Statebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa

The Aftermath of Regime Change

Irene Costantini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351121330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the regime changes in Iraq and Libya to unravel the complexity of statebuilding in countries emerging from authoritarianism and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Framed in a comparative study of post-2003 Iraq and post-2011 Libya, the book examines changes in key state dimensions – representation and political authority, security, and wealth creation and distribution – in a continuous dialogue with past trajectories in these two countries. To grasp the nature and degree of these changes, the mechanisms of state formation are explored in light of a statebuilding agenda that, in its application from Iraq to Libya, has adapted to different political prerogatives. The analysis of Iraq and Libya serves the book's ultimate goal to address the debate on statebuilding from a regional (MENA) perspective and to lay the ground for the study of other contemporary cases undergoing radical and violent process of changes, such as in Syria and Yemen. The book grapples with problems associated with the difficult process of transition from authoritarianism through conflict and towards peace by focusing on the state, its structure and function. The work is informed by a large quantity of materials collected over the past five years, including secondary literature, policy papers and reports, and semi-structured interviews with key informants on Iraq and Libya.

This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, Middle Eastern studies, peace and conflict studies, and International Relations in general.

1 Introduction

Problem statement and main argument

Iraq and Libya are in the midst of a political, security and economic turmoil. After the removal of Saddam Hussein, Iraq witnessed a downward spiral of conflict that culminated in 2014 with the Islamic State conquering swathes of Iraqi territory and thus, compromising the country’s sovereignty. This coincided with Iraq’s incapacity to uphold the state’s prerogative of maintaining the monopoly over the means of violence: the Iraqi security apparatus crumbled in the face of the Islamic State’s advancement and was later challenged by a myriad of militias expressing different degrees of loyalty to the state. The political process following regime change in 2003 has been held responsible for creating the conditions for such developments to occur by disenfranchising a segment of Iraqi society and failing to meet people’s needs in an economy offering few opportunities other than through corruption and neo-patrimonial networks.

Libya does not offer a better scenario six years after the end of Muʿammar Qadhafi’s regime. A government does not exist; rather, the governing functions in the country are contested between three political bodies, each of them claiming to be the legitimate one. In the absence of a nationally recognised government, local power centres have strengthened their role in the transition, further undermining the potential for national reconciliation. Political agendas are upheld by means of force relying on a multitude of armed groups, which, after popping up during the uprising, have frustrated any attempt at recreating a functioning security apparatus. When it is not politically driven, violence is the result of widespread criminal activities that are engulfing the Libyan economy and eroding the social fabric of the country.

How did Iraq and Libya descend into such political, security and economic turmoil? What explains the process through which Iraq and Libya moved from ousting long-lasting dictators to remain plagued by intractable tensions? No simple and definitive answer exists to these questions, yet it is still possible to identify two sets of explanations. The first one focuses on domestic factors specific to the contexts under analysis. Some explanations highlight the exceptionality (i.e. deviation from the Eurocentric experience of state formation) of Iraq and Libya in the state system. Accordingly, the challenges of building functioning states are related to the residual artificiality of the Iraqi and Libyan states, interpreted as a product of their colonial heritage and of their regimes (Anderson and Stansfield 2005; Stansfield 2007; Vandewalle 2012). By casting the analysis in the historical past of Iraq and Libya, other debates focus on some traits that continue to influence their political, economic, and social developments. Among them, prominent are the debates on identity (ethno-sectarianism in Iraq, tribalism in Libya and Islam in both), its primordial or constructed formation and the social arrangements it leads to (Phillips 2005; Visser 2006; Dodge 2010; Paoletti 2011; Lacher 2013); and debates on the legacy of authoritarianism and its implications on political authority (al-Khafaji 2003; Dawisha 2009; Sawani 2013).

A second set of explanations focuses on international factors influencing international intervention in conflict-affected countries. On the one hand, problem-solving approaches maintain that statebuilding interventions remain the necessary practice to protect populations in non-Western countries and to ensure security and peace in the international system. By privileging an analysis of modalities and practices over an analysis of power relations, these approaches tend to ‘fix’ statebuilding interventions on the grounds of the lesson learnt from previous experience (Call 2008; Paris and Sisk 2009; Paris 2010).¹ On the other hand, different views within the critical approaches to intervention in conflict-affected countries share a critique of statebuilding that calls into question its very nature, assumptions and goals. With important nuances, critical approaches tend to identify the failure of statebuilding in international political agendas and practices that mask neo-colonial ambitions, material interests and the disciplinary goal of transforming societies under the veil of liberalism (Chandler 2010; Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond 2014).²

While both sets of explanation may provide useful insights, the main argument of this book is that the political, security and economic turmoil that Iraq and Libya have been experiencing following the removal of their regimes can be explained by the contradictions that exist between statebuilding and state formation. The former refers to the instruments and the underlying worldviews underpinning international intervention in conflict-affected countries. Both the instruments and the worldviews are informed by a notion of the state that is formal in appearance (a defined territory with a population, a government and state institutions), Weberian in structure (a bureaucracy and a monopoly over the means of violence) and neoliberal in orientation (a democratic governance and a market economy). State formation refers, instead, to a dynamic process involving a struggle for affirming state authority. In the latter, the state is a locus of domination and resistance rather than a neutral arena, as postulated in the liberal-democratic tradition. State formation operates in the formal and informal political sphere; it defies borders, as it occurs at both the local, national and transnational levels; and it is not confined solely to the structure of the state. As statebuilding has been taking place in parallel to state formation, Iraq and Libya show the contradictions of this interaction.

The externally led restructuring of the formal state apparatus, according to a Weberian conception of the state, coincided in Iraq with the unfolding of competing state projects framed around ethno-religious identities, which occurred inside and outside the state structure and eventually modified it: the intrusion of parochial and personal agendas bent the Weberian architecture of the Iraqi state. To restore a legitimate monopoly of violence, statebuilding implemented a vast range of security sector reforms and programmes. However, they largely failed to produce a cohesive security apparatus, replaced, instead, by alternative security providers. The neoliberal pressure to establish a market economy in Iraq stood in contradiction to the expansion of the rentier state and its mechanisms of wealth extraction and distribution, which relied on the state rather than on the market. Also, the territorial definition of the state, held dear in an international system of sovereign states, was challenged in Iraq by the radical project of building an Islamic State and continues to be challenged by the independentist claims of an already state-like Kurdistan region.

In Libya the democratic competition that opened the post-regime change phase soon gave life to two competing governments, respectively sitting in al-Bayda and Tripoli. Their legitimacy derived more from locally based power dynamics and antagonistic national narratives based on the ethos of the revolution or an Islamist/anti-Islamist competition, rather than from the electoral process. The institutions of the state (the Weberian’s bureaucracy) found themselves in the midst of such a competition, which threatened their very existence. The monopoly over the means of violence has been undermined by the multiplication of armed groups and a polarisation between competing political projects. Also in Libya, the territorial definition of the state has been challenged by transnational dynamics (i.e. terrorism, smuggling and migration) that have impacted the state in multiple ways.

The contradictions between statebuilding and state formation in Iraq and Libya have resulted in a trapped state. After 2003 and 2011, the Iraqi and Libyan states did not entirely abandon previous modes of organisation and operation. They both maintained a distribution of power that went beyond the structure of the state (the shadow state), sustained by a political economy reliant on wealth distribution rather than wealth creation (the rentier state). While these traits were maintained, Iraq and Libya developed new state forms modelled upon the internationally led statebuilding framework. These new forms did not materialise into legitimate and effective institutions, but rather produced the contours of an “empty state”, one that is built in forms, but not in practice, and is dependent on external support (Richmond 2014). Between past modes of organisation and operation and new institutional forms, Iraq and Libya evolved as trapped states.

What accounts for the development of trapped states? The encounter between statebuilding and state formation gave rise to trapped states, such as Iraq and Libya, that have two contradictory characteristics. On the one hand, they both evolved to become irrelevant entities for their citizens. Access to the state (i.e. security, services, or welfare) has been increasingly mediated by other entities that reside outside of the state, including ethno-religious groups and affiliated parties in Iraq and tribal and town-based power centres in Libya. On the other hand, the states in Iraq and Libya evolved in such a way that the political settlements following regime change and their institutional frameworks have not managed to contain the violent character of a competition for power. Iraq and Libya are trapped states because the growing distance between them and their societies has been filled by alternative violent strategies of organisation and modes of operation, in the forms of terrorism, criminal violence, insurgency and state-sanctioned violence which all rely on their control over violence to interact with and contest the state.

The difficulties of untangling the governance knot in conflict-affected countries, which is here interpreted as having produced trapped states in Iraq and Libya, have led to new attempts at rethinking the international involvement in these contexts. Stabilisation is the approach framing both the understanding of problems and the solutions to trapped states and conflict-affected countries a decade into the new millennium. As the contradictions between old modes of organisation and operation and new state forms have proved to be intractable, the governance question has become less central to stabilisation. Instead, stabilisation brings to the fore the contradictions of the trapped state ‒ an irrelevant state contested by violent strategies of organisation and modes of operation ‒ and tries to address them through a combination of military operations and service provision to the population. The former targets violent groups who threaten the state; the latter seeks to win the hearts and minds of the population and to build resilient societies, not states, capable of maintaining basic stability and withstanding external shocks.

The book teases out the contradictions between statebuilding and state formation by focusing on three fundamental components of the state: representation and political authority, security and the monopoly of violence, and wealth creation and distribution. The book examines the tensions that exist between a process of state formation that rediscovered and adapted previous modes of organisations and operation in Iraq and Libya and new state forms that were brought about by the statebuilding intervention. It investigates how in each of the above aspects ‒ representation and political authority, security and the monopoly of violence, and wealth creation and distribution ‒ Iraq and Libya descended into a condition whereby the state has become irrelevant for its population, leaving space for alternative violent groups interacting with and contesting the state.

The book shows how in Iraq and Libya political authority is loosely attached to the state and representation rests on a sense of state citizenship that has been undermined by other forms of allegiances. The state is incapable of providing security equally for its citizens as it has lost a significant part of (Iraq) or virtually the entire control (Libya) over the monopoly of the means of violence. Compromised by the oil economy becoming part of conflict dynamics, wealth extraction has not translated into wealth distribution in the form of much-needed social investments. Its allocation follows a pattern of consumption that sustains forms of political authority outside the state and the multiplication of licit and illicit providers of security. While these dynamics are present in Iraq and Libya, their differences in scale, modalities and results are discussed throughout the book.

While the ultimate object of investigation is the state, the analytical lens is set below and above it. At the crossroad of comparative politics and international relations, the book accounts for domestic dynamics of state formation as well as for international forms of intervention, their instruments and underlying worldviews. Indeed, political, economic and social processes unfolding in Iraq and Libya are often the result of the contradictory encounter between international statebuilding and domestic state formation. While the state is the main locus and fundamental source of conflict in Iraq and Libya, the interlock between statebuilding and state formation is the driver for the creation of trapped states. In analysing the trapped state in Iraq and Libya, the book draws both on peace and conflict studies and on the literature problematising the state in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Case selection and methodology

The structured focused comparison of Iraq and Libya is based on the analysis of both domestic and international factors. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was a watershed event in the MENA region, but not in the terms that former US president George W. Bush foresaw in 2003: instead of triggering a “global democratic revolution” (Bush 2003), Iraq descended into a ruinous and self-defeating spiral of terrorism, political rivalries and malgovernance. The seeds of violence were planted and, once grown, they infested the transition. Yet, eight years later, the MENA region was, or so it seemed, back then, on the verge of a democratic revolution. The suicide by immolation of a Tunisian vendor sparked a wave of popular protests demanding the end of the regime and the introduction of political, economic and social reforms that national borders could not stop: the storm of change moved from Tunisia to Egypt, and from there to Libya, Yemen and Syria and reached other countries in the region, albeit, in the latter, with only marginal consequences.

These events ‒ the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 ‒ arose from rather different sets of logic: on the one hand, a faltering Western project of imposed regime change driven by the imperatives of the War on Terror; on the other hand, popular initiatives channelling years of oppression and subjugation into a widespread mobilisation for change. Despite being analytically unrelated, 2003 and 2011 nonetheless signal the end of an epoch of anachronistic dictators and, simultaneously, the beginning of a phase in which tensions and contradictions, long-simmering under the surface of Arab societies, erupted.

As a result of rather different events, Iraq and Libya have become paradigmatic cases with regard to statebuilding and state formation processes. They have rarely, if ever, been compared in a structured way. Considered extreme and erratic cases in a region dominated by authoritarianism, they were often relegated to the margins of the study of regional trends and addressed as single case studies. Their complexity after regime change is often considered as too overwhelming to allow for a comparative analysis and claims of exceptionalism are sometimes raised, consciously or not, to avoid such an analysis. However, their joint consideration is both possible and insightful. Not only do they share a dictatorial past, but they are also conditioned by the blessing, or the curse, of oil. Regime change in Iraq and Libya is related to international paradigms of intervention, which led to the implosion of their state structures, a confused rush to fill the remaining political vacuum, the rise of terrorist groups, and an intractable contestation between multiple political groups, inside and outside their borders.

The comparison of Iraq and Libya is crucial to assess the basic hypothesis of this book, that is, that continuing disorder and violence depend on the contradictions between state formation and statebuilding, rather than on domestic factors or international intervention strategies taken separately. In the timespan of eight years, the interventions in Iraq and Libya have assumed different forms. The strong footprint intervention in Iraq is quite different from the light footprint intervention that occurred in Libya. Differing strategies and instruments of intervention notwithstanding, the underpinning worldviews, grounded on a liberal statebuilding framework, remained the same. The intervention in Libya remained anchored to a formal, Weberian and neoliberal notion of the state. This notion has informed the goal and practice of the intervention: international statebuilding actors need a government to interact with; state inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Maps
• 1 Introduction
• 2 On state transformation
• 3 The state in the Middle East and North Africa
• 4 Iraq and Libya: under the iron fist
• 5 From ‘armed liberalism’ and R2P to statebuilding
• 6 Gone is the ‘one man in command’
• 7 From military regimes to militias’ rule
• 8 Rentier states at war
• 9 Conflict and the state in the Middle East and North Africa
• 10 Conclusion
• Index