The document discusses the development dimension of preventing terrorism and violent conflict in Africa. It argues that narrowly defining security as a military issue fails to address the root causes of conflicts, which are often related to lack of economic opportunity and political legitimacy. A human security approach is needed that considers individual livelihoods and promotes democracy, justice and inclusive development. International organizations must support long-term peacebuilding in a holistic manner rather than just focusing on short-term goals like elections.

1. Helping Prevent Terrorism and Violent Conflict: The Development Dimension –
Some Comments1
By
J. ‘Kayode Fayemi, Ph.D,
Centre for Democracy & Development, (Lagos & London)
“For most people today, a feeling of insecurity arises more from
worries about the daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world
event. Job security, income security, health security, environmental
security, security from crime, these are the emerging concerns of
human security all over the world.”
UNDP, Human Development Report, 1994
The concept of human security began to gain prominence after the collapse of
the cold war. It argues for a broader conception of security that does not limit
security to its narrowly defined, state-centric military notions hitherto dominant in
security studies and practice in the cold war era. This broader conception seeks to
articulate security in a manner that the individual, the group as well as the state may
relate to its fundamental objectives of promoting and ensuring the right to life and
livelihood. The OECD poverty reduction guideline document talks of a human
security approach that “seeks to address the sources of risk that affect poor people in a
co-ordinated fashion, breaking out of the increasingly artificial separation between
conflict resolution, post-conflict reconstruction, natural disaster preparedness and
relief and rights-based governance work”. (OECD, DAC Report 2000). Whereas
these two documents and several others make clear the link between security and
development and several attempts have been made to ensure that this registers with
world leaders, none of these extensive studies made any impact until the tragic events
of September 11. Although it is now widely accepted that efforts to address Africa’s
1
Being paper prepared for presentation at the OECD Forum 2002 in Paris, France on May 13, 2002.
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2. violent conflicts must be linked to wider democratisation and sustained development
efforts, the challenge remains how to translate this new understanding into specific
policies and how to ensure effective implementation, in particular appropriate
international development assistance.
Causes of Conflict: Understanding the Development Dimension
To understand the development dimension of violent conflict, perhaps the most
important task today is to examine in a more nuanced manner the historic roots and
contemporary trajectories of Africa’s violent conflicts and to move away from
simplistic interpretation of causes based on notions such as ‘greed’, ‘poverty’, or
‘ethnicity’. Africa’s conflicts share a common backdrop of economic stagnation and
faltering democratic rule that undermined state capacity and legitimacy in the 1980s.
Yet each conflict has followed its own trajectory shaped by political and policy
choices partly made by African governments and partly imposed by their
development partners. Among the most critical elements in understanding the new
conflict equation arising out of the 1990s political transition on the continent are:
• The shifts in global and geopolitical power relations; in particular the end of the
cold war and the withdrawal of the metropolitan security umbrella which paved
the way for serious challenges to some client regimes in a manner previously
considered impossible.
• With the demise of universalistic ideological battle between socialism and
capitalism, new forms of conflict emerged in the form of identity issues anchored
on religion and ethnicity in particular.
• The withdrawal of assistance by big states also resulted in the search for new
forms of sustenance leading to the exploitation of resources and criminal activity;
• Increasing availability and privatisation of instruments of violence, transforming
the military balance between the state and society. (A recent survey indicates that
the permanent members of the Security Council were together responsible for
81% of world arms exports from 1996 – 2000. The G8 nations sold 87% of total
arms exports to the entire world. US’ share of that is over 50 per cent and 68% of
arms supplied to the developing world comes from the United States.)
• New forms of violent and trans-national crime.
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3. Yet in this context of internal cleavages and external fuelling of conflicts, one could
almost reach the flawed conclusion that the 1980s was a period of unbridled peace.
The truth is however more complex that this. Examined critically, the most important
lesson of the 1990s conflict in Africa is that the 1980s laid a solid basis for them
through the severe economic and fiscal compression exemplified by the structural
adjustment shocks of the period. It is no longer in doubt that the erosion of social
capital, political legitimacy and institutional weakening of many African states can be
directly linked to the policy choices that informed governance during this period.
- Decomposition of the security sector was a key component of this state
collapse.
- Equally, the State lost its central relevance due to the SAP’s agenda to
retrench it from basic services’ provision to the citizens;
- State militarism largely driven by the authoritarian culture which was
so widespread in the 1980s laid the basis for the new and more deadly
societal militarism represented by the warlords of the 1990s and the
violent nature of crime
In short, the nature of conflict and politics in Africa was in essence redefined
by the peculiar context of the 1990s and the nature of partnership between Africa and
its development partners. Addressing violent conflicts in Africa therefore requires
broadening the notions of security and developing multi-faceted responses. Four
pillars of peace and security ought to form the core of this agenda: 1) human security
as the bedrock for peace; 2) democracy and open governance; 3) transformation of
violent conflicts through political processes; and 4) collective security for all African
states.
At the heart of this conflict prevention agenda is the transformation of Africa’s
security establishments. Until recently, the mantra among donors was to emphasise
cost-cutting approach to dealing with security sector problems. However, the
solutions required are first and foremost political in nature. To achieve this political
consensus, governance in the security sector which treats security actors as
stakeholders in processes of democratisation and administrative reform is central,
both in terms of long term containment of conflict and democratic consolidation. The
appropriate framework for achieving governance in the security sector is human
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4. security. Yet, if conflict provides the framework, regionalism is the basic institutional
scaffolding that the development community should help focus on.
On its own part, the OECD recognises that there is a need to focus on a human
security approach but remains very much committed to state centric notions of
security and seems unsure of the link between poverty and conflict. In my view, the
basic assumption that undergirds a human security approach is the need to adopt a
broader conception of security and development, breaking away from state-centric
notions of security which often allows the conflation of regime security with state
security to the detriment of the basic needs of the people especially when security is
not seen as a public good – which ought to be the concern of all citizens.
The above raises a fundamental problem in a region where efforts to build
homogenous nation-states on the basis of artificially constructed boundaries have
resulted in forced unity through the promotion of the principle of “non-interference”.
To the extent that sovereignty of the nation-state is regarded as sacrosanct and non-
derogable, states that have ceased to function as states in the traditional sense of
providing basic needs for the citizens still enjoy support and assistance in
development circles even when it is known that these states are nothing but privatised
entities.
So, when the guideline document argues on the one hand that poor people rate
insecurity as a key cause of poverty and states in the same breath that the evidence for
seeing poverty as a cause of armed conflict is generally weak, it is reasonable to argue
that this is tantamount to being caught in a cold-war time warp. While it is true that
inequality or relative deprivation rather than poverty as in absolute deprivation is
more to blame for conflict, it is important to take a far more complex view of the
causes of conflict in their economic, political, environmental and cultural dimensions.
Clearly, poverty – as exemplified by the inequality arising out of unfair
sharing of global opportunities - remains the greatest threat to democratic
consolidation in Africa today and, at the broadest level, globalisation is resulting in
deep polarisation between rich and poor throughout the continent. Whereas
quantitative accounts of the problems do not always tell the whole story, even the
available statistics for the African continent paint a gory picture – especially in terms
of the impact of conflict on poverty on the continent.
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5. Acknowledging the fact that an exclusive focus on the nation state has
prevented an understanding of region specific determinants in the poverty-security-
development complex might help policy makers and anti-poverty analysts to address
some of the policy issues and possibilities that can make a difference. How might this
be taken forward to improve current policy levers in the human security approach,
dealing with the practical dilemma of recognition to non-state actors in an attempt at
incorporating security into development?
Where do we go from here?
For a start, as we move towards the G8 summit in Canada, and one which
seeks to make Africa a priority, it is important to acknowledge that Africa’s violent
conflicts and security problems can only be resolved through genuine global
partnership. The 1980s were a testament to the dangers of ‘broad brush’ approaches,
characterised by the external imposition of macro-economic stabilisation and
structural adjustment programmes that were sufficiently inflexible to account for the
diversity of circumstances and need. Developing more ‘home grown’ approaches will
require donors to relinquish greater responsibility to Africa’s leaders and their people.
Given the different trajectories that we have seen on the continent, it is important to
develop a typology of African states in the post cold war transitions decade in order to
avoid the broad-brush strategies that did not work in the 1980s. It is possible to
identify in this context at least five categories of African states ranging from progress
to stasis, and in a few cases reversal, and requiring different responses from
development partners. It is possible to talk of 1) Consolidating states – South Africa,
Botswana, Ghana, Mauritius, Senegal, Benin; 2) Semi, new or proforma democracies
in transition – Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Burkina Faso; 3) States in Conflict or
emerging out of conflict – Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, DRC, Liberia, Eritrea,
Rwanda, Burundi; 4) States in relapse or remilitarisation – Zimbabwe, Guinea Bissau,
Madagascar and; 5) Authoritarian States or States that have collapsed – Togo,
Somalia, Central African Republic. I have identified issues that are common to all the
states in question below and why it is important to respond to them differently, even if
they are treated in a continuum. Ultimately, my argument is that given the ‘glocal’
nature of the conflicts afflicting many of the states, state rebuilding can only be
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6. reinforced in the context of regional integration supported by global partnership not
through a uniform understanding of globalisation.
Support for peace building and reconstruction: State rebuilding after state collapse
often requires a strong support for peace building and reconstruction measures. Peace
in this context has often been interpreted as mere absence of war and state rebuilding
is often seen only in terms of physical reconstruction. While physical reconstruction
may be a necessary departure point for state reuilding, the defining characteristic of
state rebuilding from a human security approach is the presence of holistic security
and a model of conflict management, which emphasises the fundamentals of military
security, democratisation and consensus building, development, economic reform and
human dignity for the citizens to engage their rulers.
Therefore, although the conventional wisdom is to ignore it, the security
required in the immediate aftermath of conflict also requires higher rather than lower
security expenditure to enable the state and citizens cope with the impact of conflict –
rehabilitating refugees and the internally displaced, providing for a secure, safe and
enabling environment in which development initiatives can succeed and reintegrating
former combatants into society and economy. In situations where conditions of
poverty prevail after post war conflict, it is reasonable to predict a correlation between
the lack of development opportunities in terms of direct income generation to
survivors and an increase in criminality and conflict.
For policy makers, especially international donors who just want to “move the
money” because of the domestic pressure from disaster management and relief
agencies, there is always the pressing need to construe their role in terms of
immediate restoration of peace and stability, rather than security and development
through the promotion of common values and the rule of law. The concentration on
elections and elections monitoring in say Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria in recent
times gave an impression that what mattered most was the election, not democracy or
that elections are enough to guarantee democracy and development. Experience has
since shown that while there are immediate tasks that must be addressed in terms of
peace building and reconstruction in every conflict situation – disaster relief and
management, repatriation and reintegration of refugees and reduction in the
proliferation of small arms and landmine clearance, these are not the most successful
ingredients of a successful peace building strategy.
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7. To promote sustainable security and peace building strategies therefore – anti
poverty strategists and international development agencies must take a comprehensive
look at peace building and reconstruction strategies treating them as a continuum with
short term (relief and emergency aid and creating a secure and enabling environment);
medium term (peace support operations) and long term (reconstruction, democracy &
development) components in an integrated manner. Second, there is a need for
stronger cooperation between the Bretton Woods institutions, the UN Systems and
other multi and bi-lateral development agencies as well as independent development
institutions to reduce the overzealous focus on achieving fiscal discipline and macro-
economic stability at the expense of efforts to protect social spending.
The impact that structural adjustment reform programmes have had and how it
continues to negatively impact on African states is a sad reflection of lack of
coordination on the part of these institutions. Third, it is extremely important that
international institutions should seize the momentum provided by the weak capacity
of the state to align external assistance with local needs and efforts, not an opportunity
to impose received wisdom and new theories of development. This is extremely
important in the context of recent claims that NEPAD is Africa owned – a claim that
is rejected by many Africans. Where state institutional capacity is weak, an immense
burden of responsibility is placed on IFIs and development agencies in which real
dialogue with the people and wide consultations underscore whatever actions are
taken. Finally, international donors cannot ignore the international context in their
response to peace building and reconstruction efforts. How, for example, has the
often convoluted linkage between trans-national corporations, proliferation of arms
and promotion of neo-liberal globalising trends by the industrial world undermine the
success of security and development reforms in countries emerging out of conflict,
especially within the context of an unstable region in which domino effect is real
rather than imagined.
These are some of the issues that are central to any discussion of policy
responses on peace building and reconstruction efforts and the extent to which the
guideline document considers them critically would determine the possibilities of
success that might accompany critical intervention.
Support for State monopoly of means of coercion: As has been argued above, this
thinking itself is a product of the state-centric notions of security that dominated
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8. traditional thinking in the cold war era. Since the state is increasingly seen as
unrepresentative and illegitimate in Africa, it would be useful for development
specialists and anti-poverty strategists to begin to consider seriously conditions under
which conflict might be seen to be a legitimate means of removing certain regime
types that promote conflicts and anti-poverty strategies in the way leading actors have
encroached upon common pool resources. To this end, some questions might suffice
in any consideration of complex political situations rather than focus exclusively on
state monopoly of means of coercion. This is not to suggest that states do not have
legitimate needs for security which might necessitate legitimate procurement and
monopoly of means of coercion, but this has to be demonstrated in the manner
security is treated as common public good. It may therefore be necessary to consider:
• Under which circumstances, if any, is war necessary to remove bad governments?
That is how do we distinguish between justifiable rebellion and needless conflict?
• How is regional economic and political co-operation built between and among
states to address the pathology of militarism?
• How can state-centric definitions of security be de-emphasised, and the role of
civil society in peace building increased?
• How is democratic control of the military to be built in states undergoing political
transition or moving from war to peace – through parliamentary oversight,
effective institutions of governance and genuine interaction between the military
and the rest of society?
Acknowledging the need to ask these questions should help to address some of the
policy challenges posed for conflict transformation and security sector reform in the
context of globalisation and subject state monopoly of violence to international and
regional checks. Although there is evidence to suggest that IFIs and development
agencies now accept the arguments about broadening policy framework, but the
commitment to the mutually reinforcing interaction between the values of democracy,
equity and sustainability still remain subordinate to the core need for macro-economic
stability and integration into the international political economy. This is why many in
Africa are still suspicious of the IFIs’ commitment to a human security approach in
spite of the new rhetoric about local ownership and social capital.
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9. Promoting social coherence through civil society development and multi-cultural
tolerance:
If peace-building is taken as the sum total of activities that will support peace
making and conflict transformation: demobilisation, re-structuring of the local
security system – police and the military; resettlement of refugees and the internally
displaced persons; removal of dangerous weapons – mines and other unexploded
firearms, reconstruction of shattered infrastructure and humanitarian and disaster
relief – very few still advocate that this could be done with the exclusion of civil
society. Indeed, even IFIs and development agencies now see civil society as key to
the successful implementation of these various aspects of post-conflict peace building
process. In discussing rights based approach to governance and poverty reduction,
local ownership and development of social capital rests with the civil society, but it is
important to place this within the context of developing institutional mechanisms for
managing diversity and difference and incorporating international human rights
framework into domestic law. Hence, the rights of the people to their resources should
not be compromised at the altar of encouraging foreign direct investment, especially
where this undermines environmental security.
Since states are usually products of war and rampage, it might sound far-
fetched to base the quest for tolerance on the notion of reclaiming the militarised
mind through the creation of structures capable of mediating conflict between
belligerent parties. Perhaps, an explanation of this construction is necessary here.
It is suggested that the military option now prevalent in several parts of the
African continent is the inevitable consequence of the acute nature of internal
contradictions and the almost total absence of democratic institutions that can
assist in the management of deep-rooted conflicts.
It was assumed in policy and development circles that support for neo-liberal
democracy will help achieve this objective, hence there was the enthusiasm for
democracy assistance and ‘good governance’ in the early 1990s and donor countries
made some efforts to move economic assistance away from former concerns about
stimulating economic growth to an emphasis on political objectives, including support
for processes of democratisation and building of civil society.
Although the above represented a shift from the days of the super-power
ideological rivalry, even this shift in development agencies and IFIs’ assistance has
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10. concentrated primarily on a ‘private good, public bad mantra’ through the reform of
the public sector and involvement of the ‘civil society’ to the extent that it promotes
the neo-liberal paradigm, not on an alternative vision of bottom-up reforms driven by
societal consensus. The fact that many of the transitions of the last decade in Africa
now approximate to - at best electoral democracies and at worst elected dictatorships,
has raised new questions on how to deepen the democratic content of current reforms
in a process oriented, participatory and accountable manner. At every level, the idea
of constitutionalising democratising polities that have largely functioned as
‘virtual’ democracies along multifaceted lines is taking shape.
Today, the fact that the struggle for reconstituting the African state is taking
place in no fewer than fifteen African states in Angola, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe,
Cote d’Ivoire, Swaziland and Lesotho, to mention but a few, underscores a
paradigmatic shift from constitutionality to constitutionalism, a situation where
constitutions are now seen as tools for building bridges between the state and civil
society, a social compact based upon a foundation of consensus among the constituent
elements within the polity and between them and the state. What has to be emphasised
however for the purpose of poverty reduction and human security in reconstituting
African polities is the importance of an organic link between the constitution as a rule
of law instrument incorporating international human rights framework and primarily
concerned with restraining government excesses, and the constitution as a
legitimisation of power structures and relations based on a broad social consensus in
diverse societies. In short, if it is to promote the mutually reinforcing role of
promoting development, security and democracy, the task today is largely between
bridging the gap between “juristic constitutionalism” and “political and socio-
economic constitutionalism” if the reconstituted state is to have meaning and be
accountable to its citizens.
Building assets that provide security against disasters and economic shocks:
Conventionally, the way most development agencies have promoted the
building of assets against disasters and economic shocks has been to focus on macro-
economic stability strategies like Structural adjustment reforms, electoral democracies
and support of measures that seek to provide the enabling environment for foreign
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11. direct investment and the global integration of the economy – a mutual pursuit of
political and economic liberalisation. So far, the logic of trickle down economics has
failed to produce an integrated world economy in which all zones are winners.
Indeed, as Caroline Thomas and Peter Wilkin argue,
In the process of globalisation, the continent (Africa) has quite literally been
left behind in terms of the distribution of the spoils of the process. The
promised advantages of economic restructuring, as hailed by the IMF, World
Bank and individual developed countries, have not been borne out. Foreign
investment fails to flow in; debt burdens continue; commodity prices fluctuate;
environmental degradation proceeds…and industrialisation fails to occur.
(Thomas & Wilkin: 1998).
This clearly contradicts the core assumption of globalization that wealth would
automatically be created when the free market gains universal acceptance in the
world. By arguing that the way to build assets against shocks is not via the creation of
local self sufficiency, but national economies should concentrate on what they can
contribute to the world economy, globalisation ignores the comparative advantage of
the North, locks states of the global South into relative powerlessness by creating
conditions for conflict which further weakens the mediatory role of the states.
Instead, it empowers those elites within the state who can form part of the convoluted
network in business and government capable of acting independently of the juridical
state. The fallout of this globalising trend is the unregulated trade in illicit mineral
resources, proliferation of arms and narcotics and the illicit trade in narcotics which
all of which ultimately undermine food security, environmental security and the
security of the individual – all factors responsible for conflict today. (Insert here the
other section in the globalization paper) It has also helped in deepening the rural-
urban divide, fostered inter-generational strife occasioned by youth frustration and
exacerbated the scourge of refugees and the internally displaced, all of which have
moved the hapless below the poverty line and moved them closer to violence and
conflict.
The greatest assets against shocks and disasters ultimately lie with the
development of human resources, better management of natural resource endowment
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12. and respect for local ownership of the reform agenda whether in determining the role
of the State or in arriving at the most effective poverty reducing mechanisms. It is
also useful to examine and analyse individual situations on their merit, rather than
assume that the market is God. This is of course not to suggest that market has no
role in reforming states structures. It is to say that there are no universal models of
the market as providing the best assets against shocks and disasters, hence donor
agencies must learn from their own experiences of the market, security and public
sector reforms in formulating realistic policies that are not driven by dogma even as
they admit that certain assumptions undergird their work based on their State values
and principles.
In pursuit of human security and human development
Based on the above comments, a number of measures seem to suggest
themselves to policy makers and donor agencies in developing a human security
approach that promotes human development:
1. There is a need for conceptual clarity through a comprehensive approach to
security sector reform in policy and development circles;
2. There is a need to adopt a regional approach to conflict prevention;
3. Policy instruments must recognise the need to reconcile economic and social
development and enhance the input of non-state actors – in policy formulation to
enhance social capital rather than entrench the leverage of IFIs and donor agencies
on States;
4. Recognition of legitimate security needs of nation-states must be factored into the
human security approach to poverty reduction;
5. Policy instruments must problematise the link between globalisation and conflict,
rather than assume that it is always going to be positive in the promotion of pro-
poor growth;
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13. 6. Policy instruments must locate the security agenda within the democracy and
development framework and reflect the link between politics and economics, and
between security and opportunities;
7. There is the need for democratic governance, not just civilian control of military
and security establishments in democratising polities;
8. Human security approach is a process, whose results will not necessarily be
immediate, hence the need for a long term view by interested stakeholders and
anti-poverty strategists.
It is our hope that the leaders meeting in Kananskis, Canada this June will bear the
above in mind as they prepare the Action Plan for this much needed partnership for
Africa’s Development – one that secures the world and promote peace.
REFERENCES
Barry Buzan et-al, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, (Boulder, Colorado:
Lynne Rienner, 1998).
Caroline Thomas & Peter Wilkin (eds), Globalisation, Human Security & the African
Experience, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1998)
CODEP, Report on the outcomes of the consultation on globalisation and conflict for
the White Paper on International Development: Globalisation & Development
(London, June 2000)
DFID, Security Sector Reform and the Management of Military Expenditure: Risks for
Donors, High Returns for Development, Report on an International Symposium,
February 14-16, 2000.
Draft Guideline Chapter on Poverty Reduction for OECD/ETC International
Conference.
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14. J. ‘Kayode Fayemi, “Security Challenges in Africa”, Seminar: Indian Journal of
Opinion, Special Issue on African Transitions 490, June 2000.
R.Luckham, I.Ahmad and R.Muggah, The Impact of Conflict on Poverty in Sub-
Saharan Africa. Background paper for World Bank poverty status assessment for
Sub-Saharan Africa, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, May
1999.
Brendan Martin, New Leaf or Fig Leaf? The Challenge of the New Washington
Consensus. Report prepared for Bretton Woods Project and Public Service
International. 2000.
UNDP, Human Development Report 1994
UNHCR, The State of the World Refugees 1998.
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