Book Review – Page 2 – harryjohnstone

Ethiopia: The Last Two Frontiers

John Markakis’s latest book, ‘Ethiopia: The last two frontiers’, presents a political history of Ethiopia covering the period 1916 to 2010. Focusing on the transformation of a multicultural empire into a modern nation state, Markakis continuously leans on the “centre/periphery” dynamic as a method of analysis. In the vein of subaltern studies, he seeks to give agency to “peripheral” peoples in the state-building process. Using a vast range of historical, political and anthropological sources, Markakis describes Ethiopia’s northern and central regions as comprising the “centre”. The “last two frontiers” are the two peripheries: the “highland periphery”, essentially the Oromo-dominated southern highlands, and the “lowland periphery”, inhabited by the Oromo but also by major pastoralist groups such as the Afar and the Somali, as well many other smaller ethnic groups.

Split into five parts, the book begins with a discussion of the main peripheral peoples, followed by a history of the modern Ethiopian empire from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, under Emperors Menelik II (1844–1913) and Haile Selassie (1916–74). During this period, Amharic became the lingua franca, excluding non-speakers from power. Both highland and lowland peripheries were subjugated: exploited for labour, taxes and tribute. Markakis then assesses the period of Dergue rule after the deposition of Haile Selassie, in 1974, in which the Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam succeeded in expanding the state apparatus until his overthrow in 1991. The fourth part describes how the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), led by Meles Zenawi, sought a state and national identity that would encapsulate Ethiopia’s diversity, empowering the three-quarters of the population that were not Amhara. Subsequently re-formed into the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), their brand of government has blended leftist nationalist ideology with a pragmatic drive to commercialize agriculture in the south. The final part of the book assesses the impacts of federalism on the diverse ethnic groups populating the southern regions.

Markakis believes the EPRDF has overseen an expansion of the state, with more schools and hospitals established in previously neglected regions. Pluralism has been feted. But beyond basic services and symbolic gestures, he argues, the “regime” has kept a “tight reign” and is “lacking in imagination” when it comes to offering real political power to peripheral regions.

‘Ethiopia: The last two frontiers’ reflects Markakis’s immense knowledge and passion for Ethiopia. Although the tone, structure and style could be lighter, readers will nevertheless find much worth in this expansive and original study.

Times Literary Supplement

Interventions – A Life in War and Peace

Kofi Annan’s memoirs narrate his career as a flying peacemaker, working for the United Nations. Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, takes us from one diplomatic precipice to the next. We traverse devastating failures and lasting successes. In the book’s chaotic world, Annan’s unwavering determination and moral conviction is perhaps the one constant.

Interventions is written by Annan with Nader Mousavizadeh, an ex-colleague, and focuses mostly on his efforts to prevent or resolve global conflict. After an opening chapter on his youth, observing the successful independence movement of Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah, and engaging in student politics, we then jump to his career, as head of the UN’s peacekeeping operation, followed by his ten years as Secretary General.

Chapters primarily cover the interventions in all forms of war since the early 1990s. Specific innovations such as the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, the International Criminal Court and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are upheld. UN reform is explained, and UN resolutions are never far away.

The book could be more balanced, addressing Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan more, and Israel-Palestine a little less. It could also capture the rich detail of high-level political summits with more verve; at times the content is dry and excessively policy-orientated. Occasionally the language strays into latinate prose: “The impact of the MDGs in providing this coherence has not just secured the de-confliction of certain development paradigms…”

Despite these flaws in style, Interventions engages assiduously with key topics. Annan does not shy away from criticizing the Bush administration for undermining multilateralism over the Iraq war. He is right to point out that in development debates “the spotlight should not be on aid but trade. It should really be on the failures of rich countries to remove international trade regulations that stunt the economic ambitions of developing countries.”

Interventions really comes alive when we read about Annan’s efforts to work alongside difficult personalities such as the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. These passages reflect Annan’s sensitivity and steeliness, as well as his sense for human psychology. The book’s substance lies somewhere between the personal and the policy-driven – more of the former would have made it more readable, but nevertheless it remains a fascinating account of contemporary statecraft in the post-Cold War era.

Times Literary Supplement

Pakistan on the Brink

In 2000, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid produced a bestselling account of the insurgent group that currently threatens the stability of Afghanistan. Taliban was balanced, instructive and based on plenty of fieldwork – everything good journalism should be. Pakistan on the Brink, however, feels rushed, gleaned from existing accounts written by other journalists working in the region, interspersed with a hotchpotch of statements made by senior figures working on “Af-Pak” (the term Washington policymakers use to describe Afghanistan and Pakistan).

Rashid appears to see the region’s history as determined by Great Men. The policy shifts, character flaws, indecision, infighting, meetings and announcements of presidents, envoys, admirals and generals are viewed as key markers in the narrative. Barack Obama is attacked for his “cold” approach, lack of commitment and failure to meet personally with either the Afghan president Hamid Karzai or the late US Special Adviser Richard Holbrooke. Karzai is portrayed as “deeply insecure” and “his own worst enemy”. Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari is characterized as weak and deferential to a Pakistani army “obsessed with India and the threat of Indian influence in Afghanistan”.

Beneath this network of power brokers we struggle to learn what actually drives change. There is little substantial historical context going back more than a few years, and Rashid fails to describe the deep roots of key Islamist movements undermining security in the region.

Rashid’s recent books – Jihad (2002), Descent into Chaos (2009) and now Pakistan on the Brink – echo those hawkish commentators of the Great Game and Cold War; radical Islam has replaced the perceived Russian and Soviet threats. But surely the past twelve years in Afghanistan have yielded valuable lessons about the importance of giving credence to history and culture, the historical consciousness of an invaded people; the delicacy and cost of intervention; the need for realistic strategies founded on adequate analysis? Pakistan on the Brink is symptomatic of the West’s recent failings in these endeavours.

Times Literary Supplement

Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan

The retired military intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge has written a thoughtful book tackling the reasons for Britain’s recent military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Covering politics, strategy, history, operations, institutional culture and academia, Ledwidge’s Losing Small Wars is ambitious in scope. Moreover, the book is predicated on a noble ambition: to remind readers of the injustice of Britain’s recent military adventures. Ledwidge hopes to make British senior officers and politicians see sense and promote belated reforms.

Ledwidge’s central argument is now common knowledge: Britain’s forces have struggled in both Iraq and Afghanistan because soldiers and officers alike simply failed to understand why they were actually in these countries. Ignorant of the political purpose, fearful of admitting this, and unwilling to challenge the Blair government’s mistaken policy, the military leadership was guilty of acquiescence. As Ledwidge writes, “What really happened was that generals…failed in their role as speakers of truth to power.”

Yet the Clausewitzian ‘logic’ for war was lost not only on these officers, but also for most of a Labour government who followed the United States into two wars whose rationale was never clear or fixed, but shifted according to expediency. Perhaps unsurprisingly the generals did not question their politicians given their perception that the military exists to serve the polity, not debate politics.

But Ledwidge is uncompromising. He asserts that beneath the military’s overarching failure to contest the political purpose of both wars lies a catalogue of institutional inadequacy: “A failure to adapt, antediluvian structures and intelligence systems, deployment schedules that ensured a lack of continuity, a cavalier attitude to post-entry planning, a mentality geared to an excessive readiness to use extreme violence…Inadequate equipment and a dearth of [combat] personnel coexisted alongside a vastly swollen command structure…”.

Unfortunately the writing is sloppy at times. Ledwidge calls Mazar-e Sharif a province (it is the capital city of Balkh province). He introduces the International Crisis Group twice, in almost the exact same way within forty pages. His prose can slip into silly exaggerations: “The police are widely regarded to be at best a disparate group of drug-addled rogues”. He repeats the same arguments throughout the 270 pages, many of which are drawn from the same dozen British journalists or generals. Very few Iraqi or Afghan sources are used, which is ironic given his arguments for greater cultural engagement as a means to improve the understanding of the armed forces.

But Losing Small Wars is nevertheless a brave and important book; essential reading for anyone wanting insights into the dysfunction within the British military today, and the deplorable consequences this has when thrust upon the lives of innocent civilians caught up in war.

Times Literary Supplement

Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground

Jonathan Steele has written a book that is brazenly illuminating. Ghosts of Afghanistan charts a sinuous and sobering history of the country over the past thirty five years. The results are grim reading but also perversely satisfying, as the categorical exposé of hubris always is.

Steele assiduously points out the many oversights of the Soviet and US campaigns in Afghanistan to teach us to learn from these mistakes. “The biggest lesson of recent Afghan history,” he writes, “is that it is wrong for foreigners to arm factions engaged in civil war. For foreigners then to intervene with their own troops is even greater folly.”

Rather than using chronological narrative form, Steele opts for myth debunking to shed light on the crisis. Thirteen myths are dispelled throughout the book. Some are more pertinent to the current Afghan context than others. Myth eleven, for example, writes Steele, is that the Taliban invited Osama bin Laden to use Afghanistan as a safe haven. The ramifications of this misguided intelligence were enormous. It became the principle rationale for the U.S. invasion.

Ghosts benefits from Steele’s thirty years plus of reporting on both the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. The prose is clear and lively. The personal anecdote is never far away. His history is well-researched. Steele examines WikiLeaks’ diplomatic cables from actors such as former U.S. Ambassador Eikenberry to demonstrate the increasingly cagey U.S. relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, as well as the support the Pakistani intelligence service provided to the Taliban.

Steele also offers interesting analysis into reasons for U.S. reluctance to entertain a political solution between the Afghan government and the Taliban, based on America’s historical experience; namely, the success of fought victories in the Civil War and the two World Wars, versus their unsatisfactory negotiated settlements in Vietnam and Korea.

Where Steele perhaps comes up short is in his exploration of ghosts, if only because he could have taken it so much further. The Soviets called the mujahedin dukhi – ghosts – since they were so shadowy, much like the Taliban for the U.S. military today. But if today’s various insurgent factions remain spectres in the eyes of the West, then so too does the country as a whole.

This metaphorical ghostliness, or more precisely, misperception, strikes not only at the heart military failings in Afghanistan, but actually at the whole notion of foreign intervention in a weak state that has been – and remains – so weakly understood by outsiders working in the country. This military myopia stems from an overwhelmingly ‘blind’ international civilian engagement. And this breeds the myth-making that has partly caused such tragedy in Afghanistan.

Times Literary Supplement

The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality

The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality

(edited by Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot)

This is a fascinating and revealing collection of articles, written largely by academics, that pieces together parts of the complex story that is Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality seeks to explain the motives surrounding the battles fought across the borders of Uganda, Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for nearly twenty-five years.

As an assortment of texts, covering subjects ranging from the spiritual order of the LRA to NGO involvement in the Juba peace talks, the book lacks the fluency that would come from a single author’s perspective. But the range of opinions is somehow appropriate for a story that has always been open to multiple interpretations.

Post-independence Uganda is a territory divided between the Bantu-speaking kingdoms of the south and the Nilotic- and Sudanic- speaking peoples of the north. The underlying north-south dynamic has continued to frame the conflict between the LRA, made up of northern Acholi, and President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army, derived from central southerners.

Such analytical frameworks are described with greater nuance by many of the contributors to this book. Certain chapters, such as Mareike Schomerus’s, sharply criticize the Western journalists and editors whose portrayals of the LRA as crazed followers of the Ten Commandments have tended to be both simplistic and ethnocentric.

Kristof Titeca’s chapter on the spiritual order of the LRA provides a functional explanation for LRA violence, emphasizing “the importance of religion and spirituality in Africa as both a ‘cultural practice and as a determinant of social action'”. Given the nature of guerrilla campaigns waged within the bush of northern Uganda and beyond, a spiritual order serves the function of guaranteeing internal cohesion and controlling and motivating the combatants, as well as intimidating outsiders. And the widely held belief among LRA soldiers that Kony is possessed by spirits, is omniscient and can read people’s minds, helps to explain the group’s structures of rule and accountability.

Andrew Mwenda, a renowned Ugandan journalist and the editor of the national news and current affairs magazine The Independent, makes a strong case for illustrating “the political uses of the LRA rebellion” to President Museveni. Mwenda’s chapter argues that under the twin pressures of donor-driven economic reforms and electoral competition, Museveni’s National Resistance Movement party “transformed the conflict in northern Uganda from a threat to political consolidation into an instrument of it”.

Quantitative analysis on the nature and causes of abduction, or an insider’s view of the International Criminal Court’s investigation of the LRA form the basis for other chapters. Perhaps the obvious fact – the brutal and perpetual violence committed by the LRA across the region – is underplayed. The perspectives of the articles vary widely and while the whole story is not coherently told, this book provides ample and comprehensive insights into the tragic and unending saga that is the LRA.

Times Literary Supplement

Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development

Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development

(edited by David Mosse)

Adventures in Aidland is a collection of articles by anthropologists looking not so much at the social effects of development policy on “beneficiaries” in the developing world, but more at the knowledge producers themselves. The book provides fascinating insights into the construction and constructers of knowledge about global poverty. It concerns the lifestyles and dilemmas of development practitioners in “the field”, a generic term encompassing locations across the entire developing world.

Given the authors’ background, the broad field of study and the structure of such an academic reference book, the ten chapters presented cover a diverse range of subjects. Naturally a sense of coherence is lost, but this is a book for non-specialists to dip into and enjoy passages of illuminating analysis.

In his introduction the editor David Mosse illustrates how “field”-based development professionals’ identities, if at all visible, are rendered homogenous by the universalizing content and transmission methods of ‘neoliberal institutionalism’, the orthodox approach to global poverty reduction. Mosse also explores the paradox of development practice that, under donor pressure, claims to promote unprecedented levels of community participation and local ownership and yet simultaneously makes itself increasingly ‘technicized’ – and therefore removed from those communities – in order to fulfil donors’ demands for accountability.

Rosalind Eyben, a former head of the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) country office in Bolivia, describes her need to take ‘reality checks’ to parts of the country to actually learn about Bolivian people and their social and economic institutions at the local level. But this mildly anthropological approach to enhancing her professional work made her expatriate co-workers suspicious, vaguely reiterating the same doubts that surrounded those colonial administrators who spent time in the bush a hundred years ago, whispered by colleagues to have ‘gone native’.

Dinah Rajak and Jock Stirrat’s chapter, titled ‘Parochial Cosmopolitanism and the Power of Nostalgia’ illustrates the complex, yet banal, lifestyles of many expatriate development professionals. Their argument is compelling: that while outwardly, “their peripatetic existence, their continual exposure to varying and ever-changing cultural and political milieux” and their international agenda would make development workers appear to be ‘cosmopolitan’, in reality, their insulated, isolated expatriate worlds, and the standardizing effect of neoliberal thought, which denies difference and historical specificity to countries, makes them somewhat parochial. In extension to this, as Renato Rosaldo has argued, we learn that development professionals “mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed”, bringing an “imperial nostalgia” to their imaginings of the countries in which they work.

The disillusion which many aid workers feel is caused by an acknowledged epistemic disconnect between centralized, universalizing development bureaucracies and their diverse recipient clients. By denying developing countries history, culture and specificity, aid agencies arrogantly perpetuate their own insularity. Further, they deny their cohorts on the ground two key motivations which can make them effective: humanity and curiosity. This is fascinating and under-explored territory for anthropologists and development theorists alike, making this an important collection.

Times Literary Supplement

Dead Aid

Dead Aid is almost a good title. Like dead wood, argues Dambisa Moyo, today’s aid is both useless and obstructive. The Zambian economist makes a strong case against the use of systematic aid money given yearly by Western donors to African governments, but her book lacks nuance. No one writing about “Africa” can escape the charge of generalizing, but Moyo’s prescriptions for a better future rest too narrowly and too optimistically on private sector-driven economic growth.

Moyo begins by discussing fifty years of rich countries’ wasted aid to Africa, in the form of concessional loans or grants that are frequently forgiven by donors. This leads to the most compelling (if unoriginal) argument in the book; namely, that aid fosters corruption, which in turn hampers growth.

Dirty money is not easy to track, but Moyo could have substantiated her principal argument with more exact cases of aid corruption and stated specifically where and how this has corroded growth. There are few detailed examples, which could lead readers to make assumptions about African politicians – precisely the kind of thinking Moyo wants to change. There are also oversights: she calls “glamour aid” a phenomenon of the past decade, although it began with Live Aid in 1985. Others would trace the birth of the African cause célèbre to the late nineteenth century when Joseph Conrad and Arthur Conan Doyle reported on King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo.

Dead Aid simplifies and in so doing ignores the fact that Africa has been a site for multiple competing growth and policy discourses at various levels since aid began. The second part of the book proposes a narrow focus on foreign direct investment, trade with China and microfinance as the best routes for African aid-free growth.

Aid itself is not the factor obstructing an otherwise inevitable stream of private capital; by pushing these approaches, Moyo overestimates the singularity of African markets. Aid is controversial for its historical and political connotations, but in reality its impact on Africa is secondary to structural factors such as global trading systems.

That most African countries have gone from being net food exporters in the 1960s to net food importers today is enormously significant for the livelihoods of Africans. Increasingly driven to cities, partly because of the effects of economic liberalization in the 1980s, millions now cannot afford to buy imported commodities. One issue Moyo neglects is agriculture. Ensuring more effective, equitable agricultural development will do more to promote growth in Africa than ending institutional aid.

Times Literary Supplement

Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo is published by Penguin.