Decolonising Intervention

International Statebuilding in Mozambique

Meera Sabaratnam

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783482764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Colonialisme et post-colonialisme

Building, or re-building, states after war or crisis is a contentious process. But why? Sabaratnam argues that to best answer the question, we need to engage with the people who are supposedly benefiting from international ‘expertise’. This book challenges and enhances standard ‘critical’ narratives of statebuilding by exploring the historical experiences and interpretive frameworks of the people targeted by intervention. Drawing on face-to-face interviews, archival research, policy reviews and in-country participant-observations carried out over several years, the author challenges assumptions underpinning
external interventions, such as the incapacity of ‘local’ agents to govern and the necessity of ‘liberal’ values in demanding better governance. The analysis focuses on Mozambique, long hailed as one of international donors’ great success stories, but whose peaceful, prosperous, democratic future now hangs in the balance. The conclusions underscore the significance of thinking with rather than for the targets of state-building assistance, and appreciating the historical and material conditions which underpin these reform efforts.

Chapter One

Introduction

I did not begin this study of post-war international statebuilding interventions expecting to find failure. I was in fact looking for success. Mozambique seemed worthy of study because of its relative neglect in the scholarly literature, except that it had been held up as a success story for peacebuilding and development. This was particularly in terms of the sequencing of its elections and demobilisation under UN auspices after the war ended in 1992. It had experienced high GDP growth, had held regular elections, had undertaken a series of economic and political restructuring measures with the support of international financial institutions, had a former president win the Mo Ibrahim Prize for African Leadership and recorded a marked drop in its level of absolute poverty between 1996–7 and 2003–4.¹ I read up on the theory and practice of peacebuilding and statebuilding, went through books on Mozambican history, processed the policy reports, looked at the profile of bilateral donors, multilateral agencies and NGOs in the country, learned Portuguese and set off.

Within three days of landing in the capital Maputo on a research visit in 2009, I went to a health sector capacity-building workshop in an upmarket hotel downtown to which I was warmly invited by the organiser. Community leaders from around the country were gathered by an international NGO to receive leadership training that would help them fight malaria. The American consultant running the workshop explained that one of the main problems with health systems in the developing world was not a lack of resources but the lack of leadership and management skills. However, the consultant was here to train attendees in ‘The Challenge Model’, which could then be used to help fight malaria. She promised that this would be one of the most practical classes they would ever take.

As the consultant did not speak Portuguese, the national administrative language in Mozambique, she spoke loudly and slowly in English, with a translator of variable quality summarising what she said. I looked around the room. The attendees were well dressed and authoritative looking, mostly men of varied ages between about thirty-five and sixty-five, and most were carrying multiple phones to attend to their various responsibilities. Some were paying attention, others looked somewhat disengaged, and one or two were texting. One of the more engaged attendees attempted to correct errors of translation a few times. The trainer laid down explicit ‘ground rules’ for attendance, such as no lateness and no texting. One attendee asked for the programme of activity and made a request to ‘follow the programme’, but this was not provided at this stage. Instead, videos were shown showcasing this particular leadership training package as it had been rolled out in an Egyptian hospital and a Nepali health centre (narrated in English). In both cases, the nurses and doctors were depicted as demotivated, disorganised and disinterested, but according to the narrative of the video, following the roll-out of ‘The Challenge Model’ ‘EVERYTHING changed!’.

After a substantial buffet lunch in the hotel restaurant, the workshop proceeded with another video, which was a clip from an Oprah Winfrey show, again in English – the story of Faith the dog. Faith the dog had been born with only two legs, but amazingly had learned to walk on those two legs, to the delight of Oprah and the crowd. This amazing story of perseverance and courage was a lesson for the beginning of the training: that we do not have problems, but challenges, and challenges can be overcome. Problems are outside, but challenges are something you own. The trainer went on to show the next video, which explained ‘The Challenge Model’, which entailed the leadership skill of writing down ‘challenges’ on a sheet of flip chart paper and listing ways of addressing them, in line with one’s mission. This was the basic management model that these leaders would study for the next five days and then roll out to others in their communities around the country to help the fight against malaria.

I did not attend the following days of the workshop but followed up with a number of the attendees in their hometowns across the country. One of the attendees had a master’s degree in business from a South African university and ran various business enterprises alongside attending to his religious congregation, being engaged in informal community policing and running a regular meal service for poor children in the city. I asked him what he had got out of ‘The Challenge Model’. He thought for a while and said that he had seen such things many times in management textbooks but that it was nice to have practical training on it. As for some of the other participants, he said, they didn’t understand so well. He laughed as he described the difficulties in explaining what ‘vision’ meant in management speak to the local committee. Some argued saying that a vision meant seeing the Prophet. Others argued that vision meant ‘seeing’, so how could it mean something you think? He acknowledged that for many of them, nothing really had been understood and it was quite superficial. But he would continue and see what happened.

Another attendee, who had asked for the programme at the start of the proceedings, was a priest managing six congregations in a peri-urban area in a northern province. When asked about the usefulness of the programme, he said that there was an issue with the programmes on the ground. He said that people had had big expectations when they saw the NGO cars arrive, and the NGO was giving everything for the leadership training, but not enough was provided to make it work. They needed motorbikes to travel between communities to spread messages about malaria but didn’t have them. They had been given US$100 at the district level for stationery and materials – on my calculation, this was about half the cost of a single night’s stay in the capital for the international NGO project intern. The lack of resources at the district level to execute plans was a common complaint amongst the members, which went into reports but never seemed to reach the national level. He explained that the transport was needed because usually priests did an exchange – the congregation didn’t find it strange that it was another priest from another church talking about malaria. They needed a new face, so they would listen and believe, but they had to trust the face as well. Wryly, he joked that using ‘The Challenge Model’ they would redirect some of the funding towards transport costs or where they needed to spend it.

***

Very little that I had read in the literature on intervention thus far had primed me to understand what was going on here, which was nonetheless part of a flagship programme in international development and capacity-building. Why would the interveners spend so much money on a programme which was unevenly translated to its intended beneficiaries, who then did not have the resources or infrastructure at the ground level to make it work? Why would the interveners argue – and then say to the experienced, often qualified, assembled community leaders – that their problem was a lack of leadership capacity? How could they liken such leaders to a two-legged dog? And why would such leaders attend this kind of programme? What did this contribute to the strengthening of public services and institutions? Why did complaints about the lack of resource at the local level go nowhere? Were these aspects only a technical problem of programme design and implementation? Or was there something else going on here?

As the research continued, I heard similar stories and issues raised all over the country. This suggested the answers to the questions were likely structural in nature, and these and other problems were widely understood by both interveners and targets of intervention. Moreover, the problems also seemed deeply political, in the sense of turning on highly uneven sets of identities, entitlements and power relations between interveners and their targets. They articulated a particular kind of world view about who and what was to blame for poverty and the nature of state incapacity in the global South, which incidentally seemed at odds with the realities on the ground. Finally, this political structure clearly also resulted in significant patterns of both material accumulation and dispossession – whilst some were doing well materially out of these systems of intervention, it was always clear that this money might have been spent differently, and perhaps with better effects.

***

Working through these problems, this book concludes that interventions fail – and keep failing – because they are constituted through structural relations of colonial difference which intimately shape their conception, operation and effects. This interpretation emerges from an examination of the underlying dynamics of hierarchical presence,² disposability, entitlement and dependency which characterise intervention. Such tendencies continuously undermine the attempts to centralise capacity within the state and promote wider forms of development and good governance.

Addressing ‘failure’ is then not a question of Western interveners and scholars finding another technique for ‘fixing failed states’ through better sequencing, more cultural appropriateness, more hybridity, more participatory planning mechanisms and so on. Nor can it be smoothed by more empathy or better social relations between interveners and targets. When all of these measures are constitutively structured by unacknowledged relations of colonial difference, they will simply produce small variations in this failure, rather than confronting the underlying dynamic itself. This underlying dynamic is a set of constitutive assumptions regarding who is entitled to what in the world (and who is to blame for failure), rooted in forms of common sense which naturalise such inequalities of wealth and power.

The book reaches these conclusions through taking seriously the interpretations and experiences of the targets of intervention – those people whose political systems and livelihoods are supposed to be transformed by the expertise and assistance of international assistance. In Mozambique, whilst there have been ‘internationals’ of various kinds for centuries, the period after the end of the war in 1990 has seen a particularly large cohort active in the country promoting peace, development, democracy, good governance and so on. Whilst interveners tend to come and go after a few months or years, however, the targets of intervention remain to welcome the next batch and repeat the cycles of co-operation. What does the politics of intervention look like after two or three decades to them?

Exploring the Politics of Intervention

This book uses the term ‘intervention’ as a shorthand for what are sometimes called ‘international statebuilding interventions’ which incorporate aspects of development, peacebuilding, good governance promotion and general capacity-building in ‘fragile states’ and conflict situations in the global South. Whilst there are literatures in different scholarly disciplines, from public administration to peace studies to agricultural sciences, that contribute to discussions about what should be done in such situations, this book contributes to an ongoing conversation which seeks to explain and interpret the political form and significance of intervention.

Within International Relations (IR), and conflict and peace studies, this debate has taken the form of debates on the ‘liberal peace’, peacebuilding, post-war reconstruction, international statebuilding and international trusteeship.³ Unsurprisingly, many of the contributions to the IR debates have zeroed in on questions of sovereignty – in some senses, the ‘master’ concept of IR. Many contextualise the sovereignty question in terms of the moral and political legitimacy of intervention, its role in maintaining international order and the promotion of specifically liberal norms. Some of the research particularly focuses on the imperial ‘paradox’ of international governance in a territory which is designed to lead to sovereignty and state strengthening, but which has to undermine sovereignty to do so; whilst some see this as in principle feasible and necessary, others do not.⁴

A specific and important strand of this debate examines the intersection of intervention and globalisation – in particular, the emergence of a global neoliberal economic and political orthodoxy, driven by the West, which has been reformatting all states but particularly those in the global South. In these arguments, sovereignty no longer marks a state boundary but is now articulated as a frontier, in which there is a blurring of regulatory and adm...