1st Quarter 2016 Volume 7, No. 1

Editorial

Trilateral Strategic Initiative, Conflict Management

in Africa, South Africa, Countering Convergence, Ebola Epidemic,

and “Home Grown” Weapons

Rémy M. Mauduit

Articles

The Trilateral Strategic Initiative

A Primer for Developing Future Airpower Cooperation

Col Peter Goldfein, USAF

Wing Cdr André Adamson, RAF, PhD

Third-Party Incentive Strategies and Conflict Management in Africa

Nikolas G. Emmanuel, PhD

South Africa

Africa’s Reluctant and Conflicted Regional Power

John F. Clark, PhD

Countering Convergence

“Central Authorities” and the Global Network to Combat Transnational

Crime and Terrorism

Dan Stigall

Ebola Epidemic

Yohannes Woldemariam, PhD

Lionel Di Giacomo

Darra Adam Khel

“Home Grown” Weapons

Aqab Malik, PhD

Trilateral Strategic Initiative, Conflict Management in Africa, South Africa, Countering Convergence, Ebola Epidemic, and “Home Grown” Weapons

Air operations are increasingly executed by coalition forces. In “The Trilateral Strategic Initiative: A Primer for Developing Future Airpower Cooperation,” Col Peter Goldfein and Wing Cdr André Adamson present the concept of the Trilateral Strategic Initiative (TSI) and its objective of furthering trilateral cooperation. The authors argue that the TSI and its steering group are a compelling model for improving the coherence of international airpower. The initiative reflects the vision of the air force chiefs of the United States, France, and United Kingdom to increase trust and integration among their services and to advocate for airpower. In the absence of a bureaucratic framework, the TSI is steered by collaboration among the strategic thinking cells of each service’s air staff, which includes officers from all three nations. Together, they identify the means to improve interoperability. They also debate airpower concepts to feed the thinking of senior leaders and to spawn cooperation at operational levels. The article considers the historical and cultural convergences among the three air forces as well as countervailing tendencies that allow the initiative to fully realize its potential as an enabler of the trilateral development and employment of airpower. The authors also note the role of the initiative in informing debate within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Finally, they consider the applicability of this approach for broader cooperation, including its place in a joint context.

Dr. Nikolas Emmanuel’s article “Third-Party Incentive Strategies and Conflict Management in Africa” examines the use of an incentives approach in managing intrastate conflict in Africa because in many cases, risks and costs make applications of hard power alone unfeasible. Furthermore, simply ignoring episodes of civil conflict in the hope that they will “burn themselves out” does not appear to be a viable alternative. That said, both noncoercive and coercive incentive strategies exist and have been deployed by third parties in a variety of conflict situations. Such incentives seek to manage conflict by encouraging political bargaining. The clear intention of this approach is to shift the behavior of targeted actors away from violence and towards more peaceful interaction. Indeed, such incentives offer a good deal of underexplored opportunities to help manage discord. This research has two primary objectives. First, it furthers the discussion of how external third parties can help manage conflicts. Second, it offers a typology of the available incentive strategies, classifying them along noncoercive and coercive lines. Thus, the article outlines the possibilities offered by an incentives approach, focusing on examples drawn from recent African cases.

Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has enjoyed unequalled political and economic standing in Africa. In “South Africa: Africa’s Reluctant and Conflicted Regional Power,” Prof. John F. Clark posits that the country’s record in regional diplomacy is quite mixed insofar as it has rarely employed coercive diplomacy to resolve local conflicts, preferring to use soft power to reinforce regional principles of interstate conduct. Only infrequently has South Africa used the threat of force to influence the domestic politics of other states or to resolve African interstate strife. He notes that it has generally failed to articulate a set of principles to guide either economic policy or international relations in a hegemonic fashion on the continent. This article, then, seeks to show that South Africa has acted more as a reluctant and conflicted regional power than a hegemon of any kind. Although the country is definitely a “regional power,” it is difficult to characterize its role at a continental level. After attempting a characterization of South Africa’s role, the author then inquires into the reasons for its ambiguous conduct on the African continent.

Mr. Dan Stigall’s article “Countering Convergence: ‘Central Authorities’ and the Global Network to Combat Transnational Crime and Terrorism” maintains that in a progressively unstable world order, there has never been a greater need for international cooperation in the fight against transnational crime and terrorism. The operations of nonstate armed groups, terrorists, and transnational criminal organizations are becoming global in scope. Moreover, as recent events have demonstrated, such groups are more lethal, disruptive, and destabilizing than ever before. Also apparent, however, is the fact that effective cooperation against such groups requires much development in what the parlance of international development calls “the justice sector.” Mr. Stigall argues that the international community must therefore devote more attention to the development of a central authority in critical regions such as the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel. Engines that give life to the international treaty framework must be built, serviced, and properly maintained. Otherwise, efforts to address transnational crime and terrorism through the framework of a rule of law will remain stymied.

In “Ebola Epidemic,” Prof. Yohannes Woldemariam and Mr. Lionel Di Giacomo address the effects of the 2014 outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia on those countries and on the international community. On 8 August, the World Health Organization declared the epidemic a “public health emergency of international concern.” By mid-September, nine months after the first case occurred, the numbers of reported cases and deaths were still growing from week to week despite multinational and multisectoral efforts to control the spread of infection. The epidemic has now become so large that the three most affected countries, mentioned above, face enormous challenges in implementing control measures at the scale required to stop transmission and to provide clinical care for all persons suffering with Ebola.

Dr. Aqab Malik provides an in-depth account of the indigenous manufacture of small arms and light weapons in the town of Darra Adam Khel and the wider Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. His study, “Darra Adam Khel: ‘Home Grown’ Weapons,” highlights factors such as the establishment of the infamous arms pipeline in Afghanistan; logistical issues related to the manufacture of firearms; the relationship between narcotics and arms; political problems; the buying and selling processes; methods involved in the procurement of weapons; the distribution and transportation of weapons, as well as the routes used; and the processes involved in the Hawala financial system for the exchange of payments in the black market arms trade. The article further aims to induce greater efforts to eradicate the menace of the widespread diffusion of small arms and light weapons from Pakistan. It does so by addressing concerted efforts in the consistent improvement of existing legislation and the inculcation of new legal tools that will assist in the reduction of the spread of these weapons in Pakistan as a result of the “Kalashnikov” culture that has taken root since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Rémy M. Mauduit, Editor

Air and Space Power Journal–Africa and Francophonie

Maxwell AFB, Alabama

The Trilateral Strategic Initiative

A Primer for Developing Future Airpower Cooperation

Col Peter Goldfein, United States Air Force*

Wing Cdr André Adamson, Royal Air Force, PhD

Since the rudimentary deconfliction measures of the First World War, the US Air Force, Royal Air Force, and French Air Force have developed their ability to conduct coordinated air operations, a practice they have further refined since the end of the Cold War. Interoperability—the effective integration of planning and execution during coalition operations—is now a critical factor for success. Specific to air operations, the importance of interoperability has consistently been identified during North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) actions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya, as well as ongoing coalition efforts in Iraq, Syria, and sub-Saharan Africa. Although each campaign has highlighted specific challenges for the three air forces, they have also demonstrated the potential of airpower integration. Thus, even though all three nations reserve their prerogative to act autonomously, a coalition effort seems a likely response to future crises.

Current doctrine and future strategy also confirm the importance of a coalition approach to air operations.1 Broadly speaking, coalition operations offer some tangible advantages. Specifically, political resilience, strategic reach, and individual niche capabilities are better employed when air forces combine capacity. The identification of common objectives makes national efforts more closely aligned and coherent. Additionally, responding collectively at short notice is increasingly important to national leadership; consequently, success depends upon the constant monitoring of and investment in interoperability, even for the closest of allies. Operations act as a catalyst to integration (through sheer necessity), but difficulties that emerge during complex multinational operations point to the need to preempt those frictions by raising the baseline of trust and interoperability ahead of the next operation. The effort demands clearly articulated political intent, the identification of common objectives, and the necessary resources to develop a trust-based, effective partnership.

The Trilateral Strategic Initiative (TSI) provides one such framework. The initiative had its origins in the personal relationships among the three air force chiefs who articulated their initial vision via a letter of intent in 2011 and signed a TSI charter in 2013, which not only outlines both intent and objectives but also designates a steering group. Three pillars of strategic importance lie at the heart of the initiative: increasing trust, improving interoperability, and advocating for airpower. Together, they set conditions for the more effective employment of airpower. Oversight of the initiative is the responsibility of the Trilateral Strategic Steering Group (TSSG), composed of senior officers from the three nations, serving in trinational teams placed in strategic posts close to the chiefs. This arrangement maximizes their effectiveness in areas of trilateral interest.2 The TSI is now in its third generation of trilateral chiefs who are equally supportive of the initiative, and a new version of the charter was recently signed at the Royal International Air Tattoo, United Kingdom, in July 2015.

To better understand the potential of this initiative and its steering group as a model for advancing international cooperation, one must explore the elements that make it a viable proposition for the constituent air forces. Doing so requires consideration of the initiative’s defining characteristics, the means chosen by the steering group to develop it, and the challenges that the initiative faces to achieve its goals.

Natural Convergences and Characteristics of the TSI Model

The US, French, and Royal air forces have strong historic and cultural ties; moreover, each has played a predominant role in developing and employing airpower as an instrument of national security. The core values of integrity, service, and excellence permeate these countries’ military cultures, which also have been shaped by a historic record demonstrating a consistent political appetite to employ airpower in support of national and international interests.

Existing and emerging crises have brought about a convergence of many national security objectives for the United States, France, and United Kingdom. Further, contextual reality, simultaneous multinational global operations, the diversity of threats to collective security, and an environment of increasing financial scrutiny continue to support a more compelling case for cooperation. At the same time, each of the three air forces has confronted the issues of maintaining readiness while remaining committed to expeditionary operations and wide-scale modernization. Such centripetal forces, therefore, have reinforced the need for “burden sharing” and have highlighted the value of effective military cooperation. All of these factors validate the chiefs’ vision of shared operational efficiency.

As for the characteristics of the TSI that help define its potential to progress under this vision, two in particular stand out. First, the exchange of senior officers who make up the steering group offers a small-scale but enduring framework to build trust and improve interoperability at the strategic level of each air force. Granted, the crucible of a multinational air campaign or even a complex exercise normally results in improved trust and interoperability among international participants. However, without a permanent framework designed to capitalize on progress, any advances risk being overlooked in subsequent efforts. Although not designed as a “lessons learned” mechanism, the TSI does give each air staff a mandate to promote an agenda of improving international cooperation, and its multinational steering group includes action officers charged with that responsibility. Second, the fact that the TSSG operates without the cumbersome bureaucracy commonly associated with a formal alliance or coalition gives it the liberty to creatively pursue the chiefs’ vision within the limits of its resources and to be innovative in its approach.

The convergence of values, as well as historic and current context, combined with national and organizational goals across the three air forces, helps explain the “why” behind the TSI, and the defining characteristics of its steering group help clarify the parameters of their mission. The “how”—the means employed under the initiative to realize its ambition—clearly need to be consistent with these parameters in order to sustain the tangible progress towards fulfilling the vision of the three service chiefs.

Means

The establishment in each air staff of a cadre of international officers responsible for driving trilateral cooperation at the highest level of each air force, itself a manifestation of trust, is a central pillar of delivering this vision. As with any exchange of international officers, incumbents quickly recognize the limitations of a purely national view, and their perspectives are necessarily broadened by their wider exposure. Although tactical-level exchange officers are rightly focused on developing tactics, techniques, and procedures, the individuals on this strategic exchange cross-pollinate ideas and concepts that directly influence the employment of airpower. In turn, having privileged access to the air force chiefs, they are well placed to influence the thinking of senior leaders.

The approach adopted by the steering group is a relatively simple one: it identifies impediments to airpower’s interoperability and presents solutions involving trilateral cooperation. The basis of the chosen model is ongoing collaboration among the elements of the steering group in each air force, creating opportunities for an informal exchange of ideas and for the sharing and debating of concepts (flavored by the perspective of each air staff) designed to feed the thinking of senior leaders. By maintaining an understanding of ongoing bilateral initiatives among the three air forces and an awareness of their institutional and operational priorities, the steering group can identify areas most likely of interest for trilateral cooperation. The desired results are not predicated upon placing any one nation in a lead role; rather, given the open-ended nature of the initiative, the interoperability and trust it seeks to build could support any number of cooperative constructs well adapted to a variety of operational requirements. To prime this model, each air force must select officers for this type of exchange who are well suited professionally and personally for the demands of duty at the strategic level of an air staff and who possess additional traits necessary to collaborate and advance a trilateral agenda while serving abroad. To inform its own internal discussions, the TSSG has brought together subject-matter experts and has hosted a number of forums on a rotational basis, reflecting the service chiefs’ specific priorities or deriving from major lessons identified during combined operations. Previous subjects have included combined crisis response, command and control, operational readiness, air advocacy, and national approaches to regional tensions. The formats have included workshops, planning exercises that address particular scenarios, academic seminars on airpower topics, and broad analyses. Generally, TSI activity also incorporates civilians, academics, and members of think tanks who make recommendations that will have the most impact not only on modifying reflexes and shaping behaviors but also on improving trust. The subsequent publication of trilateral results is intended to influence broader, higher-level national debate.

By steadily developing the network of officers and civilian airpower professionals associated with the TSI, efforts to institutionalize this collegiate approach are gaining traction. In Europe, trilateral cooperation has taken root among the three air operations centers, initiated through a series of exercises called Tonnerre-Lightning, launched in 2013 to conduct combined air command and control and to incorporate live sorties under progressively more complex scenarios.3 With its imperative to maximize the output of trilateral exercises, the combined air staff continually identifies opportunities to integrate collective aims into the exercise calendar. This aspect of the trilateral relationship has been reinforced by quarterly video teleconferences among air operations chiefs of the three air forces and by a new operational trilateral charter that they signed in March 2015.4

The trilateral exercise hosted by the US Air Force’s Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, in December 2015 is another excellent example of cooperation. US F-22 Raptor, French Rafale, and UK Typhoon aircraft operated together for two weeks at Langley to develop and better integrate their niche capabilities. This type of initiative, which seeks to prepare our combat forces prior to a complex conflict, concentrated on generating a disproportionate operational advantage. Other, equally pertinent opportunities for trilateral cooperation exist. An infrastructure-protection exercise held at the Avon Park auxiliary field in Florida in 2015 highlighted how this sort of cooperation can extend beyond aircraft participation. Security forces from each air force sought to protect and defend an air base by utilizing shared resources and objectives. The exercise provided an excellent basis for future operational integration among support mechanisms for air operations.

Efforts conducted under the TSI also contribute to more effective and credible air advocacy. Each of the air chiefs recognizes the priority of preparing airmen to positively influence joint and national decision makers. The most recent trilateral workshop, conducted in Washington, DC, in March 2015, was tailored to crafting a more refined, targeted trilateral airpower narrative. Furthermore, by contributing to the development of airpower, other allies can benefit from the TSI acting as a “trailblazer” or an intellectual catalyst. Results of TSI-sponsored activities have already informed ongoing debates within NATO and in the headquarters of allied air forces. The initiative can have a continuing role as a body representing the position of the three most capable air forces in the alliance on a broad range of airpower determinants. The seventh TSI workshop, to be held in France in 2016, will address potential convergences among the three air forces’ visions of future airpower employment. Moreover, it will shape recommendations for areas of emphasis in the trilateral relationship, which can complement a wider NATO study on the future of joint airpower in the alliance.

Intrinsic Challenges

Just as trilateral progress requires continuous effort, so does it demand perseverance in overcoming a variety of challenges. Fulfilling the trilateral vision of the chiefs calls for stamina, patience, and a deep cultural understanding of the three air forces so they can reach a mutually agreeable position. The steering group’s independence from organizational bureaucracy, a sort of blessing from which it derives a substantial degree of freedom of action, can equally be viewed as a curse when it comes to implementing trilateral activities.5 The streamlined nature of the model, which empowers a small group of senior officers to creatively advance their service chiefs’ vision, helps minimize implementation costs to each service. It sits on the opposite end of the spectrum from treaty-based military cooperation, created to respond to higher and more complex political objectives that require significant investment across the joint military staffs of participating allies into the oversight of cooperative objectives. Although the trilateral steering group is easier to implement than a treaty-based military hierarchy, its independence from organizational oversight means that the group cannot act as an empowered executive staff entity. Rather, it relies on initiative and creativity to overcome friction, and—given the limited degree of direct leverage that the steering group can exert on senior decision and policy makers—it must make the most effective use of its time and manpower.

At the practical level, a common impediment to cooperation is simply a lack of technical interoperability. Incompatibility of communication, information, and computer systems has a significant effect on effective integration. Coupled with the commercial sensitivities associated with procurement and open competition within the defense sector, such incompatibility makes industrial collaboration an even more complex issue. Therefore, new approaches to defense procurement may need to innovate; it is even conceivable that trilateral interoperability could become a contracted requirement in the future. Equally, in the conduct of air operations, trilateral activities will be inherently more complex than either national or bilateral alternatives and, at least initially, will demand more time to plan. To be addressed effectively, matters such as information exchange, security caveats, and intelligence sharing will call for considerable effort and trust. A central aspect of this shift is the willingness to exchange sensitive information. That is, building trust and confidence will depend upon moving from the principle of a “need to know,” which underpins many protocols related to information security, towards a “need to share” in the context of multinational operations. The TSI facilitates this principle by promoting among the partner nations an open exchange of concepts and doctrine that can propagate into wider, more accepted practices. A lack of language proficiency can also reinforce technical and procedural barriers. During a recent combined joint expeditionary force exercise between the United Kingdom and France, for example, translation and communication issues were identified as one of the major impediments to timely and accurate decision making in the combined headquarters.

However, the predominant strategic impediment to trilateral activity is cultural. Despite historic links and an increasingly rich operational capital to draw on, vested national interests and “national reflexes” can still offer a reassuring alternative to the inevitable friction and uncertainties associated with multinational operations. Even with shared NATO doctrine, defense policy and ambition are not identical and reflect the capacities and priorities of each nation. The US-UK “special relationship,” however defined, is woven into the cultural fabric of generations of military and political classes in the United Kingdom.6 This kinship greatly facilitates cooperation between the two countries’ air forces but is insufficient in itself to ensure an equally coherent trilateral relationship. Similarly, the principle of strategic autonomy is a sine qua non to France’s defense policy and continues to define many aspects of its military culture.7 Work under the TSI, therefore, must honestly acknowledge these differences and identify and exploit opportunities in each bilateral relationship to better align behaviors at a trilateral level.8

Furthermore, practical realities within each air force demand that a preponderance of the effort focus on national priorities. The inevitable consequence for most airmen is an infrequent exposure to their international counterparts, which in turn reinforces cultural reflexes towards national solutions when a country faces the need to employ airpower. Activities sponsored under the trilateral initiative are designed to expose participants to the potential of multinational operations and seek to readjust their reflexes for national responses towards a more trilateral perspective. The model must also confront limitations associated with any single-service initiative, given that many issues of interest to the three air forces inevitably have joint equities. If the TSI is to address those issues, exposure to the joint level will be necessary, and—in the absence of parallel trilateral initiatives outside the air domain—solutions for particular matters must be sought on a case-by-case basis.

Finally, the dynamic and cyclic nature of national politics presents a challenge to continuity. The TSI’s ambition to continuously improve integration is vulnerable to political cycles—a nation’s appetite for foreign intervention can change on short notice. Moreover, the level of priority afforded to defense and security concerns in national dialogues can have a profound effect on the sustainment of military partnerships. To remain insulated from these dynamics, cooperative initiatives such as the TSI must constantly prove their value. Thus, ambition should be tempered accordingly. The TSI was never intended to become the basis for an executive body in each air staff; rather, it serves as a framework designed to inspire activities to strengthen personal relationships, develop mutual understanding, and build confidence.

Consequently, even though the initiative offers a common vision for high-level trilateral cooperation, technical challenges, cultural dynamics, and national priorities will inevitably act as a drag on the rate of progress. Faced with these issues, the three countries will find that results are often difficult to quantify and must be validated against more pragmatic criteria. In this context, incremental gains and gradual progress pursued under the TSI meet the spirit of the chiefs’ vision and reflect the relatively informal nature of the steering group they established to pilot the initiative.

Conclusion

Although not a unique approach, the TSI and the steering group responsible for its implementation represent an original and potentially innovative model for exploring common ground and improving coherence in the development and employment of airpower. Each nation offers a different perspective on how to employ air and space capabilities, but the TSI seeks to refine the combined capabilities of the three air forces to respond as a team to rapidly emerging crises. By implementing a valuable forum for strategic communication and coordination, these air forces can identify and address operational impediments, establish greater cohesion, and explore the frontiers of trilateral cooperation.

As for the chosen means to implement the initiative, one finds an elegant approach in the establishment of a multinational steering group cross-pollinated at the strategic level of the three air staffs, which collaborates and sponsors trilateral activities, free from bureaucratic oversight but equally limited in its executive role. Its simplicity differs significantly from more formalized and more ambitious cooperative models such as the NATO command structure and the framework created in the French and UK military staffs to advance political objectives of the Lancaster House treaty. In this sense, the group meets the chiefs’ intent to advance their vision while respecting the practical realities confronting each air staff and its capacities to confront cultural barriers and practical challenges. The success of the TSSG depends on cultivating a community of participants in its trilateral activities and widening the number of individuals exposed to the results of its debates.

As this model gains traction, some questions inevitably arise concerning the broader utility of such an agreement: what, for example, might its applicability be for land and maritime forces or within a joint construct among the United States, United Kingdom, and France? These aspects could broaden trilateral cooperation to build trust and advance interoperability across a wider spectrum of military operations. Are there other international trilateral groupings that might benefit from a similar initiative of their own, based on its own logic, such as that of regional cooperation? Responses to these types of questions could depend on exposure and evaluation of this trilateral initiative beyond the three participating air forces.

The future success of trilateral efforts under this model hinges on several factors: sustained political intent, the highest levels of support within each air force, and continued evidence of advancement towards objectives. This progress is anticipated on multiple fronts in 2016, in collateral activities subsequent to the December 2015 trilateral exercise at Langley Air Force Base, in the continuation of the Tonnerre-Lightning exercise series in Europe, and directly from the forthcoming TSSG workshop in France. The strategic context demands these types of efforts from close allies, and ongoing operations are sure to reinforce this requirement. The TSI model is a valuable tool in meeting that need.

Notes

1. Joint Doctrine Publication 0-30, UK Air and Space Doctrine, July 2013, 2-5–2-6; Joint Concept Note 3/12, Future Air and Space Operating Concept, September 2012, 1-12–1-13; Department of the Air Force, USAF Strategic Master Plan (Washington, DC: Department of the Air Force, May 2015), 28–29, 34–35; and Ministère de la Défense, Livre Blanc: Défense et Sécurité Nationale (Paris: Ministère de la Défense, 2013), 21.

2. The US Air Force hosts UK and French officers in its Strategic Studies Group (HAF/SSG); the French Air Force hosts US and UK officers in its Plans Bureau, Strategic Studies Division; and the Royal Air Force hosts US and French officers in its Air Staff, International and Engagement Division.

3. The three centers include the 603rd Air and Space Operations Center at Ramstein Air Base, Germany; the UK joint force air component commander at RAF High Wycombe, England; and the French Centre National des Opérations Aériennes at Lyon Mont-Verdun Air Base, France.

4. An agreement between the US Air Force’s Third Air Force commander, the Royal Air Force’s commander of operations, and the French Air Force’s commander of air defense and air operations, the document creates a framework for multiple trilateral working groups designed to improve interoperability, specifically in the planning and conduct of air operations.

5. This independence could be contrasted with the proliferation of bilateral responsibilities assigned to officers in the military staffs of France and the United Kingdom as a result of the 2010 Lancaster House Treaty on Defense and Security Cooperation, a binding agreement designed to significantly improve defense and security cooperation between the two allies. Implementation has resulted in well-developed plans at the joint and single-service level to field a combined joint expeditionary force, providing a scalable asset up to two brigades in strength with an associated naval task group and air expeditionary wing. Of necessity, this approach demands general officer engagement at multiple staff levels and a commitment to training and regular exercises.

6. The US Air Force and Royal Air Force benefit from a privileged level of information sharing that underpins a robust officer exchange program and a tradition of high-level bilateral training. Though somewhat mirrored in the post–Lancaster House Treaty growth of UK-French cooperation, this sharing still outbalances similar US Air Force programs with the French Air Force.

7. Ministère de la Défense, Livre Blanc, 19–22.

8. Bilateral relationships include those provided under the United Kingdom–France Lancaster House Treaty and from increasing US-French cooperation in Africa.

*Colonel Goldfein is a command pilot with extensive operational experience in both Air Mobility Command and Air Force Special Operations Command. He has completed NATO staff tours at the Joint Warfare Center and in the command group at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe. Since 2013 he has been the USAF exchange officer to the French Air Staff, serving in the strategy division.

Wing Commander Adamson is a flight operations officer who has earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in war studies from King’s College London. He has operational experience in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Mali, and has completed assignments in Germany and Canada. Since 2014 he has been the RAF exchange officer to the French Air Staff, serving in the strategy division.

Third-Party Incentive Strategies and Conflict Management in Africa

Nikolas G. Emmanuel, PhD*

There is much to learn about the role of external actors in preventing violent conflict and managing it when it occurs. Consequently, this article focuses on the possible range of third-party conflict-management tools, primarily through the lens of an incentives approach. Third-party incentives seek to manage conflict by facilitating bargaining between the parties involved. Such an approach tries to go beyond the purview of realist international relations scholars, who concentrate predominantly on hard power, by considering soft intervention options to alter the behavior of conflicting parties.1 Clearly, military intervention on the one hand or avoidance on the other hand cannot be justified in most cases. In between these extremes, a wide variety of alternatives exists. These options are referred to here as incentive strategies, which offer the possibility for much greater leverage than is often recognized.

Outside third parties (primarily states and international organizations but also individuals and nongovernmental entities) make use of different types of incentives to manage conflict. This article takes a look at their application generally but in particular regard to African cases. It examines how external actors use incentive strategies to promote changes in behavior by helping to bring about negotiations and de-escalating intense internal conflict. The article argues that incentives are critical in conflict management. It advances the point that noncoercive incentive strategies have a great deal of potential in relation to more aggressive actions because softer approaches frequently offer rewards without the resentment and resistance that may come with more coercive efforts to alter behavior and manage conflict. To look more deeply into these issues, the article asks the following questions: What is an incentives approach to conflict management? What types of third-party incentive strategies are available? Can we draw any overarching generalizations about their utilization? By addressing these questions, the study seeks three practical goals: (1) to fill a gap in the relevant literature by exploring the theoretical basis for a use of incentives in conflict management, (2) to develop a typology of incentive strategies frequently used by external third-party actors, and (3) to further the discussion about the advantages of noncoercive approaches vis-à-vis their coercive counterparts.

Incentive Strategies

An incentives approach consists of a variety of strategies or policy options that a third-party actor may use to encourage conflicting parties to adopt a peaceful solution by easing the process of bargaining and compromise. One should note that encouraging this shift in behavior away from violent conflict towards political bargaining cannot occur only with hard power but must include soft power alternatives.2 That is, the rewards related to such soft intervention / noncoercive incentive strategies (compared with more coercive ones, such as diplomatic pressures, sanctions, or military intervention) are generally viewed more favorably by the targeted actor(s) than are punishments. That is to say, “Conciliatory gestures frequently lead to cooperative responses, while threats often initiate spirals of hostility and defiance.”3 Incentives, especially noncoercive ones, lead to less local and international resentment than do more aggressive, coercive actions. Power is clearly much more complex than just military force. The manner and context in which it is employed matter immensely. Consequently, noncoercive incentive strategies have an underestimated potential to result in peace when compared with coercion and force.4

It may be obvious that to reach a peaceful outcome, the conflicting parties themselves must learn to resolve their differences. Nonetheless, outside third parties can help push (or pull) them in the direction of peace. External actors can do so by using some of the incentives available to them. For all of their obvious potential, incentives have received little attention from scholars and the policy-making community. Instead, most of the reflection appears to concentrate on military intervention as the primary way to deal with civil conflict.

Additionally, one must emphasize that certain post–Cold War trends underscore the importance of exploring third-party conflict-management options. Over the past quarter century, two important trends have emerged in regards to intrastate war. First, such civil wars vastly outnumber interstate wars, and these internal conflicts tend to last longer.5 Second, although turned to frequently as a means of ending conflict, negotiated peace settlements appear to be more fragile in the post–Cold War era than they were before this period.6 These facts concerning civil war in the recent past make it even more important to assess the role of third parties and their efforts to help bring an end to such conflicts. Incentive strategies hold out some hope or at least provide us with some options, but what is meant by “incentives” or “incentive strategies” or an “incentives approach” to conflict management?

Incentives consist of a variety of “structural arrangements, distributive or symbolic rewards or punishments (e.g. disincentives) aimed to encourage a target state or movement in a given conflict to shift their priorities and agree to compromise on the major issues in contention.”7 Whether they are noncoercive or coercive, related to soft or hard power, incentives attempt “to raise the opportunity cost of continuing on the previous course of action by changing the calculation of costs and benefits.”8 Put differently, according to Aaron Griffiths and Catherine Barnes, incentives are measures that “can be applied to encourage or persuade one or all of the parties to a conflict to cooperate by introducing rewards for compliance.”9 Therefore, incentives are rewards or the offer of a reward. Yet, it would not have been offered had the “sender” not expected something from the “recipient”—for instance, a particular kind of behavior.10 In line with this logic, David Cortright, who analyzes how states use incentives towards other states, defines an incentive as “the granting of a political or economic benefit in exchange for a specified policy adjustment by the recipient nation.”11 Here, an incentive is the act of granting a benefit with a clear expectation of receiving something in return. For example, aid conditionality is one type of incentive.12 The overall objective of the incentives examined in this article has to do with managing conflict by facilitating bargaining relationships. These strategies can be used throughout the conflict cycle. From the potential conflict stage through postconflict peace building, the goal remains the same—to encourage peaceful relations by making political bargaining possible. Under such an approach, outside third parties offer some sort of benefit (or inflict some sort of punishment) to draw conflicting parties that are “sufficiently dissatisfied with their present costs . . . or future prospects” of warfare into a bargaining process.13 The goal of using incentives is to raise the costs of continuing down a path towards increasingly violent conflict.14 Third parties do so by expanding the benefits of abiding by the new rules of a more peaceful relationship. However, one must remember that incentives can involve positive actions such as rewards (legitimation, aid, etc.) as well as disincentives or negative inducements (punishment, threats, or coercion).

Situated between the options of doing nothing and taking military action is the choice of mediation, entailing the intervention of an outside third party (or parties) with the objective of assisting with bargaining between actors involved in the conflict. In such action, incentives are important resources available to mediators in their efforts to move the behavior of the conflicting parties in a desired direction, providing the mediators with leverage over the parties. A mediator’s influence comes from his or her ability to facilitate an outcome that is minimally acceptable to both sides or that threatens a worse outcome.15 By using incentives, external mediators make adversaries aware of the benefits of a negotiated outcome while alerting them to the increasing costs of bargaining failure and to the possibility of a return to war.16

Different levels of involvement and use of incentive strategies emerge, depending on the nature of the conflict and the third parties’ level of perceived interest. Certainly, in a large number of African conflicts, such as those in Mozambique, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, third parties have used a variety of noncoercive means to keep open the channels of communication and supply information on the intentions of rival parties. At the next level, as in the Ethiopian/Eritrean War of 1998–2000 and Sudan and Liberia in 2003, mediators led by the United States have been more proactive, persuading and criticizing, giving advice, encouraging the parties to reconsider their options, and formulating proposals. Finally, in Somalia and briefly in Liberia in 2003, the United States combined diplomacy with (humanitarian) military intervention in an effort to promote a dialogue leading to conflict resolution.

Incentives involve a trade-off between interference and the advancement of peace and protection.17 These types of policy instruments are used to influence other people’s behavior. They do so by reducing uncertainty over the process leading to a peaceful resolution of conflict, helping to give credibility to the negotiations that follow and easing uncertainty about their future intergroup relations.18 Most importantly, outside third parties can use incentives that encourage certain outcomes over others. As Donald Rothchild indicates, “determined mediators need not passively wait for a ripe moment to emerge.”19 Incentives by external actors can advance “ripeness” for conflict resolution.20 For example, in the case of Sudan’s North-South conflict, US secretary of state Colin Powell repeatedly emphasized the applicability of the “mutually hurting stalemate” concept in his interactions with the conflicting parties leading up to the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in January 2005.21 Through the application of incentives and the firm use of diplomatic pressure, mediators clearly can help advance the ripening process in some instances. In other cases, however, they can force too rapid a pace and watch ripeness turn rotten, agreements fall apart, and conflicts reignite into violence—results that occur all too frequently.

A Typology of Incentive Strategies

External third-party actors can help manage conflict in a variety of ways. They can use a wide spectrum of diplomatic, economic, and security options to de-escalate conflict once the spiral begins. This section highlights the main categories of an incentives approach, addressing their contributions to conflict management and resolution. These different incentive strategies can be arranged along a continuum from least to most coercive; however, the boundaries between different modes of third-party involvement are not always distinct. Certain policy instruments overlap different modes of influence in the typology.

As depicted in the table and figure below, at one end of the spectrum are the least coercive (i.e., noncoercive) measures that can be implemented to shift the conflicting parties’ relationships towards more peaceful bargaining.22 These include purchase, insurance, legitimation, and economic support. At the other end of the force continuum, the most coercive measures include diplomatic pressure, a wide variety of sanctions, and different types of military intervention. Although these coercive features are present in these options, they should be considered incentives that attempt to bring about cooperation. That is to say, external actors using these policies are attempting to encourage the combatting factions to alter their calculations (costs and benefits) of continuing to escalate already tense relations. The overall goal involves making the adoption of more peaceful behavior favorable to participants in a given conflict.

Table. Summary of noncoercive and coercive incentive strategies

Noncoercive Incentive Strategies

Purchase

Short-term fiscal rewards / side payments to shift behavior

Insurance

Promises or guarantees to build politico-institutional protections for disenfranchised groups

Legitimation

Offer to be a regular participant in the international community

Economic Support

Provision of developmental aid to alleviate group grievances

Coercive Incentive Strategies

Diplomatic pressure

Partially coercive strategy; expressing concern about behavior

Sanctions

Punitive strategy designed to alter behavior; symbolic dimension

Military Intervention

Strategy used by a third party especially to strengthen political initiative; can decisively alter the balance of forces

Source: Donald Rothchild and Edmond J. Keller, Africa-US Relations: Strategic Encounters (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006).

Figure. Principal incentive strategies. (Based upon Donald Rothchild and Nikolas Emmanuel, “Soft intervention in Africa: US Efforts to Generate Support for Peace,” in Strengthening Peace in Post–Civil War States: Transforming Spoilers into Stakeholders, ed. Matthew Hoddie and Caroline A. Hartzell [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010], 123–43.)

It is important to indicate at this point that incentive options are frequently applied together in packages. For example, in the case of the Machakos talks on the North-South civil war in Sudan, diplomatic pressure was combined with threats of deepening the sanctions regime on Khartoum to increase the costs of the target if it did not alter its preferences and continue the conflict. However, the choice of which incentive strategy to apply in any given case depends on a third party’s capacity, willingness to engage, and assessment of what will prove effective in de-escalating the conflict and advancing peace. Future research needs to examine this topic more closely.

Noncoercive Incentive Strategies

As Donald Rothchild and Nikolas Emmanuel indicate, noncoercive incentives are more likely to result in a durable peace; furthermore, if coercive methods are applied, one should follow up with foreign aid and encourage important political reforms like minority protections as a means of preventing a relapse of violence.23 Note that, overall, the choice of incentive(s) is based on a diplomat’s perception of his or her country’s interests and the ability of his or her strategic approach to realize its desired purposes of conflict termination at a reasonable cost.24

Importantly, making overarching generalizations about the use of different foreign policy approaches—in this case, the use of incentives—is rather difficult. Each conflict has its own dynamics and specificities. That said, it is possible to put together a general road map that gleans vital information from previous uses of incentive strategies in conflict management. It is valuable to consider past experiences to better inform possible incentive choices that may be relevant in each future context. To explore these experiences and any potential generalizations, the remainder of this article examines each of the seven incentive strategies in more detail and then offers some general conclusions.

Purchase. A number of relatively low cost but sometimes quite effective means of facilitating cooperation are available. The noncoercive incentive strategy of purchase represents one of these options. Purchase refers to short-term, tangible fiscal rewards or side payments that can alter payoff structures and behavior to help end conflict. Purchase differs from economic aid, which is much larger in terms of amount and scope. By offering such an option, the third party enlarges the pie in an effort to facilitate the possibility of reconciliation. It alters the payoff structure to transform a dispute from a constant-sum to a positive-sum game, thus enhancing the possibility of a compromise.25 More concretely, purchase can be used to make special arrangements with individuals or groups of individuals to encourage exit (i.e., leave the conflict). The hope is to eliminate the potential for spoilers that may undermine the move away from violent conflict.26

Such side payments or special deals to encourage an exit can be seen in the successful international effort to persuade former Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam to leave Addis Ababa and depart for Zimbabwe in May 1991. Furthermore, this technique can provide short-term financing to rebel movements to ease their transformation into legitimate political parties, in hopes that they will become stakeholders in the political system. At the end of Mozambique’s civil war, the rebel group Renamo received $19 million from key donors to help convert the insurgent organization into a political party. Clearly, the international community can contribute significantly to furthering conflict-management objectives.27

Purchase is widely used and, despite its relatively low cost, can contribute significantly to furthering conflict-prevention goals. By themselves, these types of incentives are not likely to overcome the commitment problem in intense conflict situations, but even here their contribution to conflict management should not be dismissed lightly.

Insurance. Outside actors can play important roles by encouraging conflicting parties to adopt and respect inclusive political institutions and minority protections, as well as to uphold negotiated settlements. As such, insurance incentives can help manage conflict by trying to alleviate the fears of disenfranchised groups. These measures are frequently offered during the peace-implementation phase in an effort to make possible more pacific interactions in the future. External third parties can attempt to transform an intrastate dispute by promising protections for minorities and safeguarding their participation in the political institutions once the peace agreement is implemented. That is to say, third parties from the international community may have considerable capacity to reassure minority groups through promises of support for regular elections, political autonomy, inclusion of weaker interests on a proportional basis in the civil service and central government, the rule of law, judicial impartiality, rules on the proportional distribution of revenues, and the protection of linguistic, religious, and ethnic rights.28 Constitutional and legal protections can offer broad assurance for vulnerable minority peoples, encouraging their participation in the peace process.

The problem of insuring the representation of minority interests in new postconflict state institutions received considerable attention in Sudan’s North-South and Darfur peace processes. Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement represents such an effort. Outside actors helped with a number of protections in this negotiated settlement, including temporary power-sharing mechanisms in Khartoum, English and local language usage in the South, and the referendum for the independence of the South in 2011, leading to an autonomous South Sudan.

Encouraging as such promised guarantees are for minority security and well-being, there are limits to their efficacy, nonetheless, and the majority party cannot credibly commit future leaders to refrain from exploiting smaller parties at a later date.29 Additionally, considerable constraints on external actors may exist and undermine such incentives. Under pressure from their own domestic constituents to reduce overseas involvements (especially ones that they believe might not fit in their perceived “national interests”), third parties find it difficult in practice to honor fully the “guarantees” they give in order to uphold the agreement.

Legitimation. Perhaps one of the most powerful inducements for peaceful relations is the inclusion of a given actor as a part of the international community. Acceptance (or nonacceptance in some cases) by other states is a form of soft intervention that affects the credibility of the underlying negotiating process.30 Third parties can use such legitimacy incentives to induce a target state’s or movement’s cooperation in preventing intense conflict or helping to de-escalate it once it has emerged. States and international organizations, in passing judgment on other actors’ legitimacy, can affect the reputation of elites and their ability to enter into beneficial relations with other members of the international community and all of the benefits it entails. This option is a form of what Joseph Nye calls “soft power.”31 At its core, legitimation offers the incentive of the inclusion of actors in the international community. Furthermore, excluding states or other actors from participation or membership in an international organization involves elements of delegitimation that can be costly. They are thus willing to take serious steps to avoid it.

Legitimacy incentives are also a resource for stabilizing the commitment to democratization in the postconflict phase. Reacting to a series of military coups in Niger, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, and Guinea-Bissau, the Organization of African Unity at its Algiers summit in 1999 decided that governments that mounted coups against constitutionally established regimes after 1997 would be suspended from future summits. The organization subsequently prevented the postcoup military governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Comoros from attending the Lomé summit in 2000.32 Similarly, the Economic Community of West African States demanded that Togo return to constitutionality following the attempted transfer of power from the late president, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, to his son in February 2005.

Given such possibilities for international action, on the one hand it seems clear that legitimacy incentives represent a noncoercive means of considerable potential importance in various contexts, such as in the area of conflict prevention and de-escalation. On the other hand, the exclusion of a state from full participation or membership in an international organization involves elements of delegitimation that can be costly in terms of access and support from donors and potential investors. As a consequence, states are willing to take serious measures to avoid a loss of international standing. The readiness of international organizations to hold out the prospect of inclusion or exclusion is clearly a powerful tool at their disposal.

Economic support. For more than a decade now, a growing body of scholarship has offered empirical support for the conclusion that the occurrence of civil war is closely related to unequal incomes and low average income in a given country.33 In agreement with this finding, James Fearon and David Laitin’s data indicate that countries with lower per capita incomes tend to be strongly related to a higher propensity for civil war in the period following 1945.34 Not surprisingly, therefore, the prospect of donor economic support seems likely to increase the size of the available pie, holding out the likelihood that increased economic opportunity for all will enhance mutual cooperation and lower the probability of future warfare. It seems clear that when a society and its elites anticipate gains from cooperation and bargaining, they should be more readily prepared to work through potential crises and try to build a more prosperous future. Using aid as incentive, therefore, can hold promise for peace.35

Development aid can be especially useful in the early stages of conflict before widespread violence takes hold. Donor funds can help overcome societal stresses and group grievances that may lead to war by reconstructing the economy and redistributing the benefits of economic growth. Additionally, economic assistance can be critical in the postconflict phase, helping ease tensions and avoid a recurrence of violence.36 Further, recent research does in fact indicate that in the sample of African cases in which international donors gave sustained developmental assistance after the signing of a peace agreement, the majority did not return to war within five years.37 However, when assistance was not sustained or decreased, the chances of a return to civil war increased noticeably. Given this empirical reality, it is not surprising that promises of economic assistance can be perceived as a chance for increased economic opportunities for all communities in a given conflict. Note that such economic support packages are not personalistic, like the purchase option; instead, donor economic aid is offered to assist the wider national community with the hope of reconciliation and development. The promise of aid (which includes bilateral, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund economic assistance; expenditures on infrastructure; debt restructuring and forgiveness; etc.) represents a future peace dividend offered to parties to induce them to overcome their differences and agree on joint problem-solving approaches. The adversaries have an incentive to agree to peace and thus gain the benefits that follow from ending the uncertainty of protracted war and creating new possibilities for economic development.38

The 1979 Lancaster House conference on Zimbabwean Independence stands as a striking example of the impact that donor economic assistance can have on a peace process. Key donors, mainly the United Kingdom and the United States, both coordinated their efforts and made important financial pledges to induce the parties to reach an accommodation. Here, incentives in the form of developmental assistance proved critical in the negotiations, which sought to cultivate the ripening process and an eventual negotiated settlement.

Coercive Incentive Strategies

In addition to the above-mentioned noncoercive incentives, it is important to note that three partially or fully coercive incentives are available for employment by third parties for the purposes of conflict management. Despite their coercive features, one should treat them as incentives for cooperation since external actors use coercive measures to change the calculations of costs and benefits of local parties and encourage them to alter policies accordingly.39 This inclusion of primarily coercive actions among the corpus of incentive strategies is different from the narrower approach adopted by some scholars but seems justified in terms of the purposes of the sending actor(s) and how they go about achieving them. These approaches include diplomatic pressure, sanctions, and military intervention.

Diplomatic pressure. Diplomats frequently act in a preventive manner by raising awareness of the potential future costs of escalating conflict. They attempt to alter the perceptions of the warring parties, shifting them to more accommodating positions. Effective communication of the possibly negative impact of continuing conflict-prone behavior is crucial to the success of this strategy. However, diplomats need leverage on the parties and the interests involved to be able to press for a more peaceful situation. Stern warnings alone are frequently not enough to facilitate bargaining and an end to violent conflict. To build this leverage, diplomatic efforts are often combined with other incentives. Some of the most effective courses of action include offering economic assistance or warning about an imminent cutoff of aid, as well as threatening to invoke or offering to remove sanctions, and deciding on the inclusion or exclusion of a target state from an international organization. US leverage in the negotiations to end the Sudanese North-South conflict concentrated mostly on diplomatic incentives, combined with pressure to increase the sanctions regime if Khartoum did not comply and the promise to reduce sanctions if it did. Overall, the mediators frequently use this leverage to ripen the situation, convincing the warring parties that they had indeed reached a mutually hurting stalemate and needed to find a negotiated settlement.

In the 2003 Machakos negotiations concerning the lengthy and brutal Sudan North/South conflict, US secretary of state Powell referred to the mutual exhaustion of all parts in the war.40 He explained that two decades of war could be ended and that a third party like the United States and others in the international community could help them push towards peace. By that time, mediators perceived and pushed the concept of the presence of a mutual hurting stalemate in Sudan. After decades of fighting, the North was thought to have become war weary and was not able to obtain and keep the upper hand in the conflict. Khartoum could control the vital oil fields in the South in the dry season, but when the rains of the wet season arrived, it had great difficulty doing so. Southern forces, though, appeared less fatigued by the conflict, but they too did not know how to escape the back-and-forth fighting that was so closely influenced by the weather and seasons. Mediators used this reality to push the idea of a hurting stalemate to move the negotiations forward. Once the mediators realized that a ripe moment was at hand in Sudan, US diplomats acted to further the mediation process by attempting to use its leverage on the regime of Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum. In doing so, the Bush administration removed Sudan from its list of countries considered uncooperative in the fight against terrorism and held out the possibility of lifting the broad-based US economic sanctions. It felt that these issues would prove helpful in building sufficient leverage on the Sudanese leaders to push them towards a negotiated peace settlement with the South.41

In this period, the United States had leverage with the parties in the Sudanese negotiations, enabling it to play a constructive role in influencing the priorities of these rivals. The International Crisis Group deemed that “sustained U.S. pressure on the parties is the single most important factor needed” in the Sudanese negotiations during the Machakos talks.42 Clearly, so that diplomatic pressures can work, mediators use their leverage over the parties involved in the conflict. In the above-mentioned case of Sudan, the mediator helped bring the parties into an agreement based on what I. William Zartman calls a “mutually enticing opportunity.”43 When such a violent conflict is intense and third-party influence is needed, a mediator requires the capacity to raise the costs of proceeding with a given course of action.44

Sanctions. Sanctions (such as aid conditionality, targeted individual sanctions, economic sanctions, etc.) are certainly an important resource for conflict management, but they call for careful application if they are to have the desired effect. The threat or actual imposition of a wide variety of sanctions on a target state or movement represents an important coercive incentive strategy. Sanctions are designed to alter the behavior of combatants in a desired direction, in this case towards a peaceful settlement of the conflict. These actions seek to punish those who violate widely held international norms and to provide incentives for cooperation if behavior changes. Additionally, sanctions have an important symbolic dimension, for they indicate the international community’s displeasure with the target’s present behavior. This second aspect of sanctions is frequently underestimated. That is to say, if one views the impact of sanctions broadly and includes the psychological and symbolic effects they have on the bargaining environment, then it is critical to stress their potential contribution on peace negotiations as well—take for example the US Congress’s enactment of the 1986 Anti-Apartheid Act. Incentives with South Africa advanced the interests of the sender—here the United States—without immersing it in a military intervention. In the case of South Africa, Washington proved that a realistic and relatively low-cost means of exerting influence could encourage the principal actors in the targeted country to alter their behavior and agree to new common institutions and norms.

Yet, it is important to note that sanctions are widely viewed by many people as rather ineffective tools. Frequently, broad-based economic sanctions have a problem targeting the precise groups deemed responsible for the offensive behavior.45 Sanctions also have not historically proven to be relevant coercive instruments with authoritarian regimes or weak states, or those with a certain level of autonomy from the sender’s, or more generally the international community’s influence. Sanctions, then, require careful application if they are to provide an incentive for change.

Nonetheless, sanctions can be considerably strengthened when applied in a multilateral manner with demands for change that are limited in scope and with targeted states that have clear links to the global economy. Sanctions represent an important coercive incentive strategy for conflict management, but they demand careful application if they are to have the desired effect. Powerful states are in an advantageous position “to exert influence to persuade the disputants to change their stance and agree to terms they are reluctant to accept.”46 Their leverage allows them to persuade and pressure the adversaries to adopt more cooperative positions on the issues that divide them.47

Military intervention. When noncoercive and minimally coercive incentives fail to prevent conflict from emerging or escalating, third parties may have little option other than raising the costs and threatening or using military force. Such actions should be viewed as a last resort to enforce peace and protect vulnerable populations. Yet, the threat or actual deployment of military power may at times prove indispensable to de-escalate a dangerous situation and to further legitimate objectives. Under the proper conditions, military intervention by a relatively benign third party can play a constructive role and can supply pressures and incentives to alter the conflict trajectory, facilitate bargaining, and protect the safety of vulnerable peoples.48 Provided their troops are sufficient in number to achieve their purposes and are well trained and armed, third-party military actions or the threat of such actions may be indispensable in strengthening a political initiative.49 When the key international actors or the international community as a whole is either unable or unwilling to use force to help stop such horrific situations as the Rwandan genocide, the consequences can be disastrous. Remarkably, these military interventions do not need to be large. The relatively small British force that deployed in Sierra Leone in 2000 was sufficient to rescue United Nations peacekeepers taken hostage and put the peace process back on track. As with this case and the example of the French military intervention in Cote d’Ivoire in 2002, although military force may be the last resort, its threat or actual use can prove crucial to further legitimate diplomatic objectives.

Beyond protecting vulnerable populations, military enforcement can be an important element in overcoming the credible-commitment problem and information issues that frequently undermine peace processes.50 In addition to monitoring the actions of adversaries and providing information, the third party’s use of military enforcement can actually further buttress a peace process by raising the costs of attempting to break the new bargain. Supporting this conclusion, Barbara Walter finds that parties in a peace process are 20 percent more likely to follow through on an agreement if a third party intervenes as a protector of the agreement.51 Thus, third parties are likely to play a critically important role in overcoming uncertainties surrounding the consolidation process, providing much-needed support to the state, and raising the costs for potential challengers.52

Obviously, military force can at times be helpful in third-party attempts to manage conflict. It may be able to protect at-risk populations from massive human rights abuses or genocide, as in the case of Rwanda or Darfur. However, war appears to be changing in the twenty-first century, in Africa and elsewhere, as militia groups replace regular armies on the battlefield. Readily available modern technology and guerilla tactics combine, making military intervention and peace enforcement and peacekeeping difficult for conventional armed forces.53 The conflicts in Somalia and Mali underscore this concept. In such situations, the very notion of victory may have lost some of its meaning, as irregular forces simply avoid surrender and melt into their communities until another opportunity presents itself. Moreover, external military force may even prove counterproductive and bring about a nationalist rally-around-the-flag effect, undermining the third parties’ efforts. Clearly, military intervention in many of today’s conflicts is a delicate task, especially while trying to protect at-risk peoples, remaining unbiased, and either helping the parties involved reach an agreement or assisting them in the implementation of one.

Conclusion

A wide variety of incentive strategies is available for third parties to use in an attempt to manage conflict in Africa and beyond. Nonetheless, external actors do not always consider the full range of options. The above-mentioned incentive strategies can give interveners leverage and aid them in efforts to mediate and hopefully manage deadly conflict. This leverage is frequently diplomatic in nature, not simply military, providing an advantageous basis for soft intervention in conflicts, especially when the extremes of withdrawal and military intervention are inappropriate and may even be counterproductive. The problem is that these noncoercive incentives may not raise the costs of noncompliance sufficiently. Hence, as the previous discussions of economic sanctions and military enforcement suggest, it is necessary at times to link diplomacy with the threat or use of force to produce breakthroughs in the negotiation process. Regardless, evidence points to the fact that African elites as well as scholars, policy makers, and the public in the sender and target countries generally prefer noncoercive incentives to their coercive counterparts because the sting of external imposition is less apparent and because the resulting bargain has a voluntary quality about it. Following on these realities, future research on this topic should examine the critical issues of (1) the proper timing of the deployment of various incentives and (2) the packages of incentives that have been used successfully to encourage bargaining and resolve conflict.

Notes

1. Donald Rothchild and Nikolas Emmanuel, “Soft Intervention in Africa: US Efforts to Generate Support for Peace,” in Strengthening Peace in Post–Civil War States: Transforming Spoilers into Stakeholders, ed. Matthew Hoddie and Caroline A. Hartzell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 123–43.

2. Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

3. Gail W. Lapidus with Svetlana Tsalik, eds., Preventing Deadly Conflict: Strategies and Institutions (Washington, DC: Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Carnegie Commission of New York, 1998), 57.

4. Rothchild and Emmanuel, “Soft Intervention in Africa.”

5. Barbara Walter, “Designing Transitions from Civil War: Demobilization, Democratization, and Commitments to Peace,” International Security 24, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 127–55.

6. Roy Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (September 1995): 681–90; and Barbara Walter, “Does Conflict Beget Conflict? Explaining Recurring Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 3 (May 2004): 371–88.

7. Donald Rothchild, Managing Ethnic Conflict (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997), 19.

8. David Cortright, “Incentives Strategies for Preventing Conflict,” in The Price of Peace: Incentives and International Conflict Prevention, ed. David Cortright (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 273.

9. Aaron Griffiths with Catherine Barnes, eds., Accord: Powers of Persuasion; Incentives, Sanctions and Conditionality in Peacemaking, no. 19 (London: Conciliation Resources, 2008), 11, http://www.c-r.org

/downloads/19_Powers_persuasion.pdf.

10. Astri Suhrke and Ingrid Samset, “What’s in a Figure? Estimating Recurrence of Civil War,” International Peacekeeping 14, no. 2 (April 2007): 195–203.

11. Cortright, “Incentives Strategies for Preventing Conflict,” 6.

12. Nikolas Emmanuel, “Undermining Cooperation: Donor-Patrons and the Failure of Political Conditionality,” Democratization 17, no. 5 (October 2010): 856–77; and Emmanuel, “Evaluating a Political Conditionality Approach: The Role of Aid in Malawi’s Democratic Transition,” African and Asian Studies 12, no. 4 (December 2013): 415–34.

13. I. William Zartman, “Negotiating Internal Conflict: Incentives and Intractability,” International Negotiation 6, no. 3 (October 2001): 301.

14. Elizabeth M. Cousens and Chetan Kumar with Karin Wermester, Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001).

15. Rothchild and Emmanuel, “Soft Intervention in Africa.”

16. Donald Rothchild and Nikolas Emmanuel, “U.S. Intervention in Africa’s Ethnic Conflicts: The Scope for Action,” in Africa-US Relations: Strategic Encounters, ed. Donald Rothchild and Edmond Keller (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 65–97.

17. Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8.

18. I. William Zartman, “Negotiating Internal Conflict: Incentives and Intractability,” International Negotiation 6, no. 3 (October 2001): 300; and Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

19. Rothchild, Managing Ethnic Conflict, 148.

20. I. William Zartman, Ripe for Resolution: Conflict and Intervention in Africa (New York: Oxford, 1985).

21. Johnny Thabo Pitswane, “The Dynamics of Mediation and Conflict Resolution in Darfur, Sudan: 2004–2011” (PhD diss., University of Witwatersrand, 2014).

22. Rothchild and Emmanuel, “Soft Intervention in Africa”; and Rothchild, Managing Ethnic Conflict, 99–108 and 256–73.

23. Rothchild and Emmanuel, “Soft Intervention in Africa.”

24. I. William Zartman, “Systems of World Order and Regional Conflict Reduction,” in Cooperative Security: Reducing Third World Wars, ed. I. William Zartman and Victor A. Kremenyuk (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 7.

25. Saadia Touval, The Peace Brokers: Mediators in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1979 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 327; and Jeffrey Rubin, ed., Dynamics of Third Party Intervention: Kissinger in the Middle East (New York: Praeger in cooperation with the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 1981), 27.

26. Richard Haass and Meghan O’Sullivan, Honey and Vinegar: Incentives, Sanctions, and Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 163.

27. Rothchild, Managing Ethnic Conflict, 257.

28. Rothchild and Emmanuel, “Soft Intervention in Africa,” 129–30.

29. James Fearon, “Commitment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict,” in The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict, ed. David Lake and Donald Rothchild (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 108.

30. Zartman, “Negotiating Internal Conflict,” 300.

31. Joseph Nye, “Soft Power,” Foreign Policy 80 (Autumn 1990): 168.

32. Monde Muyangwa and Margaret A. Vogt, An Assessment of the OAU Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, and Resolution, 1993–2000 (New York: International Peace Academy, 2000), 31.

33. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, Greed and Grievance in Civil War, Policy Research Working Paper Series 2355 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000).

34. James D. Fearon and David Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 75–90.

35. Nikolas Emmanuel, “Peace Incentives: Economic Aid and Peace Processes in Africa,” African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review 5, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 1–32.

36. Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, “International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 4 (December 2000): 795.

37. Donald Rothchild and Nikolas Emmanuel, “United States: The Process of Decision-Making on Africa,” in Africa and the North: Between Globalization and Marginalization, ed. Ulf Engel and Gorm Rye Olsen (London: Routledge, 2005), 24.

38. Emmanuel, “Peace Incentives.”

39. Rothchild and Emmanuel, “Soft Intervention in Africa.”

40. Philip G. Roeder and Donald Rothchild, Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 106.

41. Africa Research Bulletin 40, no. 12 (February 2004): 15771.

42. “Five Minutes to Midnight in Sudan’s Peace Process,” International Crisis Group, 8 August 2003, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Urgent_Action/apic.081403.html.

43. I. William Zartman, “Explaining Oslo,” International Negotiation 2, no. 2 (1997): 197.

44. Cortright, “Incentives Strategies for Preventing Conflict,” 273.

45. David Cortright and George Lopez, The Sanctions Decade: Assessing UN Strategies in the 1990s (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000), 4.

46. Saadia Touval, Mediation in the Yugoslav Wars: The Critical Years, 1990–95 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 173.

47. Rothchild and Emmanuel, “Soft Intervention in Africa.”

48. Bruce Jentleson and Christopher A. Whytock, “Who ‘Won’ Libya? The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy,” International Security 30, no. 3 (2005–6): 52.

49. Bruce Jentleson, “Use of Force Dilemmas: Policy and Politics,” in Eagle Rules: Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Robert J. Lieber (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002), 274; and Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 258.

50. David A. Lake and Donald S. Rothchild, eds., The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

51. Barbara Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 83.

52. Caroline Hartzell, Matthew Hoddie, and Donald Rothchild, “Stabilizing the Peace after Civil War: An Investigation of Some Key Variables,” International Organization 55, no. 1 (January 2001): 203.

53. Frank Hoffman, “Lessons from Lebanon: Hezbollah and Hybrid Wars.” Foreign Policy Research Institute, 24 August 2006.

*The author is an assistant professor at the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Resolution of International Conflict. Professor Emmanuel holds a BA in political science from the University of California–San Diego; an MPhil in political science and African studies from the Institut d’Études Politiques and the Centre d’Études d’Afrique Noire in Bordeaux, France; and a PhD in political science from the University of California–Davis. His research is in the area of international relations and comparative politics with an emphasis on the use of soft-intervention strategies to facilitate changes in the behavior of various state and nonstate actors in Africa and beyond.

South Africa

Africa’s Reluctant and Conflicted Regional Power

John F. Clark, PhD*

This article enquires into South Africa’s regional role in Africa from the dissolution of apartheid in 1994 through the end of Thabo Mbeki’s presidency in 2008. South Africa was widely expected to play a major role throughout the African continent with the end of apartheid and Nelson Mandela’s election to the South African presidency. Both South Africa’s economic clout and Mandela’s standing as a global embodiment of forbearance and patient statesmanship made South African leadership on the continent seem inevitable. Yet, by most accounts, South Africa has failed to live up to its promise of leadership. In general, that country has much more often and successfully played the role of Africa’s global representative than it has that of a continental hegemon or leader. As described below, it is in fact quite difficult to characterize or label South Africa’s continental role although there is no denying that it is a “regional power.”1 This article asks, then, why South Africa has failed to live up to its promise as a regional leader.

The study proceeds as follows. First, it outlines South Africa’s potential as a leader beginning in 1994. Across several dimensions, the country has had unique potential to provide strong regional leadership since that time. Second, the article offers an outline sketch of South Africa’s foreign policy in several key areas during the period in question. It obviously cannot provide a comprehensive analysis of the country’s record, depending mostly on secondary literature to summarize South African behavior. Although South Africa clearly did become embroiled in many of the continent’s most treacherous conflicts and controversial issues, it rarely proved decisive in setting agendas, resolving conflicts, or establishing and enforcing new norms of behavior. The third section begins by reconsidering how South Africa’s role as a regional power can best be characterized and then enquires into the sources of its foreign policy behavior. After examining a number of hypotheses, the article argues that one can best understand South Africa’s failure to lead by focusing on the country’s domestic politics—especially the legacy of its ruling African National Congress (ANC).

South Africa’s Potential as a Regional Power

There is little doubt that South Africa was the preeminent regional power in sub-Saharan Africa in 1990, the year of Mandela’s release from his 27-year imprisonment. During the dark years of apartheid, South Africa had built up a formidable military machine anchored by the Armaments Corporation of South Africa, established in 1968. This state enterprise produced a wide array of military equipment that included armored vehicles, tanks, self-propelled artillery, and a variety of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. These weapons were produced in considerable quantity and deployed by South Africa’s armed forces, which gained major operational experience in fighting the foes of apartheid abroad, especially the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola government. Indeed, Angola surely would have been overrun by the South African defense forces in 1975 or in subsequent years had it not been for the massive deployment of Cuban troops and Soviet weapons and advisers to that country. The total numbers in the “South African Defense Forces” numbered only about 80,000 during the 1980s, but they were the most capable in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa even developed chemical, biological, and atomic weapons in the 1970s.2

Following Mandela’s election in 1994, his administration and subsequent South African governments have allowed the quality and budget of the (renamed) South African National Defense Forces to decline. This fact is altogether understandable given (a) the domestic development focus of the postapartheid governments and (b) the termination of South Africa’s conflicts with its neighbors. Nonetheless, in 2015 that country’s defense forces remained the fourth most powerful military in Africa (behind those of Egypt, Algeria, and Ethiopia) and the second most powerful in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a leading website.3 Further, if one compares South Africa with its leading military competitors (Nigeria and Ethiopia), it is clear that South Africa is the only one of the three with the ability to project power reliably within the continent. The table below provides a snapshot of the basic military strength and ability to project force of sub-

Saharan Africa’s three regional powers. The figures clearly indicate that South Africa has some limited ability to project power, making it a potentially significant partner in peacemaking missions and a nation capable of engaging in “forceful diplomacy,” if not one able to dominate the subcontinent.

Table. Armed forces of sub-Saharan Africa’s leading regional powers, 2015

Personnel

Total

Aircraft

Transport Aircraft

Attack

Aircraft

Frigates and Submarines

Ethiopia

182,500

81

38

22

0

Nigeria

130,000

98

42

19

2

South Africa

88,565

209

106

29

7

Source: “African Countries Ranked by Military Power (2015),” Global Firepower, 15 August 2015, http://www.globalfirepower

.com/countries-listing-africa.asp.

In terms of economics, South Africa was and remains sub-Saharan Africa’s undisputed leader, with a gross domestic product (GDP) standing at $351 billion in 2014.4 This status was as much the case in 1994 as in 2014: the country has been the subcontinent’s undeniable leader since the advent of majority rule there. South Africa’s only rival among black African countries was Nigeria, which claimed to have a GDP topping $500 billion in 2014. The next highest ranking GDP in Africa in 2014 was Angola’s—only slightly more than one-third that of South Africa. As for Nigeria, no one can really say what its real GDP is, given the chaotic nature of the country’s public institutions and the absence of reliable data.5 GDP per capita in South Africa was roughly six times that of Nigeria. Further, South Africa is a significant manufacturing country whereas Nigeria mainly exports oil. South Africa has leading banks (notably Standard Bank of South Africa, Sanlam, and FirstRand) with branches in several other African countries, but Nigeria has no such peer. South Africa has major multinational companies in the areas of telecommunications (MTN, Vodafone), mining (DeBeers, AngloGold), chemicals and fuels (Sasol), and brewing (SABMiller). Accordingly, it boasts a foreign investment potential that far exceeds that of Nigeria or any other African peer.

Finally, one should not underestimate South Africa’s moral authority in sub-Saharan Africa, although this asset may be wasting. The heroic struggle of black, “colored,” and white foes of apartheid over more than 30 years and the freeing of Mandela remain an unparalleled epic of liberation in the African consciousness. Not only are most Africans proud of the ability of South Africans to liberate themselves from racial tyranny, but also many of them feel that they contributed to that cause. Mandela, of course, embodied the courage and extraordinary character of South Africa’s freedom fighters, but following his departure from power, the ANC party continues to represent the historic quest for freedom in that nation. Accordingly, all of South Africa’s successive governments have enjoyed an unequalled voice in African continental affairs on this moral basis. Even if its military and economic power had been less, South Africa should naturally have exerted considerable diplomatic leverage with its African peers following the end of apartheid.

The most important qualification that one should make about South Africa’s outsized potential for regional leadership is that concerning geography. Its capability for regional or subregional hegemony would have been increased considerably if the country had been physically situated elsewhere on the continent. In military terms, a nation located where the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is found would have more potential to intervene readily in the conflicts of most of the states of the continent. Even in terms of foreign investment, South Africa naturally finds it much easier to invest in Mozambique, for instance, than in Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, or Gabon. Indeed, South Africa has invested far more on a per capita basis in the states it borders than those thousands of kilometers further north. Only South Africa’s moral suasion is unaffected by its location on the southern African extremity.

South Africa’s Performance as a “Regional Power”

The evidence presented above suggests that South Africa is a “regional power” and might have seriously tried to act as a continental hegemon if it had wished to do so. The corroboration presented below, however, suggests that it has not done so. Yet, South Africa has sometimes taken an important role in regional affairs. This ambiguity leaves us wondering how one could best characterize South Africa’s regional role. One good place to begin is the excellent work of Miriam Prys, who has created a valuable typology of roles played by “regional powers.” According to her, they may play one of three relatively more active or passive roles:

At the one extreme, we have “regional dominators”: A clear characteristic of domination is its one-sidedness. The state at a center of such a constellation, the regional dominator, commands and extracts involuntary tributes from the secondary states under a constant threat of force. A “hegemon,” in contrast, carries most of the burdens in the region and, at most, collects contributions from the secondary states, which are mostly used for the production of common goods. Furthermore, dominating or imperialistic states directly infringe on the external and internal sovereignty of other states, whereas a hegemon, in the ideal case, refrains from doing so. On the other end of the continuum, we can find “detached regional powers,” induced either by insufficient resources or, for instance, by a lack of identification with the region. Such an actor will focus largely on domestic and⁄or on global politics, instead of on its regional role. The three ideal-types of regional powerhood thus capture a fairly complete spectrum of different roles a regional power can play.6

Considering this tripartite typology, one would have to say that South Africa has more often been a “detached regional power” than a hegemon. It has never tried to be a regional “dominator” in any context except perhaps that of the Southern African Customs Union, which groups South Africa with Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland.7 In that venue, South Africa has dominated without much effort and has often tried not to appear as a bully in asserting its prerogatives. In the larger context of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), however, South Africa’s tentative efforts to establish hegemony have been “contested.”8 Although it overshadows all other states of this subregion economically and makes considerable financial investments in several states, outside powers are greater investors in Angolan oil, Congolese copper, and Tanzanian gas, for instance. In the greater subcontinent, South Africa has often been a passive regional power. As Prys suggests, that country has been far more focused on domestic politics (and development) and secondarily on playing a global role as Africa’s chief representative. At the regional level, South Africa’s rhetoric has gained some currency, but it has hardly “carried most of the burdens,” and it has certainly not “collected contributions” unless one counts some investment returns. One would expect a regional hegemon to create norms that other states would follow. As Chris Alden and Garth le Pere contend, to act as a hegemon “mean[s] managing the challenges of organizing institutions and inculcating new regimes amongst African states as well as disciplining errant states and/or their policies which contradict or challenge these authoritative structures.”9 In this area, South Africa has made only a modest contribution. It does not fit neatly, then, into any of Prys’s three categories of regional powers.

To gain a clearer picture of South Africa’s regional role, let us examine the ensemble of its behavior in that arena. We should address the country’s roles as (a) a propagator of regional political norms, (b) an advocate for positive social transformations around the continent, (c) a broadcaster of economic ideology and an enforcer of certain economic norms that could drive economic development, and (d) a practitioner of forceful diplomacy in the region’s conflicts. A sampling of South Africa’s activities in these areas will help us better understand how to characterize its regional role.

Starting with South Africa’s activities in propagating and inculcating political norms within Africa, its part has been distinctly and surprisingly limited. At the rhetorical level, Mbeki has famously pronounced on the inevitability of an “African Renaissance.” In broad terms, the idea of such a renaissance suggests many overlapping and reinforcing notions: that a new period of African unity was at hand; that Africa would soon play a much larger and positive role in world affairs; that governance with African states was on the verge of becoming more democratic; and that the fulfillment of the economic needs of Africa would soon be realized, among others. Yet, serious analysts of the idea of an African Renaissance have savaged it for its vagueness and impracticality. Notably, Peter Vale and Sipho Maseko have pointed out that “South Africa’s idea of an African Renaissance is abstruse, puzzling, even perhaps mysterious; more promise than policy.” They go on to assert that “notwithstanding claims that the idea of an African Renaissance now stands at the very centre of South Africa’s entire diplomatic endeavor, its essential features remain deliberately vague; it is high on sentiment, low on substance.”10

In terms of concrete outcomes, democratization has not fared well in Africa since the advent of majority rule in South Africa. A majority of the democratic experiments that began shortly after the conclusion of the Cold War in Africa had failed by the end of the 1990s.11 South Africa has generally seemed insouciant about the decline of African democracy; it has rarely if ever made an issue of the death of democratic regimes on the continent. Similarly, it has not objected to such notorious dictators as Denis Sassou-Nguesso (2006–7), Mu‘ammar Gadhafi (2009–10), and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo (2011–12) becoming chairperson of the African Union (AU). Even several African states that are geographically close to South Africa and which opened their political space to political competition in the early 1990s (including Angola, Mozambique, and Madagascar) have generally failed to make any progress toward real democracy. Meanwhile, and most spectacularly, South Africa’s immediate neighbor Zimbabwe has gone in the opposite direction. Whereas Zimbabwe still enjoyed relatively open and peaceful political competition in 1994, it has since become a personalist authoritarian regime. South Africa has also done little or nothing to promote pluralism in Swaziland, a politically premodern kingdom that offers few rights to its citizens and treats women abysmally.

One might object that South Africa does have a political vision for African states but simply that it is not one of multiparty democracy. Some African regimes, notably that of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, have occasionally argued that multiparty democracy is the wrong political formula for Africa. Implicitly, some African regimes have suggested that the Chinese one-party model may be better suited to African class development or political culture. South Africa, however, has not articulated any such alternative political vision for Africa in place of multiparty democracy. Instead, it is largely silent on the question of what form the domestic politics of African states should take.

Nor has South Africa taken a strong stand in favor of human rights on the African continent. To the contrary, much of the world has been disappointed in its apparent indifference to the large-scale human rights abuses perpetrated by the regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Yet, South Africa’s behavior on human rights in Africa (and beyond) goes beyond mere indifference. One scholar studying its behavior in the United Nations Human Rights Council has “concluded that South Africa has become a defender of unpalatable regimes and an obstacle to the international promotion of human rights.”12 Within the council, South Africa has presented itself as one of the leaders of the African bloc, along with Egypt and Algeria, and has proved itself “one of the more obstructive states in the Africa Group” when it comes to punishing or condemning human rights abusers.13 Other African states, including Zambia, Mauritius, and Ghana, on the other hand, have sometimes dissented from opinions of the African Group, which has often ignored or apologized for regional human rights abuses.14

At the level of interstate norms or relations among African states, South Africa has played a somewhat more positive role, but it has failed to reinforce the principles that it appears to have advanced. Africanists widely understand that Mbeki, along with Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo and Libya’s Mu‘ammar Gadhafi, was instrumental in developing the “blueprint” for the new AU.15 In recognition of this role, the inaugural meeting of the new organization took place in Durban, South Africa, in July 2002. In turn, the Constitutive Act of the new AU made two important advances (from the liberal internationalist point of view) on the old Charter of the Organization of African Union. First, Article 4(h) asserted “the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.”16 This new principle accorded the AU the right of collective intervention in cases of grievous human rights abuses, including genocide, by member states. The second innovation is Article 4(p), which provides for the “condemnation and rejection of unconstitutional changes of governments.”17 This principle would seem to reject the participation in the AU of African governments that had come to power by coup d’état.

South Africa’s part in the insertion of these two principles in the AU’s constitutive act remains unclear since deliberations over the act were not public. Certainly, though, neither one of these new principles has been respected in practice.18 The AU has authorized only one collective intervention: restoration of the sovereignty of the government of the Comoros over one of its constituent islands that attempted to secede under the leadership of a rogue governor. It has not intervened in any serious way against the mass atrocities of Sudan and the eastern DRC, to name the two most egregious cases. Nor has the AU taken any serious action against those who overthrew existing leaders through coups d’état (i.e., “unconstitutional changes of government”). In the years that succeeded the adoption of the Constitutive Act, there were coups in Togo (2005), Mauritania (2005 and 2008), Guinea (2008), Madagascar (2009), and Niger (2010).19 However, South Africa took no substantive action to have these states suspended from the AU. Typically, the new regimes of the states in which coups occurred were initially condemned by the AU, and some suffered brief suspensions from the Union. Once a new “constitutional order” was restored under the same coup-making regimes, however, they were all allowed to retake their places in the AU. Thus, the new principles enshrined in the organization’s constitutive act have not been respected in practice. In fact, they make the body appear to have no respect for the rule of law, since it does not respect its own principles. South Africa has raised no objection to these hypocritical practices.

Turning to South Africa’s efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions in sub-Saharan Africa, let us consider its policies on AIDS as an illustrative example. One early book on South Africa’s foreign policy by a highly respected Africanist includes not a single mention of HIV/AIDS in the entire volume.20 This neglect reflects not only the author’s possible lack of interest in the subject but also the absence of HIV/AIDS as a subject of South Africa’s foreign policies, even when millions of Africans were infected in South Africa and in neighboring countries. With respect to Mbeki, of course, the former South African president’s “denialism” about the true source of AIDS is well known. A great many of his own fellow citizens were outraged by Mbeki’s policies on HIV/AIDS within South Africa, policies that followed his extremely heterodox—and frankly disastrous—views. The Young Communist League of South Africa even called for a “judicial commission of inquiry with prosecutorial powers” to investigate whether his policies made him “guilty of mass murder.”21 Since Mbeki did not accept that HIV was the cause of AIDS at home, he unsurprisingly undertook no campaign to battle HIV in continental Africa.22 Although South Africa’s lack of action on HIV/AIDS is only illustrative, no other significant initiatives in favor of social improvement were evident in the country’s foreign policy over the same years.

A third potential area of hegemonic activity for South Africa would be as a broadcaster of economic ideals or as an enforcer of economic norms that could drive economic development. Critics of both Mandela and Mbeki on the left have decried the alleged sellout of South Africa’s majority-rule leaders to global capitalism. Characteristic of this view, Patrick Bond remarks that “Mbeki and his main allies have already succumbed to the class . . . limitations of post-independence African nationalism, namely acting in close collaboration with hostile transnational corporate and multilateral forces whose interests are directly opposed to those of Mbeki’s South Africa and African constituencies.”23 Many others on the South African left share this view.24 At home, both Mandela and then Mbeki abandoned the ANC’s long-held commitment to socialism and pursued promarket-oriented economic policies as well as conservative fiscal policies. Instead of following policies of redistribution, both sought “black economic empowerment” within the liberal market system, leavened with modest doses of affirmative action for nonwhites.25

At the regional level, however, one cannot discern the systematic dissemination of any coherent economic ideology. Alden and le Pere claim that South Africa’s economic ideals are not embedded in continental institutions, limiting its influence. Further, they argue that the country’s ideas do not resonate much with other leaders of African people: “The ideas promulgated by the South African state—principally in the form of the ‘African renaissance’ and its programmatic NEPAD [New Partnership for African Development] initiative—have only limited traction amongst regional elites and seemingly are unrecognized by the masses.”26 South Africa has certainly, and hardly surprisingly, sought to promote the investment activities of its own companies throughout the Africa continent, including many of the leading ones mentioned above. Ideologically, though, South Africa has not sought to replicate its “close collaboration” with capitalist forces within the African continent; on the contrary, it has competed with them. South Africa might quite reasonably have promoted any one of three distinctive economic models for its Africa peers: (1) the quite orthodox promarket policies that it generally pursues at home; (2) the kind of socialist and redistributionist policies that marked the rhetoric of former president Mbeki when he condemned the capitalist West; or (3) the kind of state-directed and nationalist policies that have been so successfully pursued in East Asia.27 In practice, South Africa has not articulated any specific model for the development of its less-developed African peers, and in this regard it has been distinctly nonhegemonic.

Finally, let us consider the country’s record as a practitioner of forceful diplomacy in the regional context. One important analyst of South Africa’s foreign policy has claimed that the country began to emerge as the key diplomatic player during negotiations to end the epic war of the DRC that broke out in 1998. According to Chris Landsberg, “It was through that move [intervening in the DRC conflict as a mediator] that Pretoria decisively emerged as a regional power outside of the SADC area. Pretoria effectively upstaged the external great powers such as the United States, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom as the new regional power on the block.”28 Several years later, the same scholar reaffirmed his view that South Africa had become a regional hegemon with respect to resolving regional conflicts:

[Under President Mbeki] South Africa played key mediatory and peacekeeping roles in Lesotho, where it helped to end a coup d’état, and in the [DRC] and Burundi. It helped to negotiate global peace agreements, albeit fragile ones, based on power-sharing arrangements, in Cote d’Ivoire, Comoros, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Mbeki was at pains to ensure that South Africa executed this role under the auspices of multilateral authority of, variously, the [SADC], the African Union (AU), and the UN Security Council.29

Yet, considerable evidence makes us doubt this conclusion about South Africa’s role in the DRC. Landsberg himself seemed to have reservations in 2002, writing “regionally, within SADC, the reviews on Pretoria’s diplomacy were decidedly mixed. While some observers saw an emerging regional power, others witnessed an ambivalent regional power that did not know how to wield influence” (emphasis in original).30 Indeed, that view extends outside the SADC region. First, South Africa took no significant action during the crisis of 1994–96 in eastern Congo while hundreds of thousands of Rwandans took refuge in Congolese territory. The continuing presidency of Mobutu Sese Seko had become a problem for the entire Great Lakes region as well as for Angola. In this great crisis, Mobutu was defeated and removed from power by (chiefly) Angola, Rwanda, and Uganda while South Africa essentially stood by with Mandela engaging in naïve attempts at negotiation. After the installation in power of Laurent Kabila, this ruler, too, soon proved both ineffective and menacing to his neighbors. Again, South Africa played no major part in his ouster, although it did host talks that led to the December 2002 “Global and Inclusive Agreement on Transition in the D.R. Congo.” Even in those talks, however, Ketumile Masire, the former president of Botswana, served as the “neutral mediator” rather than Mbeki.

Alas, the 2002 Agreement on the DRC hardly ended conflict in that country. Although Angola, Rwanda, and Uganda officially withdrew their troops, fighting continued in the east of the country, including the two Kivu regions (North and South) and in the Ituri province of the Équateur region. Rwanda periodically dispatched its troops into the Kivu regions while also funneling arms and material to various Tutsi-led militia groups. The last and most notorious of these was the M-23 rebels, a group that periodically took control of Goma, capital of North Kivu. Meanwhile, to the extent that anyone was “enforcing” the 2002 Global and Inclusive Agreement, that task fell to the “International Committee in Support of the Transition.”31 The ambassadors to the DRC of 15 leading states and international bodies (including the European Union [EU] and AU) composed this unparalleled diplomatic creation. South Africa’s ambassador was among the group of 15, but he was hardly the leading figure.32 Its main purpose was to keep the peace in the DRC leading up to the (surprisingly) free and fair elections of 2006. These were mainly funded by the EU, individual EU member states, and the United States. South Africa did not play a major part either in imposing peace on the DRC or in getting the difficult elections organized.

In the following years, the activities of various rebel groups in the Kivus and Ituri erupted periodically, and neither the Forces Armeés de la République Populaire du Congo (FARDC) nor the large United Nations (UN) mission in Congo (successively, MONUC [UN Organization Mission in the DRC] and then MONUSCO [UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC]) was able to tame them. The two UN missions, in fact, had no mandate to do so. The murderous activities of eastern Congo’s rebels was an outrage to the world and a major irritant to all of the states of the Great Lakes region save Rwanda, which continued to sponsor the Tutsi-dominated groups. Finally, several of these states had had enough, especially the president of Tanzania, Jakaya Kikwete. According to the former Dutch military commander of UN forces in eastern Congo, “The strategy of deploying a military force to offensively engage with the rebel groups in eastern DRC was conceived and agreed to by African regional powers in the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) in July 2012.”33 This group did not include South Africa, which apparently had no role in the decision to throttle eastern Congo’s rebels once and for all. Later, a UN “intervention brigade,” attached to the larger UN mission in Congo, received a mandate to engage in offensive actions against eastern Congo’s rebels, and South Africa did contribute forces to this remarkable group.

Vale describes Mbeki’s foreign policy as a “riddle,” pointing to the myriad contradictions rife in his foreign policy initiatives.34 Among these were South Africa’s instinct for solidarity with its African peers on the one hand and its recognition of liberalism as the dominant global ideology on the other. A parallel contradiction was South Africa’s resistance to the West’s resolve to impose its human rights standards on certain rogue regimes (like that of Myanmar, where Aung San Suu Kyi replaced Mandela as “the world’s most famous detainee” after 1990)35 while also hoping to live up to the human rights aspirations embodied by Mandela.

Much of Vale’s analysis focuses on Zimbabwe, which experienced extreme sociopolitical violence following the elections of 2008 and a complete economic collapse thereafter. South Africa had contradictory impulses about Zimbabwe that it never resolved: many South African elites were troubled by the extremely violent measures that President Mugabe resorted to after the elections; however, those same elites seem to have valued their loyalty to Mugabe, based on his steadfast support of the ANC prior to 1994, more highly than they did the lives of Zimbabwean citizens. They also apparently had no desire to intervene outright in Zimbabwe. Accordingly, South Africa declined to cooperate with Western efforts to sanction Mugabe but also was reluctant to apologize for his violence. In short, South African policy was contradictory. In the end, the country helped negotiate the ill-fated power-sharing agreement between Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai in September 2008. The upshot of this deal was that Mugabe maintained real power in Zimbabwe whereas Tsvangirai was politically delegitimized as an opposition figure. The latter agreed to become a powerless prime minister, presiding over a “unity” cabinet and thus losing legitimacy as an opposition leader. In a weak neighboring state where South Africa might have brought down a despot or even provoked a deeper crisis to bring change, it instead practiced a “quiet diplomacy” that led to a deceitful and doomed diplomatic compromise—hardly the behavior of a determined hegemon.

These observations about South African behavior on the continent, of course, are only illustrative. A comprehensive analysis would require a book-length study. Such a fuller analysis might include some more examples of “hegemon-like” behavior. On the whole, though, the analysis above suggests that South Africa failed to perform the roles characteristic of regional hegemons: it generally did not try to propagate political norms for the continent; in the case of HIV/AIDS, it was virtually the opposite of an advocate for positive social transformations across the continent; and, as an economic actor, it failed to either broadcast or embody an economic model that other African states might emulate. In the important arena of diplomacy, it must be said that South Africa’s record was more mixed. The country did often make itself available as a mediator of critical conflicts in the region, particularly in the DRC. It was not generally willing to back the diplomatic deals it brokered with military force, though, except in the case of the UN’s “intervention brigade.” In this instance, however, other actors had taken the lead.

South Africa: A Reluctant and Conflicted Power

This analysis leaves us with two difficult questions. First, how can we best characterize South Africa’s regional behavior in Africa? One might be tempted to refer to South Africa as a “passive hegemon,” a phrase sometimes used by international relations theorists to describe reluctant great powers, but South Africa is neither (completely) passive nor hegemonic beyond its very immediate environs. Nor, on the other hand, do any of the labels suggested by Prys (“regional dominator,” “hegemon,” and “detached regional power”) accurately capture South Africa’s behavior.36 It is quite clear that the country lacks either the military might or the will to be a “regional dominator.” Nonetheless, as Alden and le Pere note, “The African renaissance, the formulation and launch of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) and the construction of the African Union, not to mention efforts to broaden the trade and security agenda at the Southern African Development Community (SADC) level, all speak to South Africa’s ambitions to realize a hegemonic presence on the continent” (emphasis added).37 These activities and some of the high-level diplomacy in which South Africa has frequently engaged show that it cannot be described as either a “detached regional power” or a “passive hegemon.”

Unfortunately, no clear set of descriptors serves to describe well the role that South Africa has played in Africa since the end of apartheid. By virtue of both its objective power capabilities and its ambitions for regional leadership, South Africa can be fairly described as a “regional power.” Oddly, it has much more often tried to act as spokesperson for the African continent on the global stage than it has a hegemon on the continent; in turn, the international community has also accepted South Africa in this role. This behavior bespeaks its regional power status. In its regional behavior, however, South Africa has been a reluctant and ambivalent regional power. This conclusion again raises the question posed by Alden and le Pere: “Why is South Africa falling short of fulfilling the requirements of hegemony, especially when it appears to meet all the conventional conditions for dominance of the continent?”38 Their own work gives no clear answer and ends with an inward-looking lament about South Africa’s continuing domestic difficulties.39

Let us briefly consider five different possible causes of South Africa’s “underperformance” as a regional power. For one, there is the obvious issue of geography, referenced above. South Africa’s peripheral location in relation to the geographic center of continental Africa certainly limits its ability to respond in a military fashion to crises around the continent. Its intervention in Lesotho (under cover of a SADC mandate) in 1998 suggests the possibility of more South African hegemonic behavior if it bordered other crisis areas. Yet, its inaction in Zimbabwe, a neighboring country whose internal instability has had major consequences for South African society in the form of hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwe refugees, suggests otherwise. Nor has South Africa taken any notable action to shape the politics of its other neighbors—Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Moreover, hegemonic influence does not usually require either military force or proximity. South African (hypothetical) policy statements on such phenomena as “unconstitutional changes of government,” mass murder in the Darfur region of Sudan, the advent of Salafist groups in northwest Africa, and other troubling issues would have been as important to establish a clear role for itself as a continental leader. In short, geography is not the main key to South Africa’s reluctant and ambivalent behavior.

Second, one might reasonably consider whether some state or organization at the global level has constrained South African hegemonic behavior in Africa. Yet, all of the prima facie evidence suggests otherwise. Nothing more clearly signals the readiness of the “international community” for South Africa to play the role of continent hegemon than its inclusion in the G-20 group of nations in 1999 as the sole African member. For its part, the United States has long sought “African solutions to African problems,” less as a principled ideological stand than as expediency in the face of threats perceived to be greater. The Clinton administration infamously stood by in 1994 as the genocide unfolded in Rwanda, keeping its gaze firmly averted from Africa; it was hardly even mobilized to act when two US embassies were destroyed (in Kenya and Tanzania) in 1998; the George W. Bush administration focused squarely on Afghanistan and then Iraq in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks; and President Barack Obama has sought to avoid foreign action anywhere abroad, except by drone. China also demurs when it comes to taking political leadership in Africa and has no logical reason to oppose South African assertiveness.

Three other factors account for South Africa’s reluctant and ambivalent behavior on the continent. First, the African continental environment is one over which even a highly capable and legitimate state would have difficulty ever exercising hegemony. Compared to Latin America, for instance, Africa is extraordinarily diverse, both socially and politically. The number of different identity communities (“ethnic groups”) far surpasses that of any other continent, and the diversity in worldview among them is remarkable. The main source of social unity in Africa derives from a sense of common and collective victimhood at the hands of European slave traders and then colonizers. This “negative” source of collective identity is far weaker than that provided by, say, the Catholic Church in Latin America. Moreover, South Africa remains somewhat apart from the common African identity that does exist despite the erstwhile solidarity of black Africa with the ANC during its long years of repression. Not only South Africa’s white racial minority but also many of its elite blacks consider themselves apart from the rest of Africa.40

Politically as well, Africa was marked by great diversity at the moment that South Africa emerged from its long ordeal of minority rule. Exercising hegemony over the continent’s international norms was surely easier in the era when the de jure one-party state was the rule, and the intervention of one state in the internal affairs of its neighbors was the exception. By the advent of the Mandela presidency in 1994, Africa was populated by a wide array of polity types: a handful of states were in the early stages of democratic consolidation, following democratic transitions; in others, new democratic experiments were beginning to fail, and disorder was taking hold; in still others, old autocrats were in the process of turning their former one-party states into “electoral autocracies.” Even two kingdoms (Morocco and Swaziland) survived on the margins of the continent. Although Western states, including both the United States and Africa’s former colonizers, were generally pushing for “democracy” or at least some form of “multipartyism,” their efforts proved limited. South African elites observed this chaotic scene from a closer vantage than any outsiders and surely soon realized that the imposition of a single form of domestic rule was out of the question. Meanwhile, this new diversity of domestic political forms following the collapse of the legitimacy of the one-party model drew into question the interstate norms that had prevailed since the advent of the Organization of African Unity in 1963.41

Second, South Africa is far weaker as a continental power than it seems on the surface. As described in the first section, above, South Africa has all of the tangible elements it requires to serve as a continental hegemon for Africa, but it decidedly lacks the essential intangible elements that allow a “regional power” to play hegemonic roles. Above all, South Africa has no common sense of national identity or of continental purpose. Bluntly stated, South Africans are not sufficiently united as a people for their own government to act on their behalf in a coherent way. The divides that cleave South African society, of course, are primarily racial, but ethnic divides within the black community also remain important. South Africa’s 11 official languages reflect this reality. Class cleavages are also very deep.

This lack of coherence of the national population is reflected in the only partially integrated quality of South Africa’s public institutions. Within the South African public service, the challenge of integration has arguably degraded the organizational effectiveness of the bureaucracy.42 Within the armed forces, the integration of six different “statutory” and two “nonstatutory” military organizations in the country as of 1990 has proved a daunting challenge that has been only partially overcome.43 As a result, the contemporary armed forces of South Africa are far less capable as a military machine than those of apartheid-era South Africa. Neither the military’s declining budget nor the diminution of the country’s weapons stock has weakened it most; rather, its fundamental sense of identity and purpose has eroded. This is hardly regrettable, given the circumstances.

Third, and most critical, is the nature of domestic politics in South Africa that limits the country’s hegemonic potential in Africa. Since the nation is politically dominated by the ANC—a party with enormous historical legitimacy and international status as the body that brought freedom to the country’s majority—it might seem at first glance to be well set politically for a vigorous external role. Instead, the ANC is beset with a number of problems that limit its effectiveness in both foreign and domestic policy. Ironically, one of them is the ANC’s dominance of the South African political landscape. The ANC has won each of the five parliamentary elections between 1994 and 2014 with a relatively steady percentage of the vote, ranging from 62 percent (in 2014) to 70 percent (in 2004). Because of the ANC’s 20-year dominance of South African politics, democracy has never been fully “consolidated” in the country. More significantly, all ANC leaders of the current generation continue to feel a “comradely” debt of gratitude toward their former (and continuing) supporters in other African countries. Many of the foreign ruling parties, and even individuals, that supported the ANC under apartheid remain in power across Africa. Thus, it is hardly surprising that South Africa might be reluctant to employ forceful diplomacy with countries like Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, or Zimbabwe. These former “frontline” states are all still ruled by the parties that ran them during apartheid, and all supported the ANC.

The ANC’s political dominance of South Africa is also problematic for the country’s foreign policy because the party has become rife with bitterly opposed factions. The ANC’s infighting is hardly surprising, given the inevitable fashion in which the party of Mandela dominates the political space. Cleavages within the party prevent it from developing a unified and coherent foreign policy that it might implement on behalf of the nation. Meanwhile, the ANC’s political domination also makes many of South Africa’s weak opposition parties reluctant to fully support its foreign policies. Both black-dominated parties to the left of the ANC and white- and/or “colored”-dominated parties to the right resent the ANC too much to support it fully in foreign affairs.

Finally, the ANC is rather schizophrenic in its internal economic policy positions, and this “disease” is reflected in South Africa’s failure to articulate a coherent ideology of economic development for the African continent. The fundamental economic policy dilemma of the ANC is clear, simple, and completely understandable. On the one hand, it has long been a party that staked its claim to power on “economic justice” as well as on racial justice. That is, the ANC implicitly promised its constituents rapidly improving economic conditions, based on state control of the economy and forcible redistribution of wealth, if necessary. On the other hand, the ANC has never been in a position to carry out this threat vis-à-vis the capital-owning classes of the country. If it had adopted such policies in the 1990s, large-scale capital flight from the country would have been immediate, and most foreign investment would have ceased. This in turn would have sent the economy into an immediate spiral downwards, making its desire to improve the welfare of the country’s black majority even more difficult. Moreover, in the 20 years since majority rule, the formerly tiny class of capital-owning blacks in the country has expanded considerably. Many of these, in turn, have direct ties with the ANC. Consequently, the ANC is more reluctant than ever to apply confiscatory economic policies to South Africa’s elite in pursuit of social justice. This existential dilemma of South African domestic economic policy is reflected in the country’s foreign policy: it hardly knows whether to recommend liberal market economics or socialist redistribution to its African peers, and it ends up having no coherent economic message at all.

It seems most unlikely that South African society or politics will experience a sudden coalescence of national identity or national unity in the near future. The cleavages wrought by centuries of racism and a half century of formal apartheid have bequeathed the benighted country a politics fraught with suspicion and antagonism. Whereas the ANC’s political ascendency seems assured for the coming decades, a deeper integration of the society seems even further away than it did shortly after the incomparable Mandela took power in 1994. The dream of true unity in the “Rainbow Nation” remains firmly on the horizon. Until that dream becomes more of a reality, it is impossible that South Africa will exercise the level of influence over the affairs and ideals of the African continent that its military might and economic prowess would otherwise suggest.

Notes

1. See Miriam Prys, “Hegemony, Domination, Detachment: Differences in Regional Powerhood,” International Studies Review 12, no. 4 (November 2010): 479–504.

2. Helen E. Purkitt and Stephen F. Burgess, South Africa’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

3. “African Countries Ranked by Military Power (2015),” Global Firepower, 15 August 2015, http://www

.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing-africa.asp.

4. “South Africa: Economic Indicators,” Trading Economics, 11 December 2015, http://www.tradingeco nomics.com/south-africa/indicators.

5. Further, the halving of petroleum prices in late 2014 and early 2015 has surely reduced the notional size of Nigeria below that of South Africa again.

6. Prys, “Hegemony, Domination, Detachment,” 489.

7. Chris Alden and Garth le Pere, “South Africa’s Post-apartheid Foreign Policy: From Reconciliation to Ambiguity?,” Review of African Political Economy 31, no. 100 (2004): 150–52.

8. SADC groups together 15 African states, including all of those in southern Africa; the DRC and Tanzania; and the island states of Mauritius and Seychelles. Alden and le Pere, “Post-apartheid Foreign Policy,” 152–56.

9. Ibid., 148.

10. Peter Vale and Sipho Maseko, “Thabo Mbeki, South Africa, and the Idea of an African Renaissance,” in Thabo Mbeki’s World: The Ideology and Politics of the South African President, ed. Sean Jacobs and Richard Calland (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002), 124 and 125.

11. Leonardo A. Villalòn and Peter VonDoepp, eds., The Fate of Africa’s Democratic Experiments: Elites and Institutions in Comparative Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

12. Eduard Jordaan, “South Africa and the United Nations Human Rights Council,” Human Rights Quarterly 36, no. 1 (February 2014): 90.

13. Ibid., 94.

14. Ibid.

15. Chris Landsberg, “Thabo Mbeki’s Legacy of Transformational Diplomacy,” in Mbeki and After: Reflections on the Legacy of Thabo Mbeki, ed. Daryl Glaser (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010), 220–21.

16. Constitutive Act of the African Union, 7, accessed 11 December 2015, http://www.au.int/en/sites/default

/files/ConstitutiveAct_EN.pdf. For an early analysis, see Ben Kioko, “The Right of Intervention under the African Union’s Constitutive Act: From Non-interference to Non-intervention,” International Review of the Red Cross, no. 852 (2003): 807–25.

17. Constitutive Act of the African Union, 7.

18. On the nonimplementation of Article 4(h), see Dan Kuwali and Frans Viljoen, eds., Africa and the Responsibility to Protect: Article 4(h) of the African Union Constitutive Act (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2014).

19. Eki Yemisi Omorogbe, “A Club of Incumbents? The African Union and Coups d’État,” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 44, no. 123 (January 2012): 137–52, http://www.vanderbilt.edu/jotl/manage/wp-content

/uploads/omorogbe-cr.pdf.

20. Ian Taylor, Stuck in Middle GEAR: South Africa’s Post-apartheid Foreign Relations (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001).

21. Mark Gevisser, “Why Is Thabo Mbeki a ‘Nitemare’?,” in Glaser, Mbeki and After, 63.

22. Ironically, it was (conservative) George W. Bush, in the form of his Presidential Emergency Plan for Aids Relief and other extracontinental donors and activists, who came to the assistance of Africa’s HIV-infected multitudes.

23. Patrick Bond, “Thabo Mbeki and NEPAD: Breaking or Shining the Chains of Global Apartheid?,” in Jacobs and Calland, Thabo Mbeki’s World, 53.

24. John Saul, “Cry for the Beloved Country: The Post-apartheid Denouement,” in Jacobs and Calland, Thabo Mbeki’s World, 27–51.

25. William Mervin Gumede, “Down to Business, but Nothing to Show,” in Jacobs and Calland, Thabo Mbeki’s World, 206–17.

26. Alden and le Pere, “Post-apartheid Foreign Policy,” 151.

27. For a description of such policies, see for instance Atul Kohli, State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

28. Landsberg, “Impossible Neutrality?,” 180.

29. Landsberg, “Thabo Mbeki’s Legacy,” 217.

30. Landsberg, “Impossible Neutrality?,” 180.

31. Meike de Goede and Chris van der Borgh, “A Role for Diplomats in Postwar Transitions? The Case of the International Committee in Support of the Transition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” African Security 1, no. 2 (2008): 92–114.

32. Personal communication with one of the former ambassadors, January 2015.

33. Maj Gen Patrick Cammaert, retired, “Issue Brief: The UN Intervention Brigade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” International Peace Institute, 5, July 2013, http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources

/The%20UN%20Intervention%20Brigade%20in%20the%20Democratic%20Republic%20of%20the%20Congo.pdf.

34. Peter Vale, “Thabo Mbeki and the Great Foreign Policy Riddle,” in Glaser, Mbeki and After, 254–61.

35. Ibid., 257.

36. Prys, “Hegemony, Domination, Detachment,” 483.

37. Chris Alden and Garth le Pere, “South Africa in Africa: Bound to Lead?,” South African Journal of Political Studies 36, no. 1 (2009): 148.

38. Ibid., 149.

39. Ibid., 166–67.

40. Indicative of this perhaps surprising observation was the remark of a (black) South African aide to Mbeki attending a conference in Angola that “this is my first trip to Africa.” This story was recounted to me by a diplomat who wished to remain anonymous.

41. John F. Clark, “A Constructivist Account of the Congo Wars,” African Security 4, no. 3 (September 2011): 147–70.

42. Although compare Sergio Fernandez and Hongseok Lee, “The Transformation of the South African Public Service: Exploring the Effects of Racial and Gender Representation on Organizational Effectiveness” (paper presented at the 14th International Winelands Conference, Stellenbosch, South Africa, April 2014).

43. Terence Jackson and Elize Kotze, “Management and Change in the South African National Defence Force: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Administration & Society 37, no. 2 (May 2005): 168–98.

*The author is a professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University (Miami). He would like to thank Steven Burgess, Lyn Graybill, and an anonymous reviewer for their critical advice on this article. Any errors are the sole responsibility of the author.

Countering Convergence

“Central Authorities” and the Global Network to Combat Transnational Crime and Terrorism

Dan Stigall*

Black smoke once again looms on the Iraqi horizon as a Middle Eastern country, once thought somewhat pacified, has again erupted in a spasm of violence and conflict. The recent ascendance of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which tore through large swaths of Iraqi territory and effectively effaced the border between those countries, has illuminated the increasingly transnational nature of terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East.1 Meanwhile, in North Africa and the Sahel, recent reports indicate that Libya’s remote deserts have become a redoubt for al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other jihadist groups as well as nonstate armed groups battling for control of northern Mali.2

In a progressively unstable world order, there has never been a greater need for international cooperation in the fight against transnational crime and terrorism. The operations of nonstate armed groups, terrorists, and transnational criminal organizations are becoming global in scope.3 Moreover, as recent events have demonstrated, such groups are increasingly lethal, disruptive, and destabilizing. Also becoming more apparent, however, is that effective cooperation against them requires much development in what international development parlance calls “the justice sector.”4 Justice-sector development easily calls to mind images of police training and educational initiatives for lawyers or judges in the developing world, but another sort of national institution serves as a prerequisite to effective international cooperation in the fight against transnational criminality: the “central authority.”5

Central authorities, the national entities responsible for mutual legal assistance and extradition, are the engines for international cooperation under the modern international legal framework. They are essential to effective cooperation among international law enforcement authorities. As one senior United Nations (UN) officer has noted, “Establishing effective central authorities that receive and process requests for MLA [mutual legal assistance] and extradition is essential in bringing terrorists to justice.”6

The acute need for effective central authorities is a result of the globalized nature of crime and the waning relevance of national boundaries. In the contemporary international security context, borders are largely irrelevant—especially in the most fragile parts of places like the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel.7 The virulent storm of cross-border activity emphasizes the fact that, when governments are challenged to control the full range of their territory and when borders are left unmanned, large swaths of territory are effectively ungoverned spaces that, in turn, invite transnational criminality, conflict, crime, and terrorist activity. Thus, certain parts of the globe now seem little more than a swirling vortex of violence and criminality, destabilizing the region and threatening the larger world.

Similarly, the immateriality of national borders is apparent in the burgeoning rate of other types of transnational crime. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reports increases in a wide array of transnational crime such as human trafficking, human smuggling, cybercrime, and piracy, as well as trafficking in illicit drugs, weapons, and counterfeit goods. This sort of criminal activity obviously has a destabilizing effect—especially in fragile states—and can undermine governments so extensively that its effects become an international security issue.

Moreover, security experts now express concern about the problem of “convergence”—the collusion of transnational criminal organizations with international terrorist groups. Through the phenomenon of convergence, such groups may take advantage of the logistical capabilities of transnational criminal organizations, thereby attaining greater operational prowess. To a degree, one sees this sort of convergence in the way that ISIS engages in illicit oil smuggling and other criminal enterprises to fund its terrorist activities.

For state actors, however, national borders remain an area of acute apprehension. Sovereignty and the concomitant principle of nonintervention—the cornerstones of the international legal order—provide stability in that order by severely limiting the ability of one state to conduct unilateral activity within the territory of another. This principle is reflected in Article 2(7) of the UN Charter, which provides that, aside from the application of enforcement measures under chapter 7, nothing in the charter “shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”8 Law enforcement functions are among the matters historically considered “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction.” Consequently, while terrorist and criminal groups are increasingly agile, fluid, and transnational in scope, national law enforcement powers remain tightly constrained.

Given these traditional limits on the scope of extraterritorial law enforcement activity, states, by necessity, have developed mechanisms to cooperate in transnational criminal matters. Intelligence sharing, information sharing through police channels, and the myriad forms of informal cooperation remain critical in this regard. Furthermore, extradition and mutual legal assistance are two principal mechanisms by which cooperation in transnational criminal matters is requested and afforded.

Extradition, of course, is the means by which one sovereign requests and obtains custody of a fugitive located within the jurisdiction and control of another sovereign. Through extradition, a sovereign can obtain physical custody of an offender to stand trial before a court of law. For example, recall the extradition of international arms trafficker Viktor Bout (known as the “Merchant of Death”) to the United States.

Mutual legal assistance—a more obscure term for an equally important activity—refers to the mechanism by which states request and obtain evidence and assistance for criminal investigations and prosecutions. Through mutual legal assistance, a country may seek the production of a wide variety of evidence from a foreign government—evidence that can be extremely useful in a criminal investigation of transnational criminal activity but that lies beyond the inevitable culmination point of informal assistance. Bank records, business records, the contents of e-mails, tax documents, witness statements, and a host of other types of evidence can be compelled on behalf of a foreign country through requests for mutual legal assistance.

Some states can afford extradition and mutual legal assistance based on their own domestic law and even in the absence of an international treaty requiring them. Many states have bilateral arrangements, frequently called mutual legal assistance treaties, that offer a basis for action. The United States, for example, has entered into numerous bilateral treaties of this type with partner countries across the globe. Moreover, with the ascendance of what is now termed transnational criminal law, a number of multilateral conventions under the aegis of the UN expressly require such formal cooperation. Notably, UN Security Council Resolution 2178, the most recent resolution on foreign fighters,

recalls its decision in resolution 1373 (2001) that Member States shall afford one another the greatest measure of assistance in connection with criminal investigations or proceedings relating to the financing or support of terrorist acts, including assistance in obtaining evidence in their possession necessary for the proceedings, and underlines the importance of fulfilling this obligation with respect to such investigations or proceedings involving foreign terrorist fighters (emphasis in original).9

Acting on foreign requests of such a unique and intensely legal character, however, is no easy task. Thus, in the contemporary international legal framework, states have created central authorities to act on requests for extradition and mutual legal assistance. These are national institutions that act as international nodes of coordination to receive and act upon requests from other countries in transnational criminal matters. Otherwise stated, central authorities breathe life into the treaty framework by operationalizing these international instruments. In fact, many UN treaties, such as the UN Convention against Corruption and the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, expressly call upon member states to designate central authorities in their government for just this purpose.10

Needless to say, in situations in which the requested state is unwilling or unable to afford assistance, no treaty will prove effective. Further, states will generally be unable to offer assistance without the correct institutional architecture in place. This situation creates a recurring problem vis-à-vis international cooperation in the developing world, where even the most basic national institutions are challenged, yet where threats posed by transnational criminal groups and terrorist organizations are most acute.

Fortunately, though, the problem has not gone entirely unnoticed. The UN has begun programs aimed at developing central authorities in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Such UN projects seek “to help Member States establish one single central authority in charge of processing extradition and requests for mutual legal assistance thereby strengthening their capacity to cooperate and ensuring efficient and time-effective responses.”11 These efforts are a positive trend although far more can (and should) be done. National governments and the international system are quickly being outpaced by the agility of transnational criminal groups, which are taking advantage of the seeming inability of some governments to investigate or prosecute cross-border crime.12

Given the rapidity of the rise of transnational crime and terrorism, greater attention must be paid to the development of justice sectors across the board, including the institutional architecture needed for international cooperation in criminal matters. Transnational threats cannot be defeated without creating effective central authorities and operationalizing the network necessary for states to join strengths against a global scourge. The international community, therefore, must devote more attention to the development of central authorities in critical regions such as the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel. The engines that give life to the international treaty framework must be built, serviced, and properly maintained. Otherwise, efforts to address transnational crime and terrorism through a rule of law framework will remain stymied.

Notes

1. “[ISIS is] a non-state armed group that, by exploiting ungoverned spaces and state fragility in the Middle East, has asserted a degree of control over a large swath of territory that transcends the borders of Iraq and Syria. In so doing, ISIS has become a stark reminder of the dangers posed by ungoverned spaces—lawless expanses of the globe left effectively unregulated by sovereign authority, where terrorist organizations and other transnational criminal groups are permitted to thrive.” Dan Stigall, “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Is. . .,” Global Brief, 7 November 2014, http://globalbrief.ca/blog/2014/11/07/%E2%80%9Cthe

-islamic-state-of-iraq-and-syria-isis-is%E2%80%A6%C2%A0/.

2. See, for example, Michael A. Sheehan and Geoff D. Porter, “The Future Role of U.S. Counterterrorism Operations in Africa,” CTC Sentinel 7, no. 2 (February 2014): 1–3, https://www.ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-content

/uploads/2014/02/CTCSentinel-Vol7Iss2.pdf.

3. Robert Mandel, Dark Logic: Transnational Criminal Tactics and Global Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, 2011), 1, 17.

4. “International cooperation also means improving the capabilities of our partner nations to detect, investigate, and prosecute those who intend to harm their citizens. Currently, we have 20 prosecutors working in an advisory capacity at the invitation of host nations to help implement UN and other international conventions and provide a range of technical assistance. We deploy teams of counterterrorism prosecutors, investigators, analysts, and forensic specialists to partner nations that have experienced a terrorist attack or are seeing a large flow of foreign terrorist fighters in order to assist in investigations and prosecutions.” “Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch Delivers Remarks at Technische Universität Dresden,” United States Department of Justice, 1 June 2015, http://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-loretta-e-lynch-delivers-remarks

-technische-universit-t-dresden.

5. “Success in such ventures [international law enforcement cooperation]—coupled with the increased demand for international cooperation and mutual legal assistance—will require Central Authorities to be adequately staffed with legal experts who are empowered to communicate freely with international partners in order to provide needed information and evidence, to obtain assets, and to bring offenders to justice. Only then can countries fulfill their commitments under the U.N. Convention Against Corruption and the promise of this remarkable Forum.” “Attorney General Eric Holder Delivers Remarks at the Arab Forum on Asset Recovery,” United States Department of Justice, 28 October 2013, http://www.justice.gov/opa/speech

/attorney-general-eric-holder-delivers-remarks-arab-forum-asset-recovery.

6. “International Cooperation by Central Authorities ‘Essential’ to Bringing Terrorists to Justice, CTED Expert Tells Regional Meeting in Morocco,” UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee, 11 February 2014, http://www.un.org/en/sc/ctc/news/2014-2-5_ctedexpert_morocco_essential.html.

7. “Expressing serious concern about the insecurity and rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Sahel region, which is further complicated by the presence of armed groups and terrorist groups and their activities, as well as by the proliferation of weapons, from within and outside the region, that threaten the peace, security and stability of regional States” (emphasis in original). Resolution 2056 (2012), Peace and Security in Africa, S/RES/2056 (2012), United Nations Security Council, 5 July 2012, 2, http://www.un.org

/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/2056(2012).

8. “Chapter 1: Purposes and Principles,” Charter of the United Nations, accessed 14 September 2015, http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml.

9. Resolution 2178 (2014), Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts,S/RES /2178 (2014), United Nations Security Council, 24 September 2014, 6, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view _doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/2178 (2014).

10. Competent National Authorities under the United Nations Convention against Corruption, CAC/COSP/EG.1/2012/CRP.1, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 22 October 2012, https://www

.unodc.org/documents/treaties/UNCAC/WorkingGroups/EMInternationalCooperation/22-23October 2012/CacCospEg1-2012-Crp1.pdf.

11. “UNODC and CTED Hold the First Regional Meeting on Building Effective Central Authorities,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, accessed 14 September 2015, http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en

/terrorism/latest-news/regional_meeting_central_authorities_project_jan_2014.html.

12. Discussing “revolutionary shifts in the capabilities of modern non-state armed groups, many of which now have new capabilities derived from new weapons and information technologies” and positing that “as technology becomes more accessible, this unsettling trend of increasingly empowered non-state armed groups will only continue—as will the threat to Western interests and global stability.” Dan E. Stigall, “The French Intervention in Mali, Counterterrorism, and the Law of Armed Conflict,” Military Law Review 223, no. 1 (2015): 36.

*The author is an attorney with the National Security Division of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) where he serves as counsel to the assistant attorney general. From 2009 to 2015, he worked as a trial attorney and coordinator for international security affairs with the DOJ Office of International Affairs, focusing on international cooperation with countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. From 2001 to 2009, he served on active duty as a US Army judge advocate (judge advocate general) in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. He has also worked as an adjunct professor of international law at the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School (US Army). He continues to serve as an officer in the US Army Reserve and as a Contributing Fellow for the Louisiana State University Center for Civil Law Studies. None of the opinions expressed in his writing are necessarily those of the US DOJ or the US Department of Defense.

Ebola Epidemic

Yohannes Woldemariam, PhD*

Lionel Di Giacomo

This article seeks to critically examine various dimensions of the impact of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia and on the international community. How did poverty and inequality exacerbate the epidemic? How did legacies of violence and civil war complicate efforts against Ebola? Critically examining the outbreak may trigger more questions than answers; nevertheless, it is instructive to draw lessons from such crises. What does history teach us?

The Greek war historian Thucydides was perhaps the first to detail the history of an infectious disease, which he called the “plague of Athens,” an affliction that reduced its population by over one-third and contributed to that city-state’s defeat in the Peloponnesian Wars. In what could fit a description of some Ebola-afflicted regions during the 2014 epidemic, Thucydides wrote, “The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. For the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would next happen to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.”1

In a more recent example, 95 percent of American Indians were killed by diseases brought by European explorers to the New World between 1492 and the end of the seventeenth century. Francisco Pizarro defeated an Incan army of 80,000 soldiers with only 168 Spaniard soldiers because a smallpox epidemic killed large numbers of the Native Americans.2 In the twentieth century, the morale of German forces was undermined by the 1918 influenza outbreak, contributing to an Allied victory. During World War II, disease claimed the lives of more soldiers than actual combat in many battle areas.3

Epidemics have been critically important throughout history in determining the fates of communities, armies, states, and entire civilizations. The 2014 Ebola epidemic threatened havoc in West Africa, undermining the recovery and well-being of the postconflict states of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia while also bringing attention to how the affluent world is not immune to diseases in the global South in the context of a worldwide economy.

Ebola and the Scope and Impact of the Epidemic

The Ebola virus was discovered in 1976 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire. Small-scale outbreaks have occurred in the DRC, Uganda, and Southern Sudan. There has been much public confusion about Ebola transmission. According to the New York Times,

You are not likely to catch Ebola just by being in proximity to someone who has the virus. It is not spread through the air like the flu or respiratory viruses such as SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome].

Instead, Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids. If an infected person’s blood or vomit gets in another person’s eyes, nose or mouth, the infection may be transmitted. In the current outbreak, most new cases are occurring among people who have been taking care of sick relatives or who have prepared an infected body for burial.4

Ebola forced the swift isolation of victims, along with those not showing symptoms who were from the affected or even suspected areas. Furthermore, the symptoms of Ebola closely resemble those of other diseases such as influenza, causing confusion and increased panic. Different from prior Ebola outbreaks, the 2014 epidemic was far larger, encompassing many countries in West Africa and defying earlier strategies of containment. The most affected nations in Africa were Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. Nigeria also reported over a dozen deaths and many more infected. The World Health Organization (WHO) determined that the East African country of Kenya was at high risk for Ebola because it is a hub for air travel to many West African countries.5 In a knee-jerk reaction and bowing to international pressure, Kenya’s airlines stopped all flights to the affected countries.6 South Africa followed suit by similarly banning flights.

Kenya Airways was singled out, but it is not the only major airline serving West Africa. Ethiopia, for example, is the headquarters for organizations like the African Union, and Ethiopian Air Lines makes frequent flights to West Africa and many other African countries.7 According to an Oxford study, Ethiopia was one of the African countries most at risk for developing Ebola outbreaks through animal-to-human transmission while Kenya was not, demonstrating the contradictory and incoherent nature of international responses to Ebola.8

In the United States, some people called for shutting down all air travel to the affected countries. As of August 2014, there were no commercial American airlines that had not already suspended flights to the region, and even this prohibition did not guarantee that infected persons wouldn’t simply take a connecting flight from a non-American airline—witness the case of Ebola diagnosed in Texas, the victim having arrived in Dallas via Brussels. Additionally, it was vitally important to keep lines of travel open to assist the movement of supplies and health workers critical to the local containment of the disease in efforts to stop Ebola in its tracks. As Vauhini Vara of the New Yorker wrote, “There may be situations in which the U.S. could benefit from keeping out of other countries’ affairs; this, public-health officials seem to agree, is not one of them.”9 Flight bans only served to further isolate and stigmatize countries that most needed incoming health workers, medical and emergency supplies, and international communication.

Local Responses to Ebola

Ebola exposed how dysfunctional the public health system in most of Africa truly was—in many cases almost nonexistent. However, some states are in a far better position than others. With all its imperfections, and despite President Goodluck Jonathan’s mass firing of 16,000 resident doctors for striking in August 2014, Nigeria still had a far stronger public health infrastructure than any of the other affected countries in West Africa.10 By the end of September 2014, President Jonathan told the United Nations (UN) that Nigeria is “Ebola-free.”11

In what sounded encouraging, Ethiopia claimed to have established a special hospital for potential Ebola cases. Yet, the health care system in Ethiopia was and still is one of the worst in the world. In her 2014 trip to that country, Amy Walters of National Public Radio discovered that even its best hospital, Tikur Anbessa, had inadequate equipment, facilities, and medical personnel.12 The doctor/patient ratio in the country has been suffering from a chronic brain drain to Western nations because of the exodus of doctors who complain about low salaries. Additionally, due to issues of class and accessibility, 85 percent of Ethiopians may never see doctors at all in their lifetimes.13 In Liberia, where the Ebola epidemic was at its worst, initially only 45 doctors nationally served a population of approximately 4.5 million. The picture remains more or less similar in most African countries.14

The fact that Ebola spread much faster than was generally acknowledged publicly was blamed on the porous nature of African borders. In response, governments strengthened them, but cordoning off the affected countries soon proved an ineffective approach. Ultimately, epidemiological surveillance and contact tracing (the tracking and diagnosing of all people who came in contact with an infected patient) were widely adopted as a proven method to track Ebola victims on the recommendation of Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).15

The blanket quarantining of entire communities as a reaction to Ebola or any contagious disease resembles the scenario in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish of how plague-struck towns were treated in Europe in medieval times: “First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death.”16 We saw in the 2014 epidemic a similar phenomenon happening to the inhabitants of Ebola-stricken areas. It was also evident in the international air travel bans and increased border security across the world. In an illustration of how quarantining is not effective, “a university student infected with Ebola evaded health surveillance for weeks as he slipped into Senegal, carrying the deadly virus to a fifth West African nation showing how quarantines, border closures, and flight bans have failed to contain the outbreak.”17

West African Practices and Ebola

Not only is Ebola killing Africans, it also undermines dearly held social structures and values. Touching, washing, and arranging bodies for burial are rituals integral to most African communities. For example, secret societies of women perform burial rituals for women and girls, and men do so for men and boys. To be prevented from long-held traditions of burial practices and to have strangers wearing hazardous-material suits take away the bodies compounded the tragedy. The situation deteriorated to an extent that bodies were not even picked up at all. The trauma of being denied traditional closure was psychologically devastating to surviving relatives. On the Public Broadcasting Service’s Frontline television program, a dying father practically crawls to an iPad provided by MSF staff members to see a video recording of his four children wishing him well shortly before he succumbs to Ebola.18

Moreover, much of Africa is very sensorial. Not greeting people by shaking hands and in some cases by kissing on the cheek is considered rude. Embracing people through hugging and touching is the norm. Therefore, Ebola struck at the heart of African customs and social structures: civility, liveliness, sense of community, respect for elders, and strength of the family unit. Traditional funeral practices involving contact with the corpse were forbidden. The initial resistance and respect for tradition, even at risk to one’s life, were strong in the early days of the epidemic but eventually replaced by fear as people shifted into survival mode. Still, some individuals declared that they would “rather die of Ebola than stop hugging sick loved ones,” desperately clinging to traditional norms and their humanity.19

Furthermore, religious obligations such as the Hajj pilgrimage, which millions of Muslims take to Mecca once in their lifetime, lost priority to fear of Ebola. As a precaution against the disease, Saudi Arabia turned down 7,400 visa applications from Liberian, Sierra Leonean, and Guinean pilgrims.20 This denial of an important religious practice deepened the isolation and alienation caused by the disease.

Further straining the public health scenario, people who were ill with other deadly ailments like malaria refrained from seeking hospital care because of a perception that hospitals were transmitting agents for Ebola. Even worse, a quarantine center for suspected Ebola patients in the Liberian capital Monrovia was attacked and looted by protesters.21 According to a government official, “The protesters were unhappy that patients were being brought in from other parts of the capital.” In Guinea, health workers and journalists trying to raise awareness were attacked and later found dead.22 Such outright mistrust and violence toward health workers again evoke Foucault’s writing about those people who dealt with the sick and dead during a plague: “The ‘crows,’ who can be left to die . . . are ‘people of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices.’ ”23 According to Andrew T. Price-Smith, “Emotions and perceptual distortions . . . emerging as a result of a deadly disease outbreak . . . generate the construction of images of the ‘other,’ resulting in stigmatization, persecution of minorities, and even diffuse inter-ethnic or interclass violence.”24

As people attempted to cope with the horrors of the epidemic in Albert Camus’s The Plague, citizens blamed one another, resulting in violence. In the book, a doctor thoroughly chronicles an epidemic with scientific detachment in an attempt to make sense of human mortality and the circumstances beyond human control that isolate individuals.25 Yet, the epidemic unites even the most personally and philosophically disparate within towns and villages. Camus’s message is that there’s no constant except that we are all in it together despite the panic, hysteria, and isolation. Despite the horrific conditions in West Africa, local and international cooperation offered a way out.

International Response

On 8 August 2014, Reuters reported that the WHO had declared Ebola an international public health emergency.26 The designation required the agency to make recommendations for immediate international action and a ramped-up response. Concurrently, US health authorities acknowledged that Ebola’s spread beyond West Africa was “inevitable,” and MSF warned that the deadly virus was “out of control” with more than 60 outbreak hot spots.27 MSF has been urging the WHO to provide stronger leadership in the fight against Ebola since it was the first group to realize the gravity of the situation.

The international community had been reluctant to respond constructively to the outbreak. Initially, the WHO participated only peripherally, supporting regional responses by groups such as the Economic Community of West African States, whose own reaction was considered slow and inadequate.28 However, after months of relative inaction and receiving repeated calls for an international response from groups such as MSF, on 28 August 2014 the WHO finally launched a road map for controlling the international spread of Ebola in six to nine months.29 As a specialized UN agency, the WHO is constrained by bureaucracy, donor interests, budget cuts, and interagency politics. For instance, the New York Times reported that “the W.H.O. would not send Twitter messages with links to the C.D.C.’s [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] Ebola prevention information, part of a policy not to promote material from other agencies. Various offices within the W.H.O.’s balkanized hierarchy also jockeyed for position.”30

This is an example of bureaucracy hampering efforts to address the crisis meaningfully. In particular, WHO Africa had been criticized for lacking competent leadership since many top jobs at the agency had been conspicuously given as political favors over the years. This practice had resulted in a culture of nepotism, confusion about the organization’s mandate, political considerations trumping public health, and an agency lacking the skills and political will to deal with any serious public health emergency.31 In contrast, MSF is an independent nongovernmental organization with a record of speaking out, often being the first in and the last to leave in many humanitarian interventions.

Despite these efforts, calls for a far more aggressive campaign were made to address an efficient system of transporting volunteer doctors and health care professionals to affected areas with the necessary preventive equipment and improvements in access to diagnostic technologies. The few health care workers who treated these underserved populations, including the top chief medical officer in Liberia, were consistently exposed to danger since they were overstretched and had inadequate access to protective gear.32 Even when hazardous-material suits were available, some gallant doctors and nurses had already paid the ultimate price—witness the tragic death of Dr. Victor Willoughby in Sierra Leone just hours before experimental drugs arrived from Canada to treat him.33 Furthermore, travel bans had an adverse effect on the movement of health care workers, stranding nurses and doctors in transit centers far from where they were needed.

On 25 January 2015, the WHO finally acknowledged its shortcomings in handling Ebola, after much rationalization and denial in the preceding months: “For many years we’ve been able to manage medium, small-sized outbreaks . . . [b]ut the Ebola outbreak was a mega-crisis, and it overwhelmed the capacity of WHO. The world is not as well prepared for epidemics as they are for war.” The agency pledged to establish a reserve force of about 1,500 health care workers for similar crises in the future, along with a new fund with seed money totaling $100 million for emergency response.34 Mindful of past criticisms, WHO Africa selected a new regional director, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, from Botswana, who “during the selection process . . . was not pressured to promise jobs to anyone in return for any country’s vote, which is known to have happened in the past.”35

Ebola and International Travel

According to the WHO, air travel is low risk for transmitting the disease.36 Yet, we continued to witness extreme hysteria, as when the United Arab Emirates and British Airways suspended flights to affected countries. Germany asked its nationals to leave the region. Korean Airlines suspended flights to Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. The International Olympic Committee ruled that young athletes from those countries would not be allowed to compete in combat sports or in the pool during games in Nanjing, China.37 Brazilian executives canceled a visit to Namibia over fears about Ebola despite the fact that that country has never seen a single case and is almost 3,000 miles away from the center of the outbreak.38

Some details of various international responses to this epidemic raise questions of how differently the outbreak would have been treated if it had occurred within Western states among more affluent populations. An article in the Guardian noted that “from Austria to Ireland, Spain to Germany, there have been at least a dozen cases of West Africans with mild flu symptoms being isolated until it was established that they were not suffering from Ebola.”39 Journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau wrote on 20 August 2014 that “a Berlin building [was] locked down after an African woman faints. An African man with a nosebleed [was] removed from a mall in Brussels. With Ebola panic spreading, racial profiling could be next.”40 As it turned out, the woman Nadeau refers to was from Kenya, thousands of miles from any of the affected areas. She goes on to describe other events in Italy, where schoolchildren of African descent had been required to present health certificates before returning to school, a demand that did not apply to European children even when they had recently visited Africa.41

Similar reactions have been reported in the United States, where, among other instances of discrimination, a Georgia school district barred enrollment of Liberian students.42 Even the elites of Africa were not immune from suspicion of infection: African political leaders attending the US-Africa Leaders’ Summit in Washington, DC, had to be screened before being allowed to set foot in the United States.43 The reality of how Western countries with sophisticated health care systems are able to handle Ebola doesn’t support the hysteria of targeting people of African descent, which may have more to do with typical patterns of “othering” Africans:

The consensus among scientists is that the Ebola virus does not pose any risk to the general public in Western countries with well-resourced public health care systems. However, African refugees living in foreign countries are often impacted by disease outbreaks such as the recent Ebola eruption. . . . In fact, research shows that outbreaks of diseases such as measles, rubella and hepatitis A have disrupted the resettlement of African refugees.44

Xenophobic agendas have used infectious disease to great effect in setting public attitudes against immigrants and refugees.45 In fact, there is plenty of evidence that “from the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 15th–19th centuries to the diseases, epidemics and wars of present time, the West has consciously, consistently and systematically pursued policies designed to control, reduce and eliminate altogether Africa’s population” in an effort to secure land and resources.46 Following this legacy, some Westerners see the Ebola epidemic or any other infectious disease in poorer countries as a necessary evil to control population growth. The view that the death of Africans from Ebola and other epidemics helps such control has been voiced by popular individuals such as Chris Brown and smacks of social Darwinism.47

Reinforcing this predisposition to social Darwinism, the affluent world’s priority is to invest in diseases of the “rich” (diabetes, heart ailments, etc.), whereas Ebola, tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, and so forth, may be tacitly seen as nature’s way of balancing the global population. Writing for the New Yorker, James Surowiecki declares that

[pharmaceutical companies] have an incentive to target diseases that affect wealthier people (above all, people in the developed world), who can afford to pay a lot. . . .

This system does a reasonable job of getting Westerners the drugs they want. . . . But it also leads to enormous underinvestment in certain kinds of diseases. . . . Diseases that mostly affect poor people in poor countries aren’t a research priority, because it’s unlikely that those markets will ever provide a decent return.48

This exact scenario has played out with Ebola. For nearly a decade, a 100 percent effective vaccine against both Ebola and the Marburg virus in monkeys has been shelved due to the low profitability of a vaccine benefiting primarily poor Africans. Now, these same companies that deemed developing the vaccine too costly are eagerly switching positions as wealthy donors become increasingly willing to finance any possible cure because Ebola has begun to threaten and infiltrate the affluent world.49 This approach to public health is so profit driven that WHO director-general Dr. Margaret Chan “castigated the pharmaceutical industry for failing to develop a vaccine for Ebola over the some 40 years that the virus has threatened West Africa.”50

Similar to reactions to HIV, panic about the unknown and unseen contagion can do as much damage as the disease itself. Unlike HIV, Ebola is spread by clearly symptomatic people. That said, the virus mutates over time and may eventually develop strains that can be transmitted by people with few or no obvious symptoms. This eventuality concerns the international community and has been framed as a national security threat by President Barack Obama.51 This proclamation by the president echoed a National Intelligence Estimate from the year 2000 concerning the US response to tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS: “In June 1996, President Clinton issued a Presidential Decision Directive calling for a more focused US policy on infectious diseases. . . . [An] unprecedented UN Security Council session devoted exclusively to the threat to Africa from HIV/AIDS in January 2000 [was] a measure of the international community’s concern about the infectious disease threat.”52

National security has often been invoked in politics to gain support, and President Obama has certainly been no exception, but other approaches to international relations such as “human security” may pave the way to more effective, humane responses to Ebola and other infectious diseases. Examining human security and global health, Lincoln Chen and Vasant Narasimhan write that “human security attempts to broaden security thinking from ‘national security’ and the military defense of political boundaries to a ‘people-centered’ approach of anticipating and coping with the multiple threats faced by ordinary people in an increasingly globalizing world.”53 Human security could have provided a compelling alternative lens by focusing on the victims of Ebola and their plight, in contrast to the dominant national security narrative that news media and politicians repeatedly used to characterize Ebola as lethal, contagious, and out of control, thus hampering timely intervention.

Prior Ebola cases occurred in geographically limited areas or isolated villages. The 2014 epidemic included cities and population centers, distinguishing it from earlier outbreaks in the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan. Such dramatic spread increased the fear of the virus potentially mutating, becoming infectious in new ways, and extending its reach globally. As of 26 September 2014, the CDC projected that without adequate containment, 1.4 million cases of Ebola would occur by 20 January 2015.54 Increased intervention and change in behavior, however, resulted in far fewer total infections over the course of the epidemic: 28,601 by the end of December 2015.55

Every aspect of responding to Ebola involved staggering costs. As of 3 September 2014, few states had seriously committed resources to fighting Ebola. The WHO estimated that efforts to contain Ebola would require at least $490 million; the UN a few days later updated the estimate to $600 million, and the figures kept growing.56 In response to a White House request for $88 million from Congress to fight Ebola, House Republicans argued for less than half before eventually submitting to the whole amount.57 Meanwhile, the nonprofit Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $50 million, quickly releasing funds to UN and other agencies to fight the crisis.58 Cuba took the lead in responding proactively by initially committing 165 health care workers to affected areas, and by 21 October 2014, it had helped fill the critical need for medical personnel with 276 total workers.59 As of 16 October 2014, Colombia was the first and only country to contribute to a UN request for a billion dollars to fight Ebola, giving $100,000 in cash deposits.60 Eventually, more countries did come through in a variety of ways, including many more donations to the UN fund and a $6.2 billion request by the Obama administration from Congress, of which $5.4 billion was approved in December 2014.61

After the WHO’s belated call for international intervention in the spread of Ebola, the response suddenly picked up momentum. The UN talked about a global response coalition. President Obama announced on 16 September 2014 that “[the United States] will send 3,000 troops to help tackle the Ebola outbreak as part of a ramped-up plan, including a major deployment in Liberia, the country where the epidemic is spiraling fastest out of control . . . [and] plans to build 17 treatment centers, train thousands of healthcare workers and establish a military control center for coordination.”62 Even with these efforts, escalation of the disease was so rapid that no one knew when it would be contained. It was uncharted territory. Peter Piot, who helped identify Ebola 40 years prior, worried that through this outbreak Ebola would become endemic in humans.63

An acute need exists for innovation to combat Ebola. Experimental drugs should be available and delivered in a timely manner. In an unprecedented move, the WHO determined that under the circumstances, it was ethical to use “unregistered interventions”—drugs such as Zmapp—with patient consent.64 Japan also offered Avigan, a drug used to treat new and reemerging influenza viruses, as a possible treatment for Ebola.65 Granted, these drugs were merely experimental and no clinical trials had been conducted, but lives could have been saved if they had been made available at an expedited pace. One potential treatment was the transfusion of blood serum from Ebola survivors. This treatment might have been accessible more quickly than drugs like Zmapp, which weren’t scheduled for even small-scale use until January 2015.66 Several European countries, Russia, and China provided mobile labs to help with diagnosis. Later, US Navy researchers staffed two mobile labs, reducing the time to determine if a patient had Ebola from days to hours.67

Postconflict Challenges

The severely affected countries of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone are still emerging from prolonged and debilitating internal conflict and civil war fueled by competition for mineral resources. Sierra Leone, for instance, was the locus of the Hollywood film Blood Diamond, depicting the crippling violence and corruption of the illicit diamond trade. Tourism has been critical in the region’s attempts to recover economically. The hospitality industry in Sierra Leone was disabled by Ebola, leaving businesses bankrupt and abandoned.68 The economies of these countries were all greatly affected; the World Bank predicted on 8 October 2014 that if the outbreak spread significantly to neighboring countries, costs in the region would reach US $32.6 billion by the end of 2015.69 The Wall Street Journal reported that, outside the affected region, although no flight bans had taken place in Ethiopia, Ethiopian Airlines was losing about $8 million a month in sales as travelers avoided the area.70

Fragile postconflict states are vulnerable to epidemics such as Ebola because of weak public health infrastructure and lack of confidence in public officials. An effective response to Ebola and other public health issues is therefore closely linked to economic development, improvements in governance, peacetime, and the rule of law. The history of Liberia exemplifies how tumultuous and protracted civil conflict leaves countries too weak to respond to epidemics and natural disasters.

A 2014 Frontline documentary entitled “Firestone and the Warlord” illustrates how a private American business, Firestone, embedded itself deeply in the Liberian economy. Indeed, it became crucial to financing and providing a strategic stronghold for Charles Taylor, the brutal warlord who has since been convicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes during the Sierra Leone civil war and is serving a 50-year sentence in Britain. In post-Taylor Liberia, Firestone’s rubber plantation had successfully contained Ebola in its area where the government had not.71 With significant resources and power, the company supported the people who operated the rubber plantation and protected its financial interest. In contrast, the Liberian government was ill equipped to respond to this crisis for many reasons: corruption, an inherited legacy of conflict, and a lack of timely aid from the international community. Firestone is one example of how foreign entities typically interact with poor countries. They protect their limited interests while propping up whatever dictatorial government might exist in the process, benefiting from low operational costs, cheap resources, and lax regulation provided by kleptocracies desperate for foreign exchange.

Regardless, the areas surrounding Firestone’s plantation profited from the company’s investment in terms of Ebola, but it is clear that “ground zero” for this improved care was precisely the place where the company stood to protect its earnings. If the Liberian government had been in service of the people rather than pandering to multinational corporations and enriching corrupt officials, there probably would have been more infrastructure, confidence in government, and generally better preparation for any disaster—public health or otherwise.

Fighting corruption is critical to effective public health in postconflict states. A well-known case of corruption in West Africa occurred in Nigeria, where the northern part of the country is effectively outside government control. Boko Haram militants freely kidnap girls and wreak havoc on civil and state institutions, making governability difficult at best. Nigeria, the second-largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa, has lost more than $380 billion to graft since independence in 1960.72 Further, Equatorial Guinea—which has the longest-standing dictatorship in Africa fueled by oil wealth—offers a classic example of the “resource curse.” In search of international attention and legitimacy, that country leveraged fears of Ebola and volunteered to host the African Cup of Nations when Morocco asked the Fédération Internationale de Football Association to delay the tournament because of the Ebola outbreak.73

Ebola severely limited the ability of governments in affected countries to provide for their populaces, which in turn undermined legitimacy. Citizens dissatisfied with their governments protested and rioted, which caused and exacerbated violent internal conflict. Distrust in government had been cited as a major driver of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. Helen Epstein wrote in the New York Review of Books about how Ebola was exacerbated by rumors and economic corruption, such as the misuse of aid money. According to Epstein, poor health care infrastructure was only a partial explanation; rather, the root cause for the spread of Ebola was political. She compared equally weak infrastructures in Southern Sudan and DRC, where the disease was contained relatively easily. She argued that Liberians felt so estranged from their government that they disbelieved official warnings, convinced that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had concocted Ebola to kill the people and draw foreign aid since Sirleaf has a history of diverting aid money toward family and for patronage. Moreover, Liberians perceived nurses and medical workers as messengers to poison the people and accomplish this goal.74

The long history of Liberia feeds into such cynicism. Freed slaves, known as Americo Liberians, settled in the country, oppressing indigenous Liberians and creating a system akin to apartheid for nearly 200 years. William Tolbert, a reformist president, was murdered in 1980, resulting in civil war and mayhem for over two decades. Current president Sirleaf was internationally recognized with a Nobel peace prize, presumably for what she might do: end the cycle of violence in Liberia. The reality has been far less peaceful. She has been accused of nepotism, benefiting from government contracts with foreign firms, and involvement with Charles Taylor. The fact that there is little in Liberia’s history to instill faith in government among the people contributes adversely to an epidemic like Ebola.

The Way Forward

The first months of the epidemic saw inadequate international attention, but when Ebola arrived on American and European shores, the international discourse and sense of urgency shifted dramatically. Although it was unlikely that Ebola would kill many people in more affluent countries, fear reached a new level, dominating 24-hour news cycles and public discourse. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, himself a Ghana native, released a public statement on 16 October 2014: “I am bitterly disappointed by the response. . . . I am disappointed in the international community for not moving faster. . . . If the crisis had hit some other region it probably would have been handled very differently. In fact when you look at the evolution of the crisis, the international community really woke up when the disease got to America and Europe.”75

Rather than fearful rhetoric, travel bans, and stigmatization, these countries needed effective international responses and support in a clear demonstration of shared humanity. A reasoned, compassionate approach was desperately needed. According to Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer prize winner for her writings on Ebola,

As terrifying as Ebola is, the virus has been controlled in the past, and can be again. The current crisis, which threatens an 11-nation region of Africa that includes the continent’s giant, Nigeria, is not a biological or medical one so much as it is political. The three nations in Ebola’s thrall need technical support from outsiders but will not succeed in stopping the virus until each nation’s leaders embrace effective governance.76

Garrett was urging a political mobilization transcending borders on a massive scale to stop the epidemic. She did not believe that airport screenings were effective, urging nations to exert a focused political will to deal with Ebola with high levels of coordination at the regional and international levels. Otherwise, Garrett warned that we could be looking at this epidemic graduating into a pandemic catastrophe.

Education and informed awareness are of key importance. Superstition exacerbated the epidemic, reflected by the fact that some victims were afraid to seek medical treatment since they believed sorcerers created the disease.77 To make matters worse, conspiracy theories and misinformation added to the confusion and distrust of both humanitarian intervention and domestic health workers.78 In May, several well-intentioned Liberian musicians collaborated to warn people about Ebola, but some of their lyrics wrongly implied that asymptomatic people were highly contagious and shouldn’t be touched.79 Radio and cellular technology, school programs, traditional leaders, and music by popular artists could have been more effectively used to raise awareness and improve community responsiveness to this public health emergency.80

Internationally, campaigns to educate and raise funds for Ebola and Africa in general would have proved more effective if Africa had been represented in its many facets and as many countries rather than as a perpetual single victim. On 1 November 2014, musician Bob Geldof, founder of the original Band Aid fund-raiser in 1984 that addressed famine in Ethiopia, proposed a new Band Aid single to raise money for Ebola. However, both musicians and critics expressed concern about the effort projecting a negative image of Africa with far-reaching, long-term implications. Fuse ODG, an English musician of Ghanaian descent, declined to participate in the new single, saying that “though shock tactics and negative images may raise money in the short term, the long-term damage will take far longer to heal.”81 Even so, the Band Aid single came out later in November, raising over $2 million within five minutes of release. Jack Lundie of British Oxfam responded to critics, supporting “the Band Aid single as a ‘mainstream charitable initiative’ that would ‘bring in people who wouldn’t normally engage.’ ”82

As a lesson, humanitarians—musicians, educators, nongovernmental organizations, and policy makers—need to invest in health care infrastructure and research on tropical pathogens in Africa. Ebola has been known since 1976. What does it take for the wealthy world to invest in vaccines that predominantly affect the global South? It is clear that up to this point, vaccines for diseases such as Ebola have not been lucrative for pharmaceutical companies to develop. How can a class-neutral public health system thrive globally when profit dictates what diseases to research and which people are worth curing?

Increased funding for research and finding a cure or vaccine not only is about altruism but also is a matter of enlightened self-interest. Investing in the health care of Africans is cheaper than the inevitable disruption to lives, trade, and transportation in a globalized world.83 It is myopic to assume that a disease like Ebola or any tropical pathogen can be contained in Africa for long. In medicine, as in many aspects of life, the “us versus them” mentality is pervasive. It is important to note that Ebola eventually did make it to the United States—likely part of the reason that an outcome of this epidemic has been accelerated research into the development of an Ebola vaccine.84 This virus does not discriminate. The lesson has been that rather than isolating and alienating communities, countries, or regions to try to contain an epidemic, let us recognize the humanity of every victim, regardless of race, class, or country, and fight the disease itself.

Notes

1. Andrew T. Price-Smith, Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 37.

2. Sue Peterson, “Epidemic Disease and National Security,” Security Studies 12, no. 2 (Winter 2002–3): 55, 76, http://smpete.people.wm.edu/files/epidemic.pdf.

3. Ibid., 76.

4. New York Times News Service, “What You Need to Know about the Ebola Outbreak,” Times of India, 1 October 2014, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/What-you-need-to-know-about-the-Ebola

-outbreak/articleshow/43962114.cms.

5. “Ebola Outbreak: Kenya at High Risk, Warns WHO,” British Broadcasting Corporation, 13 August 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28769678.

6. Mark Tran, “WHO Urges Calm As Kenya Bans Contact with Ebola-Affected Countries,” Guardian, 17 August 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/17/ebola-kenya-bans-travel-west-africa-virus

-fears.

7. Ethiopian Airlines, accessed 9 December 2015, https://www.ethiopianairlines.com/book.

8. Abby Phillip, “Oxford Study Predicts 15 More Countries Are at Risk of Ebola Exposure,” Washington Post, 9 September 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/09/09/oxford-stu dy-predicts-15-more-countries-are-at-risk-of-ebola-exposure/.

9. Vauhini Vara, “Should We Ban Flights from Countries with Ebola Outbreaks?,” New Yorker, 4 October 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ban-flights-countries-ebola-outbreaks.

10. Nnenna Ibeh, “Shocking: Jonathan Sacks 16,000 Resident Doctors in Nigeria,” Premium Times, 14 August 2014, http://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/166732-shocking-jonathan-sacks-16000-resident

-doctors-in-nigeria.html.

11. David Kroll, “Nigeria Free of New Ebola Cases, Final Surveillance Contacts Released,” Forbes, 23 September 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2014/09/23/nigeria-free-of-ebola-as-final-surveillance

-contacts-are-released/.

12. Amy Walters, “Reporter’s Notebook: A Not-So-Grand Tour of Ethiopia’s Top Hospital,” National Public Radio, 14 August 2014, http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/08/14/337792969/reporters

-notebook-a-not-so-grand-tour-of-ethiopias-top-hospital.

13. Anders Kelto, “Ethiopia’s Crowded Medical Schools,” Public Radio International, 20 December 2012, http://www.pri.org/stories/2012-12-20/ethiopias-crowded-medical-schools.

14. “Statement on Ebola and Conflict in West Africa,” International Crisis Group, 23 September 2014, http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/publication-type/media-releases/2014/africa/statement-on-ebola-and

-conflict-in-west-africa.aspx.

15. “Ebola,” Médecins Sans Frontières, accessed 9 December 2015, http://www.doctorswithoutborders

.org/our-work/medical-issues/ebola.

16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195.

17. “Ebola Crisis: Confusion As Patients Vanish in Liberia,” British Broadcasting Corporation, 17 August 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28827091.

18. “Ebola Outbreak,” PBS Frontline, video, 27:26, 9 September 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline

/film/ebola-outbreak/.

19. Tristan McConnell, “Some People Would Rather Die of Ebola Than Stop Hugging Sick Loved Ones,” Global Post, 30 December 2014, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/health/141010/familes

-cant-mourn-ebola-victims-liberia.

20. Ayan Sheikh, “Saudi Arabia Bans Ebola-Stricken Countries from Hajj Pilgrimage,” Public Broadcasting Service, 2 October 2014, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/saudi-arabia-bans-pilgrims-ebola

-stricken-countriespilgrims-ebola-stricken-countries-banned-hajj/.

21. “Ebola Crisis.”

22. “Ebola Outbreak: Guinea Health Team Killed,” British Broadcasting Corporation, 19 September 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29256443.

23. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195.

24. Price-Smith, Contagion and Chaos, 20.

25. Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Random House, 1991).

26. “Ebola Outbreak an ‘International Public Health Emergency,’ Says WHO,” Reuters, video, 0:55, 8 August 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/society/video/2014/aug/08/who-ebola-outbreak-international

-public-health-emergency-video.

27. Agence France-Presse, “Ebola’s Spread to US Is ‘Inevitable’ Says Health Chief,” Telegraph, 8 August 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11020538/Ebolas-spread-to-US-is

-inevitable-says-health-chief.html.

28. Jeremy Youde, “The Ebola Outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone,” E-International Relations, 26 July 2014, http://www.e-ir.info/2014/07/26/the-ebola-outbreak-in-guinea-liberia-and-sierra-leone/.

29. “WHO Issues Roadmap to Scale Up International Response to the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa,” World Health Organization, 28 August 2014, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2014/ebola

-roadmap/en/.

30. Sheri Fink, “Cuts at W.H.O. Hurt Response to Ebola Crisis,” New York Times, 3 September 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/world/africa/cuts-at-who-hurt-response-to-ebola-crisis.html.

31. Maria Cheng, “After Botching Ebola, WHO to Pick New Africa Boss,” Dallas Morning News, 3 November 2014, http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20141103-after-botching-ebola-who-to-pic k-new-africa-boss.ece; and Somini Sengupta, “Effort on Ebola Hurt W.H.O. Chief,” New York Times, 6 January 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/world/leader-of-world-health-organization-defends

-ebola-response.html.

32. Associated Press, “In Liberia and U.S., Precautions for Two Ebola Workers,” New York Times, 27 September 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/world/africa/liberia-health-chief-is-under-quarantine

.html.

33. Richard Preston, “Outbreak,” New Yorker, 11 August 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine

/2014/08/11/outbreak; and Lisa O’Carroll, “Ebola Kills Sierra Leone’s Most Senior Doctor,” Guardian, 19 December 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/19/ebola-sierra-leone-victory-willoughby.

34. Simeon Bennett and Jason Gale, “Ebola Spurs WHO Plan for Health Reserves after Missteps,” Bloomberg Business, 25 January 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-25/who-board

-proposes-new-fund-and-workforce-to-avoid-ebola-repeat.

35. Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Botswana Doctor Is Named to Lead W.H.O. in Africa,” New York Times, 27 January 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/world/africa/botswana-doctor-is-named-to-lead-who

-in-africa.html.

36. “WHO: Air Travel Is Low-Risk for Ebola Transmission,” World Health Organization, 14 August 2014, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2014/ebola-travel/en/.

37. “Ebola: Three Athletes Banned from Youth Olympics,” CNN, 15 August 2014, http://edition.cnn

.com/2014/08/15/sport/youth-olympics-ebola/.

38. Lizzie Dearden, “Ebola Outbreak: Brazilians Cancel Namibia Visit over Ebola Fears, Despite Conference Being 3,000 Miles from Disease Hotspot,” Independent, 19 August 2014, http://www.independent

.co.uk/news/world/africa/ebola-outbreak-brazilians-cancel-namibia-visit-over-ebola-fears-despite

-conference-being-3000-miles-9678108.html.

39. Ashifa Kassam, Philip Oltermann, and Henry McDonald, “Fear and False Alarms As Ebola Puts Europe on Alert,” Guardian, 22 August 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/22/ebola-europe

-spain-germany-ireland-risk-false-alarm.

40. Barbie L. Nadeau, “Ebola-Fueled Racism Is on the Rise in Europe,” Daily Beast, 20 August 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/20/ebola-fueled-racism-is-on-the-rise-in-europe.html.

41. Ibid.

42. Alan Yuhas, “Panic: The Dangerous Epidemic Sweeping an Ebola-Fearing US,” Guardian, 20 October 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/20/panic-epidemic-ebola-us.

43. Jonathan Paye-Layleh, “Obama to Host Summit with African Leaders As Ebola Continues to Spread,” Al Jazeera America, 3 August 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/3/us-africa-ebola

.html.

44. Mandisi Majavu, “Medical Racism and the African Patient,” South African Civil Society Information Service, 1 September 2014, http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/2118.

45. Rodrigo F. Rodríguez Borges, “Xenophobic Discourse and Agenda-Setting: A Case Study in the Press of the Canary Islands (Spain),” Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, no. 65 (2010): 222–30, http://www.revistalatinacs.org/10/art2/895_ULL/17_RodrigoEN.html.

46. Guy Martin, “The West, Natural Resources and Population Control Policies in Africa in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Third World Studies 22, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 69–107, http://www.popline.org/node

/257169.

47. Alan Feuer, “The Ebola Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, 18 October 2014, http://www.nytimes

.com/2014/10/19/sunday-review/the-ebola-conspiracy-theories.html.

48. James Surowiecki, “Ebolanomics,” New Yorker, 25 August 2014, http://www.newyorker.com

/magazine/2014/08/25/ebolanomics.

49. Denise Grady, “Ebola Vaccine, Ready for Test, Sat on the Shelf,” New York Times, 23 October 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/health/without-lucrative-market-potential-ebola-vaccine-was

-shelved-for-years.html.

50. Elizabeth Barber, “WHO Pillories Drug Industry on Failure to Develop Ebola Vaccine,” Time, 4 November 2014, http://time.com/3555706/who-ebola-vaccine-pharmaceutical-industry-margaret-chan/.

51. Chuck Todd, “Obama to Chuck: The Ebola Threat,” NBC News Meet the Press, video, 3:09, 7 September 2014, http://www.nbcnews.com/watch/meet-the-press/obama-to-chuck-the-ebola-threat-326074947883.

52. National Intelligence Council, The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States, National Intelligence Estimate no. NIE 99-17D (Washington, DC: Wilson Center, 2000), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Report6-3.pdf.

53. Lincoln Chen and Vasant Narasimhan, “Human Security and Global Health,” Journal of Human Development 4, no. 2 (2003): 181–90.

54. Martin I. Meltzer et al., “Estimating the Future Number of Cases in the Ebola Epidemic—Liberia and Sierra Leone, 2014–2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 63, no. 3 (Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 23 September 2014), http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/other/su6303.pdf.

55. “2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa—Case Counts,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 December 2015, http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/case-counts.html.

56. Toni Clarke and Saliou Samb, “U.N. Says $600 Million Needed to Tackle Ebola As Deaths Top 1,900,” Reuters, 4 September 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-ebola-idUSKBN0GY1V320140904.

57. Elise Viebeck, “GOP Cuts Funding Request to Fight Ebola,” Hill, 9 September 2014, http://thehill

.com/policy/healthcare/217115-gop-cuts-obamas-ebola-funding-request.

58. Kate Kelland, “Ever-Present Endemic Ebola Now Major Concern for Disease Experts,” Reuters, 23 September 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-ebola-endemic-idUSKCN0HI1OX20140923.

59. David Kroll, “Cuba Responds to Ebola Crisis As Black Market for Convalescent Serum Emerges,” Forbes, 12 September 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2014/09/12/cuba-commits-165-healthcare

-workers-to-who-ebola-response-in-sierra-leone/; and Patrick Oppmann and Mariano Castillo, “In Ebola Fight, Cuba Flexes Medical Diplomacy,” CNN, 21 October 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/21/world

/americas/cuba-ebola-diplomacy/.

60. Somini Sengupta, “New U.N. Ebola Trust Fund Falls Far Short of Goal,” New York Times, 16 October 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/world/africa/ban-ki-moon-pleads-for-ebola-aid-donations.html.

61. “Trust Fund Factsheet—Ebola Response Multi-Partner Trust Fund,” United Nations Development Group, 4 January 2016, http://mptf.undp.org/factsheet/fund/EBO00; and Alex Wayne, “Congress Nearly Grants Obama’s Ebola Wish List with $5.4B,” Bloomberg, 10 December 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com

/news/articles/2014-12-10/congress-nearly-grants-obama-s-ebola-wish-list-with-5-4b.

62. Jeff Mason and James H. Giahyue, “Citing Security Threat, Obama Expands U.S. Role Fighting Ebola,” Reuters, 16 September 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-ebola-obama-idUSKBN0H B08S20140917.

63. Kate Kelland, “Gates Foundations Pledges [sic] $50 Mln to Fight Ebola Epidemic,” Reuters, 10 September 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/health-ebola-gates-idUSL5N0RB1O420140910.

64. World Health Organization, Ethical Considerations for Use of Unregistered Interventions for Ebola Viral Disease, WHO/HIS/KER/GHE/14.1 (Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 2014), http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/130997/1/WHO_HIS_KER_GHE_14.1_eng.pdf.

65. Lizzie Dearden, “Ebola Outbreak: Japan Offers Experimental Anti-flu Drug to World Health Organisation for Ebola Treatment,” Independent, 25 August 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news

/world/asia/ebola-outbreak-japan-offers-experimental-anti-flu-drug-to-world-health-organisation-for

-ebola-9689715.html.

66. Stephanie Nebehay, “WHO Sees Small-Scale Use of Experimental Ebola Vaccines in January,”

Reuters, 26 September 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-ebola-who-idUSKCN0HL1J720 140926.

67. Jonathan Paye-Layleh, “US Ebola Labs, Health Equipment Arrive in Liberia,” Merced Sun-Star, 30 September 2014, http://www.mercedsunstar.com/news/nation-world/world/article3296464.html.

68. “Ebola Outbreak Cripples Sierra Leone’s Tourism Industry,” British Broadcasting Corporation, video, 1:41, 3 October 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29479088.

69. “Ebola: New World Bank Group Study Forecasts Billions in Economic Loss If Epidemic Lasts Longer, Spreads in West Africa,” World Bank, 8 October 2014, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press

-release/2014/10/08/ebola-new-world-bank-group-study-forecasts-billions-in-economic-loss-if-epidemic

-lasts-longer-spreads-in-west-africa.

70. Robert Wall, “Ethiopian Airlines’ Sales Hit by Ebola Fears,” Wall Street Journal, 20 November 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/ethiopian-airlines-sales-hit-by-ebola-fears-1416498962.

71. Jason Beaubien, “Firestone Did What Governments Have Not: Stopped Ebola in Its Tracks,” National Public Radio, 7 October 2014, http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/10/06/354054915

/firestone-did-what-governments-have-not-stopped-ebola-in-its-tracks.

72. “Corruption in Nigeria: Dragon-Slayers Wanted,” Economist, 3 December 2011, http://www.economist

.com/node/21541042.

73. Jeré Longman and Richard Sandomir, “Equatorial Guinea Replaces Morocco as Africa Cup Host,” New York Times, 14 November 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/sports/soccer/equatorial-guinea

-replaces-morocco-as-2015-africa-cup-host.html.

74. Helen Epstein, “Ebola in Liberia: An Epidemic of Rumors,” New York Review of Books, 18 December 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/12/18/ebola-liberia-epidemic-rumors/.

75. “Ebola: Kofi Annan ‘Bitterly Disappointed’ by Response to Ebola,” British Broadcasting Corporation, video, 2:10, 16 October 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/health-29654784.

76. Laurie Garrett, “Why an Ebola Epidemic Is Spinning Out of Control,” CNN, 24 July 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/24/opinion/garrett-ebola/.

77. Colin Freeman, “Ebola Outbreak: Fight against Disease Hampered by Belief in Witchcraft, Warns British Doctor,” Telegraph, 30 July 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean

/sierraleone/11001610/Ebola-outbreak-fight-against-disease-hampered-by-belief-in-witchcraft-warns

-British-doctor.html.

78. Brendan Nyhan, “Fighting Ebola, and the Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, 25 August 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/upshot/fighting-ebola-and-the-conspiracy-theories.html.

79. Carol Hills, “This Catchy West African Dance Tune Carries a Public Health Message about Ebola,” Public Radio International, audio, 3:40, 28 May 2014, http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-05-28/catchy-west

-african-dance-tune-carries-public-health-message-about-ebola.

80. “Statement on Ebola and Conflict in West Africa,” International Crisis Group, 23 September 2014, http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/publication-type/media-releases/2014/africa/statement-on-ebola-and

-conflict-in-west-africa.aspx.

81. Fuse ODG, “Why I Had to Turn Down Band Aid,” Guardian, 19 November 2014, http://www

.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/19/turn-down-band-aid-bob-geldof-africa-fuse-odg.

82. Tom Sykes, “Do They Know It’s Time to Stop Band Aid?,” Daily Beast, 22 November 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/22/do-they-know-it-s-time-to-stop-band-aid.html.

83. Melvyn Reggie Thomas, “Ebola Outbreak Dulls Diamond Industry,” Times of India, 7 September 2014, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Ebola-outbreak-dulls-diamond-industry

/articleshow/41906802.cms.

84. “Ebola: The Race for Drugs and Vaccines,” British Broadcasting Corporation, 27 March 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/health-28663217.

*Yohannes Woldemariam is a member of the graduate faculty in political science at the University of Colorado at Denver. His research interests include transboundary rivers, migration/refugees, state failures, nationalism, and ethnicity. His academic writings have been published in the anthology Comparative Democracy and Democratization (Harcourt College Publications, 2002). Professor Woldemariam has coedited a volume of Comparative Politics: Critical Concepts in Political Science (Routledge, 2005) with Prof. Howard Wiarda and Zuhre Aksoy and has published several book reviews, book chapters, and numerous articles in social media.

Lionel Di Giacomo, a graduate of Fort Lewis College (FLC) with a degree in socioecological education and leadership, currently works as a research and advocacy associate at Great Old Broads for Wilderness, focusing on climate change, public lands issues, and grassroots leadership and training. He also serves on the FLC Environmental Center’s board of directors and acted as co-coordinator in the campaign to divest the FLC Foundation from fossil fuels in 2013–14.

Darra Adam Khel

“Home Grown” Weapons

Aqab Malik, PhD*

The immense quantities of small arms and light weapons (SALW) diffused into Afghanistan and the surrounding regions are largely a consequence of the massive dispersal of such weapons by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the United States of America, and their respective allies during the final stages of the Cold War in the 1980s. Controls on the supply of SALWs had been limited due to their use as bargaining chips and the need to arm the conflicting parties as much as possible to counter each other’s advantages. The Soviet Union came well equipped with a modern conventional army—as did its proxy, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan—but the mujahideen were by no means a well-armed fighting force in the initial stages of the Soviet occupation. Many were equipped only with antiquated weapons such as the Lee Enfield 0.303 and the British Sten Gun; modern arms were captured from deserting or defeated forces of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and USSR.1 However, apart from the progressively increasing supply of weapons aided by the superpowers’ rather hot Cold War competition in Afghanistan, an indigenous arms manufacturing industry has existed for hundreds of years in the area now known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), especially in Darra Adam Khel. This small frontier town is sandwiched between the Pakistan and Afghanistan border and the Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Province (previously known as the North West Frontier Province) of Pakistan. In his narrative of Mountstuart Elphinstone’s deputation to the Afghan court in 1808, Sir Olaf Caroe takes note of the Darra (the Pass) of the Adam Khel Afridis and their rifle factories in Zharghun Khel.2 The Darra gunsmiths were even licensed by the colonial British Raj to provide weapons to border tribes in order to keep them at bay. According to John Fullerton, however, this strategy was used to prevent the tribes from acquiring original weapons of much better quality smuggled in from abroad.3

The FATA has traditionally been exempt from Pakistani laws on the production and possession of arms, leading to its emergence as a focal point for the manufacture of weapons. However, the smuggling of firearms is not exempted, even in the FATA, as enshrined in the Prevention of Smuggling Act (1977), which encompasses the whole of Pakistan.4 Niobe Thompson and Devashish Krishnan estimate that the FATA is awash with about one million weapons of all kinds.5 Nevertheless, given that these statistics are ascertained from the Pakistani Interior Ministry’s estimates of licensed firearms, the inclusion of a vast number of unlicensed and unrecorded weapons, as well as those that have entered the regions since the beginning of the US-led occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001, may raise the total number several times. This possibility stems from the nature of tribal affairs vis-à-vis Pakistan’s central government and the status that the tribal Pushtun bestow upon firearms.

The arms manufacturing industry in and around Darra Adam Khel (the main town in the Kohat Frontier Region of the FATA, the latter having a population of 88,456 in the last national census in 1998) was present prior to creation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.6 However, large-scale manufacture and retail sales of weapons began to increase significantly only during the early 1970s, perhaps as a consequence of the destabilization of political relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan during Mohammad Daoud’s presidency in Afghanistan and the Baluch insurgency in Pakistan.7 The coup d’état by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in April 1978 (also known as the Saur Revolution) gave a further boost to the weapons trade in the FATA since the subsequent insurgency against the communist government was considerably lacking in modern weapons: “In 1978, when the revolution came, and the refugees followed, the insurgents weren’t receiving foreign aid from abroad to buy weapons. In 1978 and 1979, they came here [Darra Adam Khel] themselves and bought weapons from what they could raise, and then fought the war. It was only later that the foreigners gave them the weapons.”8

Before the PDPA coup and Soviet invasion, the majority of weapons produced were repeater rifles such as shotguns. However, the growth of the Afghan conflict also enhanced the knowledge and expertise of Darra gunsmiths in the manufacture of more advanced weapons through the reverse engineering of new ones introduced into the conflict by the USSR.9

Types of Weapons

An impressive range of arms is produced in Darra, including daggers; Colt and Webber handguns; Lee Enfield rifles; a variety of automatic weapons from the M-16, Protecta, and Russian 222 Kalacov and AK-47 assault rifles; Italian Beretta, German Walther, and Chinese TT pistols; and an assortment of 12-bore shotguns, repeaters, submachine guns, and smaller antiaircraft guns.10 The array of firearms produced and those acquired for sale, such as landmines and RPG-7 rocket launchers, have facilitated a burgeoning black market trade in SALWs in the FATA, especially in Darra Adam Khel.

Heckler and Koch G-3 assault rifles, made under license in both Iran and Pakistan, were often seen in Darra shops.11 According to Darra dealers, the town’s gunsmiths did not make G-3s; rather, they were acquired from Afghanistan since Pakistani military aid to the mujahideen parties during the 1980s included limited numbers of these rifles.12 Iran also supplied many G-3s to Shia mujahideen groups during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s.13 Furthermore, the preference for the AK-47 led many groups and individuals to sell their G-3s to Darra dealers.

The Arms Workshops

The quality of arms manufactured in Darra has improved measurably through the introduction of electricity and acquisition of better machines to aid their production by gunsmiths and artisans. Abdul Karim Qasuria, the home secretary of the Government of the Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Province, noted that, according to a study by the Pakistan Ordnance Factories, in October 2000 Darra Adam Khel contained about 60 small-arms production units (factories), which employed 20–25 people each.14 In addition to the factories, approximately 300 smaller working places (workshops) exist that employ 4–5 technicians each, individually paid on a daily basis and earning an average Rs (rupees) 500–1,000 ($5–10) per day, depending upon productivity and speciality.15 A 2009 Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies report on FATA: Tribal Economy in the Context of Ongoing Militancy quotes Mohammad Tariq, the chief operating officer of the Pakistan Hunting and Sporting Arms Development Company, as saying that “around 250 small and medium enterprises and 2,200 families are associated with the weapons’ manufacturing business in Darra Adam Khel and Barra.”16 Recent reassessments by the Pakistan Hunting and Sporting Arms Development Company, though, have shown that the numbers of small-arms manufacturing units have decreased to 200, consisting of 1,600 workshops in Darra Adam Khel.17 A more comprehensive study to actuate the extent of arms manufacturing and the numbers of units involved has been prevented by prevailing security conditions because of ongoing, intense Pakistani military operations against a whole host of terrorist groups, parties, and individuals in the FATA.

Although the workshops tend to be located in the back streets with no regard for the general population, such as next to a girls’ school, about 400 shops of varying sizes are engaged in dealing with the sale of arms and ammunition, many on the main road through Darra. Estimates as to the number of shops dealing in arms vary considerably. A study by the National Institute of Public Administration, Lahore (Deweaponisation: Problems, Challenges, and Viable Strategy), in 2001 indicates that “there are 2,600 arms manufacturing, repair and sales outlets in this tiny place which employ over 30,000 workers, including some 8,000 skilled hands.”18 However, Darra’s arms dealers estimated that up to 5,000 shops (throughout the FATA) were engaged in the weapons trade during the Afghan-Soviet War (1979–89) and that the number of shops decreased considerably after the withdrawal of the USSR.19 The main road through Darra is saturated with shop fronts showing small arms of all kinds. Home Secretary Qasuria also noted that 10,000 families may be dependent on the local arms industry around Darra^20 and that about 400,000 people were directly or indirectly involved in the arms industry in the Darra region (referring to the FATA as a whole).21 According to the Pakistan Hunting and Sporting Arms Development Company, Darra alone is home to 2,500 retail arms and ammunition shops.22

The manufacture of weapons in Darra has produced a constant flow of various SALWs to satiate the demand from both tribal and detribalized Pushtun as well as the various parties involved in the insurgency in Afghanistan. This production also satisfies fluctuating needs in the wider region, as occurred in the supply of arms to the Sikh separatist movement for an independent Khalistan in India’s Punjab province during the 1980s.23 It also happened during the rise of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in the Sindh province and Karachi—in particular during the 1990s:24

There is no specific organization who buys weapons in Pakistan. Number one, Altaf Hussain’s MQM people did come and buy weapons. Number two, people from Qazi Hussain Ahmed’s Jamaat-i-Islami used to buy weapons; Kashmiri Mujahideen such as the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba bought weapons; and the Sikh people for an independent Khalistan also bought weapons from Darra. . . . In the Zia period, they used to do that a lot . . . to destabilize India.25

During the Afghan-Soviet War, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency became increasingly involved in the supply of weapons to mujahideen parties from Darra and other arms dealers and workshops throughout the FATA. Although dealers interviewed in Darra admitted to no government contracts, they particularly referred to an arms dealer, Haji Baz Gul, and his large Asia Arms Store on University Road, Peshawar.26 Gul, a former senator and member of Pakistan’s National Assembly, admitted that Darra dealers had cooperated with different mujahideen groups in the supply of arms but adamantly denied any involvement of the Pakistani government, even after accepting the fact that other countries such as India, Iran, Russia, and Uzbekistan were supplying weapons to the conflicting parties in Afghanistan: “Our Darra people and dealers did a lot of cooperation with leaders of the Afghan mujahideen, like Mohammad Naveed Shabib and Pir Shabib. These leaders say that the Darra people have cooperated a lot with them. But it [the weapons supply] doesn’t come from Pakistan.”27

Weapons Production in Darra Adam Khel

Research visits to Darra Adam Khel yielded insights into the methods used to manufacture a variety of different weapons by the local gunsmiths. The process of the manufacture of weapons has been in place since before the British colonized the Indian subcontinent. However, the recent massive proliferation of arms into the region during the Afghan conflict has also seen significant developments in this process; for example, the arrival of electricity and machines has greatly increased the productivity of Darra. The following is a brief account of the general manufacturing procedure in Darra Adam Khel and other workshops throughout the FATA. This description is accompanied by detailed pictorial representations to facilitate a greater appreciation of arms manufacturing in the FATA.

Acquiring Raw Materials

The raw materials that workshops in Darra require for the manufacture of weapons come from many sources. Until the PDPA coup and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, manufacturing relied upon small supplies of iron from scrap metal and several iron foundries throughout Pakistan. The numbers of weapons produced were limited to the small local demand in the FATA, and their quality was also constrained by the lack of reliable electricity sources and machinery. However, the introduction of electricity and, hence, machinery increased the demand for weapons after the PDPA coup, which also made modern weapons more available for reverse engineering and increased supplies of scrap metal from destroyed military hardware from Afghanistan. In turn, Darra and other FATA workshops expanded their manufacturing capabilities to produce much greater quantities of modern weapons that were qualitatively superior to those of the earlier FATA: “Scrap metal came from destroyed tanks and planes and used to come through this way [through Darra] from Waziristan to Wana to Dera Ismail Khan to Lahore. Lots of weapons were also smuggled with the scrap metal and auto parts. The weapons were sold here, and the scrap went to the Ittefaq iron foundry in Lahore, and through a barter system, essential iron was provided to us.”28

Some of the arms merchants who were willing to speak also mentioned that in the 1980s the United States supplied the mujahideen with weapons that were in very poor condition. These firearms often came to Darra for reconditioning. According to dealers, the weapons initially supplied by Egypt and Turkey in the early 1980s were obsolete and in such bad condition that they were not even repairable and could not be refurbished.29 Many became spare parts; others were completely unusable, even as scrap. This was particularly the case with one of the arms shipments from Egypt in 1985:30 “To my horror, no less than 30,000 82 millimeter mortar bombs were found unusable on the battlefield as cartridges had swollen in the damp and would not fit the bombs. The Egyptians had cobbled together arms that had been lying exposed to the atmosphere for many years in order to make a substantial amount of money.”31

From the assertions of many local individuals, one can ascertain that the United States lost a great deal of credibility during the initial stages of the Afghan-USSR conflict due its sourcing of Soviet-origin weapons for the conflict to uphold its policy of plausible deniability in the international arena.32 Consequently, several states took advantage of the situation to earn a quick buck and relieve themselves of degrading and obsolete stocks of weapons. Another incident exposed a Pakistani arms dealer who had persuaded the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to buy “30 million rounds of .303 ammunition . . . at 50 cents a round.” Unknown to the CIA, these were from old stocks of the Pakistan Army stamped with the Pakistan Ordinance Factory trademark, hence voiding any prospect of deniability and rendering them useless unless they were defaced at tremendous cost.33 Other suppliers also had no scruples, such as the Turkish delivery of “60,000 rifles, 8,000 light machine guns, 10,000 pistols and over 100 million rounds of ammunition,” most of which turned out to be corroded, faulty, and unserviceable but were accepted to avoid a diplomatic row.34

The mujahideen also acquired large quantities of ammunition, whether by capture or as aid from the United States and its allies. Most of the ammunition was unusable because of its unsafe condition or its inappropriate specification for the weapons used by the mujahideen, whether small-arms rounds or tank shells. Such ammunition was often sold to Darra dealers as scrap for its metal constituents, which were separated and then used as raw materials for Darra-made ammunition.35 For example, the tank shells captured with destroyed tanks were broken down into their constituent parts—that is, bronze casings, projectiles made of different metals, and explosives. Unusable small-arms ammunition was similarly reduced into its constituent parts and sold for cash or working weapons: “Commanders used to sell tank ammunition as scrap because they were not holding the tank, so the ammunition was basically useless. They used to contact us, and we went there [Afghanistan] to dismantle the ammunition into its parts and brought it back with us.”36

Even though the manufacture of weapons in Darra contravenes Pakistani laws, it is, in fact, governed by the Frontier Crimes Regulations. Consequently, however, the Government of Pakistan has made efforts to bring the arms manufacturing industry in the FATA within the official purview of the Pakistan Ordinance Factories (based in Wah Cantt, Punjab) while also encouraging economic development of the region to promote alternative livelihoods for people engaged in the arms manufacturing industry.37 Nevertheless, Pakistani agencies could also severely restrict the supply of essential raw materials to the workshops if they desired. For the scrap, auto parts, and obsolete weapons to reach the foundries, the transporting trucks would have to pass through numerous barriers and checkpoints set up by the political agencies, customs, and police:

When they used to pass through the political agent’s barrier, they used to give 10,000 rupees per truck and 10,000 rupees to customs and 10,000 to the police, and they used to smuggle in the daytime between ten o’clock and twelve o’clock. It was all done on a mutual understanding. On whether they would rather take a bribe or control the weapons smuggling, they did not control weapons smuggling; they took the money, and all this came to the administration.38

Quantity of Weapons Produced

Darra does not claim to produce massive quantities of weapons. Nevertheless, the workshops in the small town do have a significant impact on the indigenous production of firearms and do directly aid the proliferation of SALWs throughout the region. Estimates vary considerably although many are relatively dated in comparison to the rapidly changing market conditions of the arms demand and supply over the past decade. The Small Arms Survey 2003 notes that “the Darra region produces approximately 20,000 units of all kinds of weapons each year.”39 Thompson and Krishnan’s estimates nearly double this annual figure with the production of the AK-47 alone: “They have the capacity to produce over 100 AK-47s per day at less than $153 (US).”40 The daily production of 100 AK-47 assault rifle units is equal to an annual figure of over 36,000 units. The number of other weapons produced would likely bring the total amount to well over 50,000 weapons per annum, depending upon the prevailing security conditions and demand from individuals, groups, or parties involved in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan or further afield—a massive influx of unregulated and unchecked weaponry into the region. To corroborate, a Darra gunsmith noted that one skilled workshop unit of between four to five workers can produce “one Kalashnikov [AK-47 or Kalacov] in one day.”41 Other larger workshops can turn out a larger number of weapons, up to five per day.42 With an estimated 3,000 father-and-son production units, the total number of weapons may rise even higher.43 The Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies report observes that upwards of “6,000 30 mm pistols are manufactured every month and 73,000 annually [in Darra Adam Khel and Peshawar] . . . [and] 4,500 shotguns of different categories are manufactured here [Miranshah, Sakhakot, and Momand Agency] every month.”44 According to the Pakistan Hunting and Sporting Arms Development Company, “Around 400–700 guns are made in Darra each day and the number is rising with the adoption of more tools,” which amounts to between 12,000 and 21,000 a month or 144,000 to 252,000 weapons a year from Darra alone.45 This is a staggering number of weapons likely to enter the general populace of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the surrounding region.

Process of Manufacturing

The process of manufacturing weapons in the numerous workshops in Darra and surrounding areas within the FATA does not differ greatly from those procedures within a modern arms-manufacturing factory environment (figs. 1 and 2). The differences, however, manifest themselves through the automation of modern factories as compared to the artisan handmade processes in Darra workshops. The two do not differ in the approach since distinct separation and delegation of responsibilities exist for making different components. Rather than one person or groups of workers aiming at self-sufficiency in the production of a weapon, Darra has evolved a cooperative method of production among groups of workshops designed to increase productivity and profitability. Workshops have developed specializations in the manufacture of specific parts and components. A degree of coordination has evolved over time to allow a more efficient production line. The variegated workshops simulate a production line—that is, workshop(s) are linked to others along one part of the line. One workshop may produce rifle barrels for particular weapons; others may specialize in the breach-block and firing mechanisms of certain weapons or the stocks and ammunition. Completed parts are transferred to or bought by other workshops for fitting and testing, after which they are transferred to or bought by retail outlets for public sale. It is possible that a single individual or group may own a number of workshops and retail outlets since takeovers are not unknown. Weapons are also sold in bulk to various agencies or parties interested in avoiding the recorded and regulated weapons.

Figure 1. The arms manufacturing process in Darra Adam Khel

Figure 2. Indigenous small-arms production in Darra Adam Khel and FATA: Manufacture and distribution since 1980

Beating the Licensing Laws on Weapons Types

Darra has also been able to circumvent Pakistani laws on the prohibition of certain types of weapons. For example, because the AK-47 Kalashnikov is a prohibited weapon in Pakistan, a license cannot be obtained for it. By changing certain specifications of the standard AK-47, Darra and FATA workshops have been able to circumvent such laws and regulations and maintain weapons sales to some extent. The AK-47 Kalashnikov is transformed into the Kalacov, the latter having a different barrel: “The Kalashnikov is .62 bore, and the Kalacov is .333 bore. They make this [the Kalacov] out of the original Kalashnikov. . . . They just change the barrel; the rest of the machinery remains the same. They make barrels according to demand.”46

Testing and Quality Differences

The accuracy and quality of the final product do not follow the traditional path of test firing at a secure firing range. In Darra the firing range is the open space between the back of the workshop and the mountains that surround the town. As would be expected, locally manufactured weapons differ in quality from those produced under the quality-control conditions of a large factory. Darra gunsmiths unanimously accepted that local firearms were fundamentally inferior. The primary faults lie in the quality of the materials used. Regarding weapons of Russian and Chinese origin, “those weapons are machine crafted; the material used is much better than the material used over here since it is not processed as well and is generally of inferior quality.”47 The quality of a weapon manifests itself in the life expectancy that it has before it begins to fail. Therefore, the retail prices of Darra-made weapons are significantly less than those for original weapons: “Since they are handcrafted, their barrels are not as precise as they should be. If they burst, they are fixed up again. But sometimes they are not properly crafted. Either their barrels blow up from where they are weak or the bolts break because of repeated hammering. These are not as strong as foreign weapons and are not as reliable.”48

Mechanisms Involved in the

Supply, Distribution, and Diffusion of Weapons

Diffusion

The methods used to distribute small arms manufactured in Darra and FATA in general have been in existence since the times of the British Raj. The only difference is the addition of new technology to evade capture from law enforcement authorities. Many workshops and factories have their own shops to retail the weapons that they manufacture. Others also have retail outlets throughout the FATA to enable wider access and distribution of weapons: “The weapons workshops here have their own workers who distribute weapons to Pakistan. They have their own people who take them to Kurrum Agency, North Waziristan, South Waziristan, and then to Quetta.”49

However, the intensity of the distribution effort increased dramatically after the PDPA coup. Arms dealers in Darra not only sold the weapons they manufactured but also acted as intermediaries between arms buyers and sellers. As mujahideen parties became established, their demand for arms grew proportionally. Many of the arms that they acquired were initially captured from their adversaries. However, the seizure of arms by party members or commanders in the field meant that they had to be relinquished to party stores; consequently, those who captured them, many of whom had no real relationship with one or other party, were not rewarded for their efforts. In such circumstances and to gain an income of some sort, weapons often found their way to arms bazaars across the FATA through various intermediaries, who frequently purchased arms from mujahideen individuals or groups and then sold them at a higher rate to mujahideen parties or other groups in need of them: “Whatever the Afghans captured from the Russians and Afghan soldiers over there [Afghanistan] was brought over here to sell to us. We used to buy the weapons and ammunition on a cheaper rate and then used to sell it to some other party at a higher rate to make a profit.”50

In the early 1980s, many of the arms given to the mujahideen were obsolete and ineffective. Further, most of the mujahideen had no funds to fight against the Soviets. Weapons already in the possession of the mujahideen were frequently sold to pay for food, fuel, and the salaries of mujahideen fighters. Therefore, “the arms that came from abroad came here or to Pakistan. All the old weapons were given to the Afghan mujahideen, who sold them quickly and then asked for more weapons.”51 Mujahideen regularly raided arms caches of competing mujahideen groups, sold the weapons that they did not need,52 reequipping themselves with the cheaper Darra-made weapons: “The Afghans used to sell foreign weapons to us and get more money, and they used to buy local weapons at a cheaper rate.”53

After the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the fall of the PDPA, the United States announced rewards for the return of Stinger missile systems still in the possession of various mujahideen. Consequently, arms dumps were routinely raided for these systems and other high-value weapons and perpetuated by owners of arms stores due to their willingness to sell illicit and stolen arms. This situation provided a market for the raiders.54 Upon raising the question of the availability of the Stinger surface-to-air missile systems in Darra, one arms dealer diplomatically admitted their presence over a decade ago but refrained from furthering the conversation:55 “The Americans used to buy Stingers. They started from $60,000 to $80,000 (US). Because of this, lots of people used to break into lots of arms depots, especially for Stingers.”56 These Stingers were not solely those supplied to the mujahideen: “Of the original 900 Stinger SAMs [surface-to-air missiles] and 50,000 M16 rifles that the US supplied to Pakistan, as many as 560 Stinger and nearly 20,000 rifles were untraceable. There were reports that 312 of these were sold in Landi-Kotal market in January 1993.”57

Smuggling

To an extent, the smuggling of arms from Darra is facilitated by the preexistence of the lucrative trade in smuggled goods, especially electrical appliances, due to loopholes in the Afghan Transit Trade agreement concluded in 1965 between the Afghan and Pakistani governments.58 The agreement allowed goods imported by Afghanistan to come through the port of Karachi without incurring customs duties. These goods are transported through two main routes although others are also used: Peshawar-Torkham and Chamman-Spin Boldak. Once in Afghanistan, the goods are unloaded and reloaded on mules to be smuggled along the many mountain passes of the porous border, back into Pakistan’s many barras (literally bazaars, but the term is used to refer to those bazaars in the FATA) to be sold at prices much less than those for Pakistani indigenous and imported products.59 The rationale behind the lower prices may be related to Pakistan’s policies on trade and tariffs, which offer some incentive for the continuation of black market transactions, as noted by a recent study on “The Causes of Transit Related Pak-Afghan Cross Border Smuggling”:

Our estimates show that market prices of certain popular smuggled goods are on average 30–40% lower than their corresponding landed prices under official imports. The main reason for this has been high tariff and sales tax on these goods. On the other hand, the costs of smuggling are fairly low, ranging from 5–17% (average of 10–20%) which further motivates smugglers to supply goods through unofficial channels.60

Hence, preexisting smuggling routes and methods are also used to smuggle arms—which are just substituted for consumable goods—into and out of Afghanistan.61 Close tribal and kinship relations make it easier to retain secrecy from the authorities. The tribes even act as guarantors between dealers in the contraband, narcotics, and illicit arms trade.62 A large police presence is maintained on the main roads within the Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Province and leading to the other provinces, especially Punjab, to deter smuggling activity. However, rampant corruption within the police force itself has not deterred increasingly larger smuggling activities and, in turn, has allowed a massive diffusion of sophisticated arms into the whole of Pakistan.

It is important to note that for each and every occasion that goods and arms are smuggled to and from Afghanistan, a different method may be used according to the prevailing conditions that facilitate or deter each operation. The human dimension is of paramount importance to every operation. Obstacles may arise at any point, whereby the smuggler must adopt various tactics to be successful: “They are armed because there is every likelihood of an encounter.”63 Illicit goods (whether arms, contraband, or narcotics) are smuggled across the border in two ways: “One is vehicular. People just conceal the weapons, the arms and rifles, and start on the road. The other is on the hilly tracks through the mountains.”64 For the latter, smugglers, calling themselves Sauda Ghar (traders) rarely travel alone, preferring to fully arm themselves and move in convoys of between 20 to 50 people, carrying goods on their backs or on pack animals, such as mules and camels.65 A juridical raison d’être exists for going across country rather than by road. The Frontier Crimes Regulations, inherited from the British Raj by the Pakistani government to maintain a superficial degree of law and order in the FATA, permit the relevant political agents of the tribal agencies concerned jurisdiction over the roads in the FATA but not those areas beyond the roads, such as the hills.66 Therefore, the hills offer smugglers a degree of immunity from law enforcement authorities.

The Hawala System

Arms dealers used numerous methods to obtain and distribute arms during the Afghan-Soviet War. One successful and universally employed method depends upon a high degree of trust between dealers and couriers in the establishment of an underground network of transactions. Due to the illicit nature of the enterprise, many of the arms dealers adopted the Hawala system. Dealers and couriers employed a parchi (literally, note) for the purpose of identification and condition of the weapons. According to Saeed Afridi (a Darra arms dealer), the basic process of a transaction involved a Darra dealer, an arms buyer, an arms source, and several couriers.67 An arms buyer, for example, from Thailand, approaches the Darra arms merchant and identifies his intention to buy 1,000 weapons. The Darra dealer shows him an original weapon from Afghanistan—for instance, from Bamiyan: “Lots of these weapons were bought by Thailand dealers from Bamiyan.”68

Afridi describes the Hawala system as follows.69 The Darra dealer, having already established contact with the arms supplier from Bamiyan, negotiates a deal for the supply of 1,000 weapons at a predetermined rate—for example, Rs 100,000 per weapon (fig. 3).70 The Bamiyan supplier transports 1,000 firearms, at his own risk, to Jalalabad, where a local dealer or courier pays the Bamiyan supplier in full with a total of Rs 100,000,000 while also supplying a parchi as proof of the condition of the weapons received and as a form of protection for the supplier. He also receives a parchi from the Bamiyan supplier as proof of the condition of the weapons if they are already damaged and of the extent of damage. The Jalalabad courier transports the arms to Torkham, an Afghan town on the Pak-Afghan border crossing. The Jalalabad courier is paid in full by the Torkham courier with the original outlay of Rs 100,000,000 while also receiving a commission covering the transportation costs, risk, and charges at a predetermined rate (e.g., Rs 5,000 per weapon), making a total payment of Rs 105,000,000. Each courier exchanges a parchi as a receipt of the condition of the weapons given and received, respectively. If the firearms received have been damaged in any way, the Jalalabad courier may produce the parchi from the Bamiyan supplier as proof that they were not damaged by him. Otherwise, he may have to accept that they were delivered damaged by him and provide a receipt to indicate this fact if he cannot offer proof to the contrary. A predetermined penalty per weapon, depending upon the extent of the damage, may be noted on the parchi.

Figure 3. The Hawala system of arms dealing

The Torkham courier transports the weapons across the border to a Landi-Kotal courier where he receives a payment of Rs 105,000,000 while also receiving a predetermined commission—for example, of Rs 3,000 per weapon because of the increased risk taken to smuggle the weapons across the border, making a total payment of Rs 108,000,000. Each courier exchanges a parchi as a receipt of the condition of the weapons given and received, proof of damage to weapons provided if necessary, or responsibility taken and written in the parchi given to the Landi-Kotal courier. The latter transports the weapons to the Darra dealers and receives a payment of Rs 108,000,000, as well as a predetermined commission of Rs 2,000 per weapon, making a total payment of Rs 110,000,000.

Production of the parchi accounts for the condition of the weapons, indicating whether and where they may have been damaged. If they are, the Darra dealer may contact the relevant party for compensation later, if necessary. Nevertheless, in the transaction between the Thai buyer and the Darra dealer, the latter takes responsibility for any damage during transportation from the supplier in Bamiyan until the weapons are handed over to the former. The buyer would take responsibility for the risks and any further costs incurred from the point of collection in Darra up to the final destination, whether in Thailand or elsewhere. The Darra dealer receives payment in full for the weapons delivered at the predetermined price of Rs 150,000,000, which includes the full cost of the weapons hitherto—110,000,000—and the dealer’s commission covering the risk and profits (e.g., Rs 40,000 per weapon, less the damages incurred). If the weapons are damaged en route or stolen by a courier, even though he may have paid for the weapons, the Darra dealer can appeal directly to a tribal council (Jirgah) within the perpetrator’s locality, which can enforce recovery of the weapons and impose fines and/or sanctions on the perpetrator and his family.71 The individual relationships between the dealers and couriers, therefore, tend to have matured over an extended period of time and often cross generations.

Smuggling Routes

The availability of numerous routes for these types of transactions, the security measures incorporated into the Hawala system, and the semitribal backing for the trade have successfully prevented law enforcement authorities from fully conquering the illicit trade in weapons. One of the routes taken to gain entry into Afghanistan—one frequently used by smugglers yet rarely patrolled—is along a dirt-track road that travels from Peshawar to Sper Sang and then along the Darya Kabul (Kabul River) into mountainous terrain. During this journey, several small caravans of mules laden with sacks of narcotics passed in the opposite direction. They crossed the border after consultation, over a cup of green tea, with tribal elders for safe passage across the feud-ridden tribal territory along an undefined, level, arid, desert-like plain with no roads. Once over the border, Darya Kabul must be crossed to get to the main highway linking Peshawar and Jalalabad. However, the lack of a bridge along the smuggling route has led to the growth of a local crossing over Darya Kabul at La‘l Pūr, comprised of a number of boats large enough to carry a sizeable car across the river. All the boats are connected to strong cables and ropes, linking both sides of the river, acting as guides and supports along which the boats are winched across the river perpendicular to the flow of the current. No pictures were permitted at this juncture because of the presence of a local tribal administrator and his guards who were fully aware of the trade passing across the river (fig. 4).

Figure 4. A smuggling route across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. (Base map from “Pakistan Tribal Areas,” D-maps, Free Maps, accessed 16 December 2015, http://d-maps.com/carte/php?num_car=29641&lang=en.)

The Arms-Narco Nexus

The lack of regulations also facilitates continuation of the ancient narcotics trade, which has mushroomed in recent years with the growth of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. Many of the barras that openly deal with smuggled goods support shops stuffed with narcotics of all kinds, especially hashish (openly sold), opium (sold under the counter), and even those not indigenously produced, such as cocaine. Although no official statistics exist, and apart from those shops that focused solely on the sale of narcotics, many of the arms shops visited by the author also sold small quantities of narcotics. However, Haybat Khan, a Darra arms merchant, vigorously denied any link between the weapons and narcotics smuggling and trading: “There are different people for different things. People who smuggle weapons don’t smuggle narcotics, and people who smuggle narcotics don’t smuggle weapons. They are separate fields, separate staff, separate everything.”72 Such denials are contradicted in view of the evidence produced by Pakistani law enforcement authorities. Nevertheless, Superintendent Iqbal Khan of the Anti-Narcotics Force, Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, evidently disagreed with the supposition that the arms traders and smugglers were mutually exclusive from narcotics smugglers and traders: “People keep on changing over here. From drugs to customs articles [contraband], from customs articles to weapons. Wherever there is money. . . .”73 Superintendent Iqbal Khan’s assertions were evident from the massive number of narcotics and arms seizures that he regularly made during his service.

Retail and Costs of Weapons

Arms manufacture and production are not the only form of income for the people of Darra Adam Khel. The town evolved a significant enterprise in the sale of arms that were supposed to have been supplied to the mujahideen parties from the CIA-ISI arms pipeline and those weapons captured from Soviet and Democratic Republic of Afghanistan sources. Corruption was rampant throughout all of the stages of the arms pipeline: “There is clear evidence that many of the weapons being sold in Darra—and other arms markets nearby—come from CIA-funded arms shipments meant for the Afghan Mujahideen.”74 Many commanders did sell off weapons that had been captured and even those supplied by the CIA-ISI to raise cash to provide food and logistical support for their fighting men and families.75 According to Mohammad Yousaf, this was a reflection of their corruption.76 At every stage of the pipeline, funding was “being diverted . . . or sold by corrupt Peshawar representatives of Mujahideen groups.”77 This diversion involved at least one-third of the financing^78 and sometimes up to one-half. Yet, many mujahideen commanders were forced to sell weapons to pay for the transport of weapons deliveries and the running of mujahideen party offices, in part because of the lack of funds allocated from the ISI-CIA pipeline and other Arab donors.79 This was particularly true of the nationalist “old” regime parties run by Pir Sayyid Ahmed Ghailani and Sibghatullah Mojaddedi.80 Darra, with over 100 arms stores, was the center of a lucrative trade in arms and may be, according to Yousaf, “the biggest open arms market in the world.”81

The cost of individual weapons sold in Darra shops has varied over the course of the Afghan conflict. During the early 1980s, according to Francis Fukuyama, “The standard Enfield cost 10,000 Rupees, or $1,000. . . . The grenade launcher cost a staggering $9,000. One grenade for the RPG-7 was $700 and a single .303 bullet cost $2–3” at the beginning of the war.82 In 2001 Yousaf ascertained that the cost of a single AK-47 assault rifle was as much as $1,500 (US).83 In 1980 Fukuyama noted that the cost was in the range of $2,000–$2,400.84 More recently, the cost of weapons has increased, as pointed out by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies in its study “FATA: Tribal Economy in the Context of Ongoing Militancy”:

Mujahideen used to sell weapons [in Darra Adam Khel] earlier, but were now buying arms and ammunition for themselves. Requesting anonymity, the shopkeeper said the price of a second-hand Kalashnikov had risen from Rs 20,000 to Rs 35,000 and that of a new one from Rs 25,000 to Rs 45,000. The price of bullets made in Egypt has risen 14 percent and those in China 19 percent. Previously, the arms market in Miranshah, in North Waziristan Agency, met militants’ weapons needs but the supply has failed to keep pace with the growing demand.85

Costs were also dependent upon the origin of the weapon. Soviet-made Kalashnikovs tended to be of better quality, reflected in their relatively higher prices in comparison to their Chinese, Egyptian, and especially Darra counterparts. The availability of assault rifles such as the AK-47 was severely limited before the Soviet invasion. One Darra arms dealer pointed out that the original AK-47 rifles were in excess of Rs 35,000.86 Prices inevitably fell because of the massive influx of SALWs during the Afghan-USSR war. By 1987 the price of a single AK-47 assault rifle had been halved.87 In 1990 the same rifle was Rs 15,000.88 The departure of the Soviet Union and the United States from the Afghan conflict in the early 1990s coincided with the beginning of a gradual and progressive increase in weapons prices: “During the war, Kalashnikovs [AK-47] made by China or Russia used to cost Rs 15,000 to Rs 16,000; now they are Rs 22,000 to Rs 23,000 to Rs 25,000.”89 Superintendent Iqbal Khan corroborates, noting that “brand new AK-47 rifles which come wrapped in greased paper cost Rs 20,000 to Rs 22,000.”90 These prices are relatively higher than those for Darra-made copies and used originals, which retail for Rs 12,000 to Rs 15,000.91 However, the prices do fluctuate according to market supply and demand: “When we are receiving many weapons in bulk from Afghanistan and the demand is low, the prices go down. But when there is more demand and the weapons are in short supply, then they are expensive, or the prices shoot up.”92 More recently, after the devastating attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon in the United States on 11 September 2001, the availability of US-made weapons increased gradually. As of this writing, an American Colt M-4 Carbine was selling for anything up to $15,000 (US). The limited availability of such a weapon and the high demand due to its trophy-like status in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and further afield have drastically driven up the costs of ownership. However regular attacks orchestrated by the Afghan Taliban and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) container cargo transported to Afghanistan through Pakistan did lead to a relative reduction of the unit costs of US-made weapons until NATO forces had completely withdrawn at the end of 2014, significantly reducing the supply of such weapons. As such, a corresponding increase in unit costs of a variety of US-made weapons has occurred.

During the late 1970s, ammunition for the AK-47 before the war was relatively cheap at Rs 12 per 7.62 round because of the weapon’s lack of notoriety and limited availability.93 However, this situation dramatically changed after the PDPA coup because of the need to acquire greater firepower, especially after the mujahideen began receiving a massive influx of military and financial assistance during the 1980s. Currently, though, the price of original ammunition is approximately Rs 600 per round while the Darra-made version is about Rs 120 per round.94

The “anyone is welcome” ethos in Darra’s shops has also led to increased ownership of weapons, resulting in significantly greater firepower among ordinary civilians in the tribal areas and those who come to Darra from anywhere in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Thus, shotguns and antiquated Lee Enfield 0.303s have largely been replaced by automatic assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and even mortars in tribal feuds. These weapons have drastically increased their firepower and have catalyzed discordant relations into broader escalating conflicts between feuding parties, given the presence of suitable sociopolitical and economic conditions.

Conclusion

As an ongoing process, the proliferation of SALWs in Afghanistan was complicated by the collapse of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the Taliban) in 2001. The present government, headed by President Ashraf Ghani, has effective control only to the extent of the suburbs of the capital and other major urban areas. The government’s association with the country’s provinces depends upon a quid-pro-quo relationship with the various warlords who have retained hold of their local dominions. The latter’s desire to retain such authority, therefore, also facilitates further proliferation of SALWs. Furthermore, Afghanistan has become infamous through its unregulated export of SALWs to insurgencies in countries throughout the region, such as Pakistan, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, India, Burma, Chechnya, China, and a number of Central Asian republics by substate actors, arms merchants, and dealers.95 The Afghan conflict has not died down as a result of the American-led invasion. In fact, the protracted strife has exacerbated local ethnic and tribal fissures. The diffusion of weapons within and without Afghanistan is unlikely to change until a broad-based government that reflects the ethnic, cultural, and sectarian diversity of Afghanistan is successfully installed through a negotiated settlement among all indigenous conflicting parties without external interference. This is a tall order for a region that has had a historical relationship with perpetual external interventions and invasions.

Notes

1. Kareem Masoud and Iqbal Hussain Touri (advocate and arms dealer, respectively), interview by the author, Peshawar residence of the advocate, 4 February 2013.

2. Sir Olaf Caroe, The Pathans, 550 B.C.–A.D. 1957, ninth impression (Karachi: Oxford University Press, [1996], c. 1958), 277.

3. John Fullerton, The Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan (London: Methuen London, 1984), 77.

4. Yousuf Kazmi, “The Prevention of Smuggling Act, 1977, Act No. XII of 1977,” in The Controlling and Preventive Laws about Prohibition: Price Control, Profiteering, Blackmarket, Hoarding Smuggling, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil Industry (Lahore: Pakistan Legal Publications, 1978), chap. 1, par. 1 (2), 21–43.

5. Niobe Thompson and Devashish Krishnan, “Small Arms in India and the Human Costs of Lingering Conflicts,” in Over a Barrel: Light Weapons and Human Rights in the Commonwealth, ed. Abdel-Fatau Musah and Niobe Thompson, 1st ed. (London: Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, 1999), 38, 60, 94–96.

6. “FR Kohat,” Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), accessed 17 December 2015, http://fata

.gov.pk/Global-fac.php?iId=412&fid=28&pId=352&mId=43. This population figure is based on the 1998 Pakistan Census, originally provided by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Government of Pakistan, http://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files/other/pocket_book2006/2.pdf. The current estimated population of the Kohat Frontier Region, however, should be calculated by taking account of the changing annual population growth through the variation in birth-rate/death-rate ratios and migration trends, especially over the past 10 years. The latter is the result of prevailing flux in the security situation due to terrorist actions and military operations that have been and continue to be undertaken in the FATA since 2005.

7. Noor Zamaan (Darra arms dealer), interview by the author, trans. advocate Kareem Masoud, conducted in Darra weapons retail shop in the presence of a number of other individuals related to the local arms trade, 5 February 2013.

8. Ibid.

9. “1998 Pakistan Census,” Government of Pakistan, Directorate of Projects—Orakzai Agency, accessed 25 November 2013, http://dop.fata.gov.pk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47&Itemid=59.

10. National Institute of Public Administration (NIPA), Deweaponisation: Problems, Challenges, and Viable Strategy, Syndicate Research Paper 1 (Lahore: NIPA, September 2001), 12.

11. Maj Saifullah Babar (former Inter-Service Intelligence officer), interview by the author at the Peshawar residence, 23 November 2013. See also, Fullerton, Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan, 77.

12. Sajid Khan (Darra arms dealer), interview by the author, trans. Alam Zaib, conducted in Darra weapons retail shop, 5 February 2013.

13. Andre Brigot and Oliver Roy, The War in Afghanistan (London: Hervester-Wheatsheaf, 1988), 145; and Oliver Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 185.

14. Pakistan Ministry of Interior, “Illicit Manufacturing in and Trafficking of Fire Arms from Tribal Areas,” in Seminar on Arms Control in Pakistan by Abdul Karim Qasuria (Islamabad: MoI Government of Pakistan, 2 August 2001).

15. Zamaan, interview.

16. Asif Mian, “FATA: Tribal Economy in the Context of Ongoing Militancy,” Conflict and Peace Studies 2, no. 3 (2009): 2.

17. “History of Darra Adam Khel,” Pakistan Hunting and Sporting Arms Development Company, accessed 18 October 2015, http://www.phsadc.org/index.php?parentname=The%20Industry&childname=His tory%20of%20Darra%20Adam%20Khel&parentid=17&childid=47&page=mainbody.

18. NIPA, Deweaponisation, 12.

19. Zamaan, interview.

20. Pakistan Ministry of Interior, “Illicit Manufacturing.”

21. South Asia Partnership (SAP), Canada, South Asia and Small Arms: Synthesis Report on National Consultation and Regional Strategy Meeting (Ottawa: SAP Canada, 2002), 23–25.

22. “History of Darra Adam Khel.”

23. Zamaan, interview; and Masoud and Touri, interview.

24. Masoud and Touri, interview.

25. Ibid.

26. Zamaan, interview.

27. Senator Haji Baz Gul (former senator of the National Senate and former member of the National Assembly from Darra Adam Khel), interview by the author, conducted in English at the Asia Arms Store, University Road, Peshawar, 24 November 2013.

28. Masoud and Touri, interview.

29. Ibid.

30. Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), 10, 25.

31. Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, Afghanistan—The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower (Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2001), 85.

32. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 209. See also Benjamin Brémaud Billand, “Of the Use of Plausible Deniability by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan” (master’s thesis: Université ďAngers, France, 24 June 2013), 8, http://dune.univ-angers.fr/fichiers/20031843/20132MALLC1111/fichier/1111F.pdf.

33. Yousaf and Adkin, Afghanistan, 86.

34. Ibid.

35. Saeed Afridi (Darra arms dealer), interview by the author, trans. Alam Zaib, conducted in Darra weapons retail shop, 10 February 2013.

36. Ibid.

37. “Pakistan’s National Report on the Implementation of the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW),” July 2008, https://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/BMS/bms3/1BMS3Pages/1NationalReports/Pakistan.doc.

38. Masoud and Touri, interview.

39. Graduate Institute of International Studies, Small Arms Survey 2003: Development Denied (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 32–33.

40. Thompson and Krishnan, “Small Arms in India,” 38, 60, 94–96.

41. Zamaan, interview.

42. Sajid Khan, interview.

43. Graduate Institute of International Studies, Small Arms Survey, 32–33.

44. Mian, “FATA,” 2.

45. “History of Darra Adam Khel.”

46. Zamaan, interview.

47. Haybat Khan (Darra arms merchant and shop owner), interview by the author, trans. Ali Qazi, conducted in Darra weapons retail shop, 23 November 2013.

48. Ibid.

49. Zamaan, interview.

50. Afridi, interview.

51. Masoud and Touri, interview.

52. Afridi, interview.

53. Haybat Khan, interview.

54. NIPA, Deweaponisation, 2.

55. Masoud and Touri, interview.

56. Afridi, interview.

57. NIPA, Deweaponisation, 12.

58. Zafar Mahmood, A Study of Smuggling on Pak-Afghan Border, Research Report Series no. 164 (Islamabad: Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, 1998), 12.

59. Ibid., 25. (See “Routes and Mechanisms of Afghan Transit Trade for a Better Understanding of the Actual Process of Smuggling Goods,” enclosed in box 1 on that page.)

60. Sayed Waqar Hussain, Asmat Ullah, and Bashir Ahmad Khilji, “The Causes of Transit Related Pak-Afghan Cross Border Smuggling,” Dialogue 9, no. 1 (2014): 40–66.

61. Superintendent Iqbal Khan (former Kohat District Anti-Narcotics Force), interview by the author, Peshawar residence, 17 November 2013.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Sajid Khan, interview; and Iqbal Khan, interview.

66. “The Frontier Crimes Regulations (Amended in 2011),” Institute for Social Justice, accessed 19 October 2015, http://www.isj.org.pk/the-frontier-crimes-regulations-amended-in-2011/.

67. Afridi, interview.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.

70. The cost of weapons and commission rates in this example are hypothetical to facilitate an understanding of the process. The actual values of the weapons vary according to the weapons being supplied, their condition, their suppliers, the buyers involved, the couriers, and the market conditions—for example, whether or not the demand is high due to the prevalent security environment.

71. Iqbal Khan, interview.

72. Haybat Khan, interview.

73. Iqbal Khan, interview.

74. James Rupert, “Arms for Rebels Siphoned Off: Rebels Handicapped by Lack of Training,” Washington Post, 16 January 1986, A1, A24.

75. Fullerton, Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan, 77.

76. Yousaf and Adkin, Afghanistan, 135.

77. Henry S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 278.

78. “Middlemen Divert U.S. Arms Intended for Afghan Rebels,” Sunday Times, 10 March 1985, 23.

79. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1996), 198.

80. Pir Sayyid Ahmed Gailani is an ethnic Pushtun, leader (Pir) of the Afghan Qadiriyyah Sufi order, and founder of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (Mahaz-i-Milli Islami ye Afghanistan). Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, who became the interim president of Afghanistan in April 1992, is also the founder of the Afghan National Liberation Front. In 2005 he was appointed chairman of the Meshrano Jirga, upper house of the National Assembly of Afghanistan, and is on the Afghan High Peace Council.

81. Yousaf and Adkin, Afghanistan, 135.

82. Francis Fukuyama, The Security of Pakistan: A Trip Report, RAND Note N-1584-RC (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, September 1980), 12.

83. Yousaf and Adkin, Afghanistan, 135.

84. Fukuyama, Security of Pakistan, 12. The prices given to a foreigner may well have been exaggerated by the Darra gun merchants as compared to those given to locals and the mujahideen.

85. Mian, “FATA,” 3.

86. Sajid Khan, interview.

87. Yousaf and Adkin, Afghanistan, 135.

88. Sajid Khan, interview.

89. Haybat Khan, interview.

90. Iqbal Khan, interview.

91. Ibid.

92. Sajid Khan, interview.

93. Zamaan, interview.

94. Ibid.

95. Mahendra Ved Sreedhar, The Afghan Turmoil: Changing Equations (New Delhi: Himalayan Books, 1998), 152.

*The author is an assistant professor in the Department of Strategic Studies, National Defence University, Islamabad, Pakistan, where he received his PhD in strategic and nuclear studies. He was also a senior consultant and national adviser on counterterrorism at the National Counterterrorism Authority, Pakistan; a resident Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; and a Carnegie Fellow at the New America Foundation. His research has focused on small arms and light weapons proliferation, conflict dynamics in Afghanistan, irregular warfare, counterterrorism, information dissemination, revolution in military affairs, space power, grand strategy, and, more recently, exponential technologies. Among others, the author’s articles include “Violent Non-State Actors in South Asia and the Middle East,” “Jihad: Conflict Resolution or Its Anti-thesis,” “The Modernisation Process in Afghanistan: A Retrospective” (Journal of Strategic Studies); “Strategic Communication: A Synchronised Effort for Information Dissemination by Pakistan” (Sage International); and “Strategic Communication: A Proposal” (Hoopaoe—Journal of the Military Intelligence School).

Table of Contents

00Contents-E

01Editorial-E

02Goldfein-E

03Emannuel-E

04Clark-E

05Stigall-E

06Woldermariam-E

07Malik-E