Responding to State Failure in Africa

Abstract

Jeffrey Herbst's article, Responding to State Failure in Africa,' appeared most propitiously on the eve of the overthrow of the Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire. Two earlier articles by Herbst advanced a set of propositions that are relevant to his recent analysis. In Migration, the Politics of Protest, and State Consolidation in Africa, using Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Herbst argued that the exit option of outward migration had largely closed in much of Africa.2 Other avenues of exit from the state such as the informal economy and the reduction of agricultural production were greatly overrated. Meanwhile, opportunities for voice through democratic political participation had been closed in most countries. Consequently, Africans resorted to migration to urban centers and violent protest as their main options, but neither of these effectively challenged the state. Herbst ends by suggesting that, since African peoples in distress could neither leave nor hide, at least one aspect of state consolidation, control over population movements, could be said to be taking place. In War and the State in Africa, Herbst's analysis is anchored to Charles Tilly's emphasis on the role of warfare in state building in Europe.3 In Africa there have been few interstate wars, and the prevailing African norm enshrined in the Organization of African Unity (OAU) has helped preserve the boundaries of states bequeathed by colonial rule, however nonviable they may be.4 Postcolonial Africa has consequently been denied the positive effects of the Darwinian process of survival of the fittest by which European states became consolidated through the defeat of frailer enemies, and from the concurrent enhancement of their military, administrative, revenue-collecting, and other capacities. Although Herbst treads carefully, his message is unambiguous: no