The Rule of Silence versus Social Norms – Competing (in)formal Institutions

By Geerte Verduijn

Being a frequent disturber of the desired silence on our second floor, this recently launched student-campaign is making me feel increasingly uncomfortable. This post is no complaint nor, I am afraid, a definite promise of behavioral improvement. What it might be however, is an apologetic explanation of why this theoretically utopian study area – quiet, but surrounded by friends – is often failing to fulfil that goal.

Now, when real work has to be done, many people move to one of the public libraries nearby. For some reason these buildings – less socially attractive, but all the more effective – seem to escape the pitfalls of our second floor. When solely looking at the formal descriptions of both places, this does not make sense – they are practically equal. As the student campaign indicates however, contrarily to the public library’s instruction, LUC’s rule of silence fails to have effect. Accordingly, the problem must be sought outside its formal establishments.  

In their analysis of informal institutions, Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky explain how they can influence their formal companions, dependent on the effectivity of those formal rules and the degree of differing informal goals. In the case of the public library, socially shared ideas about politeness perfectly complement the official request for silence. In our LUC-building however, this institution seems to be overruled by conflicting norms: differing opinions about ‘‘real’’ silence, adolescents’ ideas on group-appreciation (publicly speaking about your alcohol-involving weekend), and a general indifference towards less enforced rules, spoil every attempt.  

If Helmke and Levitsky ever decided to trade their current employer for LUC, they would sadly conclude that the formal and informal rules of our second floor are continuously competing: following the latter often resulting in a violation of the first. I am sorry, fellow students, and will try to improve my behavior. But please do not forget - I am also just an actor, surrounded by social temptations, trapped in a weak formal institutional environment.

The Extradition Treaty Failed: The Current State of Institutional Drift

By Josh Treacher

The United States government historically has been known to create significant ties (whether forced or otherwise) with Latin American countries, particularly when the Cold War peaked interest in the actions of communist groups. A particularly significant institutional link that was formed happened between the CIA/US government and the government/intelligence agencies of Colombia.

The concept of analysing small institutional changes over time has been focused on by Mahoney and Thelen, where they note that slow and small changes "can be equally consequential for patterning human behaviour and for shaping substantive political outcomes." One form of institutional change they describe, drift, is applicable to the small, long-term institutional changes that occurred in Colombia. Drift is where an institution remains unchanged officially but experiences a different level of enforcement and impact as conditions surrounding it change.

Since 1971, when Nixon publicly announced the "War on Drugs", and particularly from the 1980's when an extradition treaty between the US and Colombia was signed in 1979, the amount of support and communication between these two governments has grown steadily in the aim to reduce cocaine production in Colombia. Support towards financing the national military against paramilitary drug cartels grew over time and more recently has culminated in the form of Plan Colombia.

The main objective of the Plan, to halve the production of cocaine in the country within five year, failed but it has been successful in reducing the regional control drug cartels had where the state should have, and has done so through the extradition of several of their leaders. But what initially caused the cartels to wage war against the government has now led to a new passive indifference. As the capacity to bribe officials has tipped from being successful in Colombia to the US, traffickers are willing to be extradited, as they can bribe their way to a short-term sentence, retainment of drug money and the ability to set up shop in the US later.

Of gangs and guards

By Hugo van Lent

Thelen and Mahoney’s theory of actors and endogenous change can easily be applied to the dynamics inside a prison. 

The general prison regime – which determines which goods are considered contraband, how severe the punishments are et cetera – may be considered the primary formal institution of the prison. Gang leaders, of course, do not wish to follow these rules, and aside from setting up their own informal institutions, one would expect them to behave as insurrectionaries by openly opposing the prison regime, or as subversives by opposing the warden without open revolt.

It is obvious, however, that those particular strategies would result in the gang leaders losing the game; their sentences would just be increased. Instead, gang leaders operate as parasites within the system. They use the fact the prison environment to sell drugs at higher prices than on the street and expand the influence of their gang – you’re in for life after all. They are able to do so because the prison regime is very difficult to enforce, and they are therefore the main actors behind drift.

However, everyone wants to be the gang leader or start his own, and we may therefore find many opportunistic gang members, waiting for the ideal moment to strike. This often causes a lot of chaos and violence, and this ultimately benefits neither individual gang leaders nor the guards.

Therefore, the prison administration and individual gang leaders are in a – arguably unhappy – mutualistic relationship with one another. Aside from profiting from corruption, guards cooperate with gang leaders to keep opportunistic gang member in check and thus keep the peace. Therefore, the interaction between these three actors keeps the gang system in place, even if it directly contradicts for what prisons are designed.

Change in UEFA?

By Jan Bogaarts

The president of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), Michel Platini is not convinced of the value of technology in football and therefore prefers to keep the decision making power in the hands of referees. Other football organizations such as FIFA and the English Premier League have already adopted what is called Goal Line Technology (GLT), a system that detects whether a ball has or has not fully crossed the goal line. Given that this technology is being implemented by other organizations and is more accurate than the human referee, will the UEFA implement it and, if so, when?

Institutions like the UEFA are often very stable (only two minor changes in the last 25 years). Unless there is some exogenous occurrence that affects football directly it is hard to imagine a change in the rules of the game. In this case there has been an exogenous change, namely the birth of GLT, but that has been available since 2006. Mahoney and Thelen (2010), propose that institutional change can also happen endogenously. They suggest that the internal power distributions are what trigger institutional change. So who has power in european football?

Football players and coaches work for clubs and national teams that are organized by each country’s football association. These football associations then come together at the UEFA congress that is led by a committee with its president. The committee and the president are the only actors who can change rules but they are voted in by the member associations every 4 years. The immediate decision making power is held by the committee but all the associations have the power to remove them.

The English Association has already decided for GLT but others have not. The power now lies in the hands of those that do not want the change. Only if the power distribution between associations shifts, such that Platini is no longer voted president, will GLT stand a chance in UEFA competitions such as the Champions League and the European Championships.

9/11 as a Critical Juncture

 By Casper Gelderblom

“Today,” a French newspaper announced on September 12, 2001, “we are all Americans.” The terror of the previous day had felt like an attack on everyone, everywhere. Indeed, the shockwaves of “9/11” hit Europe hard. The attacks’ immense political salience led to the rapid adoption of a record number of joint EU security policies. Thus, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 can be seen as a critical juncture in the development of EU security governance. The course of this critical juncture, however, can only be fully understood if antecedent conditions are considered.

Capoccia and Kelemen attribute two main characteristics to critical junctures: they expand the range of choices open to political actors and, in Pierson’s words, “place institutional arrangements on paths (…) difficult to alter.” In the context of EU security policy, these characteristics neatly apply to 9/11’s immediate aftermath. Den Boer describes how after 9/11 “all of a sudden, decisions were possible” in the area of EU security governance. Emergency summits were organised and effective decisions were taken. Within two weeks from 9/11, EU member states agreed on an Action Plan on Counter-Terrorism, which contained over sixty joint European security policy measures. Before the 9/11 critical juncture, member states’ insistence on national sovereignty rendered such measures impossible. This placed EU security governance on a self-reinforcing path of increasing cooperation; Argomaniz describes how this path eventually led to the European Security Strategy launched in 2003 and the expansion of Europol competences in 2005.

Decisions made during the 9/11 critical juncture cannot entirely explain this development of EU security governance, as they depended on what Mahoney calls antecedent conditions, which define the range of options available to actors in critical junctures. After 9/11, European policy-makers could either strengthen national policies or reconsider joint European designs they had blocked in 1999. Pressured to take swift action, policymakers favoured these pre-existing designs. Without considering the antecedent condition of the availability of these designs, the course of the 9/11 critical juncture cannot fully be understood.   
 

Child Marriage in Ethiopia: an Analysis of Critical Junctures

By Kelsey Bischot

Mahoney argues that when the choices of key actors are critical juncture points, it leads to the formation of institutions that have self-reproducing properties. Critical junctures are choice points when a particular option is adopted from among two or more alternatives. These critical points in time then lead to the structural persistence of institutions.

Critical junctures are usually thought of on a large scale, affecting central institutions and their countries, but I pose the importance of smaller critical junctures such as ones in villages created by “plain folk.”

When Aberash Bekele was 14 years old she had to make a decision that would impact not only her future, but the future of her village and women’s rights. Bekele was abducted from her home in a small village in Ethiopia (child abduction is an accepted method of marriage in Ethiopia) and was faced with a dark menu of options: either accept it like all the other girls in her village did before her, or escape and make her own future. In the end, she killed her abductor, but was arrested immediately and it took three years until the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association was able to fight her case and release her. After this event, things changed dramatically in Bekele’s village. For the next seven to eight years, not one girl got abducted, because people knew that there were consequences. Thus, the institution against abduction changed from being widely disregarded to slowly becoming more accepted and followed in this small village. This could potentially be an institutional example for the rest of Ethiopia.

Mahoney argues that critical junctures will lead to the persistence of the institution, which so far has been the case in this small village in Ethiopia, but only time will tell if it truly produces an outcome of institutional change. 

The right to be forgotten

By Robin Vroom

Figure 1. Simplified reactive sequence chains of the events leading up to the “right to be forgotten” (sequence 1) and the external processes that took place at the same time (sequence 2).  

In May 2014 the controversial “right to be forgotten,” came into effect after the European Court of Justice ruled that EU citizens can submit a request for the removal of any web-content that misrepresents them in either an inadequate, no longer relevant or otherwise harmful way. The content itself will not be deleted but search engines will not list the content in their search results. This has spurred controversy over how to balance freedom of speech and public interest with rights to privacy, leaving difficult judgement calls regarding privacy issues in the hands of private companies. For the purpose of this blog post I will look beyond this controversy and rather focus on its origin, specifically on the reactive sequence in which issues of privacy and data protection in Europe have become more salient after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on details of the US global data surveillance programs. I argue that this sequence has greatly influenced the “right to be forgotten.”   

Reactive sequences – according to Mahoney (2000) – are chains of reactions and counter reactions that are temporally ordered and causally connected and display a movement towards reversing previous patterns. The events are both a reaction to antecedent events as a cause of subsequent events.

Edwards Snowden’s revelations were a reaction to a society of mass surveillance. Though the information released was primarily related to government surveillance, its ramifications were far wider. While opening the eyes of people around the world the behaviour and actions of people, businesses, governments and courts have all undergone changes, and those changes have an impact. Snowden stirred debate on how to safeguard privacy in the current information age, causing intensified public concerns over intrusive collection, usage and storage of data. 

This represents a reactive sequence and the timing of the separate events illustrates the continuation of the process, I illustrated this in the figure below. If Snowden’s revelations, for instance, had been made earlier or later, this could have led to different European parliament and court decisions.  

Formal versus informal institutions

By Anique Zwaan

Helmke and Levinsky state in their article a basic definition for institutions: “rules and procedures (both formal and informal) that structure social interaction by constraining and enabling actors’ behavior”. However, defining informal and formal institutions are fairly more difficult and many give different interpretations to the definitions.  One way of defining them is by explaining that informal institutions are cultural traditions, and formal institutions are state-enforced rules.

As becomes clear by the statement above, there is a certain gray area around the definitions of formal and informal institutions. One example, where it is difficult to decide whether a rule is formal or informal is the case of women wearing hats in the Dutch Reformed Church (Dutch: Gereformeerde Gemeenten in Nederland).

This church requires women and young girls to wear a hat, thus covering their heads when they attend a service. If they do not wear a hat, they are denied access to the church. The question here is: is this a formal or an informal institution? You could argue it is informal, because it is a rule within a church, and it is not stated in the Dutch Law that women have to cover their heads when they attend a church. Thus, this particular rule could be seen as a “cultural tradition”. On the other hand, the church is an organisation, with its own rules, which it enforces upon its members. When you become member of a particular church, you agree to follow its rules and abide by them. This makes you question: is this or is this not an informal institution?

The Mafia and informal institutions

By Kristy Charlton

According to Helmke and Levitsky, an informal institution has three specific characteristics: the first is that the ideal of the institution is socially shared, the rules are unwritten and the ideals are enforced outside official channels.

Corruption might be an example of informal institutions, such as that displayed by the Italian Mafia.

The Mafia is a criminal and entrepreneurial economic organization that runs in different locations within Italy. It is an organization that deals within the Italian economic system in the form of loan sharking and extortion, an illegal form of business. The Mafia also runs in economic circles such as “textiles, transport, tourism, construction, and waste management” and selling of drugs. The groups make an estimated annual profit of €100bn – about 7% of Italy's GDP.

The rules of the group are unwritten in the sense that the way their business works is illegal in the form of extortion. An example of extortion is seen by telling a business they need to pay $100 to be protected from criminals, and by paying the money the Mafia will take care of them. There is also a sense of honor within the mafia that is stronger than any law that could be written down. This is socially accepted within Italy: you pay to not be killed by the people who are supposedly protecting you. The functioning of the Mafia works as an illegal political system: there is a leader and from there it is divided into smaller groups, doing different jobs. There work is not legal within the economic and political framework of Italy, and the Mafia rules are enforced on a completely separate entity to the government. They govern themselves and have their own laws and punishments that are enforced within their groups. 

Critical junctures in South Africa

By Kristy Charlton

A critical juncture is seen as the moment “when there are two possible choices to choose from and once selected it becomes difficult to return to the initial point when other alternatives were available”. At this juncture, change is possible.

On the 27th of April 1994, South Africa held their first multiracial democratic elections. The democratic elections saw the power shift to the social democratic political party known as the African National Congress (ANC) as well as the countries first black president Mr. Nelson Mandela. Before the rainbow nation was created, South Africa was a nation of segregating its race, land and its political ideals, this was known as Apartheid.

A critical juncture led to this shift in power from the National Party, consisting of an all-white government and promoting Afrikaner nationalism, to a social democratic multiracial political party.

During the ruling of the National Party from 1948 many demonstrations were held against the party and the police, one being the Sharpeville massacre where police opened fire on a group of unarmed blacks associated with the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an offshoot of the ANC. There were also demonstrations for having Afrikaans as the medium language of the country, another retaliation from the oppressed members of society.

The NP held power during an economic recession and on 1973 the United Nations denounced apartheid and heavy sanctions were placed on the country.

A combination of the sanctions, retaliation of the black communities, the rise of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela from Robin Island led to a critical juncture. This critical juncture led to a new constitution, elections that led to a coalition government with a non-white majority and the end to the apartheid system. The ANC shifted the country to a democracy; their power shift influenced a new constitution of fair and equal rights among all racial and gender groups. 

Democratic divergence

By Laura Ombelet

North Korea is notorious for being a totalitarian dictatorship. However just south of the border sits South Korea, a full fledged democracy. The drastic divergence in regime change since 1945 begs the question; how did this happen?

Mahoney’s article ‘Path-dependent Explanations of Regime Change’ centre’s on the idea that divergent regimes in Central America can partially be explained by the choice of ‘reform’ or ‘radical’ policy at the liberal policy choice critical juncture. I wanted to see if it was possible to apply the same concept to North and South Korea. Following World War II and Japan's departure, North and South Korea’s leaders faced a critical juncture; what type of state structure to adopt in the aftermath of independence. If we follow Mahoney’s argument one would assume that South Korea chose reform type characteristics; less state coercion, smaller land estates and less land privatisation. It’s these reform policy options that Mahoney claims led to liberal democracies in Central America. However South Korea’s strong anti-communist agenda led to the implementation of a highly coercive autocratic dictatorship. It wasn’t reformist policies that enforced democratic institutions but the endogenous growth of the democratisation movement in opposition to authoritarian rule that eventually led to South Korea’s transition to democracy in 1987. The adoption of radical institutions did not reinforce themselves and consequently it was possible to switch institutional tracks to democracy. 

In North Korea a communist state was imposed and although conditions were harsh, North Koreans were better off than their southern counterparts. Therefore, there was no development of a democratisation movement in response to autocracy and endogenous change did not occur.

Although Mahoney’s theory of ‘reform’ versus ‘radicalisation’ is applicable to Central America, the same cannot be said for North and South Korea. The growth of the democratic movement is only one part of South Korea’s democratic growth story, however it is possible to see that regime divergence often has many causes. 

Rightful resistance in India

By Lisa Day

Rightful resistance is a form of peaceful protest against the state, by popular contention, in which citizens make use of their own state’s law and judicial system to legitimately challenge rights violations by the government itself. Although rightful resistance tends to be seen as a Chinese social and legal phenomenon, these forms of protest can also be seen in other parts of the world where governments have failed to deliver their own promises. A particular case in India, which involved rightful resisters fighting for basic infrastructure to be provided in all government-run schools, was legitimized and eventually implemented by the success of resisters framing their protest around India’s Right to Education Act.

India’s Right to Education Act involves the governmental obligation to ensure that all children have access to free and compulsory education. The Environment and Consumer Protection Foundation (ECPF) had been fighting for a legislation which would ensure that governments must provide basic infrastructure in schools. These included properly functioning and separate toilet facilities for boys and girls and appropriate drinking water facilities. Around 800,000 schools were concerned to have improper infrastructure. The ECPF argued that because of this parents would not allow their children to attend these schools if they were without basic toilet and water facilities. Therefore they contended, “The right to education cannot be enjoyed unless basic infrastructure is provided by the state”. Eventually the court issued an interim order stating: "it is imperative that all schools must provide toilet facilities. Empirical researches have indicated that wherever toilet facilities are not provided in schools, parents do not send their children (particularly girls) to schools. It clearly violates the right to free and compulsory education of children guaranteed under Article 21A of the Constitution”. By 2012 it was issued that all state governments must provide “toilet facilities for boys and girls, drinking water facilities, sufficient classrooms, appointment of teaching and non-teaching staff etcetera”.

The judgement passed shows a successful use of rightful resistance. This movement was employed to actively seek the attention of the Indian authorities in order to legitimize a set of specific infrastructural requirements in schools. Therefore ensuring that all children would now rightfully have access to education.

Rightful resistance

By Lexi Rowland

Rightful resistance in rural China, as presented by O'Brien in his paper on the movement, has been extremely successful in creating a degree of democracy in a country where the communist party has so long been the rule of law. The type and success rate of the resistance practiced by China's rural population, as well as the many other examples of such a resistance in other countries, poses the question for whether this resistance would not be a non-violent way of creating meaningful change in all countries. Are revolutions and rightful resistance movements mutually exclusive?

Rightful resistance, in the form that it is practiced in rural China, is based on a few factors which O'Brien claims to be fundamental to its creation. Among these, the use of the existing institutional framework, allegiance of the resistors with political elites and the disavowal of violent protest are the most important for creating grass roots support for the movement. The use of an existing framework has been especially useful to the resistance movement because it leaves no room for political elites to claim that the resistors are illegitimate. This fact as well as the use of non-violence often creates the widespread support of both political elites and the community as a whole. In trying to make such a framework work for movements against the system however, this fact becomes problematic. 

The toss up lies in the fact that a revolution arguably cannot be simultaneously legitimate and revolutionary. The absence of violence may be achieved, and support at a grass roots level may be easily obtained, but working within the system of institutions in order to change such a system is something that is not easily achieved. Perhaps a movement may start this way but generally, in order to change the system it would need to discard of the system or become violent. Thus, this would not fall within O'Brien's analysis of what a rightful resistance should be.

Other definitions, which may offer more room for a movement to be defined as both revolutionary and rightful, are described in the Qu'ran. Here, the rightful resistance movement is one in which those who are resisting should be in a state of oppression. As an addition, violence should not be used without violence first being used by the aggressor. Due to the fact that an oppressed community is often the case with revolutionary environments, many of these revolutions could then be deemed rightful.

The use of violence would not be the deciding factor as to whether a movement should be deemed rightful or not. The decision lays with the political elites which are opposing such a resistance and therefore it would seem that rightful resistance and revolutionary resistance would remain mutually exclusive. 

War as a cause of state formation

By Anique Zwaan

As Herbst mentions, several scholars have addressed the topic of state formation and stressed the effects war has on state formation. Samuel P. Huntington argued: “war was the great stimulus to state building,” and Charles Tilly even stated “war made the state, and the state made war.”  While Herbst mostly focusses on state formation in Africa, he also states briefly mentions that in many cases in Europe, war has indeed been a cause of state formation.

The example that sprung to mind was the case of the formation of the Dutch Republic in 1581. For some historical background: before the Dutch republic was formed, the land that we now call The Netherlands and Belgium was known as the Spanish Netherlands, and was under full control of Philip II of Spain. The Netherlands were being oppressed by the Spanish, and the Roman Catholic faith was being forced upon the country. In 1568, the mainly Calvinist Netherlandish provinces started the Dutch Revolt, thus beginning the Eighty Years’ War. From the beginning, the country was divided (page 547) in two sections: the southern, catholic provinces (the land we now know as Belgium), and the northern, protestant provinces. In 1581, the northern provinces declared independence from the Spanish oppressors, creating the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. And now, almost 500 years later, the land that once was declared the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, is currently known as The Netherlands.

This example perfectly illustrates how a war has crucial effects on a country, and the process of state formation. The Spanish Netherlands, that were once separated by and during war, continue to exist as separate countries, many centuries later. The southern provinces as Belgium, and the northern provinces as The Netherlands.

Resource revenues and state formation

By Onno Blom

In “War and State in Africa’ Herbst argues that much of the lack of state formation in Africa can be contributed to lack of warfare in the past. He finds that war allows the state to collect significantly more taxes with greater efficiency and less public resistance, and that war is the only thing that forces governments to do so. The formation of a strong state, with inclusive institutions based upon taxing, will thus only emerge in foresight of warfare. Herbst concludes that because there has never been large scale interstate warfare in Africa, state formation has lagged behind.

Although the mechanisms that Herbst poses might have worked in Europe, they certainly will not act in the same way in most of contemporary Africa. The main reason for this is Africa’s comparative high dependency on natural resources. For example, government revenues are made up of resource exploitation for 90% for Equatorial Guinea, and 80% for Congo, Angola, Nigeria and Chad. Unfortunately, if most revenue comes from resources, governments would likely get their funding for war from those institutions as well: these sectors have large vested interests which the government takes into account. Moreover, a marginal increase in a large sector provides the same benefits as a large increase in a small sector, while an increase in exploitation of natural resources is easier to realize than setting up inclusive institutions based upon taxation, especially for a government with expertise in the first. Thus, after and during the war, only extractive institutions are created and the state continues to be weak: a state reliant upon the power of its resources instead of taxation of its people does not act in the interest of its population, and this creates institutions which slow down development. 

State making: Italy’s struggle

By Lorraine Besnier

The Italian unification, also known as “Risorgimento”, the Resurgence, was the social, political and armed movement that consolidated the different Kingdoms of Italy throughout the 19th century. The exact period of this process is agreed to have started with the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and ended in 1871 with the proclamation of Rome as the capital of Italy.

When applying this study case too Tilly’s design, Italy falls in the category of a state created, and united by war. Indeed, Tilly states that “war made states and States made war”. As a result from a rising ideal of a united Italy, and the creation of groups of rebellion, the Kingdoms of Italy went through not less than three revolutionary wars.

The first step was the revolution of 1848, which merely was a cumulation of uprisings in several Italian cities. Despite the help of independent armies from various areas, the movement was unsuccessful and by 1849, the old regimes were once again in place. Yet, the failure did not break the increasing feeling of unity, and more people joined the trend. The second insurrection led to a unification between Piedmont-Sardinia and Lombardy.

With this successful outcome, the northern part of Italy voted in 1859 to join this Kingdom, and an additional army went marching in the South to rally the different areas. By the end of 1861, only Venetia and Rome were still outside of the unification.

In 1866, following a campaign against Austria, Italy won Venetia, and in 1870, Italy entered Rome, and both the city and Papal States were incorporated to Italy, thus completing the Risorgimento.

As Tilly proved, Italy became a state through war, but as a state, continued to make war - for instance through the first and second world wars. This design is helpful not only to understand international relations nowadays, but also the intra-national relations. Nothing binds people together like a common enemy.

Does war still make states?

By Lisa Staadegaard

‘War makes states’ is a statement that is generally considered to be true among social scientists. Tilly is one of the scholars who outline how war influenced the state making in Europe. He discusses how nation states were formed through violent competition for territory and capital. The idea of the nation state developed and replaced the settlements that were formerly in place. However if we look at contemporary warfare, where states are already in place, does war still makes states?

Tilly describes 3 stages of state making: first some power holders in ‘external’ struggles differentiate between an ‘internal’ and an ‘external’ area where force is used. Secondly this process of defending the ‘internal’ creates ‘internal’ state making. Finally, ‘external’ war making among states strongly determined the form a particular state takes.

With the international formalization of state boundaries the struggle for coercion is currently mainly internal. Countries increasingly experience internal struggles instead of having external ‘enemies’.

Whereas Tilly describes how the internal state making was a centralized process, finance and capital are decreasingly centralised businesses. Privatisation, de-regulation and reduced budget deficits are recent policy preferences that reduce a state’s control over its financial resources. This often results in a state that is fragmented due to a lack of centralized power.

Therefore wars, especially in the contemporary developing world, trigger a further break down of the state. This instead of creating a centralized, strong structure which is comparable to the states in European history. Therefore we can conclude that contemporary wars do not make states anymore as these wars are often internal ones. This internal warfare often supports the unravelling of states, and thus does the exact opposite of state making. 

Extortion or Protection?

By Rens Edwards

Tilly (1985) provides a necessary condition for state making, namely capital accumulation. Without capital, a state cannot afford a standing army. Consequently, without an army, protection of the state itself nor expansion is possible. An essential aspect of capital accumulation for upcoming states was to demand money in exchange for protection. It did not matter to the government whether its people actually wanted protection, the government simply created demand for protection.

When multiple parties exercise violence in an area, the costs of protection increase. Therefore, an important requirement was that a state had a monopoly on violence, or protection would become too costly. This created “protection racketeering”, which meant that “customers” paid a given amount of money for the protection granted by the government. By doing so, the government gained more income which was used to form an army and hence finance war.

In South Africa, protection rackets are still part of everyday life. Protection used to be the responsibility of the state. Nowadays however, South Africa does not have a single body that controls violence. Rather, several private companies and informal protective organizations (mainly criminal groups) exist to provide protection to the people. Most private security companies are legitimate. Some companies however, mostly located in Cape Town, are being operated by infamous underworld figures. Those companies are a threat to society, because they often make use of extortion instead of offering protection. Although the people should be protected from violence, these gangs are a danger to their own society.

In short, protection racketeering in South Africa functions among others as a means for criminal groups to get cash quickly, which instead causes more violence in its bigger cities. These gangs demonstrate how violence can be abused in the absence of a monopoly on violence by the state itself. 

Did a lack of war cause African states to fail?

By Camelia Vasilov

Starting from Tilly’s well-known argument that in Europe “war made the state, and the state made war”, Herbst proposes an insightful thesis in his article on state-making in Africa: that the absence of inter-state war removed one important avenue for successful state formation on the African continent.

I think the state-war-making thesis hides more from the researcher than it reveals. For instance, it allows us to dispense with the local conditions in the pre-colonial times as variables explaining the success of state making or lack thereof. One example in which these conditions can hardly be ignored is the Tiv culture in Nigeria: a flourishing yet completely egalitarian and stateless society before the arrival of the British.

The Tiv people held beliefs that impeded state creation at every point in time before and even during the colonial times. Namely, as the anthropologist Paul Bohannan argued, the Tiv believed that a person capable of making others following his or her orders must be guilty of witchcraft. A very popular religion amongst this population – the Nyambua – was based on selling charms to protect from those who seemed to possess the dark power tsav (which we would maybe call today “leadership”) and on issuing accusations against such people. Tsav did not mean only “power” or “leadership” – a successful tsav was thought to be also a cannibal that gains extra power from eating human corpses.

The spread of Nyambua posed real problems to the British government in 1939, when its adepts started to declare the “local chiefs” put in place by the British as tsav and rebel against them. Further research showed that this religion became popular since time immemorial, when a series of intra-community conflicts caused by men gaining too much power spilled the blood of the Tiv people. Essentially, the deeply held belief of this people – learnt from war times – was that no one should gain too much power. How can one expect a state to arise that would successfully govern the Tiv?

Obama’s opportunity

By Jan Bogaarts

On June 26th 2015 the United States Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right in the case of Obergefell et al. v. Hodges. This decision was supported by 5 of the 4 justices, a small but huge difference. Gay marriage and LGBT rights have played an important role in american politics especially since the 1970´s. Activists, politicians and celebrities have stood in the face of injustice when the odds were against them. Harvey Milk, Harry Hay and many others paved what has been the path of change for the institution of marriage.

The last notorious civil rights movement in the United States was that against racial discrimination and segregation. Today the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is seen by many as the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks. However the man who signed the Act was Lyndon Baines Johnson, the democratic president of the United States between 1963 and 1969. Not only did Johnson sign, he closely worked with Dr. King to design the act and put it in motion.

Often U.S. presidents are judged by their legacy. LBJ’s legacy is civil rights (and the Vietnam war). The civil rights movement opened a political space for Lyndon Johnson and the democratic party to move into. The democratic party is seen today as the more progressive one and is more likely to be chosen by minorities. If the U.S. president at the time had been republican, the democratic party may not have had an edge over the them. This shows the importance of timing in politics.

The timing of the Supreme Court ruling gives president Obama a chance building his “legacy”. In other words, the Supreme Court ruling has created a political space in which president Obama has a first mover advantage to create a legacy for him and the democratic party. Occupying this political space reinforces the image of democrats as progressive and open minded but the fact that it happened during their presidency is just a coincidence.