Contents

Introduction 7
Laurent Goetschel

Politics of Peace: Emergence and Critique

1. Origins and State of the Art of Swiss Peace Policy 13
Heinz Krummenacher
2. Peacekeeping through Changing Conditions 27
Tim Guldimann
3. Rethinking Peace, Peace Research and Peacebuilding 45
Laurent Goetschel and Tobias Hagmann

Old and New Roles of States

4. Between Divergence and Convergence:
The State in Peacebuilding 61
Lothar Brock
5. Darfur in the Middle of Crisscrossing Fault Lines that
Shape the Sudan: Can Switzerland Help to Promote Peace? 79
Günther Baechler
6. Making War, Building States? Notes on the Complex
Interplay between Statehood and Conflict in Africa 95
Didier Péclard

Civil Society and Business

7. How should Business be involved in Peacebuilding,
Conflict Management and Peace Promotion? 107
John Bray
8. Re-Thinking War. The Challenge to Civil Society
Peacebuilding in a Post-Iraq Context 121
Mari Fitzduff
9. Reflecting on Non-state Actors in Peacebuilding.
Differences and Similarities between Business Actors
and Non-governmental Organisations 131
Ulrike Joras
6

Future of Peace Policy

10. Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding:
The EU “Holistic” Approach and Instruments
in Support of a more Peaceful World 20 years from now 139
Marc Van Bellinghen
11. Future Fields and Instruments 151
Thomas Greminger
12. Where have all the Flowers gone? Some Reflections,
more Questions, and no Single Answer 159
Cordula Reimann

From Research to Practice

13. How can Science contribute to Politics? 175
Barbara Haering
14. Policy Advice: Conditions for Success 183
Harald Müller

Conclusions: The Challenges Ahead 201

Anita Müller

Abbreviations 207
About the Authors 211
Bibliography 217
6. Making War, Building States? Notes on the Complex
Interplay between Statehood and Conflict in Africa

Didier Péclard1

During the last quarter of the 20th century, states throughout the globe
have come under increased pressure. In Africa in particular, this world-
wide trend has manifested itself in a double crisis: (1) Unprecedented
levels of debt, poor state governance, and the corresponding pressure
from international agencies towards deregulation and neo-liberal policies
had direct consequences on state (infra)structures, as well as on the
state’s capacity to provide services to its populations. To a certain extent,
this also affected clientelist networks on which neo-patrimonial rule was
developed and sustained. The end of the Cold War also compounded this
functional crisis, since it meant the end of crucial financial, technical, or
military support for several African states. (2) Besides, many states un-
derwent a severe crisis of legitimacy, expressed in its most dramatic fash-
ion by rebel movements taking up arms against their government and by
the correlated spread of civil wars throughout entire regions of the conti-
nent.
This formed the basis on which “narratives of crisis” developed in order
to account for the apparent weakening of state structures. In many of
these narratives, the validity of the state as a primary frame of reference
for organising and regulating social life in postcolonial Africa has even
been put into question. In an historiographical survey covering 40 years
of research on the state in Africa, Crawford Young thus suggested that it
was time to “close the historical parentheses around the African post-
colonial state”. He argued that, since the early 1990s, “the webs of con-
flicts, violent social patterns and governmental dysfunctionalities in many
parts of [the continent] ma[d]e the state a far less dominating, agenda-
setting actor than in the first post-independence decades” (Young
2004:24).

1 The author acknowledges the support of the NCCR North-South in researching and writing this paper. Much of the
reflection behind this article has also benefitted from regular exchanges with Tobias Hagmann while preparing a collec-
tion of essays on „Negotiating Statehood“ in Africa (see Hagmann and Péclard 2010).
96 Didier Péclard

Not surprisingly, postcolonial states in Africa have also come to feature

prominently in discussions about state failure, collapse, and reconstruc-
tion (Miliken and Krause 2002). Against the backdrop of the purported
“de-connection” of the continent from the “globalized world”, states in
Africa have been portrayed in virtually pathological terms as being
threatened by “collapse” (Zartman 1995) or “failure” (Rotberg 2004), as
endemically “fragile” and “weak” (Jackson and Rosberg 1982), and as
being on their way towards degenerating into nightmarish “shadow”
(Reno 2000) or “quasi” states (Hopkins 2000) devoid of any legitimacy,
administrative capacity, and actual presence on the ground.
Despite their initial success and the dominant position they reached in
many academic and policy circles, state failure discourses have been in-
creasingly criticised recently for their strong normative undertones. In-
deed, they tend to measure up degrees of statehood (from “collapsed” to
“fragile” to “weak”, etc.) against the Western model, which is taken as
the norm (Raeymaekers 2005; Hagmann and Péclard 2010). From this
perspective, states in Africa are always “identified as failed not by what
they are, but by what they are not, namely, successful in comparison to
Western states” (Hill 2005:148). Besides, state failure discourses tend to
naturalise the state and to consider it as a somewhat a-historical object,
rather than as the result of complex historical dynamics (Bayart 2006
[1989]). Finally, analysing the state as “weak” or “failed” also often
serves the interests and agendas of Western donors, diplomats, and for-
eign policy experts who, in the name of “anti-terrorism” or “develop-
ment”, engage in “state building” and “reconstruction” in Africa (Duf-
field 2002).
In parallel as well as in reaction to the development of state failure dis-
courses, a wide array of publications have shown how important it is to
shift the focus from a normative and prescriptive view about what states
should be to a political ethnography of the ways in which statehood is
enacted and practiced on the ground.2 With this shift in perspective, the
frontier between state and society, the public and private spheres, appears
fluid, constantly changing, and resulting from historical processes rather
than pre-defined norms (Lund 2006; Hansen and Stepputat 2001). Far

2 Within a wide range of literature, see, for instance, Bayart 2006 [1989]; Boone 2003; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan
1997. See also the “States at Work” research project led by T. Bierschenk and M. Tijani Alou (http://www.ifeas.uni-
mainz.de/projekte/StatesatWork_neu.html [October 2010]).
 Making War, Building States? 97

from being a problem, this lack of distinction supplies a clue to the nature
of states themselves (Mitchell 1991).
For instance, as recent research on “the privatization of the state” has
shown, the sale of state assets to private companies has, paradoxically,
contributed to reinforcing the state’s presence in various sectors of the
economy rather than led to its demise (Hibou 2004; Pitcher 2002). Ac-
cording to this stream of thinking, states are not just sets of institutions
responsible for providing services to their constituencies, for formulating
and implementing norms and values to regulate social life, and for pro-
viding security by means of control over the monopoly of violence. They
institutionalize constantly changing power relations or, as Schlichte aptly
put it, represent “a field of power whose confines is decided upon with
means of violence and whose dynamics are marked by the ideal of a co-
herent, coercive, territorial organisation as well as by the practices of
social actors” (Schlichte 2005a:106).
Thus statehood as a historical process is made up of constant interaction
between images, i.e., social and cultural representations of the state, and
the social practices linked to exercise of power in a given setting. Image
and practice are at times congruent, at times opposite. Far from being a
cultural trait of Africa alone, these “dynamics of states” (Schlichte
2005b) in the era of globalization, which Trutz von Trotha aptly termed
para-statehood (Parastaatlichkeit), may even represent the future of the
state worldwide (Trotha 2001).
Accounting for the crisis of the state in Africa in a non-normative manner
requires alternative concepts that try to grasp processes of state formation
in a dynamic manner based on in-depth case studies. Suggesting such an
alternative approach was and remains the prime objective of the research
module on “Negotiating Statehood” developed at swisspeace within the
framework of the NCCR North-South.3 As Lothar Brock correctly indi-
cates in his chapter, reflecting about the state in Africa in terms of ”nego-
tiating statehood” is part of an attempt to grasp situations of “diffused and

3 The Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North-South is a wide research programme and network
focussing on global change and sustainable development. It is organised around research partnerships between institutions
in Switzerland and institutions based in eight regions of the “global South”. As a member of the network since 2001,
swisspeace has been researching the links between changes in the environment and violent conflict, the role of the econo-
my and the private sector in peace promotion, as well as the changing nature of states in conflictive contexts (Negotiating
Statehood). See www.north-south.unibe.ch.
98 Didier Péclard

informal governance” typical of the many areas where formal state insti-
tutions seem to be “a facade with little substance” (Brock, this volume).
The reason why ideas and discourses about the state in Africa having
“little substance” or being an “empty shell” (Chabal and Dalloz 1999)
have taken firm ground in policy and research over the past two decades
has a lot to do with civil wars and their interpretation. The debate over
state failure itself emerged in the wake of analyses on the causes of vio-
lent conflicts, civil wars, armed uprisings by rebel groups, and other such
instances of more or less organised violence. The upsurge of civil wars
typical of the immediate post-Cold War era in Africa has been its - often
unspoken - subtext. It still reflects much of current thinking, especially
within policy circles, about “fragile states”. In short, violent conflicts are
either seen as expressing the inability of African states to exert one of
their fundamental prerogatives (namely control over the monopoly of
legitimate violence) or as the very reason why post-colonial states have
“failed”. The problem with such a direct causal link is that it is reduction-
ist and rests on a number of binary oppositions - between war and peace,
state and non-state, local and international, colonial and postcolonial
which produce an overly simple picture of a very complex nexus. In the
following, I suggest some avenues for further research on this nexus. I
start by sketching out four theoretical propositions that sustain the reflec-
tion on “negotiating statehood” in postcolonial Africa, before turning to
some examples of the way in which violent conflict contributes to state
formation processes. The paper ends with some considerations on the
dynamics of legitimacy and hegemony.

6.1 Understanding statehood in postcolonial Africa4

In their seminal contribution to the history of the state in Kenya, John

Lonsdale and Bruce Berman suggested distinguishing between state
building, defined as “a conscious effort of creating an apparatus of con-
trol” and state formation as “an historical process whose outcome is a
largely unconscious and contradictory process of conflicts, negotiations
and compromises between diverse groups whose self-serving actions and
trade-offs constitute the ‘vulgarization’ of power” (Berman and Lonsdale
1992:5). States, in other words, result from dynamic and, at least partly,
4 This paragraph is adapted from section 2 of Hagmann and Péclard, 2010.
 Making War, Building States? 99

undetermined historical processes. These processes are fueled by con-

stantly evolving “relations of control and consent, power, and authority”
(Munro 1996:148), and “state institutions are never definitively formed”
(Lund 2006:697). The emphasis on the partial ”undeterminedness” of
state domination does not imply that the evolution of statehood is arbi-
trary or dis-embedded from social interests and political economy. Nor
does it mean that one cannot distinguish between qualitatively different
phases of institutionalization and (de-)institutionalization of state and
political authority. What it highlights is the non-linear and non-
teleological trajectory of empirical statehood in post-colonial Africa and
elsewhere.
Studying how statehood is negotiated in Africa leads us to consider the
diverse strategies by which variegated actor groups, both successfully and
unsuccessfully, compete over institutionalization of power relations into
distinct forms of statehood. To do so, one must understand “state-society
relations” (Bratton 1989:408) as well as the intrinsic characteristics of
government bureaucracies and how these relate to other forms of power.
Domination is never or rarely exerted exclusively by one power; it is
rather the product of multiple powers. As Olivier de Sardan (2006:186)
elegantly put it, there are at least two kinds of power, “the power every-
body has and the power only some people have”. In other words, human
beings are not only “shaped by power, or by different techniques and
practices of government” (Abrahamsen 2003:199); they themselves shape
power and government techniques and practices. One cannot understand
the ways in which state and political orders are ruled without factoring in
the multiple actors that “struggle for social control” (Migdal 1998:31).
The negotiating statehood framework further emphasizes the profoundly
contested nature of the state and the host of conflictive interactions inher-
ent in defining statehood. Negotiation over state power is particularly
pronounced, since this is the site where political struggles condense (Pou-
lantzas 1978). While currently fashionable “state building” and ”recon-
struction” discourses project a consensual image of how state institutions
are established on the African continent (see Cramer 2006, for a critique),
we draw attention to the power differences that inhabit these processes.
Contrary to common-sense assumptions, negotiation does not occur be-
tween coequal parties or in an inclusive manner. Rather it engages het-
erogeneous groups with highly differentiated assets, entitlements, legiti-
100 Didier Péclard

macy, and styles of expression. Not everything is or can be negotiated,

and not everyone takes part in negotiating statehood. But the political
configurations and institutional arrangements that result from such nego-
tiation processes must be seen as imprints of domination by the more
powerful groups over weaker ones.
Rather than reducing statehood to a limited set of function attributes or
arbitrarily defining minimal criteria that need to be fulfilled in order to
call a state a state, we propose a more grounded approach to statehood. Its
starting point is empirical, not judicial.5 The aim of the negotiating state-
hood framework is not to classify or measure states in Africa. Its objec-
tive is to understand the transformations of power that find their expres-
sion in distinct forms of statehood in Africa as well as to grasp how non-
state powers and sub-national authorities engage and disengage with the
existing state. The primary unit of analysis is therefore what Olivier de
Sardan (2008:2) calls “real governance”, which can be observed with
qualitative and quantitative research methods.

6.2 War and state formation

The end of the Cold War was accompanied by strong hopes that a more
peaceful future was at hand, since the end of the East-West confrontation
was expected to cut the flow of fuel into the engine of conflict and ”proxy
wars” in many parts of the world. As is well known, these hopes were
shattered by the increase in civil wars and apparently meaningless brutal-
ity that ravaged many parts of Africa such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, the
Great Lakes region, and Angola. A number of new narratives and theories
of conflict developed towards the end of the 1990s in order to account for
these conflictive trends. I briefly want to allude here to three of them,
because they had a strong impact on the way in which the politics of war
came to be conceived and therefore affect the study of relations between
statehood and conflict.
US journalist Robert Kaplan suggested in a typically neo-Malthusian
pamphlet published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1994 which became widely
influential that “scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism and disease”
were “rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet”, making what he

5 The difference between „empirical statehood“ and „judicial statehood“ goes back to Jackson and Rosberg (1982).
 Making War, Building States? 101

called the “coming anarchy” unavoidable (Kaplan 1994). A few years

later, and in a much more scientific genre, of course, Paul Collier and
Anke Hoeffler suggested something similar in a series of articles that had
a deep and lasting influence. In the post-Cold War era, they held, civil
wars were no longer fought primarily for political “grievances” but were
mainly the result of the “greed” of military entrepreneurs whose only
concern was to accumulate wealth and power, often at the expense of the
very people they claimed to represent and fight for.6 For her part, Mary
Kaldor introduced a distinction between what she called “old” and “new”
wars as a way to explain how the rationale and practice of civil wars in
developing countries had changed dramatically since the end of the Cold
War.7
Obviously, there are very important differences between these three nar-
ratives: differences in style and social positioning, differences in perspec-
tive, and differences in analysing certain aspects of civil wars. But there
is no room here for a thorough discussion of each of them. What I would
like to highlight instead is how these three perspectives have comple-
mented each other and formed a sort of grand narrative of civil wars in
the post-Cold War era. All three, in their own manner, put in question the
very political nature of the conflicts they observed. To put it in Mary
Kaldor’s words, the “new wars” of the 1990s were no longer fought
“with” or “alongside the people” for the defence of clearly articulated
political projects sustained by identifiable ideologies, but “against the
people” by greedy rebels exclusively interested in getting their share of
the economic and political cake (Kaldor 1999).
As Paul Richards put it recently, a main problem with such arguments is
that they “serve to set up a dichotomy between war as some kind of in-
herent ‘bad’ (the world ruled by instincts and base desire), and peace as
an ideal ‘good’ (the world ruled by principle and law). With this kind of
approach, war itself becomes the enemy - indeed, the common enemy of
human kind” (Richards 2005:3). Besides, war is taken out of its social
context, away from the historical, cultural, religious, and political element
that, if properly analysed, would in fact contribute to give it meaning.

6 See, for instance, Collier and Hoeffler, 2002. This is not the place for a thorough discussion of the “greed vs. grievances”
model. For critical outlooks on this perspective, see, for instance, Cramer 2006; Schlichte 2009; Marchal and Messiant
2002.
7 Kaldor 1999. For a critical discussion of the distinction between “old” and “new” wars, see Kalyvas 2001.
102 Didier Péclard

“War is foregrounded as a ‘thing in itself’ and not […] one social project
among many competing social projects” (ibid.). Rather than opposing war
and peace, then, it is more fruitful, sociologically speaking, to focus on
the continuities from the one to the other in order to pay due attention to
the governance patterns that emerge “between war and peace” (Arnaut
and Højbjerg 2008).
Thus civil war is “not a stupid thing” (Cramer 2006). And it is not per se
the opposite of state building, as much of the literature on state failure
seems to argue. Whereas historians of Europe (and among them most
prominently perhaps Charles Tilly) have shown how war has contributed
to construction of states and how war and states historically are strongly
interdependent, the reflection is only really starting to be extended to the
African continent. Not that hypotheses about the way in which the West-
phalian state system developed through internal and inter-state wars
(thanks to the effects on European political systems of increased political
and financial centralisation of military means and needs for protection)
could be simply reproduced in the African context (Marchal 2003). But
there is definitely room for reflection on how emergence of new govern-
ance patterns in a context of civil war relate to processes of state forma-
tion. This is a point made by Timothy Raeymaekers, for instance, in his
research on the border town of Butembo, in the eastern Democratic Re-
public of Congo. Drawing on Tilly, Raeymaekers shows how, in a con-
text of a nearly absent central state, arrangements between local cross-
border traders and rebels guided the emergence of new regulating mecha-
nisms. Due to the role that Butembo traders came to play locally, these
mechanisms gradually influenced politics at the regional and national
levels in the DRC. This process gave way to what Raeymaekers calls a
“‘scaled’ form of state politics, in which the local level increasingly de-
termine[s] the behaviour and chances of survival of politics at the na-
tional level” (Raeymaekers 2010:580).
More generally, violent conflicts such as civil wars or rebel insurgencies
are moments of intense and often rapid social and political change. Cru-
cial dimensions of statehood such as citizenship, nationhood, representa-
tion of social or ethnic groups in the state apparatus, distribution of re-
sources, etc., can either emerge as new items on the political agenda or be
re-interpreted and imbued with new meaning in the course of conflict. In
other words, conflicts usually open up new arenas of negotiation where
 Making War, Building States? 103

social actors contest for power and control as well as for defining state-
hood in the aftermath of conflict. In Côte d’Ivoire, for instance, the coun-
try was split into two as the result of a military conflict that was partly
waged around the definition of what it meant to be an ‘Ivorian’ as ex-
pressed in the concept of ‘ivoirité’ (Marshall 2007). The issue emerged
on the political agenda with particular salience in the mid-1990s in the
midst of a succession crisis after the death in 1993 of the ‘Father of the
Nation’ Houphouët Boigny. He had brought the country to independence
in 1960 and had stayed in power since then.8 But although Boigny’s suc-
cessor, Henri-Konan Bédié, played a crucial role in re-igniting debates
around the strongly exclusivist notion of ‘ivoirité’, the ethno-national
dimension of the conflict is best understood against the background of
how the Ivorian state formed itself. Indeed, as Henri-Michel Yéré sug-
gests, formation of the state in Côte d’Ivoire was strongly influenced by
two competing views on citizenship among the elites that emerged in the
1930s and eventually took power at independence. In the first view,
Ivorian citizenship was defined in exclusivist terms, i.e., it rested on a
sense of Ivorian nationhood for the sons of the Ivorian soil, whereas in
the second view the notion of an imperial citizenship for Africans living
within the former French colonial empire dominated. The 2002 crisis is
but one expression (albeit the most violent one) of a protracted battle over
the symbolic contours of the Ivorian state (Yéré 2010).
Finally, violent conflicts either result from or lead to shifts in power bal-
ances. New actors may emerge in the political fray and, drawing on the
social and political capital they ‘earned’ during the conflict, they may try
to ‘sell’ this capital and thus negotiate new positions within the state
structure. The role of youth in the recent conflict in Côte d’Ivoire is again
a good case in point here. In particular, the so-called ‘Young Patriots’
movement, a wide network of associations made up of young men, stood
up and took arms in defense of their country and President Laurent
Gbagbo before and after the attempted coup d’état in September 2002.
Young patriots claimed to defend the nation against what they saw as
threats to Ivorian identity (‘ivoirité’) by non-Ivorian residents in the
country as well as against France’s ”neo-colonial policies”. Many youths
who joined the Young Patriots saw the conflict as a national and individ-
ual “struggle for independence”, since it was “both a war of national lib-
8 For a good synthetic analysis of the socio-political roots of the conflict, see Akindès 2004.
104 Didier Péclard

eration and a daily struggle to assert their autonomy as individuals”

(Banégas 2006:536). The conflict allowed the youths to negotiate their
position in the Ivorian polity, even though they were largely controlled by
the Presidency. As recent research suggests, a process of dual instrumen-
talisation took place. The government manoeuvred disenfranchised and
unemployed urban youth in its response to the rebel Forces Nouvelles’
attempted coup in 2002 by mobilising them against what was presented
as aggression from the outside. These youths also used the position that
the government awarded to them to try and find a political and economic
space within a society that they felt had excluded them due to high unem-
ployment - even for university graduates. Therefore, the regime of
Laurent Gbagbo and the youths are now mutually dependent,9 which is
not without dangers in view of the highly volatile situation that the con-
tested presidential elections of November 2010 created.

6.3 Conclusion: vying for legitimacy and hegemony

In sum, violent conflicts are far from being the opposite of state building
and are closely intertwined within the history of states - in Africa as well
as in the rest of the world. If one refers to the distinction made by Berman
and Lonsdale (see above), the crucial point in studying states as historical
processes is to understand how social and political legitimacy is con-
structed, both due to conscious undertakings by social actors and as the
unconscious and at times unwanted outcome of historical dynamics. This
is still a far cry from the way in which most interventions occur in post-
conflict settings. Indeed, such interventions in the name of ‘liberal peace-
building’ (Newmann et al. 2009), conceive state building quite differ-
ently. They largely leave out the dynamics of state formation by concen-
trating exclusively on state mechanisms (power-sharing agreements,
elections, establishment of representative democracy, neo-liberal eco-
nomic policies, etc.). Thus peacebuilding becomes a “bureaucratic” rather
than a “political” project (Hagmann and Goetschel, this volume), and the
mechanical introduction of liberal democracy combined with market
economies can have devastating effects on countries emerging from pro-
tracted conflict (Paris 2004).

9 This is suggested by Gnangadjomon Koné, who recently completed his PhD thesis at the University of Bouaké (Côte
d’Ivoire) under the auspices of swisspeace and the NCCR North-South (see Koné 2010).