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The Failure of State Building and the Promise of State Failure: Reinterpreting the Security-Development Nexus in Haiti

Author: Kamil Shah
Date: 2009
Size: 19 pages (186 KB)

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Summary

How can a relational perspective inform state building in fragile states? This Third World Quarterly article argues that mainstream approaches to resolving concerns of security and development through state building fail to consider the influence of historical and external factors such as transnational power relations. The case of Haiti illustrates how attempts to consolidate the modern (liberal) state have in fact contributed to insecurities. A focus on social and political struggle, domination and subordination provides a useful framework for analysis of the historical trajectory of development in — and of — fragile states.

The modern liberal state is widely perceived as the necessary condition for facilitating security and development, but this perception is based on an idealised understanding of state formation and development. It privileges the form of the state over existing social and political relations, analysing insecurity, poverty and fragility in state-centred terms. It also imputes a temporal logic to the development process, which assumes that states will graduate out of insecurities and into modernity. However, the relational dynamics invisible from a state-centred perspective return repeatedly to frustrate attempts to resolve the challenges of security and development through the contemporary project of state building.

Despite the significant achievements won by emancipation struggles, persistent attempts to consolidate the modern liberal state have worked to repress many of the goals these struggles were fought over. The case of Haiti, for example, shows that conceptions of emancipation motivating subaltern struggles have been repeatedly subjugated to the perceived needs of the state operating within the inter-state system. Attempts to establish a modern liberal Haitian state in fact contributed to the country’s impoverishment.

• ‘Freedom’ for the slaves of colonial Saint Domingue was not upheld in the 1801 and 1805 constitutions, which established a militarised system of plantation agriculture. Racial equality and liberty from slavery were guaranteed, but in reality were incompatible with the maintenance of the transcontinental plantation economy.
• The 1915-1934 US occupation of Haiti was ostensibly initiated to restore order and promote modernisation and effective democracy, but created conditions that later facilitated nearly 30 years of bloody dictatorship. Centralisation weakened the autonomy and coherence of Haiti’s regional economies, Haiti became more dependent on the export of a single crop, and the construction of the gendarmerie left the country with a military force trained only in suppressing Haitian dissent.
• The US-led multinational military intervention ‘Operation Restore Democracy’ seems to have been designed primarily to provide an advantageous environment for transnational capital. After a coup exiled the socioeconomic reformer President Aristide in the 1990s, his return to power with the help of the international community was made conditional on implementing a neoliberal development framework. When local people objected to the (obligatory) privatisation of nine state-owned enterprises, (which would have transferred wealth to the Haitian elite, many of whom had supported the military coup), Aristide refused to implement the privatisations. The international financial institutions responded by freezing credits to Haiti.

Haiti’s development trajectory is defined by inequalities accompanying political economy and identity constructed within the context of world history. Attempts to pursue ‘development’ through state-driven modernisation have reproduced highly unequal social experiences shrouded under the rhetoric of ‘security’ and ‘development’. A particular vision of ‘progress’ is used to justify the perpetuation of deep socio-political inequalities, and social struggles have been written off as at best irrelevant and, at worst, unrelated to and independent of development. Further implications include the following:

• Historicising processes of state formation and state building enables assumptions concerning the relationship between conceptions of development and (in)security to be reconsidered
• Historical context must be taken into account in order to effectively operationalise the security-development nexus in fragile states
• A focus on social struggles and underlying transboundary social and political relations provides a useful analytical framework for development trajectories; it offers insight into alternative pathways to progress and emancipation that were not taken.

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Source: Shah K., 2009, 'The Failure of State Building and the Promise of State Failure: Reinterpreting the Security-Development Nexus in Haiti ', Third World Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1, pp 17-34