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Key Text Complex Political Emergencies and the State: Failure and the Fate of the State

Author: L Cliffe and R Luckham
Date: 1999
Size: 24 pages

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Summary

Complex Political Emergencies (CPEs) share one common denominator: that of state failure. Understanding the nature and role of the state, and with it the process of state collapse, plays a crucial part in conflict resolution. But should state restoration be an overriding priority for peace makers? How can and should humanitarian assistance operate in the context of collapsed or contested states?

This paper provides an analytical framework to explore the different origins, shapes, and outcomes of CPEs, with a strong focus on the characteristics of the state before, during and after a conflict. The report seeks to draw practical lessons from CPEs around the world, with special reference to Africa, where most post cold-war conflicts occurred. It strongly warns against the danger of over-simplification, concentrating instead on the characteristics of a conflict.

A state should be seen as caught in a process though which it itself is profoundly modified. This challenges the assumption that peace recovery and state rehabilitation imply a return to the status quo.

Other conclusions of the study are that:

State failures can stem from poor development policy; ethnically-based politics and failures in conflict management; the absence of a democratic process; and weak legitimacy or governance.
The causes of CPEs are also to be found in the issues around which conflicts are politicised.
Few post cold-war conflicts have arisen from mass-based revolts. Discontent arising from social and economic deprivation has more often been articulated in ethnic, nationality, or regional terms.
Few of today’s conflicts can be entirely isolated in terms of their origins, progress or resolution from other states or political forces in the immediate sub-region.
There have been very few conflicts in which contending sides have agreed to some negotiated power-sharing peace formula.
Conflicts leave strong legacies which manifest themselves at different levels; from state institutions (regional and local) to civil society.

The erosion or implosion of state capabilities does not always generate an overt crisis. There is a need to develop early warning methodologies that could shed a new light on development programs, particularly those that focus on democracy and good governance.

Policy pointers to donors are:

Donors’ strategic miscalculations, through intervention, poor co-ordination or ill-devised political conditionalities have proved particularly damaging.
The shape of a conflict will largely determine what is possible in terms of combining relief and development.
Donors need to make informed political judgements about the intentions, capacities and support of the different participants in a conflict.
A wide range of issues need to be tackled while reconstituting a state and in so doing setting it on a new trajectory. Questions should be asked as to whether the state should be reconstructed at all and how much priority should be attached to democratisation:
There is a strong possibility that former rulers may seek to re-assert themselves or that former ways of exercising power, most notably those related to corrupt practices or repression, may re-emerge during the reconstruction of the state.

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Source: Cliffe, L. and Luckham, R., 1999, 'Complex Political Emergencies and the State: Failure and the Fate of the State,' Third World Quaterly, vol. 20, no. 1, pp 27-50.
Author: Robin Luckham , r.luckham@ids.ac.uk
School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/polis/