,
usually rooted in increasingly rigid ethnic
or narrowing kinship identities, the very
presence of which is designed to inhibit
attempts to organize broad-based polit-
ical opposition. In addition to providing
the contours of how political order will
fragment in the event that the central au-
thority collapses, this situation creates a
deep-rooted social (dis)order that is the
common critical element that defines con-
temporary state failure and the character
of violence that accompanies this failure.

Effective broad-based armed opposition

requires areas that are socially insulat-
ed from the incumbent regime’s control.
These social spaces are where movements
are built to mobilize populations that will
harbor and support rebels. But the disper-
sal of the exercise of violence and incorpo-
ration of parochial conflicts into personal-
ist systems of political control intrudes into
this social space, even if the formal insti-
tutional capacity of a state is very weak or
even absent. These tactics of governance in
failed and failing states severely limit pub-
lic space in which people can debate and or-
ganize between the regime, the politicized
economy (including its illicit sectors), and
the ordinary household. Activists have to
operate amidst the instrumental mobiliza-
tion and the politicization of community di-
visions that tend to intrude into their orga-

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146 (4) Fall 2017William Reno

nizations. Old-style Maoist revolutionary
warfare, in which rebels build broad-based
popular support in “liberated zones” that
they use as strongholds from which to chal-
lenge state forces, is tremendously difficult
to organize in the fragmented social envi-
ronment of failed and failing states.

The organization of political protests in
the Congo illustrates the difficulty of orga-
nizing broad opposition in a failing state,
even when public opinion would seem to
support such an initiative. The Congo’s cap-
ital city Kinshasa has a record of soundly re-
jecting the Congo’s president, a man who
does not speak the local language of Lin-
gala, in internationally mediated elections.
Youth groups regularly stage protests, ap-
pearing to presage a broader opposition.
But these groups encounter and have to
deal with infiltration by gangs, described
as jeunes sportifs, associated with martial arts
and combative sports, criminal operations,
and the militias of politicians.32 While these
groups also express popular hostility to the
regime, onlookers wonder whether youth
leaders actually have been co-opted to ad-
vance the interests of political cliques out-
side of Kinshasa that are jockeying for po-
sition in the deeply corrupt political sys-
tem.33 These activists are forced to operate
in a social terrain in which a security force
commander under U.S. Treasury Depart-
ment sanction for the violent suppression
of mass protests serves as the chairman of
the popular Kinshasa as Vita football team
and thus plays an important role in youth
mobilization.34 Leaders of armed groups
have to struggle against these countervail-
ing pressures that draw recruits to fight for
politicians and a political system that even
armed group members may detest. The
overall environment of violence and inse-
curity drives people further into compro-
mises with regime-friendly strongmen for
protection and economic survival. Day-to-
day politics in this environment remains re-
lentlessly parochial, even while radical po-

litical change features in the ideas and dis-
courses of popular culture. Reflecting this
fragmentation, the Congo’s government es-
timated that it had registered 477 political
parties in 2015.35

Political scientist James Scott has pointed
out, in the context of classic Maoist insur-
gencies in the 1960s and 1970s in Southeast
Asia, that armed rebellion against the state
works only if there are local social bonds
that are independent of state authority and
that insurgent leaders can co-opt and rely
upon to help them rule the people and to le-
gitimate their presence. This social connec-
tion is essential to assist armed groups to
govern. Rebel governance through these le-
gitimate networks and intermediaries is es-
sential if the armed group is to keep at arm’s
length the parochial and personal intrigues
as rebels build a social movement alongside
their armed force. Otherwise, fighters are
drawn into people’s personal or purely lo-
cal problems. The armed group, in turn, is
infected with the acrimony of these divi-
sions, leading members of the armed group
to become involved in these various affairs
to the detriment of discipline and pursuit
of a common goal.36

Leaders of some of the armed groups in
failing and failed states recognize these dan-
gers and try to find strategies to gain auton-
omy. For example, leaders of Mungiki, an
armed “cultural association” that had a
strong presence in the Kibera slum in Nai-
robi, were concerned about the involve-
ment of Mungiki members who were re-
cruited into violent campaigns of politi-
cians running for election in 1992 and later.
These leaders tried to lead a mass conver-
sion of members to Islam and threatened
to call for jihad, perhaps in hindsight not
the most politic choice. But conversion
appeared to be aimed at helping the lead-
ership assert more exclusive control over
their group’s members and to insulate the
organization from politician interference.
The hostility of some Mungiki leaders to-

146

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ward what they called the “mental slavery”
of their previous associations with politi-
cians and their struggles was part of a search
for a distinct political narrative that would
supersede the violent ethnic divisions that
had become such a prominent element of
the country’s existing political system.37 In-
sulation from and mastery of this social en-
vironment proved to be beyond the capacity
of this leadership, as opportunities in petty
crime and protection rackets continued to
draw Mungiki members to collude with the
politicians who shielded these and larger
criminal pursuits. This failure of the Ken-
yan group to escape the gravitational pull of
this crime-politics nexus suggests that the
risks of radicalization may be overstated,
such that many would-be jihadist groups
collapse back into this degenerative polit-
ical milieu before they can pose a serious
threat.

The failed and failing state pattern of so-
cial fragmentation endures after the col-
lapse of central authority. This effect tends
to be strongest in the communities that
bore the brunt of the precollapse regime’s
most intense suspicions, and thus the
most concerted efforts to undermine col-
lective action at the broadest social level.
The eastern regions of the Congo, host to
several armed rebellions against Mobutu’s
rule in the 1960s, provide such an example.
Through the years of the Mobutu regime
(1965–1997), particularly as domestic and
foreign pressures for political reforms grew,
Mobutu intensified his instigation of local
disputes over land tenure and the rights of
citizenship. He took particular care to se-
lectively empower and then shift his sup-
port for local strongmen who would use vi-
olence in ways that would widen these paro-
chial divides and ensure their centrality in
politics. These strongmen featured prom-
inently among the leaders of armed “reb-
els” that dominated the region after the
fall of Mobutu’s regime. Similar patterns
of intense politicization and militarization

of parochial conflicts appeared in commu-
nities that had histories of opposing the pre-
collapse regimes in Somand Libya. In these
cases, too, many of the most prominent
“warlords” in the conflicts that followed
state collapse were drawn from the ranks
of those who appropriated and built upon
their favored positions in commercial net-
works and in regime-sanctioned communal
violence to field armed groups of their own.

The social atomization of failed and fail-

ing states shows how the recession of the
formal institutions of the state does not
simply leave ungoverned spaces in its wake.
The dense networks of personalist political
systems occupy that social space: ungov-
ernable in a conventional sense, but an im-
portant element of a political system that is
based upon using indirect means of domi-
nation to limit peoples’ capacities to orga-
nize politically. These regime strategies also
highlight how what seem like flare-ups of
ancient and recurrent ethnic or sectarian
conflicts really are intended consequences
of the instrumental use of violence by fail-
ing state regimes. It is more accurate to por-
tray the parochial bases of these conflicts
as “neotraditional,” in line with the dom-
inant discourses to define group interests,
rather than actual holdovers from the past.
This alternative system of governance can
maintain what seems like a significant mea-
sure of stability, at least so long as a ruler
is able to uphold coordinated control over
these disparate and contending elements.
At first glance, these regimes may seem
much like any other authoritarian regime.
But the internal workings of these regimes
differ from old-style authoritarian regimes
that rely upon capable institutions to sup-
press political challenges. Old-style author-
itarians are less inclined to create the kinds
of webs of insecurity and dependency that
characterize failed and failing state regime
strategies. Their institutional strategy, how-
ever, leaves more ground for insurgencies

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to connect to and ride broad-based popu-
lar movements to power in a decisive defeat
of the incumbent regime. A quick glance
at the Middle East highlights this contrast
in authoritarian strategies. The intense in-
terest that Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi took
in manipulating conflicts through the use
of kinship networks as vehicles for patron-
age and corruption created the social con-
ditions that, by 2011, as Gaddafi lost his
grip on this system of control, spawned a
large number of militias. In contrast, the
Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, while not
strangers to nepotism and intense corrup-
tion, remained more dependent upon insti-
tutional military and security forces to ad-
dress threats. That latter form of repression
left autonomous social spaces for broad-
based social movements to mobilize “si-
lent majorities” who, unlike counterparts
in failed and failing states, were not com-
pelled to retreat to the relative safety of neo-
tribe or neoclan protectors.

The same social forces that undermine
collective action against the regime also
undermine popular insurgencies. Militias
based in narrow neotraditional identity
communities constantly hedge their bets,
readily switching sides to balance against
any armed group that threatens to become
strong enough to dominate all of the oth-
ers. This behavior acts as a sort of anti-
insurgency, constantly frustrating would-
be indigenous state-builders and foreign
groups that are drawn to politically unsta-
ble areas as venues in which to act out their
own political narratives. For example, the
internal records of Al Qaeda operatives
who tried to organize the “silent majori-
ty” in Somalia in the 1990s and 2000s tell
a story of poorly disciplined local recruits
who remained obsessed with obligations
to their clans, entangling the foreign activ-
ists in their parochial battles and causing
other Somalis to worry that the foreign-
ers were becoming the instruments of nar-
row clan interests. With growing disdain

for their supposed partners, Al Qaeda or-
ganizers realized that these social condi-
tions contaminated the ideological under-
pinnings of their efforts and reinforced lo-
cal suspicions of the foreign group.38

This social fragmentation has important
implications for foreign intervention. For-
eign intervention forces initially find it easy
to push back these armed groups. But the
social forces that undermine popular rebel-
lion also plague subsequent counterinsur-
gency operations. Intervening forces, such
as the African Union Mission in Soma-
lia, find that they cannot mobilize neigh-
borhoods to sustain hard-fought security
gains. These counterinsurgents, which this
author observed, did not have to invest a
great deal of effort to win over a civilian
population. But when the counterinsur-
gents needed to identify and destroy mil-
itant networks of questionable local pop-
ularity, this task became unexpectedly
difficult. Endemic social atomization, ex-
acerbated by years of violence, led tight-
knit kinship groups to hedge their bets. In
this social environment, one’s best protec-
tion is to maintain links to all groups that
are likely to be important at some point,
trading information and infiltrating them
with one’s own family members as a guard
against future risk. Thus, it is not surpris-
ing when government officials in countries
like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia are sus-
pected of collusion with insurgents, mili-
tias, and criminal networks, sometimes all
at once. This microlevel strategy results in
behavior that, from the counterinsurgent’s
perspective, suggests duplicity among the
people that the counterinsurgents are sup-
posedly helping. In undermining insur-
gents and counterinsurgents alike, this
social context continues to defeat broad-
based collective action more generally.

Another lesson from this analysis of fail-
ing and failed state politics and conflict is
that external pressure for reform can lead
instead to collapse and much greater and

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prolonged violence. Mobutu warned for-
eign officials who pressured him to hold
democratic elections: Après moi, le déluge.
No doubt Mobutu reflected on the dan-
gers of empowering subordinate members
of patronage networks to challenge their
central patron. The sudden introduction
of competitive elections in this setting is a
powerful accelerant of instability, as some
have observed.39 Tanja Börzel and Sonja
Grimm highlight similar negative conse-
quences of poorly thought-out democratic
reforms in the Western Balkans.40 This sit-
uation leaves foreign officials and local ac-
tivists with a quandary of whether to sup-
port risky elections or support a dictator
who has created what is a very dangerous
situation in the long run but is a guarantor
of a rough stability in the short run.

What are the future prospects of seem-
ingly stable regimes that employ tactics
such as the decentralization of violence
alongside insider networks, including in
illicit commerce to disrupt collective ac-
tion through the promotion of intense so-
cial fragmentation? To the extent that these
precollapse patterns are prominent features
of political life in Central Asian countries,
these countries may face a risk sudden col-
lapse and protracted conflict like those in
Somalia, the Congo, and Libya. The rulers
of these countries are allergic to the institu-
tions of their own states and tend to favor
personalist networks. They exercise author-
ity through controlling people’s access to
economic opportunities and, in some cases,
manipulating community tensions while
preserving presidential roles as arbiter.

A nonviolent transition from failed state
politics is very difficult, given the overlap-
ping and fragmented nature of armed net-
works and the danger to rulers of build-
ing strong institutions that are able to rein
them in. Anxieties about leadership suc-
cession plague these regimes, as stabili-
ty rests increasingly on the networks and
personal discretion of the incumbent rul-

er. The death or the ouster of the ruler cre-
ates a free-for-all as the different armed el-
ements of these networks compete to rene-
gotiate their places in this hierarchy and to
gain more exclusive control over resourc-
es, with the possibility of violent stale-
mate. These problems should give pause to
state-builders, particularly when conven-
tional solutions such as democratic elec-
tions and institutional reform risk sparking
multisided conflict. The historical solution
to this problem is to routinize these person-
al connections so that they survive the rul-
er’s demise. Because generational succes-
sion maintains continuity in the control of
personalist networks and thus reduces un-
certainty, monarchy makes sense in this sit-
uation. This may explain why republican
monarchies appear as features of the con-
temporary political landscape. Gabon and
Togo, for example, saw sons of presidents
assume office after the deaths of their pres-
idents-for-life, as did Syria when Bashar
Hafez al-Assad became president in 2000
after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad,
president since 1971. Republican monarchi-
cal lineages can include daughters. This is
suspected to be the intention of Nursultan
Nazarbayev, the current president of Ka-
zakhstan, a man who came to power un-
der very different circumstances in 1989 as
First Secretary of the Communist Party of
the Kazakh ssr.

Monarchism is small comfort for those
who worry about the collapse of authori-
tarian regimes of the type discussed in this
essay. Gaddafi’s effort to groom a son to in-
herit the residential office in Libya did not
work as planned, for example. Most peo-
ple really are not that enamored with mon-
archies, at least not with new ones, in an
age in which people expect to have some
choice about who leads them. The genie of
popular sovereignty is hard to put back in
the bottle. The difficulty of implementing
even this unconventional (from a contem-
porary perspective) state-building strategy

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is discouraging. The careful analysis of the
politics of state failure points to a different
focus that is likely to be no less discourag-
ing to external promoters of state-build-

ing: that real progress will come only when
societies discover ways to stand up to the
forces that divide them from within.

endnotes
1 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Liberia: Growth with Development, Re-
port No. 426a-lbr (Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction and Develop-
ment, 1975), i.

2 David Laitin, “The Political Economy of Military Rule in Somalia,” Journal of Modern African

Studies 14 (3) (September 1976): 455.

3 Jean-Claude Willame, Patrimonialism and Political Change in the Congo (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford

University Press, 1972), 133.

4 Paul H. Wise and Michele Barry, “Civil War & the Global Threat of Pandemics,” Dædalus 146

(4) (Fall 2017).

5 Mary Moran, “Surviving Ebola: The Epidemic and Political Legitimacy in Liberia,” Current

History 114 (772) (May 2014): 179.

6 Fund for Peace, Fragile States Index, http://fsi.fundforpeace.org/.
7 Alexis Arieff, Democratic Republic of Congo: Background and U.S. Policy (Washington, D.C.: Con-

gressional Research Service, 2014), 7.

8 Peter D. Feaver, “Civil-Military Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 211–241.
9 Patrick McGowan, “African Military Coups d’État, 1956–2001: Frequency, Trends, and Dis-

tribution,” Journal of Modern African Studies 41 (3) (September 2003): 345.

10 Paul Collier, Coup Traps: Why Does Africa have so many Coups d’État? (Oxford: Centre for the Study

of African Economics, Oxford University, 2005), 3.

11 Stephen Biddle, “Building Security Forces & Stabilizing Nations: The Problem of Agency,”

Dædalus 146 (4) (Fall 2017).

12 Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Organized Crime, Illicit Economies, Civil Violence & International

Order: More Complex Than You Think,” Dædalus 146 (4) (Fall 2017).

13 “Liberia: Towards Collapse,” Africa Confidential, April 10, 1985.
14 United States Agency for International Development, Final Report of the Liberia Economic Sta-
bilization Support Project (Washington, D.C.: usaid, 1989), http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/
PDABP324.pdf.

15 United Nations Security Council, Midterm Report of the Panel of Experts on Liberia Submitted Pursu-

ant to Paragraph 5 (b) of Security Council Resolution 2128 (2013), April 25, 2014, 20.

16 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Transnational Organized Crime in West Africa: A Threat
Assessment,” press release, February 25, 2013, http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases
/2013/February/transnational-organized-crime-continues-to-affect-vulnerable-west-african
-countries-says-new-unodc-report.html; and Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “The Sting: An Ameri-
can Drugs Bust in West Africa,” The Guardian, March 17, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/
world/2015/mar/17/the-sting-american-drugs-bust-liberia.

17 Mark Shaw, “Drug Trafficking in Guinea-Bissau, 1998–2014: The Evolution of an Elite Pro-

tection Network,” Journal of Modern African Studies 53 (3) (September 2015): 339–364.

18 Adam Nossiter, “Leader Ousted, Nation Not a Drug Haven,” The New York Times, November

1, 2015.

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19 This finding is explored in greater detail in Stephen Heydemann, “Civil War, Economic Gov-
ernance & State Reconstruction in the Arab Middle East,” Dædalus 147 (1) (Winter 2018).

20 “Sierra Leone: The Unending Chaos,” Africa Confidential, October 20, 1982.
21 Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James

Currey, 1999).

22 Jimmy Kandeh, “Ransoming the State: Elite Origins of Subaltern Terror in Sierra Leone,” Re-

view of African Political Economy 26 (81) (1999): 349–366.

23 Lanre Adeleke, “The Attack Was Sponsored,” Tell, July 26, 1999.
24 “Resurgence of Campus Cults,” Daily Times [Lagos], June 29, 2004.
25 Human Rights Watch, Criminal Politics: Violence, “Godfathers” and Corruption in Nigeria (New York:

Human Rights Watch, 2007).

26 Quoted in Mwangi Kagwanja, Killing the Vote: State Sponsored Violence and Flawed Elections in Kenya

(Nairobi: Kenya Human Rights Commission, 1998), 10.

27 David Anderson, “Vigilantes, Violence and the Politics of Public Order in Kenya,” African Af-

fairs 101 (405) (2002): 531–555.

28 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Displaced Populations Report,

no. 3, January–June 2008, 2.

29 Republic of Kenya, Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence [The Waki Report] (Nairobi:

Government Printer, 2008), 35.

30 Roxana Gutiérrez-Romero, “An Inquiry into the Use of Illegal Electoral Practices and Effects
of Political Violence and Vote-Buying,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58 (8) (2014): 1500–1527.
31 Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, “Proportional Violence by Conflict Agent,

Africa, 1997–2016,” http://www.acleddata.com/trend-2-agents-of-violence-in-2016/.
32 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report of The United Na-
tions Joint Human Rights Office on Human Rights Violations committed by Agents of the PNC during Oper-
ation Likofi in Kinshasa between 15 November 2013 and 15 February 2014 (Geneva: Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2014).

33 Krossy Mavakala Kalunseviko, Etude de la perception du phénomène Kuluna par les habitants de la

commune de Kinshasa (Kinshasa: UPN-CEPRISE, 2013).

34 Pierre Boisselet, “rd Congo: lefoot, ce business politique, ” Jeune Afrique, August 20, 2016,
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/mag/347186/politique/rd-congo-foot-business-politique/.
35 Freedom House, “Congo, Democratic Republic of (Kinshasa),” in Freedom in the World, 2016
(Washington, D.C.: Freedom House, 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom
-world/2016/congo-democratic-republic-kinshasa.

36 James Scott, “Revolution in the Revolution: Peasants and Commissars,” Theory and Society 7

(1) (January 1979): 97–134.

37 Margaret Gecaga, “Religious Movements and Democratization in Kenya: Between the Sacred
and Profane,” in Kenya: The Struggle for Democracy, ed. Godwin Murunga and Shadrock Nasong’o
(London: Zed Books, 2007), 80–81.

38 Clint Watts, Jacob Shapiro, and Vahid Brown, Al-Qaida’s (Mis)Adventures in the Horn of Africa

(West Point, N.Y.: Combating Terrorism Center, 2007).

39 Paul Collier, Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (New York: Harper Perenni-
al, 2007); and Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

40 Tanja A. Börzel and Sonja Grimm, “Building Good (Enough) Governance in Postconflict So-
cieties & Areas of Limited Statehood: The European Union & the Western Balkans,” Dædalus
147 (1) (Winter 2018).

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146 (4) Fall 2017William Reno
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