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The ‘Failed State’ of InternationalRelations

ADAM DAVID MORTON

On 4 May 1898 Lord Salisbury delivered one of his most notable and controversialspeeches as British Prime Minister to an audience at the Albert Hall in London.The ‘dying nations’ speech, as it became known, applied Darwinian principlesto the emerging international states system and the symptoms, causes andthreats facing Britain at the time. Salisbury argued that:

You may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living andthe dying . . . the weak states are becoming weaker and the strongstates are becoming stronger . . . the living nations will graduallyencroach on the territory of the dying and the seeds and causesof conflict among civilised nations will speedily appear.

Imperialism was seen as a biological process that, according to the laws of nature,would lead to the ‘curing or cutting up’ of weak states, equated with ailing‘patients’ ready for autopsy.1

The purpose of this essay is to expose a similar bias across the current policy-making and academic debate surrounding assumptions about ‘failed states’ in thepostcolonial world. At present, such debate revolves around taken-for-grantedassumptions about the weakness of state capacity in postcolonial states, with‘failed states’ commonly regarded as the harbingers of global terrorismand instability. My argument falls into two sections. First, it will be argued thatthere exists a pathology surrounding Western concerns about ‘failed states’ thatperceives stateness, or the identity of states, in the postcolonial world as instancesof deviancy, aberration and breakdown. Drawing from policies emanating fromthe UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit, the argument will demonstratehow the link between ‘failed states’ and terrorism is articulated, notably within thenew ‘Countries at Risk of Instability’ (CRI) programme defining policy makingtowards ‘fragile states’. The essay will also highlight here how similar assump-tions of aberration, deviancy and breakdown are equally upheld in InternationalRelations (IR) theory, which adheres widely to the view that ‘much of theworld is under the sway of states that are not states in the strict sense, but areso only by courtesy’ as ‘quasi-’or ‘failed states’.2 My argument will therebyadvance a dual practical and theoretical focus on the ‘failed state’ of IR by

New Political Economy, Vol. 10, No. 3, September 2005

Adam David Morton, School of Politics, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG27 2RD, UK.

ISSN 1356-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online=05=030371-9 # 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080=13563460500204274

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highlighting similar assumptions about the disintegration of state structures inpostcolonial states, resulting in state ‘failure’, degeneration, chaos and anarchy.This enforces a pathological view of deviancy, aberration and breakdown.

Second, and by contrast, I will then assert the case for adopting a more nuancedapproach to understanding postcolonial state identities that is sensitive to alterna-tive forms of social organisation that arise within different historical processes ofstate formation and conditions of capital accumulation. In a nutshell, a thoroughhistoricisation of state formation processes in the postcolonial world is requiredthat is cognisant of the political economy within which such states exist. Here,awareness will be drawn to the globally embedded dimensions of postcolonialstates within conditions of combined and uneven development. Wider cognisanceof this alternative political economy approach might then promote the possibilityof moving beyond the increasingly evident shortcomings of policy and scholarlydebate on ‘failed states’ in IR.

A pathology of deviancy, aberration and breakdown

Emergent across a host of contemporary institutions is a policy-making consen-sus linked to the threat posed by ‘failed states’ and the new set of associatedsecurity, development and humanitarian challenges. Hilary Benn, Secretary ofState for International Development in the UK, has recently stated that ‘weakstates present a challenge to our system of global governance. For the inter-national system to work, it depends on strong states . . . that are able to deliverservices to their populations, to represent their citizens, to control activities ontheir territory, and to uphold international norms, treaties, and agreements.’ Bycontrast, ‘weak and failing states provide a breeding ground for internationalcrime’, harbour terrorists and threaten the achievement of the Millennium Devel-opment Goals with the spread of HIV/AIDS, refugee flows and poverty.3

This identified perfusion of warlords, criminals, drug barons and terroristswithin ‘failed states’ has become a central policy-making concern within theUK and the US.4 Institutions in the UK such as the Foreign and CommonwealthOffice (FCO), the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the Department for InternationalDevelopment (DfID) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) support theview of ‘failed states’ as representing deviancy from the norms of Western state-hood. The aforementioned CRI programme emerging from Tony Blair’s StrategyUnit develops a focus on ‘fragile states’ in conditions of crisis. Preliminary policydocuments have highlighted the breakdown of political, economic and socialinstitutions; the loss of territorial control; civil unrest; mass population displace-ment; and violent internal conflict in states as diverse as Somalia, the DemocraticRepublic of Congo (DRC), Sudan, the Central African Republic, Liberia, SierraLeone and Cote d’Ivoire.5At the centre of the most recently launched Commissionfor Africa report, Our Common Interest, is also ‘the long-term vision for inter-national engagement in fragile states . . . to build legitimate, effective andresilient state institutions’.6 As Blair indicated in launching this report, ‘to tacklethe instability, conflict, and despair which disfigures too much of Africa and whichcan fuel extremism and violence, is to help build our own long-term peace andprosperity’.7 Elsewhere, the putative ‘better effects of empire’ (such as inward

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investment, pacification and impartial administration) have been heralded ascentral to United Nations strategy on state-building within weak states based ona re-consideration of models of trusteeship.8 The United States National SecurityStrategy has also announced that ‘America is now threatened less by conqueringstates than we are by failing ones’, and the United States Agency for InternationalDevelopment (USAID) has similarly produced a ‘Fragile States Strategy’ focusingon the problems of governance and civil conflict arising from poor state capacityand effectiveness.9

This policy-making approach represents a pathological view of conditions inpostcolonial states as characterised by deviancy, aberration and breakdown fromthe norms of Western statehood.10 It is a view perhaps most starkly supportedin the scholarly community by Robert Kaplan’s vision of the ‘coming anarchy’in West Africa as a predicament that will soon confront the rest of the world. Inhis words:

The coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are shut down,states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes placethrough dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, willloom large in the century we are entering.11

Hence a presumed reversion ‘to the Africa of the Victorian atlas’, which ‘consistsnow of a series of coastal trading posts . . . and an interior that, owing to violence,and disease, is again becoming . . . “blank” and “unexplored”’.12 Similarly,Samuel Huntington has referred to ‘a global breakdown of law and order, failedstates, and increasing anarchy in many parts of the world’, yielding a ‘globalDark Ages’ about to descend on humanity. The threat here is characterised as aresurgence of non-Western power generating conflictual civilisational fault-lines. For Huntington’s supposition is that ‘the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc . . .from the bulge of Africa to central Asia . . . has bloody borders’ and ‘bloodyinnards’.13 In the similar opinion of Francis Fukuyama:

Weak or failing states commit human rights abuses, provoke huma-nitarian disasters, drive massive waves of immigration, and attacktheir neighbours. Since September 11, it also has been clear thatthey shelter international terrorists who can do significantdamage to the United States and other developed countries.14

Finally, the prevalence of warlords, disorder and anomic behaviour is regarded byRobert Rotberg as the primary causal factor behind the proliferation of ‘failedstates’. The leadership faults of figures such as Siakka Stevens (Sierra Leone),Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaıre), Siad Barre (Somalia) or Charles Taylor (Liberia) aretherefore condemned. Again, though, the analysis relies on an internalist accountof the ‘process of decay’, of ‘shadowy insurgents’, of states that exist merely as‘black holes’, of ‘dark energy’ and ‘forces of entropy’ that cast gloom over previoussemblances of order.15

Overall, within these representations of deviancy, aberration and breakdown,there is a significant signalling function contained within the metaphors: of

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darkness, emptiness, blankness, decay, black holes and shadows. There is, then, adominant view of postcolonial states that is imbued with the imperial represen-tations of the past based on a discursive economy that renews a focus on thepostcolonial world as a site of danger, anarchy and disorder.

In response to such dangers, Robert Jackson has raised complex questionsabout the extent to which international society should intervene in ‘quasi-’ or‘failed states’ to restore domestic conditions of security and freedom.16

Indeed, he has entertained the notion of some form of international trusteeshipfor former colonies that would control the ‘chaos and barbarism from within’such ‘incorrigibly delinquent countries’ as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti andSudan with a view to establishing a ‘reformation of decolonisation’.17 AndrewLinklater has similarly stated that ‘the plight of the quasi-state may require abold experiment with forms of international government which assume tempor-ary responsibility for the welfare of vulnerable populations’.18 In the opinion ofsome specialists, this is because ‘such weak states are not able to stand on theirown feet in the international system’.19 Whilst the extreme scenario of sanction-ing state failure has been contemplated, the common response is to rejuvenateforms of international imperium through global governance structures.20

Backers of a ‘new humanitarian empire’ have therefore emerged, proposingthe recreation of semi-permanent colonial relationships and the furtherance ofWestern ‘universal’ values, and, in so doing, echoing the earlier mandatorysystem of imperial rule.21 In Robert Keohane’s view, ‘future military actionsin failed states, or attempts to bolster states that are in danger of failing, maybe more likely to be described both as self-defence and as humanitarian orpublic-spirited’.22

What these views neglect, however, is the way in which the expansion of inter-national society and the adoption of specific Western norms, values and propertyrights is itself linked to the international expansion of capitalism. For,

on the surface of it, the expansion of international society wasmeasured by the adoption of civilised norms of international inter-course; underlying this process, however, were the surreptitiousforces of capitalist accumulation and exchange, imposing the uni-versal logic of value creation and appropriation.23

Beyond the phenomenal form of state failure – with which much of the abovefocus on state failure is enamoured – what needs to be given greater considerationis how the different logics of sovereignty and capitalism are intertwined and shapethe structural conditions confronting postcolonial states. However, this is not torecommend the view that states have a simplistically predetermined structuralposition within the world economy where ‘the world-economy develops apattern where state structures are relatively strong in the core areas and relativelyweak in the periphery’.24 Nor does it entail acceptance of Robert Cox’s categoriesof ‘protostates’, conceived as reflecting an impasse in the relationship betweenstate and society, ‘lumpenprotostates’ which ‘manifest bizarre forms of arbitraryrule resting on the violence of armed thugs over an inarticulate majority of thepopulation’, or the ‘black holes’ of governance in Somalia, Angola, Liberia or

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Mozambique.25 What is instead at stake is the need to relate an understanding ofsovereignty to political economy and the conditioning, as well as enabling, effectsof a capitalist global division of labour.26

Anarchy or accumulation?

According to Mahmood Mamdani, the African postcolonial state after indepen-dence comprised a bifurcated political structure in which the formal separationof the political and economic characteristics of modern capitalist states was com-promised. In his words:

The colonial state was a double-sided affair. Its one side, the statethat governed a racially defined citizenry, was bounded by the ruleof law and an associated regime of rights. Its other side, the statethat ruled over subjects, was a regime of extra-economic coercionand administratively driven justice.27

The postcolonial state was thus bifurcated due to the existence, on the one hand, ofa civil political form of rule similar to modern capitalist states, based on law andconcentrated in urban areas, and, on the other, of a customary form of power basedon personalism, extra-economic compulsions and exploitation centred in ruralsociety and culture.28 This distinct process of state formation and its associatedform of sovereignty emerged within a global division of labour shaped by theexpansion of capitalism and the uneven tendencies of development characterisedby a combination of capitalist, pre-capitalist and semi-capitalist relations. A con-sidered appreciation of the contemporary nature of ‘failed states’ is thus bestadvanced through an historical understanding of the uneven development ofprocesses of capital accumulation within which different processes of productionwere combined in colonial territories.

This entails, firstly, acknowledging the specificity of the historical origins ofthe genesis of capitalism through processes of primitive accumulation in latemedieval and early modern Europe, and, secondly, understanding how verydifferent processes of primitive accumulation have unfolded within the frame-work of an emerging capitalist mode of production in colonial and semi-colonialterritories. Hence a distinction can be drawn between ongoing processes ofcapital accumulation in the domain of advanced capitalist states and ongoingprimitive accumulation in the domain of (post)colonial states facing differentconditions of development.29 Following Ernest Mandel, this process of unevenand combined development – involving uneven processes of primitive accumu-lation alongside combined processes of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes ofproduction – has contributed greatly to shaping state sovereignty and economicdevelopment in postcolonial states. In the latter, the age of imperialism suffo-cated the process of primitive accumulation so that the state became the primechannel of accumulation, serving thereby as a ‘surrogate collective capitalist’,as in Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Zaire and Sierra Leone.30 At the same time,though, ‘the distortions of the state are not just the result of the external depen-dence of African political systems. They also arise from the evolution of their

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internal stratification.’31 Hence, ‘primitive accumulation . . . entails appropriationand co-optation of pre-existing cultural and social achievements as well as con-frontation and supersession’.32 This is where Jean-Francois Bayart’s notion of‘extraversion’ gains purchase in appreciating the general trajectories of state for-mation shaped by historical patterns of the uneven and combined development ofcapital accumulation alongside the predatory pursuit of power and wealth tied tospecific cultural routines, practices of social action and social forms of organis-ation in the postcolonial era.33

By way of illustration, factional struggles within and between sub-SaharanAfrican states (Liberia, Rwanda, DRC and Uganda) would be better interpretedas the use of war as a mode of political production: a source of primitive accumu-lation that enables the seizure of the resources of the economy based on strategiesof extraversion involving new claims to authority and redistribution.34 Forexample, rebel groups, such as Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front(RUF), in Sierra Leone in the 1990s engaged in predatory forms of primitiveaccumulation through the seizure of resources such as conflict diamonds, whilstCharles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) similarly fundedwarfare through the timber, rubber and diamond trades.35 Also, in the late1990s, the rebel Alliance for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, led by LaurentKabila, played off the diamond cartel De Beers against one of its rivals,America Mineral Fields, for diamond mining contracts as well as contracts tomine copper, cobalt and zinc in just this fashion.36 This arrangement is also some-what mirrored by the intervention of the Ugandan Peoples’ Defence Force (UPDF)in the ensuing Congo war, by means of which some officers of the UPDF managedto institutionalise their private interests and benefit from the predatory pursuit ofprimitive accumulation whilst simultaneously underwriting the Ugandan state’scompliance with debt obligations to creditors within the global politicaleconomy. Long-term aims of state building, however, remain thwarted by thevolatile balance sustained by these competing factional interests in the Ugandanstate.37 Elsewhere, the conflagration in Cote d’Ivoire since 19 September 2002,initially involving the launch of an attack by army rebels on Abidjan and twonorthern towns, Bouake and Korhogo, in an attempt to seize state resourcesagain reflects more the conditions of extraversion – the predatory pursuit ofwealth and power through primitive accumulation – grounded in specific histori-cal experiences and the cultural, ethnic and political conditions of the region, thanthe classic case of a ‘failed state’. Additionally, bodies such as the Somali Recon-ciliation and Restoration Council (SSRC) – set up on 1 April 2002 to establish afourth Somali government in Baidoa, joining the breakaway regions of Puntlandand Somaliland in rejecting the authority of the Transitional National Governmentin Mogadishu – is less an example of another ‘failed state’ and more an instance ofcontestation over social and political organisation embedded within complex pro-cesses of historical state formation and capital accumulation. In sum, there is anurgent need to shift the focus from pathologies of deviancy, aberration and break-down in relation to the analysis of ‘failed states’, in order better to appreciate thecentrality of strategies of primitive accumulation, redistribution and politicallegitimacy that unfold in the uneven and combined conditions of developmentthat shape postcolonial state sovereignty.

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Conclusion: the doctrine of ‘failed states’

Just as Lord Salisbury drew distinctions between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ states in theinternational states system at the height of classical imperialism, policy makersand international theorists today are making similar assumptions about statesoutside the non-Western context. Evoking the medical metaphors of Salisbury,it has been assumed that ‘state collapse is a long-term degenerative disease’,although it should equally be noted that ‘cure and remission are possible’.38

Albeit with shifts of emphasis, postcolonial states are still seen in a pathologicalmanner as the main sources of instability and disorder that threaten the securityconcerns of the West. In this vein, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw high-lighted the perfusion of warlords and terrorists within failed states to the extentthat he declared himself as having ‘no doubt’ that the domino theory applies tothe chaos, disorder and anarchy of ‘failed states’.39 At a time when it has beenclaimed that the post-Cold-War order lacked an overwhelmingly dominant clea-vage, the threat of ‘failed states’ has come to the fore of policy makers’ and inter-national theorists’ concerns. ‘The perception of fault line wars as civilisationalclashes’, argues Huntington, ‘also gave new life to the domino theory whichhad existed during the Cold War’.40 What has recently emerged, then, is a doctrineon failed states that is deployed as part of a rejuvenation of Cold-War strategicthinking and practice within a ‘new Cold War on terrorism’.41 As RichardPerle, Chairman of the US Pentagon Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003,has put it:

The struggle against Soviet totalitarianism was a struggle betweenfundamental value questions. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ is about as effectivea shorthand as I can imagine in this regard, and there’s somethingrather similar going on in the war on terror . . . [that is] a battlebetween good and evil.42

At the same time, though, this doctrine itself reveals the failed state – in terms of acondition or status – of much IR theory. Statehood is assumed to be a universalorder achieved through the acceptance of objective conditions of sovereigntyshaped in the self-image of Western development. Yet my argument has raisedthe need to problematise universally recognisable signs of sovereign statehoodin order to highlight the ‘failed universalisation of the imported state’.43 More-over, I have argued that greater account has to be given to the relationshipbetween sovereignty and capitalism that shapes state identities. A politicaleconomy approach to sovereignty is better able to draw attention to the capitalistglobal division of labour within which state identities have been and are consti-tuted, whilst also according due regard to forms of political action operatingwithin such conditions. Imperialism unleashed a world process of uneven devel-opment in capital accumulation within which different forms of productionwere combined. This posed certain problems for the postcolonial bifurcatedstate in reconciling both the territorial and capitalist logics of power. These havemost commonly become manifest in ongoing attempts to engage in continual pro-cesses of primitive accumulation – or accumulation by dispossession44 – through

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the tactics of predation, fraud or warlord violence. Recognising these rather differentpolitical economy processes is essential in moving beyond the increasingly evident‘failed state’ of International Relations.

Notes

I would like to thank Kristen Nordhaug for his kind invitation to present the ideas expressed in this piece at

‘The Discipline of Development Conference’, Graduate School of International Development Studies, Roskilde

University, Denmark, 30–31 October 2003, the participants themselves for further feedback, and the support

and recommendations of Andreas Bieler and Nicola Phillips in developing the argument.

1. J. A. S. Grenville, Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the Nineteenth Century (Athlone Press,

1964), pp. 165–6.

2. Hedley Bull & Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 430.

3. Hilary Benn, ‘The development challenge in crisis states’, speech delivered to the Crisis States Research

Centre, London School of Economics, 4 March 2004, available at http://www.dfid.gov.uk and ‘A shared

challenge: promoting development and human security in weak states’, speech delivered to the Center for

Global Development, Washington DC, 23 June 2004.

4. Pinar Bilgin & Adam David Morton, ‘From “Rogue” to “Failed” States? The Fallacy of Short-termism’,

Politics, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2004), pp. 169–80.

5. Maguı Moreno Torres & Michael Anderson, ‘Fragile States: Defining Difficult Environments for Poverty

Reduction’, Poverty Reduction in Difficult Environments (PRDE) Team Policy Division, Working Paper 1,

UK Department for International Development (DfID), August 2004; and Nicholas Leader, ‘Aid Instruments

in Fragile States’, Poverty Reduction in Difficult Environments (PRDE) Team Policy Division, Working

Paper 5, UK Department for International Development (DfID), January 2005. I would like to thank

Mark Duffield for bringing these documents to my attention.

6. Commission for Africa, Our Common Interest: Report of the Commission for Africa (11 March 2005),

available at http://www.commissionforafrica.org, p. 353. Also see Overseas Development Institute

(ODI), ‘Harmonisation and Alignment in Fragile States’, draft report for Senior Level Forum on Develop-

ment Effectiveness in Fragile States, Overseas Development Institute, 13–14 January 2005.

7. Tony Blair, Remarks at the launch of the Commission for Africa report at the British Museum, London, 11

March 2005, available at http://www.commissionforafrica.org

8. Simon Chesterman, Michael Ignatieff & Ramesh Thakur (eds), Making States Work: State Failure and the

Crisis of Governance (United Nations University Press, 2005).

9. White House, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, September 2002, available at

http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf, p. iv; and United States Agency for International Development

(USAID), ‘Policy Statement’, available at http://www.usaid.gov/policy

10. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (Zed,

2001), pp. 136, 140.

11. Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy (Random House, 2000), p. 9.

12. Ibid., p. 18.

13. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster,

1997), pp. 258, 321; also ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (1993), p. 35.

14. Francis Fukuyama, State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century (Profile

Books, 2004), p. 125.

15. Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton University Press, 2004),

pp. 9–10.

16. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge

University Press, 1990).

17. Robert H. Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford University Press,

2000), pp. 309–10.

18. Andrew Linklater, ‘Rationalism’, in: Scott Burchill et al. (eds) Theories of International Relations

(Macmillan, 1999), pp. 107–8.

19. Robert H. Jackson & Georg Sørensen, Introduction to International Relations: Theories and Approaches

(Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 283–4.

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20. Jeffrey Herbst, ‘Let them fail: state failure in theory and practice: implications for policy’, in: Rotberg, When

States Fail, pp. 302–18.

21. Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite (Vintage, 2003), p. 17; Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations, p. 310; and

Fukuyama, State Building, pp. 131–2, 140–1.

22. Robert O. Keohane, Power and Governance in a Partially Globalised World (Routledge, 2002), p. 282,

emphasis in original.

23. Alejandro Colas, International Civil Society (Polity, 2002), pp. 126–7.

24. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European

World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Vol. 1 (Academic Press, 1974), p. 355; and Immanuel Wallerstein,

World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 52–6.

25. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (Columbia

University Press, 1987), pp. 218–19, 230–1; and Approaches to World Order, with Timothy Sinclair

(Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 33.

26. Naeem Inayatullah & David L. Blaney, ‘Realising Sovereignty’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 21,

No. 1 (1995), pp. 3–20.

27. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (James

Currey, 1996), p. 19.

28. Ibid., pp. 16–23.

29. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (Verso, 1975), pp. 46–61, 85–103.

30. Crawford Young, ‘The End of the Post-Colonial State in Africa? Reflections on Changing African Political

Dynamics’, African Affairs, Vol. 103, No. 410 (2004), p. 31.

31. Jean-Francois Bayart, ‘Civil society in Africa’, in: Patrick Chabal (ed.), Political Domination in Africa:

Reflections on the Limits of Power (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 121.

32. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 146.

33. Jean-Francois Bayart, ‘Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion’, African Affairs, Vol. 99, No. 396

(2000), pp. 217–67.

34. Jean-Francois Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (Longman, 1993), pp. xiii–xiv, 74–5.

35. Morris Szeftel, ‘Between Governance and Underdevelopment: Accumulation and Africa’s “Catastropic Cor-

ruption”’, Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 27, No. 84 (2000), pp. 287–306.

36. William Reno, ‘How sovereignty matters: international markets and the political economy of local politics in

weak states’, in: T. Callaghy, R. Kassimir & R. Latham (eds), Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa:

Global–Local Networks of Power (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 204, 206.

37. William Reno, ‘Uganda’s Politics of War and Debt Relief’, Review of International Political Economy,

Vol. 9, No. 3 (2002), pp. 415–35.

38. I. William Zartman (ed.), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority

(Lynne Rienner, 1995), p. 8.

39. Jack Straw, ‘Order out of chaos: the challenge of failed states’, in: Mark Leonard (ed.), Re-Ordering the

World (Foreign Policy Centre, 2002), pp. 98–104.

40. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations, p. 271.

41. Larry Diamond, ‘Winning the New Cold War on Terrorism: The Democratic Governance Imperative’,

Institute for Global Democracy, Policy Paper No. 1, 2002.

42. Interview by Adam Curtis for BBC Television documentary, The Power of Nightmares, ‘Part III, The

Shadows in the Cave’, broadcast 3 November 2004.

43. Betrand Badie, The Imported State: The Westernisation of the Political Order (Stanford University Press,

2000), p. 235.

44. Harvey, The New Imperialism pp. 144–5.

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