Thanks very much to Kate Baldwin for her incisive review of my book. Her thoughtful engagement with the text raises some important questions on the nature of African politics and how we study it. Because she is a scholar who focuses on Zambia and other more institutionalized states in Africa, her critique is especially valuable and illuminating. From her perspective, I overstate the explosiveness of power sharing. Rather than a source of violent competition for state power and a potential pathway to civil war, Baldwin sees the institution as a stabilizing, and even a democratizing, force. How can we reconcile these seemingly diametric analyses of African politics?
In many ways, our contrasting perspectives nicely encapsulate the two equilibriums that have arisen in postindependence Africa that I address in Chapter 10 of Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa. In one equilibrium, power sharing has too often broken down into a vicious cycle of ethnic exclusion and civil war. In another, it has proven more durable with few, if any, bouts of large-scale political violence and has paved the way for democratization. That our formative research experiences have been in countries in these different equilibriums—Sudan and Zambia, respectively—it is perhaps not surprising that we draw such sharply different conclusions. Yet strikingly, despite working in these different contexts, we ultimately derive similar models of politics: Both revolve around the incentives that rulers of weak states have to share power with societal brokers to effectively deliver goods and services and overcome low-state capacity. Baldwin shows how brokers play an integral role in facilitating the implementation of development projects in response to voters’ demands; I show how they play a critical role in the provision of security and cooperative counterinsurgency.
Why, then, do these similar models lead us to draw different conclusions about the efficacy of power sharing? Baldwin suggests that it is because we treat ethnicity differently. In her view, I assume that citizens blindly line up behind ethnic patrons, making political breakdown along ethnic lines inevitable, whereas she suggests that citizens are motivated by performance, not social identity. I disagree with this characterization. On the contrary, we have similar understandings about the microfoundations of brokerage networks in weak states. Like Baldwin, I believe that citizens absolutely care about regime performance and their access to resources, security, and opportunities. However, the challenge that citizens face is how to hold politicians accountable to ensure that they deliver the goods promised.
Baldwin draws inferences about this process in the context of an electoral democracy that has formally devolved power to local chiefs. What about in other states in which the institutions of democracy and decentralization are weak or nonexistent? How do citizens mobilize to gain access to vital services in these circumstances? In these contexts, networks need not be organized along ethnic lines—as I go to great lengths to show in Chapter 5 in analyzing the Islamic movement in Sudan. But they often are—not because ethnicity socially conditions citizens to organize around this shared identity (though that matters and is understudied), but because ethnicity as a social institution has a number of technological, sociological, and geographic attributes (e.g., common language, overlapping and dense social and kinship ties, physical proximity, shared normative principles) that lower the costs of collective action and coordination.
In such states, the main culprit of the coup–civil war trap is not ethnicity but politics: how elites embedded in these different networks can credibly commit to share power in the absence of strong institutions and when the threat of force is necessary to uphold it. Ethnicity compounds this bargaining problem via its effects on information flows and networks of reciprocity (or trust), but it is ultimately rooted in weak institutions and political uncertainty. As pernicious as this uncertainty is, it can be managed, opening the door to durable power sharing. In addressing both sides of the power-sharing coin—its explosiveness but also its persistence—Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa has sought to advance an integrated theory of war and peace in weak states.
