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Key Text Weak States and Humanitarian Emergencies

Author: R Vayrynen
Date: 2002
Size: 42 pages

Summary

Are complex humanitarian emergencies the product of impersonal social or natural forces? How do political factors make them worse? This study of the origins of humanitarian emergencies for the Queen Elizabeth House centre for development studies at Oxford University (UK) and the United Nations University (Finland) argues that crises are caused by venal, predatory state characteristics as well as weakness.

It is widely assumed that complex humanitarian emergencies are the products of impersonal forces such as natural disaster, political or economic decay. However, deliberately venal policies of greedy rulers and elites always worsen crisis. Bad rulers almost always govern weak or collapsing states. They are concerned with preserving power and accumulating economic and military assets, not with promoting the common good. Countries affected by crises suffer from arrested economic and intellectual modernisation, polarised social structures, stale and secretive ideological atmospheres, and a lack of democratic institutions and procedures. Case studies from Angola, Columbia, Northern Iraq, Serbia, and Tajikistan show that the most important factors pushing society into crisis are:

The devolution of military power from central government to local militia. Warlord violence is shown to deepen and protract crisis.
Rent-seeking activities. In the absence of public order, rent-seeking makes political rule predatory. The looting of public resources becomes primary, and the economic needs of the people forgotten.
While poverty is an important element of crises, it is an effect not a primary cause.
Private elite groups may emerge outside the state to pursue their own agenda.

Humanitarian crises occur in societies where the state is weak and elites greedy in pursuing their own interest. These two factors reinforce each other, and lead to spiralling crisis. Elites benefit from the continuation of emergencies. It is essential to understand the politics behind the economic factors. The main policy recommendation is that bad rulers should be removed. In addition:

Open and accountable economic policies which integrate nations into equitable international cooperation should be promoted.
War seldom affects all parts of a country. Fixed investments may be made in more peaceful areas to enable recovery.
More attention needs to be paid to the private material obstacles to peace. The suffering of elites, not ordinary people, stops wars.
Wars may be about status as well as asset control. Policies need to be informed by research on the non-state organisations of violence.

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Source: Vayrynen, R., 2002, ‘Weak States and Humanitarian Emergencies’ in eds. Nafziger, E., Stewart, F., and Vayrynen, R., War, Hunger and Displacement: Vol. 2, Oxford University Press, Oxford