Short Abstract:
Increasingly, scholars recognize disorder and uncertainty as political phenomena, the effects of which require further study. The panel asks: (1) how do disorder and contingency function as contemporary modes of governance? and (2) can development practitioners work in such environments? If so, how?
Long Abstract:
This panel starts from the premise that disorder and uncertainty do not mark the inverse of an institutionalized and consolidated state with a monopoly on force. Instead, disorder and uncertainty are discrete political phenomena, the political uses and effects of which require further study.
The panel pursues two related areas of inquiry. First, it examines how disorder and contingency function as modes of governance. Scholarship has increasingly recognized the instrumental use of disorder to shape and pacify political populations, though how this relates to international development is less well treated. By injecting indeterminacy and contingency into the daily lives of citizens, perpetuating low-level insecurity in communities, allowing competing factions to duel it out, or producing zones of exception where the law does not apply, authorities can destroy citizens' ability to predict terms of exchange and distribution, thereby producing quiescent subjects. Papers might examine the various forms that instrumental disorder takes, including arbitrary intervention, legal indeterminacy, misinformation, institutional fragmentation, and zones of insecurity in relation to developmental goals.
Second, this panel asks if and how development practitioners can meaningfully work in environments that are purposefully made unpredictable and contingent. Cultivation of unpredictability and disorder are anathema to teleological assumptions of international development, in which people and states desire and progressively produce increased control over politics and the economy. How, then, ought international development practitioners engage in such an environment? Should they at all? Is there any way that international development and unpredictable governance could be compatible?
Accepted papers:
Session 1
Public Authority in Weak States
Teddy Brett
(LSE)
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides a comprehensive analytical framework for a pluralistic response to the unresolved crises of public authority in weak states involved in contested democratic transitions. It identifies the institutional challenges that all societies must meet to sustain political order and public authority, and the different processes they adopt in authoritarian and modern liberal social systems. It accepts the normative and technical claims of liberal and social democratic institutions, but also the need to reconcile and harmonise them with neo-traditional institutions in societies that are still building modern states. It shows that this can only be done by using hybrid solutions that take account of the diverse historical legacies in different types of state, and uses the insights of classical development theorists to provide a comprehensive social-centric methodology to do so. It concludes by identifying the major changes that this implies for the neo-liberal good governance agenda, refers to several recent studies that address the ambiguous role played by modern traditional institutions in weak states, and reviews case studies that demonstrate the contribution that progressive hybrid programmes can make to the rehabilitation and reconstruction of weak and conflict states, and the serious costs of failing to adopt them.
Making the most of disorder: Governance and development aid in Melanesia
Rob Lamontagne
(Griffith University)
Paper short abstract:
In Solomon Islands, governance is liberal, Christian, customary and hybrid. Having failed to create effective liberal states, development partners are now making the most of this disorder through radical decentralisation from 'slush funds' to hyperlocal courts and withdrawal from urban planning.
Paper long abstract:
The states of Melanesia are extremely weak despite decades of close development assistance. Long term efforts to build liberal states that can nurture institutions of effective governance have failed to account for local environments that have their own modes of governance that shift from liberal to Christian to customary or hybrid between two or more. Melanesia, the most ethnolinguistically diverse area on the planet, upends the Western idea of disorder as a temporary impingement on order; there, disorder is order. My paper will explore new efforts by the states themselves and by Australian aid workers to make the most of this disorder and to work with unpredictability and uncertainty rather than insist exclusively on an alien and ineffective form of governance. Driven by a new preference for a 'thinking and working politically' approach rather than 'good governance agenda' universalism in the face of dysfunctional Western-style states, actors in the region are embracing a push for radical decentralization. Using examples from Solomon Islands, my paper will discuss the instrumental retreat from state power and authority by letting hyperlocal hybrid courts operate freely; the unregulated and increasing use of MP local 'slush funds' to create rudimentary welfare systems that also inhibit the persistent calls for formal, liberal federalism; the withdrawal from city planning in the rapidly urbanizing Honiara area; and finally, the role of customary 'big men' now acting like 'big shots' by using authority arbitrage switching between modes of governance to outwit opposition.
'We're not supposed to understand!' Refugee Governance and the Politics of Uncertainty in Lebanon
Nora Stel
(Maastricht School of Management)
Paper short abstract:
Refugees in Lebanon face a regime of institutional ambiguity that is routinely explained as stemming from capacity/resource deficits. This paper however argues that institutional ambiguity is also a deliberate governance modality and explores it as an instrument to pacify, exploit and expel refugees
Paper long abstract:
Lebanon has the highest per capita number of refugees worldwide and governs them rather specifically. The 1.5 million Syrian refugees in the country face a 'no-policy-policy' that rejects the establishment of official refugee camps and refuses to give them formal refugee status. A stringent entry and residency regime created a situation under which 70% of Syrian refugees are without legal residency status, making them extremely vulnerable to exploitation. This situation of systematic unpredictability and contingency reproduces the position of Lebanon's Palestinian refugees. With reference to an increasingly illusory 'right to return,' these have faced seven decades of 'permanent temporariness' in what is often considered a 'state of exception.'
Such institutional ambiguity is routinely explained as the consequence of capacity problems stemming from so-called state fragility or hybridity and the unprecedented scale of these refugee crises. This paper, however, argues that institutional ambiguity might also feature as an intentional governance modality. It explores the ways in which institutional ambiguity is produced and/or maintained as an instrument to pacify and control refugee populations.
Building on critical policy analysis and qualitative case-studies, the paper investigates the legal limbo and arbitrary authority that constitute institutional ambiguity. It analyzes these as crucial aspects of the 'manufactured vulnerability' that renders refugees exploitable and 'encourages' them to leave. As such, this paper complements our structural understanding of fragility or hybridity with the more agency-oriented idea of a 'politics of uncertainty' that institutionalizes ambiguity, liminality, and exceptionalism to control, exploit, or expel particular populations.
Regime longevity and arbitrary governance in Uganda
Rebecca Tapscott
(The Graduate Institute, Geneva)
Paper short abstract:
How can regimes in seemingly weak or fragile states sustain power? Through an examination of Uganda’s security sector, this paper proposes a novel theory of governance through disorder, which is termed “institutionalized arbitrariness”.
Paper long abstract:
This article theorizes uncertainty as a contemporary mode of illiberal rule in northern Uganda, focusing on how violence is institutionalized in the state’s governing institutions. It examines the relationship between the state security apparatus and informal security arrangements such as local vigilantes, civil militias, and community police in Uganda. The findings are based on nearly ten months of qualitative field research and hundreds of interviews conducted between 2014 and 2018. I find that in the area of security the central Ugandan state is ever-present in citizens’ imaginations. I argue that this is achieved through a strategy of rule that I have termed institutionalized arbitrariness, in which violence is institutionalized in the state’s governing system but remains unpredictable from the perspective of ordinary citizens. In particular, the state unpredictably claims and denies its authority, while deploying potentially exceptional violence to quell resistance. Unpredictability renders the regime illegible to citizens, thereby fragmenting citizen resistance to and claim-making on the state. In this way, the ruling regime maintains control of this post-conflict frontier zone without expending the resources typically associated with direct rule, while also avoiding the principal-agent problems associated with indirect rule. Thus, institutionalized arbitrariness is an effective and efficient mode of governance and contributes to our understanding of regime longevity in seemingly fragile states.