In 2013, the Central African Republic was engulfed by violence. In the face of the rapid spread of the conflict, journalists, politicians, and academics alike have struggled to account for its origins.
In this first comprehensive account of the country's recent upheaval, Louisa Lombard shows the limits of the superficial explanations offered thus far – that the violence has been due to a religious divide, or politicians' manipulations, or profiteering. Instead, she shows that conflict has long been useful to Central African politics, a tendency that has been exacerbated by the international community's method of engagement with so-called fragile states. Furthermore, changing this state of affairs will require rethinking the relationships of all those present – rebel groups and politicians, as well as international interveners and diplomats.
State of Rebellion is an urgent insight into this little-understood country and the problems with peacebuilding more broadly.
In 2013, the Central African Republic was engulfed by violence. In the face of the rapid spread of the conflict, journalists, politicians, and academics alike have struggled to account for its origins.
In this first comprehensive account of the country's recent upheaval, Louisa Lombard shows the limits of the superficial explanations offered thus far – that the violence has been due to a religious divide, or politicians' manipulations, or profiteering. Instead, she shows that conflict has long been useful to Central African politics, a tendency that has been exacerbated by the international community's method of engagement with so-called fragile states. Furthermore, changing this state of affairs will require rethinking the relationships of all those present – rebel groups and politicians, as well as international interveners and diplomats.
State of Rebellion is an urgent insight into this little-understood country and the problems with peacebuilding more broadly.
State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic
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State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic
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Overview
In 2013, the Central African Republic was engulfed by violence. In the face of the rapid spread of the conflict, journalists, politicians, and academics alike have struggled to account for its origins.
In this first comprehensive account of the country's recent upheaval, Louisa Lombard shows the limits of the superficial explanations offered thus far – that the violence has been due to a religious divide, or politicians' manipulations, or profiteering. Instead, she shows that conflict has long been useful to Central African politics, a tendency that has been exacerbated by the international community's method of engagement with so-called fragile states. Furthermore, changing this state of affairs will require rethinking the relationships of all those present – rebel groups and politicians, as well as international interveners and diplomats.
State of Rebellion is an urgent insight into this little-understood country and the problems with peacebuilding more broadly.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783608874 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2016 |
| Series: | African Arguments |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 868 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
State of Rebellion
Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic
By Louisa Lombard
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Louisa LombardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-887-4
CHAPTER 1
CONFLICT AND THE STATE IN THE PEACE-KEPT WORLD
Welcome to CAR
In June 2003 I arrived in Bangui for the first time, on a Cameroon Airlines flight from Douala. The aircraft was dilapidated and my seat was broken, creating a perma-recline that perfectly assuaged the fever I'd gotten by eating bad watermelon while waiting an entire day for the flight to leave. This was three months after François Bozizé's successful takeover of the presidency. In the centre of Bangui, locked, heavy metal doors and shuttered windows made many buildings unusually faceless. Others had been ransacked, leaving their entrails exposed. Waves of paperwork flowed across the floors of the looted offices of civil servants. A statue of the ousted president, Ange-Félix Patassé, was dressed daily in colourful drag, one of the few signs of playfulness in an otherwise tense and heavy climate. It seemed like everyone was waiting. Would people be able to go about their lives without fear of violence? Responses to this question were hopeful, but decidedly uncertain. Even in the centre of town, traffic was sparse enough for me to cross the street without looking both ways.
My task on that trip was to document the socio-economic toll of small arms and light weapons in CAR. Canvassing the humanitarian organizations for statistics and stories was quick work. There were only four: Cooperazione internazionale, Handicap International, Oxfam-Quebec, Doctors Without Borders-Spain. The then-current UN peacebuilding mission, BONUCA, occupied a compound on the Avenue Barthélemy Boganda that seemed fairly empty and deserted, as if several sizes too large. Once or twice, I was able to check my email at the BONUCA office. I arranged meetings from the landline at my hotel. (My recollection is that the only mobile service available had to be cadged from across the river in DRC. As much as Central Africans and others lament the slow pace of 'progress' in CAR, some things have changed!)
Early one morning, a police officer arrested me for taking a photograph. From my perspective, I was attempting to get a shot of an impossibly decrepit multistory building (a former ministry) that nevertheless contained many camped-out residents. From his, I had captured an image of the monument to the founder of the nation, a site of prime national security interest. It was only after he pointed it out that I even noticed the pile of rubble and concrete that had been a memorial to Barthélemy Boganda. The ironies of the incident – the officiousness with which a once-proud, now-crushed legacy was treated – seemed telling.
Just over a decade later, in December 2014, I returned to Bangui for the first time since mid-2012. What had begun as a rebellion and an attempt to claim the presidency by Michel Djotodia and the Seleka in late 2012 had become a war with sectarian dimensions, with Christian nationals fighting those they perceived as Muslim foreigners. By the time I arrived, armed violence was minimal, but just two months before it had been commonplace in the capital (and it would return). Before arrival, my plane did a fly-over to assure that none of the tens of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) who had made the airport their temporary home were loitering in our landing path.
I expected to find a climate like the one I had experienced more than a decade earlier: a state of suspended animation, a partially inhabited ghost town. Instead, I found traffic jams – the first I had ever experienced in Bangui, thanks to a greater number of cars and of the daily proliferation of potholes caused by heavy, armoured peacekeeping vehicles and a general lack of maintenance. Vendors with gaudy Christmas gifts (half-deflated beach balls, neon-coloured tinsel) crowded the sidewalks and streets, along with the usual boys balancing pyramids of boiled eggs and women expertly carving green oranges to reveal fragrant, glowing orbs beneath. The four INGOs of 2003 had become about fifty, accompanied by a massive UN peacekeeping mission, MINUSCA, which had outgrown the old BONUCA compound. Even with unofficial curfews in place, European-standard restaurants did brisk business. A new Lebanese-owned fast-ish food place was packed every day for lunch, both because it served decent burgers and falafel and suited the frantic pace of humanitarian work: always in a rush, if only to write the next report. Offices and expat-standard housing (a perimeter wall, good running water, on a favoured part of the electricity grid and ideally with a generator) were in short supply, with rents higher than ever. But not everything had changed: civil servants were waiting for their salaries, and every Central African I met seemed to have a story of trauma and dispossession.
Why did I find a bustling, almost overflowing metropolis in 2014, rather than the not-yet-post-conflict purgatory I had expected? Why had peacebuilding not made itself redundant, but become more prominent, in concert with escalating conflict? And how could a situation of such immiseration and violence be accompanied by such apparently robust economic activity?
These are, of course, somewhat naive questions. That war can offer opportunities for enrichment has long been noted and lamented. Carolyn Nordstrom (2004) argues simply: war is always profitable. And yet, what is striking about CAR in 2014 and today is that while a few intrepid (or foolish, or corrupt) people overtly take advantage of the war to make money, the vast majority of the people working in and on the country claim other motivations.
This is certainly the case for the various players usually referred to as the 'international community'. Rather than a community, though, these actors are more properly a crowd – an assortment of people all present at the same place, but who have diverging interests and backgrounds and might not even get along. What they share is their location – their position as part of the crowd – and their sense of self as motivated primarily by good intentions (which implicitly if not explicitly means they are less concerned with accountability for outcomes). Hence my preferred term: the good intentions crowd.
They can make a lot of money doing this work, but for most money is not the draw. Members of rebel groups find ways to make money, too, but their interest in it is also inseparable from what it does for them in terms of dignity and social status. And then there's me. I make money studying these issues, and I would not do it if I didn't (one must feed one's family). But I place the money factor far down on a list of motivations topped by deciphering the puzzle of CAR: why has this persisted in being such a tough place – and even become tougher – for so many of its inhabitants?
So while I came to this project with a sense of the changes I had seen over thirteen years of studying the country foremost in my mind, finding answers to my questions required going further back in time to understand which dynamics are new and which are not. What I have found is that the ever present but always changing role of violence in Central African politics has had a lot to do with the state form itself. As I've alluded to, building a state in the classic, Weberian mould has been very difficult in CAR. For much of its history, its 'statelessness' – or in contemporary parlance, its 'fragility' (World Bank 2011) – has been ignored or considered part of its charm. (For instance, CAR's erstwhile safari/game hunting industry depended on this being the 'real' or 'wild' Africa.) At the same time, there are specific forms of violence and other problems that arise in CAR given that a state form ideal that is in this context difficult to flesh out and fulfil nevertheless monopolizes the box accorded legitimate political organization.
As the region has militarized over the past few decades, international organizations and other diplomatic actors have come to see 'weak' states as a problem with only one solution: the creation of the ideal-type state that has already proved elusive. This concern has drawn a range of actors, new and old, to the table in CAR. But though united by the primacy they assign the state as a form, that same nation-state form – in particular, its status as the unit of identification and analysis in a ranked international order – divides them, allowing some at the table to see themselves as 'internal' or 'national', and others to see themselves as 'external' or 'expatriate'. In different ways, then, the idea of the state becomes a 'bond' – both a point of connection and a chain that structures those relationships in ways that the individuals involved cannot transcend.
Therefore, understanding the entrenchment of armed conflict in CAR today requires shifting the analytical frame. Rather than acting as if the people interested in conflict and politics in CAR – in whatever capacity – constitute separate, bounded cultures unto themselves (e.g. 'venal' Central African politico-military entrepreneurs, 'well-intentioned' UN and humanitarian employees, 'meddling' regional actors, 'occasionally insightful but mostly irrelevant' researchers), we must look at the nature and structure of their relationships.
Although anthropologists have long critiqued the bubble model of culture (i.e. that each culture is a self-contained bubble unto itself), it remains current in popular understandings, and it is also perpetuated by the nationalist international order. It's much easier and more comfortable to focus on 'their' culture or 'our' culture than it is to look at how these categories are given meaning through their relationships with each other. And perhaps more to the point, working to create a sense of who 'we' are as opposed to who 'they' are can be socially useful for the sake of mobilization and action, and loyalty and belonging. With analysis, however, our goal is not simply to reproduce 'native' categories but to understand and explain them – to see what they do. We want to understand the hows and the whys, and doing so shows that the differences people see as socially salient are in fact produced by their relationships with those they see as other.
Thus this book has a very simple argument, with more detailed corollaries and implications: understanding conflict in Africa today requires looking at the relationships among all of the people present and how those relationships structure what people do. I come to this argument from an interest in the good intentions crowd's newfound and growing institutionalization over the past two decades and its effects. But, given the always-outsourced nature of CAR's politics and economy (Smith 2015b), or put otherwise, given its longstanding extraversion, the country's tricky when not tragic politics have always been produced by the interplay among a number of actors who see themselves as different from each other – who claim different entitlements and different timeframes for involvement with this place. So in this book I navigate that longer history of unequally structured relationships and its contemporary manifestations, in part to reflect on both what really is different and what has persisted. It is always easier to see injustice in the past than in the present, but perhaps the recognition of significant similarities will spur critical reflection on the current moment as well.
Still fighting for the rainforest?
Twenty years ago, Paul Richards published what has become a manifesto for the anthropology of war, Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth, and Resources in Sierra Leone. The Cold War had recently ended, and in its aftermath violent conflict had broken out in various places around the world, with a notable concentration in West and Central Africa. At the time, the reigning explanation came from the journalist Robert D. Kaplan, who explained these conflicts as but the beginning of 'The Coming Anarchy' in a 1994 article in The Atlantic. He argued that in an age of environmental destruction and scarcity, senseless conflict would become increasingly prevalent. Kaplan's article was infamously faxed (those were the days) by the United States State Department to every US embassy. In a similar vein, Samuel Huntington argued in The Clash of Civilizations (1996) that coming wars would be fundamentally about identity and incompatible worldviews. The dominant thrust of these journalistic and political science accounts was that whatever these post-Cold War wars were about, it would not be politics. Enter Richards, an anthropologist with a decades-long engagement with Sierra Leone. Richards showed that in Sierra Leone – one of Kaplan's main cases of coming-anarchy-in-the-present – fighting that appeared senseless or at best tied to scarce resources was in fact born of long-festering political grievances about how society should be structured. He further demonstrated that even the brutal techniques used in the war, such as amputations, had a logic in the minds of people committing them. In doing so, he showed that rather than a 'new barbarism' (Richards' term for Kaplan-style analysis), post-Cold War wars grew from political struggles over distribution, status, and belonging.
In this way, Richards charted a course for a new genre of anthropological accounts of contemporary wars. My work has consistently seconded Richards' contention that it is analytically vacuous to describe wars in terms of degrees of 'barbarism', that is, to describe the West's interest in long-distance killing (Lindqvist 1993) as more evolved than those who continue to fight face to face. I have also striven to understand why people engage in violence – what violence communicates and why. This approach has limits, but it has nevertheless been a useful corrective to the journalistic accounts that focus on barbarism and 'blood-letting', which tend to tell us more about the prejudices of the people writing than they do about the fighting taking place.
Alongside the possible resurgence of barbarism, observers also wondered whether post-Cold War wars reflected a fundamental alteration of the classic Clausewitzian model of battles between state armies. Was this a 'new' mode of warfare? Military historian Martin van Creveld (1991) and political scientist Mary Kaldor argued yes. Kaldor coined the term 'new wars' to serve as an ideal type, a guide for policy and research. (She did not mean to imply that such wars never occurred in the past; rather, she wanted to make the limitations of the usual war model – 'old war' – explicit.) What set 'new wars' apart, she argued, was that 'whereas old wars tended to extremes as each side tried to win, new wars tend to spread and to persist or recur as each side gains in political or economic ways from violence itself rather than "winning"' (Kaldor 1999; 2013). Other terms used to describe 'new wars' include non-conventional wars, small wars, asymmetrical wars, or insurgency. The key throughout is that these other varieties of war involve non-state actors, and are in large part about the economic benefits that accrue to certain people during wartime.
So while the extent to which post-Cold War conflicts reflect new trends is debatable, they have undoubtedly prompted a new emphasis on the social context and study of war. In this book, I pause to ask where we are today. I contend that since the early 2000s there have been major shifts in the prosecution and management of violent conflict, and we cannot understand conflict without including these shifts – that is, without making all the people present the objects of the analysis. When Kaplan, Richards, and Kaldor were writing, international intervention in conflict zones was moving from its Cold War logics into UN-led, humanitarian modes. Some of the older players (e.g. France in its former colonies, African regional heads of state and their soldiers) continued to exert important influences, but various international conflict-response agencies also swelled and came to take on an increasingly wide range of functions. While there were only eighteen UN peacekeeping missions between 1948 and 1990, since 1990 there have been more than fifty.
These new interventions and modes of helping are shaped and constrained by the nation-state form, and the fictive conception that the world is composed of equal nation-states. The term 'fictive' (as opposed to 'fictional') highlights that people treat it as socially real, even though aware of the flimsiness of its empirical basis. Anthropologist-turned-novelist Amitav Ghosh presciently pinpointed the problem of the rigid state form in his notes on an early UN mission, in Cambodia:
there is an unspoken and unwritten agreement that underlies the UN's actions, not merely in Cambodia, but wherever it goes: an agreement that derives ultimately from what might be called the primal mandate of the UN itself. The UN represents the totality of the world's recognized nation-states, and the fundamental logic of its functioning is to recreate the image of its membership wherever it goes. Elections are, thus, only a step in restoring or conjuring up a nation-state, and wherever the demands of democracy or humanitarianism run contrary to the exigencies of the nation-state, it is the latter that will always win out. (1994: 421)
The problem is that while in theory these nation-states are equal, in practice they are anything but. The international system is constructed to insist upon perpetuating a single political form (i.e. the state as holder of an a priori monopoly on legitimacy it has done little to earn). This can make it impossible to focus on organic processes of accountability and democratic participation while staying agnostic on the ultimate administrative shape of things. The insistence on the state form also determines a great deal about the kinds of relationships that the various people involved in Central African political economies are able to have. That is to say, despite the apparent institutional frailty of the state, the state form nevertheless organizes the possible relationships and ideas about what can be done, and introduces hierarchies, power dynamics, and incentives that to a large extent structure relationships and privileges. Curiously, these hierarchies, dynamics, and incentives are perhaps most constraining for the people who are most privileged.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from State of Rebellion by Louisa Lombard. Copyright © 2016 Louisa Lombard. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction1. Conflict and the State in the Peace-Kept World
2. The Nativeness of 'Foreign' Violence
3. Mobility as Power
4. Long and Short Histories of Rebellion
5. DDR and the Frustration of Desires for Entitlement
6. War as the Violence of the Pack
7. World Champion of Peacekeeping
Conclusion