ment can easily defeat a youth militia, and so the FN advanced rap-
idly on Abidjan. At this point President Gbagbo had few options. If
he stayed put and fought it out his fate would be the same as Gueï’s.
If he went into exile and appealed to the international commu-
nity, the end result would be an internationally supervised election,
which he would most surely lose. Gbabo’s only card was his capacity
for violence within Abidjan: could this be useful? He could use the
young street gangs to murder some more northerners, but where
would that get him? Was there any group in Abidjan whose vulner-
ability to violence might be turned to advantage? Recall that until
the coup Abidjan had been Africa’s Paris. This description was not
entirely figurative: it had by far the largest concentration of French
citizens in Africa. Gbagbo used them as hostages, demanding that
the French army come to his defense. They arrived within three
days to reinforce Gbagbo’s position: French troops had to defend
his regime to avoid a massacre of French civilians. This accounts
for the extraordinary spectacle of Gbagbo denouncing the French to
mass rallies of his youth supporters and indeed inciting youth to kill
French civilians in Abidjan at the same time as the French army was
defending his regime against the FN.
The French military imposed a cease-fire line, Operation
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Licorne, and forced the FN to withdraw around one hundred ki-
lometers from positions that they had won. This created a strong
signal that the French government was not impartial. At this stage,
outside of urban areas, the FN was in a position to advance on the
south, and with its finance at least partly dependent on unsustain-
able outside sources in Burkina Faso, it was in a hurry.
The international community again tried to broker a power-
sharing agreement during negotiations in Paris. The agreement set
up a coalition government under Gbagbo, but assigned some of the
most important cabinet positions to the FN. Specifically, the rebels
would hold the post of minister of defense. This was the guaran-
tee for the rebels of post-settlement security. Once the peace deal
was taken back to President Gbagbo for ratification he rejected this
component of it, whereupon it fell apart. In the process he inadver-
tently signaled that he had every intention of reneging on the peace
deal.
Gbagbo appears to have realized that time was on his side. Al-
though initially weaker militarily than the FN, he had the larger
revenue stream and invested in buying armaments. The United Na-
tions and the regional organization, the Economic Community of
West African States (ECOWAS), responded by placing an embargo
on exporting arms to Cote d’Ivoire. However, this did not prevent
both sides from acquiring guns. Weapons from Belarus and other
poor-governance countries came into the country via Togo. Gbagbo
even acquired an air force. His forces began to move against the
north in violation of the Paris agreement. The French peacekeepers,
whom Gbagbo had previously needed for protection, were now in
the way of his own attack. He therefore ordered his new air force
to bomb the French base near Bouaké, killing nine soldiers. The
French retaliated by destroying his air force.
The conflict attracted neighbors and predators. Mercenar-
ies from Liberia and Sierra Leone, hired on a “pay yourself” basis,
preyed upon Ivorian citizens and were responsible for some of the
Meltdown in Cote d’Ivoire
165
bloodiest attacks. In addition to the major armed groups there were
at least nine unofficial militias: organized violence was all too feasi-
ble in this environment. The methods all parties used to finance the
conflict drew in unscrupulous companies, countries, and leaders.
The Central Bank of West Africa was robbed first in Abidjan and
then in Korhogo. Money came in from the neighbors: both Presi-
dent Compaoré of Burkina Faso and President Taylor of Liberia
were generous. The FN created an “economic police force” to patrol
diamond areas and levy taxes.
From this situation it was going to be difficult to reach a settle-
ment. The French cordon of troops kept the fighting limited so the
cost of the conflict was not so severe as to force the parties to nego-
tiate. Since neither side had the slightest trust for the other, there
would normally have been an important role for the international
community to negotiate a settlement. The attempts failed because
the only type of settlement that the international community could
endorse was one that was validated by free and fair elections. But
such elections would inevitably hand power to one or other of the
serious Ivorian politicians, Bédié and Outtara, both in exile. Worse,
from the perspective of the FN in control in the north and Gbagbo
in control in the south, Bédié and Outtara managed to patch up
their differences sufficiently to form a common electoral front: they
would fight the election under one party. So, from the perspective of
both the incumbent leaders, an international peace settlement was
equivalent to defeat. The only hold that the international commu-
nity had over them was that Gbagbo’s term as an elected president
expired. With his term expired, Gbagbo’s legitimacy began to look
highly suspect. In a deal forced on him by the international commu-
nity, his own government was dismissed and a neutral technocrat
brought in as prime minister, a change described by some members
of his government as a coup. It was hard to envisage how this stale-
mate could be unblocked.
And then a settlement appeared out of nowhere: certainly with-
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out the participation of the international community. It was an in-
ternal settlement, between Gbagbo and Soro. Gbagbo got rid of the
technocrat and appointed the rebel leader, Soro, in his place. Bédié
and Outtara were excluded. Gbagbo and Soro promised elections
in due course, but now there was no international community to
require that excluded candidates could stand, or that the elections
would be free and fair. As you have seen, under such conditions in-
cumbents have a range of strategies for winning an election, and so
at last Gbagbo and Soro need not regard peace as the path to the hell
of electoral defeat. The internal settlement was potentially very at-
tractive for both of them. Aid could be resumed, and Cote d’Ivoire’s
offshore oil could be tapped without awkward questions. The poli-
tics was brilliant. Within a month Soro narrowly escaped death in a
helicopter accident.
Cote d’Ivoire is at last back to peace. But a decade of coups,
war, and elections have taken their toll. The mantle of Francophone
Africa’s flagship has passed, largely by default, to Senegal. Could
anything have been done to avert this catastrophe? It is time for
some solutions.
> Part III
C H A N G I N G
R E A L I T Y :
A C C O U N T A B I L I T Y
A N D S E C U R I T Y
C h a p t e r 8
S T A T E B U I L D I N G A N D
N A T I O N B U I L D I N G
Famously, President Bush began by deriding state
building and ended up attempting it. I am going to suggest
why it is so difficult. The now-successful states were built
through a painfully slow and circuitous process of formation that
turned them into nations with which their citizens identified. This
enabled them to undertake the collective action that is vital for the
provision of public goods. In the high-income societies we have come
to take these features for granted: so much so that we have forgotten
that they are essential. Legally, states can be built by the stroke of an
international pen: they need only recognition. This is how the states
of the bottom billion came into existence. They have not been forged
into nations, and so they face an acute lack of public goods.
Most modern states were once ethnically diverse. The boundar-
ies of a modern state generally emerged not out of deepening bonds
forged out of a primordial ethnic solidarity but as the solution to the
central security issue of what size of territory was best suited to the
creation of a monopoly over the means of violence. Often the sense
of a common ethnic origin bonded to the national soil was imagined
retrospectively: conjured up by the urban, middle-class, romantic
nationalists of the nineteenth century.
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State formation was driven not by a sense of community but
by the unusual economic properties of violence. We now know
that violence is not something that emerged as a result of the for-
mation of states: on the contrary, stateless societies are horribly vio-
lent. The production of violence depends upon the available tech-
nology. Hunter-gatherer societies are inherently extremely violent
because the technology does not permit anything else: the winning
strategy for a group of hunter-gatherers is the preemptive strike
against neighbors through the predawn raid, catching your enemies
detached from their weapons. Any group sufficiently quixotic to
trust a peace deal gets eliminated before it can change its mind. So
violence is intrinsic to such societies: they would more accurately
be described as hunters, gatherers, and killers. However, with tech-
nological advance the production of violence becomes subject to
specialization and economies of scale. Both make violence a paying
proposition.
Start from a primitive landscape with no government and many
identical households and now introduce a minimal degree of differ-
entiation. Some people are more productive than others and some
people are stronger than others. From the resulting four different
types of people, ask yourself how one type, the unproductive strong,
are going to earn a living? They are going to plunder those who are
productive but weak. By abandoning their incompetent efforts to
produce and specializing in violence, the unproductive strong get
even better at violence. Violence requires skill and hence gives an
advantage to professionals.
Onto this scene of specialization now add economies of scale in
violence, this being a fancy way of saying that size matters. It is this
that makes violence distinctive. Other economic activities had to
wait until the industrial revolution before scale became important.
A thousand-person farm was no more productive per person than a
one-person farm; a thousand-person firm of cobblers was no more
productive per person than a solo cobbler. But a thousand-person
State Building and Nation Building
171
army could kill, one by one, a thousand solo fighters: large groups
of professionals tend to defeat small groups of professionals. Not
always and everywhere: small armies can win if they have better
technology and better management; there is even room for differen-
tial heroism. The race is not always for the swift, but that is where
to put your money.
So, by forming or joining a large group of professionals that
establishes a monopoly of violence over a territory, you as a mem-
ber become safer from attack. That is clearly a powerful incentive.
But safety is not the only consideration: life can only be sustained
with income. People specialized in violence forgo the chance to
produce. Where is your income to come from? The answer, as any
mafioso knows, is that having established a monopoly of violence,
you now have the power to extort from other inhabitants of the ter-
ritory. Why do the inhabitants not run away? Perhaps your army
can enforce penalties for attempting to escape: you are able to turn
the inhabitants into serfs. Perhaps the inhabitants have nowhere to
run because the neighboring territories are dominated by similar
armies, so flight would merely get them out of your frying pan into
some other army’s fire. Perhaps the protection from other predators
that is a consequence of your local monopoly of violence is worth the
payments. You, the army, are inadvertently supplying a public good:
you have become a state.
Although the public good of security for the locality may be
inadvertent, you gradually realize that it is in your own interest to
supply a few other public goods. One is to help your inhabitants to
trade with one another. If they become richer, then you can become
richer by taxing them. So you provide a contract-enforcement ser-
vice for them; after all, you are good at enforcement. You call it a
court, and around it grows a legal system. You might also run to
some trade-enhancing infrastructure: roads, bridges, and market-
places. You might even, though this takes a certain amount of vi-
sion, put a few limits on yourself. By closing off some options, you
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make your richer subjects less inclined to adopt the infuriating de-
fensive strategy of refusing to invest. We have arrived at a state, but
not a modern one: the range of public goods is too limited because
the interests of many people are ignored.
The final step from a state that is effective but serves the inter-
ests of a minority to one that serves everyone is another long haul.
Once hemmed in by neighboring states, these become the primary
threat: either you defeat and swallow them or they defeat and swal-
low you. Arms races develop. This requires high taxation, and the
warfare generates a sense of nationalism: people start to sense a
common identity. As the effective state facilitates economic growth,
even the politically weak become better off, and this, together with
an emerging sense of common identity, gradually makes them more
powerful. Recall that autocracies become more prone to political
violence as income rises. More specifically, they become increasingly
beset by riots, demonstrations, and political strikes. T
he sense of
common identity further eases the collective action of protest. Better
provision of public goods is gradually prised out of the elite by this
pressure. To make these improvements credibly permanent, elites
also concede limited extensions of the franchise: the society inches
toward modern democracy.
I n t ry i n g t o a p p ly t h e s e simple but powerful economics of violence to the actual history of state formation, it is always convenient if we can find a starting point for history. In the process of
European state formation, to my mind, the natural starting point
is the fall of the Roman Empire during the fifth century. This has
some rudimentary analogy to the decolonization of Africa in the
mid-twentieth century. Given the suddenness of the decolonization
of Africa, which was basically over a decade after it had first been
seriously contemplated, the closest analogy is with the decoloniza-
tion of Roman Britain.
State Building and Nation Building
173
The decolonization of Roman Britain was even more abrupt
than that of Africa. Britain had the single largest unit of the Roman
army, around 15 percent of the imperial force, paid for by aston-
ishingly heavy taxation of the British economy. So whoever was in
charge of this army had the potential for conducting a coup d’état.
As the Roman Empire hit political turbulence in the late fourth
century, twice in twenty-five years the head of the Roman army in
Britain tried to become emperor. Since the first attempt in 380 had
failed, the leader of the second attempt in 403 decided to improve
his chances by taking his army with him on a march toward Rome.
He still lost, but in the process Britain suddenly lost its army. Since
the Roman government in Britain had been military, not only did
Britain lose its army, it lost its government. The history of Brit-
ain post-403 makes the post-colonial history of Africa look like a
staggering success. Within a few years the British had petitioned
Rome to be recolonized: even heavy taxation was preferable to the
absence of security and government. But Rome was not in a posi-
tion to respond, so British society was left to its own devices. What
followed was a descent into civil war, the collapse of public goods to
the extreme extent that the urban economy disappeared. People fled
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