States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control

by Jeffrey Herbst

Theories of international relations, assumed to be universally applicable, have failed to explain the creation of states in Africa. There, the interaction of power and space is dramatically different from what occurred in Europe. In States and Power in Africa , Jeffrey Herbst places the African state-building process in a truly comparative perspective. Herbst's bold contention―that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before European penetration of the continent―is sure to provoke controversy, for it runs counter to the prevailing assumption that colonialism changed everything.

This revised edition includes a new preface in which the author links the enormous changes that have taken place in Africa over the past fifteen years to long-term state consolidation. The final chapter on policy prescriptions has also been revised to reflect the evolution of African and international responses to state failure.

Genres: Africa, History, Politics, Nonfiction, Political Science, International Relations, Academic

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Ian Fleischmann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Herbst's book is an extension of Tilly's argument in that it was not land, but labor that was scarce in developing African states. This did not bring states into direct conflict until after their false creation through European colonialism and thus their state institutions lacked the social credibility and depth complicated by the manipulation of those states as Cold War proxies and subjugation through development aide. Herbst proposes two camps of solutions to the problem: state reform or state reconstruction. State reform may be aided from the outside but largely consists of the development of internal institutions to reassert control throughout physical territory. State reconstruction may come in the form of support to state devolution and re-definition (such as with the establishment of South Sudan) or simply the revocation of recognition of sovereignty for states who fail to maintain control (which could be applied in states like Mali).Lastly, Herbst proposes a possibility of a new solution beyond the nation-state concept but leaves the operationalization of this concept to the minds of the readers, and more specifically, Africans since the only way such a move could work would be an internal revolution and redesign of state institutions.
Formal criticisms of Herbst include his overreliance on population density (ala Tilly) as a driving factor in poor institution development as opposed to colonialism and value judgments on the quality of developed states and their support for individual rights and decreasing levels of violence. Of the two, it seems to me the assumption that somehow more alignment between a state's institutions and borders would make a state more responsive to the needs of its people or stable would appear to be hopeful if not misguided. One could imagine the suffering generated in an African version of the 30-years war as states seek to redefine themselves in accordance with the limits of their control. One could also argue that such a process has been ongoing in Somalia since 1991 with little resolution. In summary, Herbst's extension of Charles Tilly's argument for state formation is logically-constructed but I'm not sure his propositions for the future are of much help.
Insomuch as Herbst has appropriated the basic framework of Charles Tilly in terms of the structuralist approach to nation-building, it goes without saying that he should be [rightly] criticized for overlooking the domestic interplay of culture and politics. Herbst would likely employ the same defense as Tilly (generalization of trends and accounted for in the concept of coercion structures) but this approach is insufficient to explain the range of levels of development evident in African states. Also, for a supposedly scholarly work, this book is lacking a detailed bibliography. The footnotes are there so I'm not sure why the author or publisher chose not to include one.

[Jeffrey Mervosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should start by saying that if I could have written any book on international affairs or politics, this would have been it. I think Herbst's book is brilliant. That said, here's an interesting thought exercise:

The premise of "States and Power in Africa" is that Africa's underdevelopment and instability can in part be explained by the manner in which states were forged, and the relationships they maintain with their people. Herbst concludes that the ability of a state to project enough power to tax a population fairly and efficiently is both a mark of stability and development. Obviously this is something that doesn't exist in any real sense in Africa, so it makes for a provocative argument. But it's one that I'm beginning to sense has real merit.

Herbst begins by analogously examining Europe's political development in order to show that taxes form the fundamental social contract between Western populations and their states. The people agree to give up a portion of their capital in exchange for specific services provided by the state - namely, security, various civil liberties, infrastructure, sanitation, electricity, etc. Now, this would make sense to replicate in Africa, except that the historical structure of African society is not conducive to instituting such a system.

Europe's political consolidation took a very long time - centuries of conflict and political division have sliced and diced the continent into political entities of varying duration. Herbst argues that it was this seemingly endless process of conflict and political jockeying that created the modern state. Leaders in a city sought to secure their position against external threats. The easiest way to do this was to acquire geographic space between their metropole and the metropole of the enemy. To do this, power had to be extended into the periphery. Armies were sent into the hinterland of states, determined to deter invasion. In exchange for this protection from pillaging and conflict, the population of these territories were expected to pay tribute. This early form of taxation marked the first time that elites in the metropole were able to exact any real control over remote rural areas. And it also marked the beginning of democracy (rural populations denounced taxation without compensation, and in some cases demanded representation to secure desired compensation).

As time passed and the threat of conflict subsided, the relationship (taxation) between the state and the people remained. However, the people demanded that the state provide other services now that security was no longer paramount. Thus, the beginning of public funding for infrastructure development, education, etc. The social contract between state and society has endured.

Now, African states were born into the same borders created by the 1885 Conference of Berlin. These artificial colonial boundaries were adopted by African leaders as a necessity in order to ward off the sort of violent shifting of political allegiances implicit in actual self-determination. On this both the international community and African nationalists were united - to open the discussion to a re-drawing of borders would only invite chaos and instability. And to date, Africa has remained stable in that sense. There has only been one real intrastate conflict (well, depending how you count - Libya's incursions into Darfur in the 1980's pissed off Sudan but didn't amount to much; Ethiopia technically owned Eritrea for the duration of that conflict; Ethiopia invaded Somalia in the last year or so, but did so at the behest of the internationally-recognized government there; and South African troops did fight against the Angolan government in the early nineties, but not under the South African flag) in the whole of Africa's independence period, a pretty remarkable record given the bloodshed in the formative years of Europe's political development.

That said, internal conflicts are common. Herbst argues this is because African states don't have the capacity to tax. Or rather, the security of their borders has never compelled states to develop the same relationship with their populations that has been cultivated in Europe and America.

For the literary gurus, think of the African state in the same way that Dante considered Hell (not a far stretch of the imagination for most whose familiarity with Africa is one of conflict and death). Concentric circles emanate outward from the metropole, only in Africa, chaos increases further away from the center. The state is able to exert control over the capital out of necessity, and as such, taxation there is common. However, out in the bush the state is non-existent. Why devote state resources to protecting a border that is in no danger of violation?

Well, perhaps because failure to control one's own hinterland is the greatest threat to political stability in Africa that we can identify. In the absence of the state providing public services and security, it is common for rural populations in Africa to turn elsewhere. In some cases the international community can step in and prop up local economies through aid. And in others, warlordism rises to challenge the state. Regionally-based entrepreneurs, eager to sever linkages between the state and resource accumulation or capital extraction, make bargains with local populations, providing basic services in exchange for allegiance to movements that rise in opposition to the state. By capitalizing on the human insecurity of population centers outside the sphere of influence of the metropole, these warlords are able to challenge state authority and legitimacy. You can imagine how states take this - they seek to crush any and all threats to supremacy, and war is created. And then if the warlords emerge victorious power shifts and there is a new hinterland and a new metropole, and soon new opposition.

Furthermore, underdevelopment is perpetuated by this cycle in two distinct ways. First, inequality is created through the unequal distribution of aid and capital accumulation by the state. Clientelism and rent-seeking in the metropole is unfortunately exceedingly common, creating distortions in income distribution and aid disbursal. Economic growth (however slow) serves the elite few and not the poor - in fact, when inflation rises faster than wages, it can actually hurt the poor. Healthy social service institutions can alleviate this cleavage in society. Second, conflict only serves to destroy all sorts of indicators, from economic (inflation, etc.) to human development (life expectancy drops, education rates plummet as children become soldiers instead of students, local economies are destroyed by pillaging, and infant mortality increases as sanitary medical facilities become rare). In fact, the World Bank has acknowledged that conflict is the biggest "trap" keeping underdeveloped states poor.

So maybe it's time to re-evaluate the exercise in liberalist state building going on in Africa. Politically, the continent is still in its infancy, and despite criticism there are signs that its development may still be more rapid than its European forefathers. But in lieu of the fundamental force that drove state consolidation in Europe, some creative engineering may be in order. In other words, the key to development in Africa just may be a good tax policy. All this time we've been sending members of the World Health Organization and the International Monetary Fund to Africa when perhaps we should have been sending representatives from the IRS!

[Oliver Kim]

Despite the unwieldy title, "States and Power" is on the shortlist of political economy books that I would recommend to non-academics, alongside Scott's "Seeing Like a State" and Tilly's "Coercion, Capital, and European States". It hits the sweet spot of being clear and fun to read, while still tackling a "big picture" question -- in this case, why states in Sub-Saharan Africa are so weak.

Herbst's argument goes something like this: Africa is big, and population density is relatively low, which makes it really hard for states to control people. Pre-colonial societies were structured around this reality, and had pragmatic, local solutions that responded quickly to changing power balances. (Could have used more detail on this point -- could always use more pre-colonial history.) Even the colonial regimes, despite their immense cruelty and capacity for violence, really were not able to project power outside of their capitals and coastal trading posts. However, the Europeans maintained the fiction of clean borders, and respected each others' claims, like at the Berlin Conference of 1885, even though their level of effective control was quite low.

The fiction of rigid borders was carried over by post-independence leaders, who rose to power on waves of urban nationalism. But, as we well know, the straight-line borders invented in European map-rooms made very little sense for governance -- and because they were enshrined in international law, there was no way to reorganize things. In fact, there was no incentive to, since international legitimacy depended on their maintenance. Herbst argues (quite provocatively) that while the persistence of these borders spared Africa much of the horror of inter-state war, it also short-circuited the bloody centuries-long process of internal consolidation in Europe that created nation-states. The result is the continued existence of weak states encased in strong borders, who still struggle to extend basic services throughout their territories.

I'm too new to this subject to comment on whether Herbst is right. It's definitely a States-First view of the world, in the mould of Tilly, with capitalism, religion, culture, ideology, etc. taking a backseat. Even within his framework, my sense is that Herbst underplays how much the old colonial boundaries have mangled things -- the recent papers by Michalopoulos and Papaioannou are a nice counterpoint -- and that he also elides how much continued involvement by the West has made things worse. Going forward, I would be interested to read some more critical perspectives. But credit still to Herbst, who made me think.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herbst constructs an argument attempting to explain the reasons that the modern African state fails to govern or develop areas on its periphery. The basic argument is that the pre-colonial forms of rule were ones which 'rippled out' from a power base, with certain areas coming under the suzerainty of multiple leaders or benefactors. The primary explanation for this is the difficulty of African geography, and the fact that populations are sparsely spread out. The attempt to control a large, therefore, was difficult due to the simple fact that people could move beyond the area of control. this has continued in the post-colonial area, however given that leaders need not concern themselves with the integrity of their borders (due to international consensus regarding non-interventionism), they simply ignore the peripheries at the expense of the core. This, Herbst asserts, is a key explanation for the emergence of rural-based guerrilla insurgencies.

[Juan · Rating 5 out of 5]

*States and power in Africa* is probably one of the best social science books of the last twenty years. It’s a book about state capacity in Africa, why it’s so low, and the answers Herbst comes up with are mostly about geography.

The story Herbst lays out is that, for most of its history, Africa was sparsely populated, in part because of its highly varied, difficult geography. Low population density made it expensive for states to consolidate territory and project power. The result is that early African states “missed out” on the way that interstate competition over territory forged strong states in Europe (i.e., Tilly’s thesis of state formation).

In Herbst’ formulation, colonialism comes along and either worsens or continues some of these long-term trends. Herbst’s telling of the colonial experience is more measured than others. He highlights the continuity between colonial administrators who barely govern the local population and pre-colonial rulers who seemed to do little different. But he also highlights how the European’s prohibitions on interstate conflict, their drawing of arbitrary boundaries, etc., kept artificially weak states alive that in a different universe would have maybe been absorbed by stronger neighbors.

The idea that states become strong and capable in the nice, Western European sense through warfare is obviously normatively weird. Perhaps the earliest states became stronger by accident, sure; but once the blueprint was there, can’t other states simply imitate it?

The chapter on the pre-colonial period also left me wanting more. The picture you get of pre-colonial African leaders and polities is vague, maybe reflecting how little we (in the West) know. The basic idea – that African polities did not govern territory, but people – was vaguely sketched out and I’m not sure I buy the difference.

But there’s just a lot of great stuff here. Herbst has great ambition and is willing to try on different ideas. There’s a whole chapter on the shapes of countries and the distribution of population patterns within states that is fascinating even if hard to buy at times. The maps are awesome.

[Jessica Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is intense and it has taken me 12+ years to absorb the ideas involved. It challenges your thinking and makes an important contribution to questions of development in African states.

[Yeşil Zeytin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just brilliant.

[Cyrus Lloyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent intro to African political history. Emphasizes the continuity of precolonial to modern times.

[owlette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the few comparative politics books I've kept from my PhD years. Upon rereading, I find some parts of the book weaker than when I read it years ago, but I still see its enduring scholarly merits and place on political science syllabi.


This book is about contemporary state building in sub-Saharan Africa. To put the question inelegantly, why are these state governments so shittydysfunctional? Herbst unambiguously places sub-Sarahan African challenges on geography instead of colonialism, culture, or racist explanatory factors. Europe had high population density and land scarcity; sub-Saharan Africa has had low population density and too much inhospitable land, a combination of which makes it difficult to broadcast power from the center to the hinterlands. European states emerged through a series of wars over land; states that could demonstrate their power projection--most notably road construction--within their border survived. But because African statehood is nominally protected by international legitimacy, African states can remain standing, fly their flags, establish embassies, and sit at international organizations, belying that they have any control over their territories.


Because Herbst is aiming for a generalizable theory that covers more than half of the continent over multiple centuries before and after European colonialism, his theory is bound to be shaky in certain areas. For one, too many things conveniently fall into place, such as that Africa never developed the plow (38) or that they never indigenously manufactured guns even after their contact with European traders (51). These technologies would have changed population distribution by opening up more land for agriculture and state capacity to control the population through force. This brings me to my general concern with Herbst's argument: the geographic conditions seem too rigid for a long period of time when one considers that human history would be full of examples of taming various terrains and climates for long-term human habitat. Has there never been any top-down intervention or bottom-up movement to change where people settled or bottom-up agency to settle in lands that used to be inhospitable?

Despite its theoretical weaknesses, it calls for a radical solution to resolve sub-Saharan Africa's current problems: decertifying these countries' sovereignty. Herbst constantly uses the word "fictitious":

- in chapter two, page 55, "Overall, precolonial Africa was a state system without fictions";

- in chapter three page 96, "European rule was no fiction ... [it was not] the case that Europeans had established states that actually sought to rule over all the territories that were indeed said to be theirs";

- finally in chapter four page 135, "Independent Africa had thus become a state system with considerable fictions ... ."


The greatest punchline to his own theory comes not in the book but in a Foreign Policy op-ed piece, "There is No Congo." He's basically calling for the chips to fall. And he's calling out the complicity of the international community and organizations like the UN in sustaining dysfunctional despotism all over the world. Though Herbst is by no means the first person to point out this pathology--cf. Jackson and Rosberg (1986)--Herbst proposes somewhat actionable criteria for sovereignty, namely that the state's border be shrunk to the actual range of the central government's power projection. This would mean that Africa should see the creation of smaller countries in the future. It's a radical break from the status quo but one that asks the world to stop cosigning to dysfunctional despotism: "The international community acts like creditors who, having seen their investment lost by a company without a viable business, seek to reinvest in the same company after bankruptcy has been reached but without demanding a restructuring that would protect their investment."

Other related readings
- Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg (1986) "Sovereignty and Underdevelopment: Juridical Statehood in the African Crisis" doi
- THE book on state formation in Europe, Charles Tilly (1992) Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990-1992
- on the legacy of European colonialism in contemporary Africa, Mahmood Mamdani Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

[Doron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a bit of a dry read, but it's an intriguing work.

Jeffrey Herbst’s ‘States and Power in Africa’, as the title alludes to, focuses on how the exercise of power and the design of state boundaries in Africa has shaped many of the problems afflicting African states today and led to the creation of failed states. Herbst examines and contrasts the projection of power in Africa in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence periods and surveys the role of boundaries in the evolution of state power in Africa. The changing nature of state boundaries and state systems from pre-colonial to post-independence times and the enduring concentration of power around the core political areas are key factors in the inability of African states to consolidate power and authority, acquire or preserve legitimacy in the eyes of its subjects, provide effective governance in many areas and maintain order and the rule of law; all of which contribute directly to the creation of failed states.

The main solution to state building in Africa offered in this book is to redefine state boundaries to better reflect the social and political realities on the ground; but for that to happen, political reform (i.e. democracy) will need to take place first.

[Andrew Kapaln · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating examination of the fundamental issues in Africa that maintained from pre-colonial times, through colonization, and into today. Herbst calls for a reexamination of African political history beginning with a break from the ethnocentric European perspective. The development of the European state and the African state significantly contrast, and are in actuality polar opposites with respect to geographical make-up which are one of the critical factors for the failure of many African states. I highly recommend for anyone with an interest in political science, Int'l Affairs, Africa, or just plain History. Herbst's analysis is crucial for the next step in examining sovereignty and the make-up of a state, as well as most importantly the future of Africa's states .

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important corrective to the usual post-colonial interpretation of recent African history. The underdevelopment and political instability in Africa is not all the fault of colonialism or neocolonialism. It has continuity with pre-colonial Africa. Geography and demography play a large role in the problems of Africa. Outside of the white settler colonies, governments have had difficulty broadcasting authority and actually controlling the territory of the state. This has always been the case in Africa. Africa has always been a sparsely settled continent of generally hostile environments except for southern Africa. In pre-colonial times, Africa had empires but never states, and people has always had more value than land.

[goddess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good insight into Africa pre-colonial, colonized, and post-colonial. The author makes some interesting points differentiating the states of Africa and those of Europe, who were the colonizers. He talks about the problems that most Africa countries have had and continue to have with maintaining control within their borders. Though he explains why he didn't include the northern regions of the continent in his writings, I felt like there should have been some discussion regarding them and how they do (or do not) fit with the rest of Africa.

[Xaolaura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read several chapters for a course in my erasmus exchange in Ghent, for a class called Poverty, Inequality and Development in Modern African History.

It was okay, good compared to other academic texts I have read before.

[elvedril · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting book explaining the system governing states and power in pre-colonial sub-saharan Africa. His explanation of the topographical and social reasons that led to a different political and military model than in most of Europe and Asia is a valuable for anybody interested in the region or just fascinated by the political theory.

[Dylan Groves · Rating 4 out of 5]

fundamental problem of state consolidation in africa is political geography - low population densities and difficult topography

would-be state builders confront the challenge of political geography on three dimensions: (1) cost (2) political boundaries, (3) character of state system

[Mike Nicholson]

Woke up early this Sunday morning, so might as well get to reading my stack o' books.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

KOBOBOOKS

[Gundopush · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the best of this type of book I have ever read.
This books is academic enough that it might prove difficult for those not used to the idiosyncrasies of political science writing.