The 15th Chr. Michelsen Lecture

Alex de Waal:
Fixing the Political Marketplace

How can we make peace without functioning state institutions?

Despite the significant decline in armed conflict around the world, certain civil conflicts seem remarkably persistent. The violence that occurs is neither purely political nor strictly criminal, but a hybrid of the two. Despite immense international resources devoted to these crises, they are not becoming any easier to resolve – in fact they seem to be getting harder to fix. As a consequence, in several important and difficult countries, including Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, there is no endgame in sight to international involvement.

International policy tends to be guided by models that are framed by certain norms of what a state ought to look like, and how it ought to be run. These frameworks are deaf to the vernacular of politics and tend to regard the insights of ethnographers and historians as providing only contingent and local knowledge, useful solely for the practicalities of implementing policies that are designed on the basis of grander, simpler models, derived from economics and a grand tradition of political science.

We should study countries like Afghanistan, Congo and Sudan as they actually are, rather than as deficient examples of what we think they ought to be. We neglect the vernacular of politics to our intellectual loss and at the peril of our policies and objectives – not to mention our troops, and most importantly, the political future of these nations and their citizens. Quite possibly, one reason why we neglect the actual functioning of politics is because it is obvious, ordinary and boring. National politics in these countries function much like village politics or even family politics: on the basis of personal affinity and loyalty, including status and reward.

Politics are fractal in the sense that the same principles and practices are found at all levels. The astute village chief has the skills he needs to be a functional head of state, and the journalist for a provincial newspaper can rival the professor of politics in insight. Our first challenge in managing this awkward reality is the intellectual one: we must seek to understand it.