Dallying at DFAIT Due to the DRC

I went to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade today as they had a roundtable on the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  I don't know bumpkus about the Congo since I only studied its politics for the years 1960-1963--when Katanga tried to secede.  But I went today because the topic was intervention there, and I figured I could catch up a bit on one of the most intensive/extensive/enduring UN efforts. 

What did I learn?

• M-23, the new rebel group getting heaps of attention, despite having various ICC indictees involved, is actually better than average on human rights abuses.  Of course, that says a lot about the average rebel group .... or government in Congo.  The army of the DRC--the FARDC--is pretty awful.
• The various rounds of DDR (disarmament, demobilization, reintegration) have meant the inclusion of "former" rebels in the FADRC, which means that the government's military is infiltrated, that not all of the DDR-ed have given up their allegiances.  I know that the prospect of this is one thing that makes DDR hard, but I am curious whether there has been much social science to assess when this problem is particularly bad.  Any readers have any suggestions?
• That DFAIT, the Canadian government, and perhaps Canada in general has awesome MAT leave.  The person running the roundtable is going to be gone for a year as she is about to have a baby.  I know I have heard about this policy before, but when I am reminded of this, I just think this is awesome.  I had, um, a few days.  And it was a very tough year.  So, much kudos to Canada for this policy.
• Speaking of such stuff, this roundtable at DFAIT is a lot like a political science class at McGill--the gender balance was about 65%-35% females to males.  All of the CIDA reps who came over were female.  Not sure what, if anything, this means.  Is the DRC as a topic more likely to have female desk officers at Foreign Affairs and at Canada's Development branch?  Do the two agencies  just generally have more women?  The Department of National Defence, military folks excluded, seemed more balanced. 

Anyhow, it was an interesting morning in the big brown building on the edge of Ottawa.

Is Geography Destiny, part two

In response to my previous post, an anonymous commenter posted a link to a NYT map:

This map nicely illustrates that the Europeans drew up the borders of Africa with little regard to the distributions of linguistic groups, not to mention religious or racial composition.  We can see a mixture of colors in some new and old conflict zones like Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, and, of course, Sudan.  The problem is that this would cause us to overlook other places that have seen lots of violence that do not appear to be all that "colorful":

• Somalia: always the exemplar of homogeneity breeding conflict, as Somalis speak the same language, worship in the same way (Islam), and are of the same race.
• Both the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia appear more homogeneous than they really are.  Of course, Ethiopia's borders were not drawn as much by the colonial powers since it was only conquered by the Italians in the 1930's.  
• Angola had heaps of conflict in the aftermath of the Portuguese, but you would not guess it from this map.
• Rwanda and Burundi have both seen heaps of violence over the years, and the colonial powers (Belgium) did heaps of damage here, but boundaries are not really the issue.
• Zimbabwe would not appear to be problematic, but Robert Mugabe has more to say about that than the lines drawn.

I don't want to minimize the colonial inheritance.  My point is simply there is heaps of variation across the continent, both in terms of the diversity of populations and the levels of conflict (ethnic and not so ethnic)--and they do not co-vary.  Indeed, one of the critical mistakes made by lots of scholars studying civil war is to toss into their quantitative analyses an indicator for ethnic fractionalization (how diverse is the society) and usually find no statistical significance.  Since few scholars of ethnic conflict actually make claims that more diversity leads to more conflict, this is not surprising. 

The key is how ethnicity interacts with political institutions.  Sometimes, institutions mitigate ethnic conflict and sometimes they exacerbate it.  I used to study this question, and hope to come back to it soon (problems with data sets should be fixed soon).  The importance today is to remember that borders are not destiny and the past only shapes but does not completely determine the future.  Southern Sudan's diversity can be a strength if it can be like Tanzania, which has always been one of the most diverse countries on the planet .... and has had very little violence.

The Past and Future Of Africa

Pierre Englebert had an interesting piece in the NYT op-ed section yesterday (blogging delayed by an ultimate tourney).  He uses the 50th anniversary of the independence of many African countries as the occasion to argue that the international community is doing Africans no favors by maintaining normal relations with many of Africa's flawed states.  He argues that many of these countries never developed real nationhood or political institutions since they were granted independence rather than having to work for it. This, of course, suggests a  testable hypothesis: have we seen better outcomes in African states where independence was a contested political process versus those countries that were dumped by their colonial masters?

Anyhow, Englebert proposes de-recognition--that the international community would deny recognition, compelling the worst performers to seek more domestic support and thus legitimacy.  This is an interesting recommendation with two problems.  The first is whether this would really work--would the denial of embassies and aid really compel states to get their act together?  I don't know.  I am not sure the exemplar of Somaliland really proves much.  The second is: this would require a tremendous amount of cooperation by the international community since decisions to reverse the current status quo would require a great deal of unity.  I am more confident about my answer here: not gonna happen.

I am no expert on Africa although hunks of my first book focus on a few case studies there, but my work does focus on the challenges of international cooperation.  So, I am a skeptic.  To de-recognize would probably mean UN Security Council resolutions.  Is China not going to veto such things?  The Chinese have spent the past decade or so developing good relations with any kind of regime that has natural resources, and so China has not been very helpful when it comes to Darfur, for instance.  Indeed, there are two converging dynamics in Chinese foreign policy: the traditional one of limiting the ability for the international community to interfere within the domestic politics of states combined with the thirst for resources.  And, of course, it is not just China.  So, even if de-recognition would have the kind of effect that Englebert proposes, it is simply not going to happen because there will be enough dissension among the various countries of the world.