Дарон Аджемоглу - Why Nations Fail

by the end of Momoh’s rule he had stopped paying civil servants, teachers and even Paramount Chiefs. Central government had collapsed, and then of course we had border incursions, “rebels” and all the automatic weapons pouring over the border from Liberia. The NPRC, the “rebels” and the “sobels” [soldiers turned rebels] all amount to the chaos one expects when government disappears. None of them are the causes of our problems, but they are symptoms.

The collapse of the state under Momoh, once again a consequence of the vicious circle unleashed by the extreme extractive institutions under Stevens, meant that there was nothing to stop the RUF from coming across the border in 1991. The state had no capacity to oppose it. Stevens had already emasculated the military, because he worried they might overthrow him. It was then easy for a relatively small number of armed men to create chaos in most of the country. They even had a manifesto called “Footpaths to Democracy,” which started with a quote from the black intellectual Frantz Fanon: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” The section “What Are We Fighting For?” begins:

We continue to fight because we are tired of being perpetual victims of state sponsored poverty and human degradation visited on us by years of autocratic rule and militarism. But, we shall exercise restraint and continue to wait patiently at the rendezvous of peace—where we shall all be winners. We are committed to peace, by any means necessary, but what we are not committed to is becoming victims of peace. We know our cause to be just and God/Allah will never abandon us in our struggle to reconstruct a new Sierra Leone.

Though Sankoh and other RUF leaders may have started with political grievances, and the grievances of the people suffering under the APC’s extractive institutions may have encouraged them to join the movement early on, the situation quickly changed and spun out of control. The “mission” of the RUF plunged the country into agony, as in the testimony of a teenager from Geoma, in the south of Sierra Leone:

They gathered some of us … They chose some of our friends and killed them, two of them. These were people whose fathers were the chiefs, and they had soldiers’ boots and property in their houses. They were shot, for no other reason than that they were accused of harbouring soldiers. The chiefs were also killed—as part of the government. They chose someone to be the new chief. They were still saying they had come to free us from the APC. After a point, they were not choosing people to kill, just shooting people.

In the first year of the invasion, any intellectual roots that the RUF may have had were completely extinguished. Sankoh executed those who criticized the mounting stream of atrocities. Soon, few voluntarily joined the RUF. Instead they turned to forcible recruitment, particularly of children. Indeed, all sides did this, including the army. If the Sierra Leonean civil war was a crusade to build a better society, in the end it was a children’s crusade. The conflict intensified with massacres and massive human rights abuses, including mass rapes and the amputation of hands and ears. When the RUF took over areas, they also engaged in economic exploitation. It was most obvious in the diamond mining areas, where they press-ganged people into diamond mining, but was widespread elsewhere as well.

The RUF wasn’t alone in committing atrocities, massacres, and organized forced labor. The government did so as well. Such was the collapse of law and order that it became difficult for people to tell who was a soldier and who was a rebel. Military discipline completely vanished. By the time the war ended in 2001, probably eighty thousand people had died and the whole country had been devastated. Roads, houses, and buildings were entirely destroyed. Today, if you go to Koidu, a major diamond-producing area in the east, you’ll still see rows of burned-out houses scarred with bullet holes.

By 1991 the state in Sierra Leone had totally failed. Think of what King Shyaam started with the Bushong (this page–this page): he set up extractive institutions to cement his power and extract the output the rest of society would produce. But even extractive institutions with central authority concentrated in his hands were an improvement over the situation without any law and order, central authority, or property rights that characterized the Lele society on the other side of the river Kasai. Such lack of order and central authority has been the fate of many African nations in recent decades, partly because the process of political centralization was historically delayed in much of sub-Saharan Africa, but also because the vicious circle of extractive institutions reversed any state centralization that existed, paving the way for state failure.

Sierra Leone during her bloody civil war of ten years, from 1991 to 2001, was a typical case of a failed state. It started out as just another country marred by extractive institutions, albeit of a particularly vicious and inefficient type. Countries become failed states not because of their geography or their culture, but because of the legacy of extractive institutions, which concentrate power and wealth in the hands of those controlling the state, opening the way for unrest, strife, and civil war. Extractive institutions also directly contribute to the gradual failing of the state by neglecting investment in the most basic public services, exactly what happened in Sierra Leone.

Extractive institutions that expropriate and impoverish the people and block economic development are quite common in Africa, Asia, and South America. Charles Taylor helped to start the civil war in Sierra Leone while at the same time initiating a savage conflict in Liberia, which led to state failure there, too. The pattern of extractive institutions collapsing into civil war and state failure has happened elsewhere in Africa; for example, in Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda. Extraction paves the way for conflict, not unlike the conflict that the highly extractive institutions of the Maya city-states generated almost a thousand years ago. Conflict precipitates state failure. So another reason why nations fail today is that their states fail. This, in turn, is a consequence of decades of rule under extractive economic and political institutions.

WHO IS THE STATE?

The cases of Zimbabwe, Somalia, and Sierra Leone, even if typical of poor countries in Africa, and perhaps even some in Asia, seem rather extreme. Surely Latin American countries do not have failed states? Surely their presidents are not brazen enough to win the lottery?

In Colombia, the Andean Mountains gradually merge to the north with a large coastal plain that borders the Caribbean Ocean. Colombians call this the tierra caliente , the “hot country,” as distinct from the Andean world of the tierra fria , the “cold country.” For the last fifty years, Colombia has been regarded by most political scientists and governments as a democracy. The United States feels happy to negotiate a potential free trade agreement with the country and pours all kinds of aid into it, particularly military aid. After a short-lived military government, which ended in 1958, elections have been regularly held, even though until 1974 a pact rotated political power and the presidency between the two traditional political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. Still, this pact, the National Front, was itself ratified by the Colombian people via a plebiscite, and this all seems democratic enough.

Yet while Colombia has a long history of democratic elections, it does not have inclusive institutions. Instead, its history has been marred by violations of civil liberties, extrajudicial executions, violence against civilians, and civil war. Not the sort of outcomes we expect from a democracy. The civil war in Colombia is different from that in Sierra Leone, where the state and society collapsed and chaos reigned. But it is a civil war nonetheless and one that has caused far more casualties. The military rule of the 1950s was itself partially in response to a civil war known in Spanish simply as La Violencia, or “The Violence.” Since that time quite a range of insurgent groups, mostly communist revolutionaries, have plagued the countryside, kidnapping and murdering. To avoid either of these unpleasant options in rural Colombia, you have to pay the vacuna , literally “the vaccination,” meaning that you have to vaccinate yourself against being murdered or kidnapped by paying off some group of armed thugs each month.