I’ll begin by saying that I like ICG, that I think their analysis is more often right than wrong, and that even when it’s wrong it’s useful. However this podcast makes it clear that they – like everybody else – are stuck in a certain way of thinking. On violence in Southern Sudan:
While it’s important to understand that these conflicts between tribes in Southern Sudan are not new – they’ve been going on for generations – the fact that 2500 people have been killed in South Sudan in 2009 alone and 350,000 displaced means the nature of that violence has changed and to a certain degree become politicised. This is of particular concern given what is at stake in the coming year. If the government can’t get a handle on the violence, extend state authority, prove itself a credible provider of security, the forthcoming elections could be disrupted and this could also become an obstacle on the road to the all-important self-determination referendum in 2011.
First, while I totally accept that ICG has a more thorough analysis of the violence than I do, it’s difficult to see how, if these conflicts have been going on for generations, that their continuation demonstrates that the nature of the violence has changed. These conflicts were always political, unless you think that inter-tribal relations have no political content – in which case you probably haven’t read enough history books – and an increase in death and displacement might not demonstrate politicisation per se but simply improvements in tactics, new supply of weapons or just a new assymetry in the conflict (for example, if one tribe loses cattle to a drought). My worry is that if – as I suspect – ritualised violence (particularly in the form of cattle raids) is an integral part of Sudanese tribal politics and culture (and possibly entertainment as well) then any solutions that you might derive from this reading of that violence are likely to have failure built in.
Second, notice what ICG thinks the effects of the violence might be – to undermine state authority and threaten the 2010 elections and the 2011 referendum. What these two things have in common is that they are state projects. While local communities might take a passing interest in those projects, they’re not things that are core to their existence. This is partly because ICG is interested in political development rather than humanitarian assistance, but it’s also because we – as people coming from established functioning states – tend to see politics in terms of the state, or – taking this violence as an example – in terms of how it relates to the state. This is the second part of building in failure – a state-centric diagnosis of Sudan’s problems and the consequent prescription of “Please sir, can I have some more state?” are unlikely to resonate with people for whom the state is not a player.
Skipping lightly on, we find the UK Defence Academy has published From General to Strategic Corporal: Complexity, Adaptation and Influence. In some ways this paper is little more than a breeze through some of the key buzzwords of the last 10 years – Black Swans? Check. Bottom Billion? Check. Behavioural economics? Check.1 Although it’s nice to see the military taking these concepts on board, they don’t really cohere, but there is a point relevant to the violence in Southern Sudan about halfway through:
In Afghanistan we believe the coalition has struggled to frame the choices we are asking a war-torn nation to consider. The simplest example would be the offer of democracy. Whilst well understood in liberal western countries it requires far greater explanation and framing in low income, conflict ridden countries when the decision to vote or who to vote for is largely irrelevant when compared with choices presented by the Taliban, or just by social circumstance, of life and death. We would contend that, to date in Afghanistan, we have paid little attention to how choices might be appropriately framed to change individual and collective behaviour. Many of the choices that are currently presented are too stark: poppy bad/wheat good; Taliban evil/ISAF good and so on. The reality is that we have consistently failed to understand that what seems to us as irrational behaviour is entirely rational to the individual facing tough choices.
Ignore the Afghanocentric example – it’s tough to find anything published by the UK military these days that doesn’t think Afghanistan is the be-all and end-all – and look at the forest rather than the trees. These guys have realised that the choices we present to people might not always be the choices that they’re actually facing. In the Sudanese example, tribal violence bad / state violence good (in the Weberian sense) is unlikely to play well in Jonglei, which should make us ask not if we’re offering the right solution but if we’ve even identified the right problem.
- A note to the authors: best not to refer to Kipling‘s “savage wars of peace” in this context, since Kipling was talking (essentially) about colonial wars of oppression, which is why Alistair Horne used it for the title for his excellent book about the brutal Algerian war for independence, and it’s probably a good idea to keep Afghanistan well away from that kind of language. Somebody might get hurt. [↩]