When There Was No Aid

War and Peace in Somaliland

Sarah G. Phillips

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781501747175
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

For all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. Sarah G. Phillips's When There Was No Aid offers us one such example.

Using evidence from Somaliland's experience of peace-building, When There Was No Aid challenges two of the most engrained presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South. First, that intervention by actors in the global North is self-evidently useful in ending them, and second that the quality of a country's governance institutions (whether formal or informal) necessarily determines the level of peace and civil order that the country experiences.

Phillips explores how popular discourses about war, peace, and international intervention structure the conditions of possibility to such a degree that even the inability of institutions to provide reliable security can stabilize a prolonged period of peace. She argues that Somaliland's post-conflict peace is grounded less in the constraining power of its institutions than in a powerful discourse about the country's structural, temporal, and physical proximity to war. Through its sensitivity to the ease with which peace gives way to war, Phillips argues, this discourse has indirectly harnessed an apparent propensity to war as a source of order.

Chapter 1

THE IMPERATIVE OF INTERVENTION

Somaliland received almost no official development assistance (ODA) during its early years.¹ Indeed, not only did Somaliland receive no ODA, it received (almost) no international charitable contributions, no support for state-building or peace-building, no peacekeeping missions, no political support for belligerents in its civil war, no military assistance, no access to the licit international weapons trade, no significant involvement in extractive industries, minimal foreign investment, and no access to international loans. And it was unencumbered with international debt repayments.² Other than the remittances Somalilanders were sending home from abroad, the country was remarkably free from external involvement of any kind during its formative years, in sharp distinction to the rest of Somalia. And yet, as the World Bank (2017, 5) recently wrote, “Somalia is a fragile state, while Somaliland seems to be doing well.”

This chapter argues that intervention in so-called fragile states is so widely seen as beneficial (or at least inevitable) that only its form is open to debate. The idea of fragile statehood is produced by a powerful discourse about the ostensible harms certain states cause their citizens and the wider world—a discourse powerful not because it is empirically grounded but because it resonates with the ideologies and organizational mandates of northern policy makers as they try to manage the effects of globalization (Richards 2005, 6).

The experience of state formation in Somaliland challenges the assumptions that hold the fragile states discourse together. The first of these assumptions is that the causes of state fragility are primarily, if not wholly, domestic in origin. This is usually illustrated by emphasizing domestic corruption, patronage politics, social cleavages, and weak governance institutions in a country’s experience of violence and/or poverty.³ At the same time, the discourse disregards the ways that external intervention can exacerbate conflict and economic malaise in the states it designates as fragile. The second assumption is that the intervention of northern actors is self-evidently useful for overcoming these problems. More broadly, these assumptions deflect responsibility for global conflict and poverty to the south, and the levers for change within northern states are left largely ignored. By revealing how Somalilanders speak of their exclusion from the international system throughout the 1990s as generally beneficial, I provide some empirical footholds from which to challenge these assumptions.

Somalia is widely deigned the quintessential case of fragile or failed statehood. In 2008, The Economist referred to it as the “world’s most comprehensively failed state” (see also Kaplan 2006), and it was ranked in first place by the Fragile States Index for all but two years of the index’s first decade (2006–2016). A paradigmatic example of how Somalia’s experience of conflict is framed can be found in Greg Mills, J. Peter Pham, and David Kilcullen’s 2013 book, Somalia—Fixing Africa’s Most Failed State:

Many Somalis are quick to point to external reasons for failure … [and] often refer to the Cold War and its undoubted manipulations.… A few might go back even further and speak about the injustices of colonialism, though these memories pale against recent scars. On paper, Somalis would seem to have a point.… Currently, however, the threats to Somali security can be grouped into three different but related clusters, all of which are internally generated: first, that of Al-Shabaab … the second issue is the absence of government and governance.… This situation is related to, third, the most intractable problem in recent Somali history: the clan system, once a basis of social stability and consensus, today a basis of power and control outside of government. Indeed, this history shows that the central problem of Somalia is the virtual impossibility of governing Somalis, from without and also within. (2013, Kindle Location 306–333, emphasis added).

This short passage provides a snapshot of the conventional wisdom about Somalia’s troubles, particularly the insistence that they are detached from recent interventions by powerful states (other than on paper) and that as a result, its problems are all internally generated. In fact, as chapter 2 details, none of the three threats that the authors point to can be understood in isolation from the interventions that shaped Somalia from the colonial era to the present.

Making Intervention Inevitable

In 2019, the Fragile States Index listed 119 out of 178 countries at warning level or higher (Fund for Peace 2019, 6–7). Considering the diversity of those 119 countries it is not surprising that a large literature critiques the use of general terms like “fragile,” “failing,” or “failed,” which suggests they all share certain fundamental defects along a spectrum of dysfunction.⁴ Yet despite this, such terms remain integral to mainstream security and development policy doctrine in northern states. They provide the primary lens through which violence and poverty in the Global South are understood by major development agencies, think tanks, university research centers, the United Nations, and multilateral organizations like the OECD, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and African Development Bank. Every year, international organizations monitor, measure, rank, and compare the political, economic, and social characteristics that supposedly define states as fragile and, as such, render them in need of remedial action.⁵

Despite an engrained trope about the importance of local ownership in solving state fragility, and the ineffectiveness of one-size-fits-all models for exiting the condition, practitioners adhere to a reasonably specific template. The World Bank’s influential World Development Report 2011 emphasizes that while local context matters, “a basic set of tools emerging from experience” can be adapted to suit different places (World Bank 2011, 16). These tools invariably focus on enhancing the capacity of state institutions to deliver security and political and economic goods to citizens through programs that reform the security sector, increase judicial capacity, manage elections, enhance citizen empowerment, improve livelihood opportunities, and develop macroeconomic policy (Westendorf 2015, 230). Development professionals continue to advocate for these tools despite the simultaneous acknowledgment that they have not achieved their stated objectives.

Those who produce the fragile states discourse readily admit that the precise meaning of fragile statehood is contested.⁶ However, they agree that external assistance is an efficient, even necessary, way of breaking domestic cycles or traps of conflict and poverty.⁷ Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT, then AusAid) put the case plainly, stating that fragile states “have little chance of overcoming such serious problems alone. In fact, if left unassisted, they may experience fragility and development stagnation for generations” (DFAT 2005, 7). Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) made a similar claim five years later: “Eliminating global poverty and achieving the [Millennium Development Goals] will not be possible unless the international community tackles conflict and fragility more effectively” (DFID 2010, 10).

Paul Collier, the author of widely cited academic papers, popular books (2008; 2011), and some of the World Bank’s most influential research papers, argues for a highly interventionist approach to development. He suggests that failed or failing states have “structural characteristics which gravely impede … the provision of public goods,” particularly security and accountability (Collier 2009, 219). The key to turning the situation around lies “partly in a phase of international provision of the key public goods, partly in enhanced regional pooling of sovereignty, and partly in institutional innovation to make the domestic provision of public goods less demanding of the state” (220; see also Mallaby 2002; Krasner 2004; Fearon and Laitin 2004). A guiding assumption in this argument, and which is also central to the discourse, is that the international provision of key public goods will be contextually appropriate, benevolent, and disconnected from transnational systems that reproduce inequalities. It also assumes that human agency follows institutionalized incentives in a predictable manner. However, as we shall see in chapter 2, these assumptions obscure some important possibilities for autonomous recovery (see Weinstein 2005; Rutazibwa 2013).

Vast sums of money hinge upon the label of fragility. Chandy, Seidel, and Zhang (2016, 2) report that in 2012, a median fragile state relied on foreign aid for about half of its foreign capital. Large portions of northern states’ ODA budgets are also reserved specifically for states that have been designated as fragile. In 2016, Britain’s DFID committed to spending 50 percent of its annual budget in fragile states and regions. The World Bank and other donors made similar commitments to increase the proportion of their budgets allocated to fragile states.

Not surprisingly, organizations and the professionals whose careers they sustain seek to spend the money they are allocated in order to secure further funding. There is strong pressure for staff to meet the burn rate—a measure of the rate at which an organization or its partners spends its budget. Within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for instance, it is commonly understood that faster spending means faster replenishment from Congress (Arnoldy 2010) and that project success is measured, in no small part, by the speed at which funds are disbursed (Munter 2016). This is not specific to USAID though. A World Bank Report from 1992 found that Bank employees widely saw the timely dispersal of funds as “the dominant institutional value” and that demonstrating an ability to secure loan approvals quickly was a means for staff to “achiev[e] personal recognition” (World Bank 1992, 16, 14). Both Ngaire Woods (2006, 39), and Alnoor Ebrahim and Steven Herz (2011, 66) found that these incentive structures had changed little since that report, suggesting that internal corporate objectives and reward structures constitute at least part of the reason that nonintervention is almost never seriously considered as a solution by development agencies.

A multitude of indexes categorize, rank, and thereby determine the amount of funding that fragile states receive. This helps to produce the realities that they describe. The coproduction of fragile states and donor entities can be seen clearly in the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), which is the most influential index of state fragility. Its findings drive resource allocation for the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA), African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC), the Millennium Challenge Account, and the governments of Scandinavia, France, and the UK, among others (see Rocha De Siqueria 2014, 271; Nay 2014, 216). The CPIA defines a state as fragile and conflict-affected when its score across sixteen indicators is 3.2 or below or it has experienced a regional or UN peacekeeping or political/peacebuilding operation within the last three years. Sitting above a score of 3.2 renders a state ineligible for fragile states funding from many of the biggest international donors. The fact that significant pools of funding are linked to a determination of fragility hardens the incentives for states to accept the term and, presumably, perpetuates its use.⁸

But the role of the major development agencies in the production of state fragility goes beyond simply designating some states as fragile and dispensing money accordingly. The very definition of fragility expresses the identity and corporate mandate of the agencies that define the term such that they are indivisible from it. All that the World Bank’s CPIA measures across its sixteen indicators is clear from the four clusters into which they are grouped: economic management, structural policies, policies for social inclusion and equity, and public-sector management and institutions. As Mick Moore (2016) notes, these are essentially the criteria upon which international lenders like the World Bank rate the creditworthiness of potential borrowers. They have nothing to do with political factors like the prevalence of violence or the perceived likelihood of a major political breakdown. They are also silent on human security and harm minimization, despite the central role that both play in the justification for intervening in fragile states. The most influential tool for determining whether a state is classed as fragile is therefore based on criteria that fit the World Bank’s institutional mandate of providing loans—not the specific needs of countries that it ostensibly seeks to assist. The policy tools surrounding state fragility are principally about creating efficiencies within existing modes of distributing development assistance and, by extension, the power arrangements nested within those modes. They are not about unsettling these arrangements in the name of human security or equality. Fragile states and the development agencies that define states as fragile are coproduced. They do exist without each other.

Susan Woodward (2017, 135) quotes a representative from the OECD-DAC, who bluntly explains his own understanding of what constitutes fragile statehood: fragile states are “environments where international agencies cannot use their preferred aid effectiveness modalities.” A senior official at Australia’s DFAT told me something similar, that the idea of fragile statehood was developed by major international development agencies “to explain why their incentivized business models weren’t working in these places.”⁹ Indeed, the consistency with which development agencies note their own failure to reverse state fragility is striking. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 concedes that: “No low-income fragile or conflict-affected state has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal (MDG)” (World Bank 2011, 50). The codirector of that report, Nigel Roberts, went further elsewhere:

If you look at the experience of low-income, fragile states over the last 25 years, the lack of progress in health and education is pretty stunning.… No single low income fragile state has achieved or will achieve any of the Millennium Development Goals. And believe me, this is not for lack of trying, it is not for lack of investment in health and education, it is for a lack of success in transforming institutions. (Roberts 2011)

I will return to the institutional fix that this statement presumes. For now, however, note the circular reasoning implicit in the failure of development agencies to reduce state fragility: development projects are more effective in states that already have stronger governance institutions (see Hellman 2013). The World Bank’s 2004 Annual Review of Development Effectiveness was clear on this point:

The Bank’s efforts have been more successful in countries that are politically stable; where there is strong ownership of reform; where the executive, legislature, and the bureaucracy are working for common purposes; and where the country has the administrative capacity to implement reforms. The Bank’s efforts have been less successful where one or all of these elements have been lacking. (cited in Woodward 2017, 59)

Of course, stronger governance institutions would presumably negate the state’s supposed fragility and thus the reason for Bank intervention in the first place. The paradox is striking: the interventions used to tackle state...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Brief Timeline of Events
• A Note on Spellings
• Introduction
• 1. The Imperative of Intervention
• 2. Somaliland’s Relative Isolation
• 3. Self-Reliance and Elite Networks
• 4. Local Ownership and the Rules of the Game
• 5. War and Peace in the Independence Discourse
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index