Hybrid security governance in Africa: rethinking the foundations of security, justice and legitimate public authority

Abstract

This article asks whether the concept of ‘hybridity’ offers a more convincing account of security governance in Africa than the standard state-focused models. It seeks to clarify the complex intersections between formal and informal, state and non-state security actors, and the varied terrains on which hybridity is constructed, instrumentalised and recalibrated over time. Rather than romanticising informal or ‘traditional’ institutions, it suggests that they too embed their own power hierarchies, become sites of contestation, and do not work equally well for everyone, least of all for the weak, vulnerable and excluded. Thus the focus is placed upon the real governance of security in hybrid systems, and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion (including gender biases) they reinforce. Finally the paper considers how policy-makers and shapers can work with the grain of hybrid security arrangements to create more legitimate, broadly-based and effective African security governance.

Keywords:

• Security
• justice
• SSR
• governance
• hybridity
• Africa
• informality
• exclusion
• state
• fragility
• authority

Acknowledgements

This paper was commissioned by the African Security Sector Network (ASSN) as part of a research programme on ‘Hybrid Security Governance Africa’ funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada. The Project Leader is Eboe Hutchful, who may be contacted at [email protected]. Information about the research network may also be obtained by contacting the Programme Officer, Elom Khaunbiow at [email protected]. The authors and ASSN would like to thank the IDRC for its generous support. We would also like to thank David Leonard for his incisive comments, as well as Rhiannon McCluskey, Eunji Lee and Elom Khaunbiow for their assistance with library researches and the bibliography.

Notes on Contributors

Niagalé Bagayoko has published widely on African security issues, taught at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, been a Research Fellow at the IDS, Sussex, managed (2010–2015) the ‘Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Programme’ at the International Organisation of La Francophonie (OIF) and is on the Executive Committee of the African Security Sector Network (ASSN).

Eboe Hutchful is Professor of Africana Studies at Wayne State University. He has published extensively on military politics, security sector governance and the politics of economic reform. He is Executive Secretary of ASSN and leads its ‘Hybrid Security Governance in Africa’ network funded by IDRC. He co-ordinated drafting of the AU’s Security Sector Reform Policy Framework and belongs to the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters.

Robin Luckham is Emeritus Fellow of IDS, Sussex. He has held positions at universities in West Africa, USA, Australia and UK. Since writing a seminal book on the Nigerian military in 1971, he has published extensively on militarism, democracy, security governance and latterly ‘security in the vernacular’. He is also on ASSN’s Executive Committee.

Notes

1. Scheye, State Provided Service, 5.

2. Max Weber himself, however, cannot himself be held responsible for the stereotypical characterisations of the ‘Weberian state’ in the state-building literature and critiques thereof. His seminal essays on ‘Bureaucracy’ and on ‘Politics as a Vocation’ offer more nuanced interpretations of the state, political authority and rational-legal organisation than one finds in much contemporary analysis.

3. As early as 1968 Zolberg in ‘The Structure of Political Order’ made a prescient critique of the limitations of conventional political analysis in conditions of political disorder.

4. See Erdmann and Engel, ‘Neopatrimonialism Reconsidered’; and Bach ‘Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism’.

5. Seminal analyses using these terms are Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics; Bayart, The State in Africa; Mbembe, On the Postcolony; Chabal and Deloz, Africa Works; Bayart et al., The Criminalization of the State; and Reno, Warlord Politics and African States.

6. Boas and Jennings, ‘Insecurity and Development; Call, ‘The Fallacy of the “Failed State”’; OECD, Concepts and Dilemmas of Statebuilding.

7. Bayart, The State in Africa. A similar line of argument is pursued by Banegas, La Démocratie A Pas de Caméléon, in his analysis of the extreme ambiguities of African democratic transitions.

8. On African political marketplaces see De Waal, ‘Mission Without End?’.

9. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 78–79.

10. Particularly strong in the work of French or Francophone scholars like Bayart, The State in Africa; Mbembe, On the Postcolony; and Chabal and Deloz, Africa Works.

11. Leonard, ‘Social Contracts, Networks and Security’.

12. On the need for such an approach see De Sardan, Researching the Practical Norms; and Booth, Development as a Collective Action Problem.

13. Ekeh, ‘Colonialism and the Two Publics’.

14. See especially Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 18–23.

15. Discussed in Sindzingre, ‘The Relevance of the Concepts’; and in De Soysa and Jutting, ‘Informal Institutions and Development’.

16. Helmke and Levitsky, ‘Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics’, 727.

17. See in particular North, Institutions, Institutional Change.

18. Not just in Africa. A long tradition of organisation theory, going back to the French sociologist Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, has focused on informal networks and forms of power in bureaucracies. Focusing on their respective social systems—namely interpersonal relations, group relations and power relations—Crozier challenged and re-examined Weber’s ideal-type of bureaucracy based on rational administration in light of the way institutional bureaucracies have actually developed. Such a theory inspired the way Luckham, The Nigerian Military, analysed the micropolitics of military and security institutions in Nigeria.

19. Especially influential and useful for our purposes have been Boege et al., ‘Hybrid Political Orders’; and Mac Ginty, ‘Hybrid Peace’.

20. Luckham and Kirk, ‘The Two Faces of Security’, 7. See also Bagayoko, ‘Introduction: Hybrid Security Governance’.

21. On these concepts see respectively Menkhaus, ‘Governance, without Government’; Raeymakers et al., ‘State and Non-State Regulation’; De Sardan, Researching the Practical Norms; Titeca and De Herdt, ‘Real Governance Beyond the “Failed State”’; Hagmann and Péclard, ‘Negotiating Statehood’; Menkhaus, ‘The Rise of a Mediated State’; Wenneman, ‘Getting Armed Groups to the Table’; Lund, ‘Twilight Institutions’; and Goodfellow and Lindemann ‘The Clash of Institutions’.

22. Boege, Traditional Approaches to Conflict Transformation; Boege et al., On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States, 11–15; Boege et al., ‘Hybrid Political Orders’.

23. Boege et al., On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States, 16.

24. Debiel and Lambach, ‘How State-Building Strategies’.

25. As argued both by Kaldor, New and Old Wars, chaps. 1 and 5; and by Collier et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap, chap. 1.

26. Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, 6.

27. Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’.

28. Menkhaus, ‘Governance without Government’; Boege et al., On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States; Raeymaekers, ‘Protection for Sale’; Raeymaekers, ‘Post-War Conflict and the Market’.

29. Mampilly, Rebel Rulers.

30. Bayart coined the term the ‘politics of the belly’ in the State in Africa.But he cannot in all fairness be accused of the reductionism prevalent in some other analyses of African neo-patrimonial states.

31. Meagher, ‘The Strength of Weak States?’.

32. Chabal and Deloz, Africa Works.

33. See Luckham and Kirk, ‘The Two Faces of Security’ for a more detailed analysis of this distinction.

34. Notably in WDR, World Development Report 2011.

35. Krause and Williams, Critical Security Studies; Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars; Booth, Critical Security Studies and World Politics.

36. Booth, Critical Security Studies and World Politics, 276.

37. Eriksen et al., A World of Insecurity.

38. Goldstein, ‘Toward a Critical Anthropology’, 487.

39. Helmke and Levitsky, ‘Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics’.

40. Bryden and Olonisakin, Security Sector Transformation; Bryden and Ndiaye, Security Sector Governance.

41. Hills, ‘Lost in Translation’. Yet this is not solely an African phenomenon. All military and security organisations (indeed all formal organisations) are an amalgam of formal attributes and informal ways of operating. All operate within, interact with and are shaped by their political environments, as Janowitz, The Professional Soldier, most famously analysed in the United States.

42. This paragraph draws on our own work. See Luckham, The Nigerian Military; Hutchful and Bathily, The Military and Militarism; Luckham, ‘The Military, Militarization and Democratization’; and Luckham and Hutchful, ‘Democratic and War-to-Peace Transitions’.

43. Notably Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo; Baaz and Stern, ‘Making Sense of Violence’; and Baaz and Verweijen, ‘The Volatility of a Half-Cooked Bouillabaisse’.

44. Baker, ‘How Civil War Altered Policing’; Baker, Multi-Choice Policing; Baker, ‘Beyond the Tarmac Road’; Baker, ‘State and Substate Policing’; Baker, ‘Hybridity in Policing’; Hills, Policing Africa; Hills, ‘Policing a Plurality of Worlds’; Hills, ‘Policing, Good Enough Governance’; Hills, ‘Somalia Works’; Mayamba, ‘Mapping Police Services’; Charley and M’Cormack, ‘A Force for Good?’.

45. Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers. For a more polemical view see Mazrui, Soldiers and Kinsmen.

46. Hyden, ‘Between State and Communities’, 1.

47. In particular, a thorough knowledge of names and patronyms is needed to understand social but also professional relationships in each national and local context.

48. In the early thirteenth century, following a major military victory, the founder of the Mandingo Empire and the assembly of his wise men proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga the new Manden Charter, named after the territory situated above the upper Niger River basin, between present-day Guinea and Mali. The Charter is one of the oldest constitutions in the world albeit mainly in oral form.

49. For a general survey, see Luckham, ‘The Military, Militarization and Democracy’; on ethnic links Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers; on business ties Adekanye, The Retired Military; on patronage and corruption Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo and De Waal ‘When Kleptocracy becomes Insolvent’; on peer groups Luckham, The Nigerian Military, chap. 5; on gender Mama, ‘Khaki in the Family’, Baaz and Stern, ‘Fearless Soldiers and Submissive Wives’ and Baaz and Stern, ‘Why do Soldiers Rape?’.

50. Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.

51. For instance Mayamba, ‘Mapping Police Services’, shows how constitutionally recognised presidential authority in the security sector is in practice structured around particularistic, personalised, networks, which are embedded in formal institutions and legislation.

52. De Waal, ‘Mission Without End?’.

53. As documented for instance by Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo; Baaz and Stern, ‘Making Sense of Violence’; Baaz and Verweijen, ‘The Volatility of a Half-Cooked Bouillabaisse’; Veit, Intervention as Indirect Rule; De Waal, ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent’; Allouche and Zadi Zadi, ‘The Dynanics of Restraint’.

54. See the earlier discussion in this paper of the hybridity of African states, including the stress on the multilayered nature of their governance arrangements and the networking of power around them.

55. Gbla, ‘Security Sector Reform’; Hills, ‘War Don Don’; Hills, ‘Policing, Good Enough Governance’; and Hills, ‘Somalia Works’.

56. As analysed in Luckham, The Nigerian Military; and Luckham, ‘The Military, Militarization and Democratization’.

57. See for instance Albrecht and Buur, ‘An Uneasy Marriage’; Bagayoko, ‘Introduction: Hybrid Security Governance’; Baker, Multi-Choice Policing; Baker, ‘Beyond the Tarmac Road’; Baker, ‘Linking State and Non-State’; Baker, ‘Hybridity in Policing’; Fourchard, ‘The Politics of Mobilization’; Gore and Pratten, ‘The Politics of Plunder’; Heald, ‘Controlling Crime and Corruption’; Jörgel and Utas, The Mano River Basin Area; Kyed, ‘Community Policing’; Marks et al., ‘Reconfiguring State and Non-State’; Meagher, ‘The Strength of Weak States?’; Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story; Renders, Consider Somaliland; Scharf and Nina, The Other Law; Schlee, ‘Customary Law and the Joys’; Titeca, ‘The “Masai” and Miraa’.

58. Ebo, ‘Non-State Actors, Peace-Building’, 10–11.

59. Menkhaus, ‘Governance without Government’; Raeymaekers et al., ‘State and Non-State Regulation’; Raleigh and Dowd, ‘Governance and Conflict’; Trefon, ‘Public Service Provision’; Vincent, ‘A Village-Up View’; Vlassenroot, ‘The Politics of Rebellion’.

60. Eggen, ‘Chiefs and Everyday Governance’; Fanthorpe, ‘On the Limits of Liberal Peace’; Jackson, ‘Decentralized Power and Traditional Authorities’; Labonte, ‘Same Car, Different Driver?’; Sawyer, ‘Remove or Reform?’.

61. Crook et al., ‘Popular Concepts of Justice’; and Leeson and Coyne, ‘Sassywood’.

62. Mushi ‘Insecurity and Local Governance’, 23–24.

63. Bassett, ‘Dangerous Pursuits’; Hellweg, ‘Hunters, Ritual and Freedom’; Hoffman, The War Machines, Part 1.

64. Ellis, ‘Liberia 1989–1994’.

65. Ikelegbe, ‘Engendering Civil Society’; Nolte, ‘Without Women Nothing can Succeed’; Medie, ‘Fighting Gender-based Violence’; Nolte, ‘Identity and Violence’; Ismail, ‘The Dialectic of “Junctions” and “Bases”’; Leonardi, ‘“Liberation” or Capture’; Servant, ‘Kikuyus Muscle in on Security and Politics’.

66. Such as the OPC in Nigeria: Abdulazeez, ‘O’odua People’s Congress’; and Guichaoua, ‘How do Ethnic Militias’.

67. Ellis, ‘Liberia 1989–1984’; Harnischfeger, ‘State Decline and the Return’; and in creative peacebuilding roles, Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story.

68. Adamu, ‘Gender, Hisba and the Enforcement’; and Harnischfeger ‘Sharia and Control over Territory’.

69. MacLean, ‘Mediating Ethnic Conflict’; Vincent, ‘A Village-Up View’.

70. Analysed in Pratten and Sen, Global Vigilantes, which includes African case studies. See also Anderson, ‘Vigilantes, Violence and the Politics’; Heald, ‘Controlling Crime and Corruption’; Harnifscheger, ‘The Bakassi Boys’; Meagher ‘Hijacking Civil Society’; Higazi, ‘Social Mobilization and Collective Violence’; Pratten, ‘The Politics of Protection’; Fourchard, ‘A New Name’; Buur, ‘Democracy and its Discontents’.

71. Hoffman, The War Machines; Menkhaus, ‘Governance without Government’; Podder, ‘Non-state Armed Groups’; Wlodarczyk, ‘Politically Enfranchising the Non-Political’.

72. Utas and Jörgel, ‘The West Side Boys’.

73. Hoffman, The War Machines, passim but especially Introduction and Part 1.

74. Scharf and Nina, The Other Law.

75. Ero, ‘Sierra Leone’s Security Complex’, 26.

76. Baker and Scheye, ‘Multilayered Justice’; Baker, ‘Linking State and Non-State’; Hills, ‘Somalia Works’.

77. Chabal and Deloz, Africa Works; Meagher, ‘The Strength of Weak States?’; Baaz, ‘The Volatility of a Half-Cooked Bouillabaisse’; De Waal, ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent’.

78. As argued by Anderson, ‘Vigilantes, Violence and the Politics’.

79. Luckham and Kirk, ‘Understanding Security in the Vernacular’; Luckham, ‘Whose Security?’.

80. Meagher, ‘The Strength of Weak States?’

81. Lombard and Batianga-Kinzi, ‘Violence, Popular Punishment and War’.

82. Berridge, ‘The Ambiguous Role’.

83. In relation to poor and marginalised women: Nordstrom, ‘Women, Economy, War’.

84. Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

85. Mama, ‘Khaki in the Family’; Oshikoya, ‘Who Guards the Guards’; Mackenzie, Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone; Baker, ‘Women and Security Governance’.

86. Saferworld, Masculinities, Conflict and Peacebuilding; Richards, ‘Young Men and Gender’; Baaz and Stern, ‘Fearless Fighters and Submissive Wives’; MacKenzie, Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone; Bowah and Salahub, ‘Women’s Perspectives on Police Reform’.

87. Coulter, Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers.

88. Baaz and Stern, ‘Why do Soldiers Rape?’; Banwell, ‘Rape and Sexual Violence’; Cummings, ‘Liberia’s “New War”’; Bartels et al., ‘Militarized Sexual Violence’; Marks, ‘Sexual Violence’.

89. Lacey, ‘Women for Cows’; Tønnesen, ‘When Rape Becomes Politics’.

90. Husakouskaya, ‘Rethinking Gender and Human Rights’.

91. Adamu, ‘Gender, Hisba and the Enforcement’.

92. El-Bushra, ‘Feminism, Gender and Women’s Peace’.

93. Men are more often victims of violence in general, sometimes including sexual violence. See for instance Christian et al., ‘Sexual and Gender Based Violence’.

94. Utas, ‘Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering’; Douglas ‘This Hut is Working for Me’; Ikelegbe, ‘Engendering Civil Society’; Medie, ‘Fighting Gender-Based Violence’; Pinaud, ‘Are Griefs of More Value’; Ukeje, ‘From Aba to Ugborodo’.

95. Arostegui, ‘Gender, Conflict and Peace-Building’; Duany and Duany, ‘War and Women in Sudan’; Ingiriis and Hoehne, ‘The Impact of Civil War’; Pinaud, ‘Are Griefs of More Value’.

96. As argued by Autesserre, ‘Dangerous Tales’.

97. Hassane, ‘Autorités Coutumières et Régulation’.

98. OECD, Informal Institutions.

99. OECD, Concepts and Dilemmas of State Building, 36. See also OECD ‘The State’s Legitimacy’.

100. Boege et al., On Hybrid Orders and Emerging States, 13–15; Bradbury, Becoming Somaliland; Hesse, ‘Lessons in Successful Somali Governance’; Leonard and Samatar, ‘What Does the Somali Experience’; Moe, ‘Hybrid and “Everyday” Political Ordering’; Moe and Simojoki, ‘Custom, Contestation and Co-operation’; Renders and Terlinden, ‘Negotiating Statehood’; Renders, Consider Somaliland; Walls, ‘The Emergence of a Somali State’.

101. Schlee, ‘Customary Law and the Joys’.

102. Hoehne ‘Limits of Hybrid Political Orders’.

103. Autesserre, Peaceland.

104. It represents an advance on our own previous work as well, for instance Cawthra and Luckham, ‘Democratic Control and the Security Sector’; and Luckham and Hutchful, ‘Democratic and War-to-Peace Transitions’.

105. Booth, Development as a Collective Action Problem, 84–89.