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Intra-national IR in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2010

DOUGLAS LEMKE
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Abstract

Scholars debate whether Eurocentric theories of International Relations (IR) offer useful explanations of African international politics. They also debate the applicability of Eurocentric theories of state making for understanding African state making in the post-colonial era. I argue that theories like realism and war-and-state-making appear inconsistent with African political reality because when IR scholars apply these theories to Africa, they study the wrong actors. The ‘right’ actors for understanding these theories include not only the official states IR scholars traditionally analyse, but also all of the autonomous political entities that control territory, possess military resources, and struggle to survive under anarchy. I substantiate my claims about the usefulness and necessity of expanding the roster of actors studied with an historical narrative of the first six years of Congo's independence. During this time six autonomous political entities, in addition to the one official state, warred with each other, allied with each other, and struggled to make states.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 49 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

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References

1 Brown, William, ‘Africa and International Relations: A Comment on IR Theory, Anarchy and Statehood’, Review of International Studies, 32:1 (2006), pp. 119–143CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

2 Clapham, Christopher, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, Review of International Studies, 24:2 (1998), pp. 143–157CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

3 A review essay summarising many studies of African IR and thus motivating this claim is Lemke, Douglas, ‘African Lessons for International Relations Research’, World Politics, 56:1 (2003), pp. 114–138CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

4 Brown, ‘Africa and International Relations’, pp. 121, 127.

5 Varying critical intensities characterise the contributions to Neuman, Stephanie G. (ed.), International Relations Theory and the Third World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998)Google Scholar , and to Dunn, Kevin C. and Shaw, Timothy M. (eds), Africa's Challenge to International Relations Theory (New York: Palgrave, 2001)Google Scholar . Rather than carefully delineate Africanist scholars into different critical camps, I refer readers to the thoughtful discussion in Brown, ‘Africa and International Relations’, specifically pp. 120–2. I restrict myself to specific citations where possible, and use ‘Africanist critique’ or ‘IR theory’ only as a short hand for what I recognise to be varied scholarly groups.

6 Brown, ‘Africa and International Relations’, pp. 125–6; and Herbst, Jeffrey, States and Power in Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 105.Google Scholar Both emphases added.

7 Ibid., both quotes p. 129.

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15 To offset concerns that I am cherry picking obscure quotes from Waltz, a more recent but equally prominent American neo-realist writes: ‘Although the focus in this study is on the state system, realist logic can be applied to other kinds of anarchic systems. After all, it is the absence of central authority, not any special characteristics of states, that causes them to compete for power.’ Mearsheimer, John, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 414Google Scholar .

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27 An alternate presentation of this narrative might focus considerably more attention on the role of the UN and superpowers. Certainly that is true of standard summaries of this period as recorded in IR datasets (see below). A transnational focus emphasising the UN might contradict my claims of the usefulness of neo-realism in explaining the First Congo Crisis.

28 The quotes are from, respectively, Young, , Politics in the Congo, p. 336Google Scholar ; Nzongola-Ntalaja, , The Congo from Leopold to Kabila, p. 106Google Scholar ; and Kaplan, , Congo, p. 49Google Scholar .

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59 Returning to the variability of Africanist critiques, many scholars specialising in African IR would readily agree that a focus on a wider range of actors would greatly clarify empirical findings about African IR. My claims here, in one form or another, are consistent with past work such as Ayoob, Mohammed, The Third World Security Predicament (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995)Google Scholar ; the various contributors to Clapham, Christopher (ed.), African Guerrillas (Oxford: James Currey, 1998)Google Scholar ; and Reno, William, Warlord States in Tropical Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998)Google Scholar .

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62 See Tilly, Charles, (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar ; and Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar . An enormous literature building on Tilly's war-and-state-making perspective includes: Porter, Bruce, War and the Rise of the State (New York: The Free Press, 1994)Google Scholar ; Spruyt, Hendrik, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar ; Thomson, Janice, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar ; Anderson, Malcolm, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996)Google Scholar ; Lee Burke, Victor, The Clash of Civilizations: War-Making and State Formation in Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997)Google Scholar ; and Bates, Robert, Prosperity and Violence (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001)Google Scholar .

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