Mauro De Lorenzo reviews Big African States, edited by Christopher Clapham, Jeffrey Herbst, and Greg Mills.

Resident Fellow Mauro De Lorenzo

Most successful countries in Africa are small. Afro-optimists are always ready to brandish Botswana and post-genocide Rwanda as evidence that the continent is not doomed. But all big African states except South Africa are a mess, a danger both to their own population and to their neighbors. Donors have all but given up on big states; small states receive per capita much more aid. Yet the political science literature overwhelmingly claims that big is better. Challenging this assumption is the purpose of this volume edited by three of today's leading political scientists of Africa. They do not merely point out that big states are dysfunctional; they claim they are dysfunctional because they are big.

This approach calls into question the extreme conservatism with which African territorial integrity has been treated since independence (contrasted, for example, with the more sensible method adopted in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union after 1990). Their thesis also suggests that Western plans to turn over management of African regional security and peacekeeping to regional powers is premature and possibly foolish, since the very states called upon to supply troops are in many cases facing their own unmet internal security challenges.

The book is divided into thematic and country chapters. The quality of the latter is variable. Analytically the strongest chapters are those by Daniel C. Bach on Nigeria, Greg Mills on Angola, and Christopher Clapham on Ethiopia; though Clapham argues contrary to the spirit of the volume that Ethiopia's problems stem more from its 'culture' than from its size. Bach's chapter is a detailed, sophisticated account of the changing structure of the Nigerian state, though he does not directly tackle the book's central questions. Jack Kalpakian on Sudan offers more an ethnographic tour d'horizon than an analysis, and Claude Kabemba's chapter on the DRC places too much emphasis on 'Western interference' and gives undue credence to rumor and speculation.

What emerges from Jeffrey Herbst's stimulating chapter is that large states have a harder time identifying and stopping rebellions, particularly in their early stage. He concludes that states should invest more in intelligence services (the professional kind that detect threats, not the bands of thugs who pursue regime critics under the rubric of intelligence). He also convincingly demonstrates that the reason that African rebellions have become more focused on looting and terrorizing civilians is not because rebel movements have grown weaker, but because states have. 'Rebels structure their forces according to the amount of military power that states can project. [. . .] Settler states could not have been defeated by children.' Marina Ottaway, always original and refreshing, develops the provocative thesis that the relevance of 'lootable commodities' to African civil wars has been overstated. In a 'contrarian postscript', she ventures that 'illegal' commodity exploitation may in fact be positive if it generates the resources necessary to rejuvenate the state, or to cause the formation of new states.

The authors have--through this book and the wider research project of which it is a product--articulated bold and consequential policy guidelines from the analysis of the weakness of African big states. First, don't be afraid of boundary changes. The international system should not promote the redrawing of borders; but neither should it seek to save states that ought to dissolve (this lesson is particularly pertinent for the DRC). Second, as Nigeria and Ethiopia both demonstrate, federalism is not a magic bullet for stability and efficiency in big states. Third, neither is democracy. Because ethnicity and religion are highly politicized, democratic processes in weak states can cause conflict rather than prevent it. Democratic reform should be closely tracked with increased institutional strength. Fourth, the international community has a role to play in Africa's evolving security architecture by protecting small states from being destabilized by the internal crises of large states. It will also have to continue to shoulder the burden of peacekeeping missions.

Despite some uneven chapters, this book is an important addition to any Africanist political science library. It poses fundamental questions in new ways and addresses them in counterintuitive, often striking fashion. If in the coming generation the dysfunction of African states is repaired by focusing on basic security and by allowing weak states to fail, it will prove to have been far ahead of its time.

Mauro De Lorenzo is a resident fellow at AEI.