8.5: Promoting Human Security in Weak States

The current political and scholarly debate about state fragility and state-building frames the issues at stake too narrowly. It sometimes sees only the problems (real though they are) without also taking into account the strengths of the societies in question, acknowledging their resilience and encouraging indigenous creative responses to the problems and strengthening their own capacities for endurance.^[4]

Talking about ‘weak’ states, for example, implies that there are other actors on the domestic socio-political stage that are strong in relation to the state. In the countries of the Pacific ‘The state’ is only one actor among others, the state order is only one of a number of orders claiming to provide security, frameworks for conflict regulation and social services. In Melanesia, neither colonial rulers nor post-colonial governments have been capable of establishing a legitimate state monopoly of violence in the territories that became independent ‘nation states.’ In particular they have not been able to impose effective control over the peripheral outlying areas of their own state territory. There is a considerable sovereignty gap in these systems. Effective control cannot be exerted over the whole state and services cannot be provided by central state institutions. Although state institutions claim authority within the boundaries of a given ‘state territory’, only ‘outposts’ of ‘the state’ can be found in large parts of that very territory. It is a societal environment that is to a large extent ‘stateless.’ ‘The state’ has not (yet) permeated the whole of society.

Having no state institutions, however, does not mean no institutions at all. Rather, traditional non-state societal institutions are of major importance. Traditional societal structures—extended families, clans, religious brotherhoods, village communities—and traditional authorities such as village elders, headmen, clan chiefs, healers, religious leaders (and the belief structures they stand for), etc. determine the everyday social reality of large parts of the population in developing countries even today, particularly in remote peripheral areas. Legitimacy rests with these actors, and not with state institutions – and this lack of formal political legitimacy is a decisive feature of a state’s fragility. Thus state fragility is not only a problem of political will, functions, institutions and powers of enforcement and implementation, but also a problem of preferences, perceptions and indigenous legitimacy.

State fragility, therefore, has two sides: fragility with regard to functions and effectiveness, and fragility of legitimacy. People on the ground do not perceive themselves as ‘citizens of the state’ (at least not in the first place). They identify themselves instead as members of some sub-or trans-national, non-state societal entity (kin group, tribe, village). For them it is the community that provides the nexus of order, security and social safety, not the state.

This has extraordinary consequences for their loyalty or disloyalty to the state. People are loyal to ‘their’ group (whatever that may be); legitimacy and authority rests with the leaders of that group, not with the state authorities. ‘The state’ is perceived as an alien external force, ‘far away’ not only physically (in the capital city), but also mentally. This of course significantly reduces the capacity of state institutions to fulfil core state functions effectively. ^[5]

The fragile states discourse with its focus on a functioning and effective state organisation is in danger of missing a critical point: the relative disengagement of the people on the ground from the introduced state.^[6]

We are seeing in countries as diverse as Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia and most of Melanesia and Polynesia that traditional actors and institutions, customary law and indigenous knowledge have shown considerable resilience and in many places are enjoying a resurgence that defies ‘modernisation’ theory. It is the indigenous actors and institutions that provide what order there is in the peripheral territories of each state. They form an integral and important dimension of local governance – all the more so as the state’s ‘outposts’ are mediated by ‘informal’ indigenous societal institutions that implement their own logic and their own rules within the (incomplete) state structures.

The infiltration of the outposts of the state distracts them from the ideal type of ‘proper’ state institutions; for example, clientelistic networks penetrate state institutions, and kinship ties determine who is in charge and how the outposts actually operate. State institutions are captured by social forces who make use of them not in the interest of the state and its citizenry, but in the interest of traditional kinship-based entities. This has caused complaints about clientelism and nepotism (wantokism in the Melanesian context), parochialism, corruption and inefficiency with regard to state authorities and the public service (e.g. Turnbull 2002). On the other hand, the intrusion of state agencies impacts on the local societal orders as well. Customary systems of power and rule are subjected to deconstruction and re-formation as they are incorporated into modern state structures and processes.

An additional important dimension of societal and political life in fragile states is the emergence and growing importance of new non-state institutions, movements and formations. This is a consequence of poor state performance, and their activities contribute to the further weakening of state structures. In situations where state agencies are incapable of or unwilling to deliver security and other basic services, people not only rely on their traditional societal structures, but also increasingly turn to other social entities for support since those are perceived as more powerful and effective: warlords and their militias in outlying regions, gang leaders in townships and squatter settlements, ethnically based protection rackets, millenarian religious movements, transnational networks of extended family relations or organized crime, new forms of tribalism — but also NGOs, collectives, and other elements of civil society and local or global social movements. These new formations often are linked to traditional societal entities and try to instrumentalise them for their own goals (power, profit, etc.).

Finally, developments at the international level, induced by the various aspects of globalisation, also put pressure on the state in its conventional form as a nation-state. The state-building approach hence is not only at odds with local traditional forms of social and political order in the Pacific and other regions of the Global South, but it also has to cope with the fact that certain functions of the state are challenged by international developments such as the evolution of international regimes, the emergence of an international civil society, the growing importance of a global capitalist economy, the World Trade Organization and other international organisations.

Regions of fragile statehood thus are places in which diverse and competing claims to power and logics of order and behaviour co-exist, overlap and intertwine: the logic of the ‘formal’ state, the logic of traditional, informal societal order, and the logic of globalisation and international civil society as well as societal fragmentation in various forms (ethnic, tribal, religious). Thus what we call hybrid political orders combine elements of the introduced western model and elements stemming from the local autochthonous traditions of governance and politics.