Donor-Induced Democratization and the Privatization of State Violence in Kenya and Rwanda

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Since the end of the cold war, the proliferation of violent irregular units, including mili tias, paramilitaries, vigilantes, and warlords, has been widely discussed.1 Many claim that this phenomenon is a consequence of the wresting of the monopoly of violence out of the hands of the state by violent groups and communities and signifies a anarchy.2 They see the formation of violent nonstate actors as a by-product of state breakdown. Martin Van Creveld declared at the end of the cold war: As the second mil lennium A.D. is coming to an end, the state's attempt to monopolize violence in its own hands is faltering.3 Though this pessimistic outlook may be warranted, it is too one sided. It fails to take into account the actions and intervention of the state. Whereas irregular forces are rapaciously eating away at the state's monopoly of violence, the state is also willingly giving it away. States are sponsoring violent irregulars to carry out repressive activities?what can be called privatized state violence. Why would the state invite and sanction irregular forces to use violence within its borders and compromise its ultimate control of coercion?4 Particularly in Africa, where states never completely established a monopoly over the use of force, it seems paradoxical for a government to risk further undermining its own authority by creat ing militias and inciting ethnic violence.5 The relationship between donor-induced democratization and the rise of militias and state-sponsored ethnic violence can help explain this apparent contradiction in Africa.6 External donor pressure had interactive and mediating effects on domestic politics in African states in the early 1990s. By itself, international pressure did not lead to democ ratization or privatized state violence. Instead, when political conditionalities converged and interacted with domestic political threats (for example, massive opposition protests and rebel insurgencies), it caused some governments, particularly those that had previ ously politicized ethnicity and mobilized groups along ethnic lines, to privatize their coercive strategies. Incumbents are rational actors, whose sole goal is to stay in power, but their preferences and behavior are shaped and constrained by international and domestic structures. Analysis of incumbents' repressive policies in Kenya, Rwanda, and Malawi shows that democratization and external pressure altered state coercive strate gies, leading the incumbents intentionally to compromise their monopoly of violence as a means of neutralizing the opposition threat.