Introduction: African and European states

A map of Africa in 1900 will show see the continent’s territorial subdivisions laid out in a generally familiar form. Some details, certainly, remained to be fixed: the four territories that were to form South Africa had yet to be united, even though their individual frontiers were established; French West and Central Africa had not been subdivided into individual colonies; the German colonies of Togo and Kamerun were not carved up between the French and British until after World War I; a number of relatively minor boundary adjustments had still to be made. But broadly speaking, the map is still pretty much the same today.

Consider a map of Europe in the same year, and the continent’s boundaries have been totally transformed. No more than a very few states — Spain, Portugal and Switzerland — had the same frontiers then that they have now. The great landmass of Central and Eastern Europe, then covered by three vast empires — Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian — and the remains of a fourth — Ottoman — has changed beyond recognition. The great German Empire that stretched unbroken from Löthringen in what is now France to Königsberg in what is now Russia has shrunk to a truncated territory that just reaches the Rhine in the west and is cut short at the Oder and Niesse in the east. The dismemberment of Austria and Russia has been still more brutal. Poland, wiped off the map in the late 18th century, has reappeared, alongside states like Lithuania and the Czech Republic (in essence the former Bohemia) that had been still longer absentees from the international scene. Even in the west, the formerly united British Isles have been split by the Irish secession. Nor are these upheavals simply the result of World War I and II. The changes in the 1990s have been every bit as dramatic, with the re-emergence of the Baltic states (independent from 1919 to 1940, then suppressed for half a century), the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, the reunion of a divided and reduced Germany, and the division of two other creations of the Versailles settlement, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

This contrast between Africa and Europe is not only striking but paradoxical. Europe, or so it is believed, is the homeland of the strong state, founded on nationalism and sustained by centuries of history. In Africa, on the other hand, states are weak and artificial, the result merely of an arbitrary colonial partition, lacking internal coherence and raison d’être, failing, dysfunctional, even collapsed. So what accounts for this dramatic difference? Are African states stronger than expected, capable of surviving the kind of challenges that shattered their apparently more powerful European equivalents — including the once mighty Soviet Union? Are they living on borrowed time, teetering on the edge of an abyss that will shortly do to many of them what it has already done to Yugoslavia? Or are they simply different kinds of creatures, that march to a different drum, and may be expected to continue in pretty much the same way, regardless of the upheavals that are transforming other parts of the world? The understanding of what Africa’s current conflicts are about depends on the answers to these questions. This contribution, inevitably speculative, will attempt to sketch out some answers.

States and boundaries, boundaries and states

One place to start is by exploring the relationships between statehood and territoriality in Africa and Europe. Why do states take the territorial form, and possess the boundaries, that they do? Do the states define the boundaries, or do the boundaries define the states? If the boundaries change, does the state cease to exist, or dramatically change its character? Or is it to all intents and purposes the same state, albeit with different boundaries? In this respect, some broad — though by no means mutually exclusive — differences can be distinguished between the kind of state found in Africa, and the kind found in Europe.

Generally speaking, European states exist in order to express the identity of the groups of people who inhabit them. It is the community that defines the state, and the boundaries are drawn in order to reflect the extent of this community. This ideal, certainly, is by no means always met; but where it is evidently not met — in Belgium, Northern Ireland and the Basque provinces of Spain — a palpable tension results. The dynamic of European statehood over the last century and a half, ever since the campaigns for German and Italian unification got under way, has been to redraw boundaries where necessary to reflect ‘national’ identities. Often, as after World War I and II, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, this redrawing has been politically possible only after the defeat of states that had previously prevented it; but the redrawing itself has been no big deal. Europeans have adapted to the upheavals of the 20th century by changing the political units within which they lived. An elderly central European could have been governed by five different states over the last 90 years, without moving house.

In Africa, it has been very different. The boundaries, on the whole, came first, and states have been formed within them. Some African states — Ethiopia, Lesotho, Liberia, Rwanda and Somalia — certainly have identities that preceded the late 19th century process of African state formation, though as this list shows, this has by no means always been a recipe for subsequent stability. Most of them, however, are very directly the descendants of the colonial partition, and have no other raison d’être. The African paradox is that this makes their boundaries more important to them, and not less. Precisely because these boundaries were arbitrarily imposed by an external colonialism, their maintenance has become the primary concern of subsequent African ruling élite. Once there is an attempt to change the colonial boundaries of Zambia or Côte d’Ivoire, for example, there is no alternative basis on which a Zambian or Ivoirian state could be constructed. The safety valve provided in Europe by the possibility of redrawing boundaries in order to reflect changing political realities has not been available— save in the exceptional case of Eritrea. For those significant social groups for whom the state has been absolutely central — politicians, bureaucrats, soldiers, and their intellectual supporters and affiliates — it has been essential to preserve the institutional entity on which they depended. Since this imperative was widely shared across the continent, it was built into the international architecture of the continent — most evidently in the Charter of the Organisation of African Unity — to such effect that Africa has proven able to resist (again with the Eritrean exception) any emulation of the wholesale redrawing of boundaries that occurred with the end of the Cold War in Europe. To this extent, African and European states are indeed different kinds of creatures, and do march to different drums. For how long they will be able to do so, however, is a different matter.

Can African states survive?

The problems of establishing viable African states on the feeble social and territorial bases provided by colonial rule were recognised from the very outset of independence, characteristically in the form of the now outdated ideology of ‘nationbuilding’. Resting on an essentially ‘constructivist’ conception of nationalism, this held that it was possible for virtually any ruling élite, guided by the appropriate policies, to create a sense of common identity among the people whom they ruled. This was, of course, an ideology that suited such rulers very well, and that readily justified expedients such as leadership personality cults and the imposition of single-party states, which were evidently far more in the interests of the rulers than of those whom they ruled. Since that time, constructivist theories of nationalism have taken a bashing, nowhere more so than in the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union into its constituent ethnic units. The idea that African states might be able to succeed where much more powerful European ones had failed has increasingly been challenged. In Ethiopia — the African state with by far the strongest claim to historic status — the government in power since 1991 has gone so far as to reconstitute the whole structure of governance on the basis of ethnic confederalism.

For all that, the African record of nationbuilding cannot be entirely written off. Over the intervening 40 years, and drawing on an earlier 60 years of colonialism, many if not most African states have acquired at least some measure of common identity: the kind of ‘banal nationalism’ created by a century of living together, a lingua franca (usually of colonial origin), a consciousness of shared experience (much of it bitter), and even some inklings of an emerging ‘national character’. Even the inhabitants of a state as artificial as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), who have gained virtually nothing since the establishment of the Congo Free State that could plausibly make them grateful to be Congolese, have nonetheless acquired at least a sense of common national identity, and some commitment to the continued existence of the ramshackle political unit that they inhabit.

As the cases of the DRC and, still more strikingly, Somalia illustrate, however, the existence of some sense of common identity (in Somalia a particularly intense one) provides no sufficient basis for the construction of a viable and legitimate state. But the peoples of at least a number of African states — Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania, to take three examples — have now had sufficient experience of living together, not just within broadly accepted boundaries, but within a concept of national identity with which they are generally comfortable. This justifies the expectation that these will settle down into what might be described as ‘normal’ states, capable of implementing stable formulae for their own domestic governance that can combine a measure of accountability and representation with the provision of public goods — peace, welfare and development — for the majority of their citizens. This massive achievement rests on a number of bases:

a favourable political geography, in terms of the distribution of population, resources and communications, with which some but by no means all African states have been endowed;¹



the capacity to combine a core ethnic identity, where there is one (Akan in Ghana, Wolof in Senegal), with the incorporation of other peoples into the political system on non-discriminatory terms;



the level of élite coherence and toleration necessary to permit peaceful leadership succession; and



not least, an adequate quality of individual top leadership.

Zimbabwe provides a tragic example of a state with most of the requirements for stable and effective governance that is being brought close to failure by its leader’s determination to remain in power at whatever cost to the state and its population. As this case shows, the future of many of Africa’s most successful states must remain at least provisional, until a social and institutional infrastructure has been created that is strong enough to protect them against the aberrations of individual leaders.

But while it is essential to emphasise the success of some African states, not least in order to guard against the continent-wide over-generalisations that mar much analysis of Africa, these are not the states that are of primary concern. Of much greater significance for the purposes of this argument are the distressingly large number of states in which acceptable political formulae have not been developed, and that remain vulnerable to collapse, or have actually collapsed. In turning from Ghana, Senegal or Tanzania to states such as Angola, the DRC or Sudan, the prospects of achieving some plausible political formula through which to attain security and public welfare shrink virtually to vanishing point. A number of other major African states, with Nigeria as the most worrying, arouse significant cause for concern. Even states that once appeared to be models of successful African development, such as Côte d’Ivoire, are perilously close to implosion. Others, such as Congo-Brazzaville, Liberia and Sierra Leone, have reached this point. In cases such as these, the post-independence ideal of establishing effective governments within the boundaries bequeathed by colonial rule are so evidently problematical as to demand some attempt to think of alternatives.

It can reasonably be objected that there may be life in the old states yet. As already noted, even some of the most improbable states have been able to establish some sense of their own identity, such that their dismemberment or reconfiguration would arouse a real sense of loss, even beyond those élite whose commitment to the state derives to a large extent from its commitment to them. There has as yet been astonishingly little attempt by aspirant and oppositional African politicians to articulate any alternative to the post-colonial state. Even the most destructive insurgent leaders — John Garang, Laurent Kabila, Jonas Savimbi, Charles Taylor — have claimed, sometimes plausibly, to be seeking to reform and re-establish existing states, rather than simply to dismember them. Where dismemberment has been the explicit goal, as in Eritrea and Somaliland, even Biafra, this has been based on the demand to re-establish former colonial jurisdictions rather than to carve out new ones. Only in Ethiopia, with its very different trajectory of state formation, is it possible to identify any significant movement — notably the Oromo Liberation Front — in favour of creating new states in accordance with the ethnic or national formula that has been taken for granted in Europe.

Nor is there any significant international support for reconfiguration. The African diplomatic consensus remains firmly opposed to any alteration in the existing boundaries, and it could well be argued that with Africa having survived the first dangerous decade after the end of the Cold War while keeping its territorial structure intact (apart from the deviant cases of Eritrea and possibly Somaliland), the prospect of the continent following the European route has now receded. Whatever they may do within their own backyards, moreover, the now dominant western states continue to adhere to the formal principles of sovereignty in the rest of the world. There has not been the slightest sign that they might extend the precedent of the former Yugoslavia, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) alliance, in effect, has forcibly dismembered an existing state, and established its own quasi-colonial jurisdiction in parts. The structure of international law likewise remains basically intact, and rests on respect for statehood at the domestic level. Whatever claims are made for a droit d’ingérence or right of intervention on humanitarian grounds, commercial law remains resolutely statist: a multinational company seeking to exploit the resources of the DRC, for example, can only have its right to do so recognised in courts around the world, provided this right derives from a formally recognised state that has territorial jurisdiction over the area concerned. Therefore, far from undermining African states, in the way that they have often been accused of doing, multinational corporations are actually among their most important buttresses.

All this is true enough. At the same time, many of the sources of support that helped to sustain African states as effective power structures rather than notional entities occupying areas designated on maps have now atrophied. The end of the Cold War, obviously enough, has removed the superpower support that was once provided to favoured client states within the context of global bipolarity. Post-colonial clientelistic structures have likewise — with the remarkable exception of British military intervention in Sierra Leone — been significantly weakened. The French government’s appallingly misjudged support for the genocidal regime in Rwanda in 1994, coupled with the collapse of the Mobutu regime in Zaïre three years later (coupled with developments both in Europe and in French domestic politics), have deeply undermined the willingness of Europe’s most interventionist post-colonial power to become engaged on the continent. While neither Zaïre nor Rwanda had been French colonies, France has been left as little more than a helpless onlooker, even in the jewel in the crown of the former French empire in Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, whose problems have ironically been greatly exacerbated by the French use of Ivoirian territory to support Charles Taylor’s insurgency in neighbouring Liberia.

Nor has support for existing African states been sustained at the continental level. Regardless of formal African diplomatic commitment to the maintenance of the former colonial boundaries, and the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states, actual adherence to this principle has been dramatically reduced. It had never been complete: in Southern Africa, intervention across state boundaries was a fact of life during the apartheid era, whether in the form of destabilisation by the South African regime at the time and its regional associates, or support for liberation movements by the frontline states. In the Horn, insurgencies in Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan at least from the early 1960s, were able to gain tacit support from across the frontier. A significant breach occurred in West Africa, until then the most internationally stable region on the continent, with the regionalisation of the Liberian civil war from 1990 onwards, as the Economic Community of West African States’ monitoring group (ECOMOG) forces intervened on behalf of the government in Monrovia, Côte d’Ivoire tacitly backed Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), and Taylor himself extended his operations across Liberia’s frontiers, notably through support for the Revolutionary United From (RUF) in Sierra Leone. Following the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and the first and second Congo wars of 1996/7 and 1998 onwards, the process spiralled out of control. With up to eight other African armies operating within DRC territory, several of them on an uninvited basis, it has become impossible to regard the principles of non-intervention and respect for existing frontiers as operative rules for African state behaviour.

These changes at the interstate level, however, merely reflect and recognise to a large degree, developments within the affected states themselves. Whereas the great majority of African states, however feeble their formal militaries, did in fact exercise unchallenged control over the whole of their designated territories at independence, this has long ceased to be the case. Military power has shifted very significantly away from formally constituted armies, under the control of state governments in the capital cities, towards rural-based groups that exercise direct control over local economic resources, and gain their weapons either from friendly states across the border, or through the informal weapons networks that have proliferated since the end of the Cold War. The fiscal base of many of the affected states has collapsed at the same time: in Liberia for most of the 1990s, and in Sierra Leone in the early 2000s, the formally recognised government in the capital city had virtually no domestic sources of revenue, and depended entirely on external aid. The government of the DRC, whether under Mobutu (Zaïre) or his successors, has primarily gained its domestic revenues through plunder. Although the oil-producing economies of Angola and Sudan have access to substantial revenues, which they use to a large extent to purchase arms in turn, these depend on control of highly specific areas of the national territory, and derive from the operations of multinational companies. Almost throughout the continent, indebtedness, economic failure and the consequent imposition of structural adjustment programmes have deeply undermined governments that relied for their authority mainly on clientelistic networks sustained by the trickle-down of economic favours.

The globally dominant states and international organisations associated with them have sought, since the end of the Cold War, to reconstruct African states according to an approved model of multi-party democracy, ‘good governance’ and liberal economic management, and have provided substantial amounts of aid in order to help favoured states (such as Ghana, Mozambique and Uganda) to make the necessary transition. Built into this project, however, has been a universalist conception of the bases for effective and accountable statehood, deeply influenced by the European experience, which takes for granted the prior existence of basic public order and, at least a potentially viable economy. While some of those African states in which these preconditions have been met have indeed been able to manage the transition to more stable political structures and more effective economies, the less effective have been left stranded. Precisely those mechanisms for political and economic reform that help to consolidate viable states now only serve to exacerbate the problems of those territorial units in which the foundations of statehood are feeble or non-existent.

In short, there is little reason to regard the continued validity of some of the elements that have historically upheld African statehood as providing any viable basis for the reconstruction of those states that have been most severely challenged by collapse and civil war. Here and there, certainly, an apparently defunct state may be rescued by a fortunate combination of external circumstances: in Mozambique, for example, the end of the apartheid regime removed the last significant source of outside support for the Renamo opposition, and opened the way to an internationally brokered settlement. Or the emergence of dynamic, principled and competent leadership may lead to a process of state revival, in the way that Museveni’s (NRM) brought about the resuscitation of the Ugandan state after 1986 — even though its achievements are now challenged by its own increasing autocracy and corruption, engagement in the DRC war, and its inability to resolve the conflict in the north. Sometimes, as in Sierra Leone, external forces may preserve at least the appearance of a state that is unable to survive on its own. As a general project, however, the idea that viable states can be constructed throughout Africa on the basis of the territorial units established by colonial rule has now reached the end of the road.

Thinking the unthinkable

Powerful taboos have long prevented any serious discussion of alternatives to the post-colonial state in Africa, even in those cases where such states have most abysmally failed to meet the basic needs of their inhabitants. It is time that these taboos were broken. In part, this process simply calls for a rearrangement of the intellectual furniture: the unthinkable remains unthinkable only until someone thinks it. It is also useful to recognise how quickly the previously inconceivable can metamorphose into the normal and banal. Changes in the international system, which like earthquakes ultimately result from the slow build-up of underlying forces, characteristically occur in sudden and unpredictable shocks. In 1985, any analyst who had predicted the imminent disappearance of the Soviet Union would have been dismissed as crazy. Only 16 years later, it takes a real effort of the imagination to recall that such a state ever existed, and a whole new collection of states — Belarus, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia — have taken on the appearance of normality. Human beings adapt with remarkable speed to changed circumstances, and Africans on much of the continent have proven extraordinarily adept at responding to upheavals far greater than those that have occurred in most of Europe. In time, it may well prove to be the maintenance of the mythology of defunct states amidst such upheavals, in Africa but not Europe, that turns out to be anomalous.

What are the elements from which a new African political order is likely to be constructed? The existing states, of course, provide at least a basis from which to start. Not only do quite a number of them form perfectly viable political units that, with reasonable management, are likely to survive, but important elements of the colonial legacy are likely to prove permanent. As already noted, they have acquired a measure of residual legitimacy that will prompt demands for their retention or resuscitation, and they have laid down ongoing features of the political landscape — most obviously language — that continue to shape the boundaries between one political entity and another. It is worth remembering that the border between England and Scotland still essentially follows the frontier of the Roman empire.

Ethnicity, quite regardless of arcane academic debates over its ‘primordial’ or ‘constructed’ character, has likewise developed into an enduring feature of African life, and provides a ready basis for the consolidation of political identities. The problem here, as the Somali example all too clearly shows, is that the existence of a common ethnic identity by no means necessarily upholds the maintenance of an effective state. Critical to the relationship between ethnicity and statehood is not just the existence of an ethnic identity as such, but more importantly the substantive content of this identity in terms of the shared attitudes towards issues of political authority and control that it embodies. Different ethnicities, in other words, will actually do different things for the people who share them. Notably, they derive from very different historical experiences on different parts of the continent, in terms of underlying ecological conditions — from settled agriculturalists through pastoralists to scattered forest dwellers - and traditions of governance — from highly centralised states, through segmentary systems, to nomadic bands, and systems of religious belief. The decay of viable and effective states has created massive political violence in Liberia, Rwanda and Somalia, to take three of the most appalling examples. But the nature of this violence and the role of ethnicity in it, have varied quite dramatically, in keeping with the very different indigenous social structures and values through which violence has been articulated.² In some cases, such as Rwanda, the structures and values associated with ethnicity help to consolidate statehood, whereas in others, such as Somalia, they help to undermine it. African ethnicity constitutes not a set of building blocks of different shapes and sizes, through which a system of states based on ‘African tradition’ rather than on colonial imposition might be constructed, but rather a complex and variable set of elements that interact in different and often unpredictable ways.

One guide to the construction of alternative forms of political authority in modern Africa is provided by the emergence of the individuals commonly known as ‘warlords’ and the movements that they have created — movements that echo the shifting and unstable political processes characteristic of parts of precolonial Africa in many respects.³ The warlord phenomenon illustrates the integration of the different elements in modern African politics from which new systems of rule may be constructed, either in opposition to the inherited structure of colonial statehood, or indeed through the metamorphosis of post-colonial units into very different entities, behind the cover of what Reno terms the ‘shadow state’.⁴ The most visible expression of the warlord phenomenon is the leader himself, as the embodiment of the ‘big man’ syndrome that pervades many African political cultures. Leadership, however, is not just a matter of personality, but depends on the ability to manage the available resources in such a way that effective structures of authority and control will be created. The two critical elements in this are the creation of a military following that is at least capable of competing with its rivals on the ground, and the development of a set of economic linkages to global trading networks.

Though clientelistic systems based on ethnicity provide the most obvious starting point for building a military following — for example, with the role of the Ovimbundu as an ethnic core for Savimbi’s UNITA, or the segmentary clan bases for the various Somali warlords — there are equally cases where such followings cross ethnic lines. Over a longer period, indeed, warlords may even create their own ethnicities by consolidating different groups within a common military system, in the way that Shaka did with the Zulu empire in the early 19th century. Control over the linkages between locally generated economic resources and the external economy has likewise been a common element in the creation of states, not just in Africa, but throughout the world. The indigenous states created through local control of the slave trade in both Western and Eastern Africa provide the clearest historical examples, for which equivalents can be found in the role of diamonds in sustaining modern political entrepreneurs such as Savimbi and Charles Taylor. There are, of course, advantages for such entrepreneurs in being able to present themselves as the rulers of formally recognised states: Charles Taylor as president of Liberia is in a stronger position to control and manipulate his international economic networks than he was when he merely led the NPFL. But the nature of the operation is much the same.

The shift from territorial states, defined by their colonially created boundaries, to trading states, defined by their control over internationally marketable resources, reflects broader changes in the nature and value of territoriality in the modern global system. Broadly speaking, territory no longer matters in the way it once did. European frontiers that were bitterly contested in the first half of the 20th century have now softened into insignificance. The ever-growing number of states in the international system reflect not only the growth of subnational demands for independent statehood, but the relatively low cost for existing states of permitting their own dismemberment: the most striking feature of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the fact that no significant group within the core unit, Russia, was prepared to fight to retain control over the14 peripheral republics. At the other extreme, tiny territorial units such as Singapore and Hong Kong can profit dramatically from their role in global trade. One critical effect of this change is to devalue the role of size, and to undercut the claims to leadership of large African states such as the DRC or Nigeria, as well as the pretensions of regional integration schemes based on the supposed advantages of a large domestic market. Where territory matters the reason is not that a large state has inherent advantages over a small one, but that political groups based in regions with low levels of profitable natural resources want to retain control over the rents derived from the presence of such resources in other parts of the country. Conflicts over access to oil revenues in Nigeria, or diamond revenues in Angola and the DRC are cases in point.

This leads to another emerging resemblance between African political systems and their precolonial predecessors: the division of their territories between core zones that contain the greatest concentrations of people and exploitable resources, and peripheries where the government is much less important. This division persisted to some degree into the colonial era: the French distinguished between ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ Chad, while the British African empire contained large areas subject only to token administration by lonely district officers. But with the failure of ambitious projects of post-colonial statebuilding, many African states have shrunk both geographically, as they have lost control over their peripheries, and functionally, as they have withdrawn from the provision of services that are supplied, if at all, by private enterprise or western non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Though fixed boundaries continue to appear on maps, effective states fade out into borderlands or peripheries where actual levels of state control are uncertain, disputed or non-existent. At the furthest extreme, there are areas of Africa where it is doubtful whether states can be maintained at all. The principles that the whole of the inhabited territory of the earth is divided up between states, and that states exercise a monopoly over the legitimate use of force within their territories, have become so firmly entrenched in the formal conception of the modern international system that it is easy to forget, both how recent the establishment of these principles has been, and how fragile the basis to actual governance is on which they rest.

Much of Africa, and indeed of the rest of the world, was not incorporated into territories formally controlled by states until the end of the 19th century. This formal incorporation then had to be made good, not just through the expenditure of force, money and human lives, but through the construction of institutional systems of rule, on the one hand, and of habits of obedience on the other. But the territories concerned could not generate the resources to sustain this. With the passage of time — first with the ending of the colonial project, then with the decline of post-colonial and superpower support for weak client states, and finally with the decay of many of those states themselves — the resources available to impose statehood from the outside on areas that could not sustain it internally have likewise atrophied. If a map of Africa had to be drawn that indicated, not the colonial division indicated at the start of this contribution, but the level of control exercised by governments, much of the continent would again be designated as ‘stateless’.

Conclusion

The architecture of post-colonial Africa is still unfolding, with much of it already in place. It is a messy construction, comprising areas of effective and even democratic statehood; areas under the control of personal rulers of one kind or another, some of them formally recognised and others not; borderlands and zones of shifting control; and areas altogether beyond the realm of statehood. As inevitably happens when major transformations are afoot, this shifting scene is subject to numerous conflicts, some of them between the embattled adherents of the formal state order and those who are seeking to contest it, others between competitors for control over the disparate resources — ethnic identities, diamond mines, smuggling networks and arms supplies — that have been left up for grabs as a result of the failure of post-colonial states to maintain effective control. Quite where the dividing lines will be drawn remains uncertain: though the regions with the densest populations and most valuable resources are most likely to be able to sustain some reasonably settled form of governance, there is plenty of room for individual leadership and political skills, or the intervention of external states, to shift the outcome one way or the other.

Eventually, the African diplomatic system and the world as a whole will have to come to terms with the fact that the demarcation of the continent between crisply delineated sovereign states based on the old colonial frontiers, that they have struggled so hard to sustain, is now in many areas no more than a fiction. They will need to find some way of coping with the uncomfortable realities that have displaced it. Unlike the dramatic transformation of 1989-91 in Europe, where the very hardness of states meant that changes had to be rapid, clear and formally recognised, it is likely that the sheer sponginess of threatened African states will lead to a gradual and piecemeal shift in the continental rules of the game, rather than a sudden break with the past. The critical turning points are likely to be the willingness of dissident élite to adopt political programmes that explicitly reject the bases of the post-colonial state, and the willingness of outside states to recognise and work with political units that no longer correspond to those already established. There are some signs that each of these changes may be coming about. Eventually, in any event, some recognition of the real as opposed to the formal bases of African statehood will need to come into being.

Notes

For the idea of favourable and unfavourable political geographies, see J Herbst, States and power in Africa: Comparative lessons in authority and control, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2000.



For the relationship between violence and spiritual belief in Liberia, see S Ellis, The mask of anarchy: The destruction of Liberia and the religious dimension of an African civil war, Hurst, London, 1999.



For a discussion of the warlord phenomenon, see W Reno, Warlord politics and African states, Lynne Rienner, Boulder CO, 1998.



See W Reno, Corruption and state politics in Sierra Leone, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.