Africa and International Relations: A Comment On IR Theory, Anarchy and Statehood

Review of International Studies (2006), 32, 119–143 Copyright British International Studies Association
doi:10.1017/S0260210506006954
Africa and international relations: a comment

on IR theory, anarchy and statehood
WILLIAM BROWN*
Abstract. It has become rather commonplace to read that, what is referred to as ‘traditional,
western IR theory’, is problematic when taken to the African continent. At best, we are told,
IR theory misrepresents or misunderstands African reality, at worst it participates in an
exercise of neo-colonial theoretical hegemony. In this article I will seek both to assess this
‘Africanist critique’ and to mount something of a qualified defence of IR theory. However, I
argue that in exploring the relevance of IR theory to Africa we need to distinguish between
neorealism – the real target of the critics’ fire – and other strands of IR theory. Once we do this
we can see that other theoretical standpoints within IR are relevant. Moreover, I argue that
while trying to question neorealism, the critics in fact maintain neorealism’s conceptualisations
of the state and anarchy, simply inverting the picture. I argue that this represents a theoretical
step backwards. Problematic issues in IR theory do not simply appear when one moves one’s
focus to Africa, they are there to begin with.
Introduction
It has become rather commonplace to read that, what is referred to as ‘traditional,

western IR theory’, is problematic when taken to the African continent. At best, we
are told, ‘IR theory’ misrepresents or misunderstands African reality, at worst it
participates in an exercise of neo-colonial theoretical hegemony. The claimed
inappropriateness of traditional IR to the African experience thus reinforces the
marginalisation of the continent in the international system with a marginalisation
within the discipline.1 In this article I will seek to both assess this ‘Africanist critique’2
and to mount something of a qualified defence of IR theory. However, I argue that
some clarification and rethinking is necessary for us to get a proper perspective on the
potentialities of IR in studies of Africa. In this regard I make three related points.
First, that we need to be clear that what is under attack is neorealism and not some
generic body of ‘IR theory’. Second, by differentiating neorealism’s specific approach
* An earlier version of this article was presented at the BISA annual conference, London, LSE,
16–18 December 2002.
1
Kevin C. Dunn, ‘Introduction: Africa and International Relations Theory’, in Kevin C. Dunn, and
Timothy M. Shaw (eds.), Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–8.
2
I use the label ‘Africanist critique’, inadequate as it is, to characterise this group of critics who
loosely share some common critical analyses of IR theory and who include scholars of Africa based
in the West as well as African IR scholars. I realise that some might object to the term ‘Africanist’,
though I am at a loss to think of an alternative label. I certainly do not mean to imply by this that
all ‘Africanists’ – analysts of Africa – would share these critics’ views on IR.
119
120 William Brown
it is possible to see not just the limitations of that approach, but the potential of other
theoretical approaches within IR. Finally, by exploring the concepts of the state and
anarchy I argue that the critics in fact maintain neorealism’s conceptualisations,
simply inverting the picture. I argue that this represents a theoretical step backwards.
Of necessity, the centre of gravity of this article is one of debunking (or at least a
partial debunking) of what I argue is a misdirected critique. However, I endeavour to
offer some illustrative examples to demonstrate the potential relevance of other
approaches within IR once one moves beyond the constraints of neorealism. The
problems of theories of IR do not simply appear when one moves one’s focus to
Africa, they are there to begin with.
The idea that ‘Western’ social theory is inappropriate to understanding the
non-Western world is hardly new or novel, although the variant of this critique which
focuses on the relationship between Africa and IR theory has only fairly recently
come to prominence. Kevin Dunn and Timothy Shaw’s volume Africa’s Challenge to
International Relations Theory3 is an important marker in the debate although the
contributions to Stephanie Neuman’s earlier collection International Relations
Theory and the Third World cover many shared ideas.4
The criticisms of ‘traditional’ or ‘western’ IR5 that I am concerned with operate on
a number of levels but perhaps the most general idea is an assertion that traditional
IR theory, and the models of the international system which it uses, when taken to
the African continent, fail to explain much about the continent’s international
relations, nor help us understand the key problems and issues which are deemed to
be central to Africa’s international politics. This misapplication of theory means that
‘. . . the dominant IR theories [are] not adequate in explaining what was actually
happening on the African continent . . ’.6 The claimed results are several. One is that
Africa is simply ignored in mainstream IR discussions. Nkiwane maintains that
‘. . . the ‘‘canon’’ of international relations has been consistent in its dismissal of
Africa’.7 To illustrate the point, Kevin Dunn asserts that Antarctica gets more of a
mention than Africa in many undergraduate IR courses.8 There would indeed be
something awry if the analytical models used by the discipline meant that Antarctica,
as the only large piece of territory not the property of a sovereign state, can show
3
Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy M. Shaw (eds.), Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
4
Stephanie G. Neuman (ed.), International Relations Theory and the Third World (London:
Macmillan, 1998). Others include Siba N. Grovogui, ‘Regimes of Sovereignty: International
Morality and the African Condition’, European Journal of International Relations, 8:3 (2002),
pp. 315–38; Larry A. Swatuk, ‘The Brothers Grim: Modernity and ‘‘International’’ Relations in
Southern Africa’, in Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy M. Shaw (eds.), Africa’s Challenge to
International Relations Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 163–82; Tandeka, C. Nkiwane,
‘Africa and International Relations: Regional Lessons for a Global Discourse’, International
Political Science Review, 22:3 (2001), pp. 279–90; and Cirino, H. Ofuho, ‘The Legitimacy and
Sovereignty Dilemma of African States and Governments: Problems of Colonial Legacy’, in Bakut
tswah Bakut and Sagarika Dutt (eds.), Africa at the Millennium: An Agenda for Mature
Development (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 103–25.
5
The prefixes vary between ‘traditional’, ‘orthodox’, ‘western’, ‘northern’ and ‘Eurocentric’, but all
imply a definite and identifiable body of theory or ‘received wisdom’ in the discipline. As I go on
to argue, precisely which parts of existing IR theory are being attacked is in fact rarely made
sufficiently explicit.
6
See Kevin C. Dunn, ‘Tales from the Dark Side: Africa’s Challenge to International Relations
Theory’, Journal of Third World Studies, 17:1 (2000), pp. 61–2.
7
Nkiwane, ‘Africa and International Relations’, p. 280.
8
Dunn, ‘Introduction: Africa and IR Theory’, p. 2; also Dunn, ‘Tales from the Dark Side’.
Africa and international relations 121
students something fundamental about the nature of the anarchic international

system, that Africa, home to some 800 million people, cannot. Another claimed result
is that when Africa is analysed it is misinterpreted through highly suspect conceptual
lenses that try to squeeze an ‘African reality’ into ‘European’ models. The seemingly
obvious misfit of the latter produces analyses and concepts – such as failed, or
quasi-states – which it is claimed conceptually and theoretically marginalise the
continent from the mainstream. Africa becomes the subordinated ‘other’ to the
western ‘self’.9 Such marginalisation is reinforced by the professed focus of many of
the most influential writings in IR on the great powers. Ayoob goes as far as to claim
that ‘. . . both neorealism and neoliberalism share a neocolonial epistemology that
privileges the global North over the global South . . .’.10
Although a variety of different specific criticisms about IR theory are made in
these contributions, the core of the problem is claimed to be that the conceptual basis
of IR theory is the product of Western experience and is therefore inapplicable to
Africa, and as a result, IR theory fails to acknowledge the historical specificity of the
African experience – analyses of Africa are produced by ‘reading through’ European
history. The argument is encapsulated by Neuman who writes:
Even central concepts such as anarchy, the state, sovereignty, rational choice, alliance and
the international system are troublesome when applied to the third world . . . mainstream
IR theory . . . is essentially Eurocentric theory originating in the United States and
founded, almost exclusively, on what happens or happened in the West.11
In a similar vein Dunn maintains that:
Africa’s pseudo absence in IR theory is exacerbated by the continued privileging of

concepts that help maintain that invisibility. Basic concepts that are central to traditional
IR – anarchy, sovereignty, the state, the market, the international/domestic dichotomy –
become problematic, if not highly dubious, when applied to Africa. Rather than use
African experiences to revise their theories, most IR scholars simply continue to ignore the
continent.12
Lying behind many of these arguments is a concern with the differences between the
emergence of the ‘Westphalian’ state system in Europe and the states system in
Africa. Here, it is claimed that whereas in Europe, the state system emerged with an
almost innate coherence between the boundaries of territorially-defined political
authority and various other social groups and processes – nation, secularisation,
religion, industrialisation and so forth – in Africa the formation of states was
somehow more artificial.13 This artificiality, this imposition of an alien form of rule,
it is argued, leads to the weakness or absence of the state in African societies today.
A host of claims are then made about the ethnic diversity of the populations within
African states, the ‘misfit’ between patterns of trade and state boundaries and the
9
Dunn, ‘Introduction: Africa and IR Theory’, p. 3; also Swatuk, ‘The Brothers Grim’.
10
Mohammed Ayoob, ‘Subaltern Realism: International Relations Theory Meets the Third World’,
in Stephanie G. Neuman (ed.), International Relations Theory and the Third World (London:
Macmillan, 1998), p. 37.
11
Stephanie G. Neuman, ‘International Relations Theory and the Third World: An Oxymoron?’, in
Stephanie G. Neuman (ed.), International Relations Theory and the Third World, p. 2.
12
Dunn, ‘Introduction: Africa and IR Theory’, p. 4.
13
Assis Malaquias, ‘Reformulating International Relations Theory: African Insights and Challenges’,
in Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy M. Shaw (eds.), Africa’s Challenge to International Relations
Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 12–15.
122 William Brown
seemingly consequent lack of control exercised by the state domestically. Where

domestic sovereignty in the West is therefore presented as an unproblematic issue,
providing the basis for theories of international relations, in Africa it is highly
problematic rendering those theories useless. The historical experiences of the two
continents here points to the need for difference to be recognised in the theories of the
international that we use, and we are asked to look back to pre-colonial Africa to
pinpoint the building blocks of new theoretical departures. In a manner reminiscent
of Davidson,14 Ofuho argues that, ‘Long before the imposition of the state structure,
the African peoples had their modes of organising society, which were phased out
because the continent did not have any choice but to adopt the Westphalian structure
designed by European powers in Berlin’.15 This meant it was ‘moulded in the
European frame but lacked the ethnic or cultural congruence that most of Europe
followed’.16 Or as Malaquias puts it, ‘. . . Africa’s political development in the
pre-colonial era differed from the European experience in important respects.
Therefore, attempts to explain uniquely African phenomena by using essentially
European models are inadequate.’17 In such circumstances, to prioritise an IR theory
based on European historical experience over analysis of a different African reality is
to subordinate the study of Africa’s international relations to European experiences.
Flowing from this questioning of statehood is a dismissal of a host of other elements
of IR theory – the division between the domestic and the international, of hierarchy
within and anarchy without, and of a clearly demarcated political realm of
interaction between states.
The implications of these claims could in fact point in several directions. They
could be read as a call for a refined conceptual basis for IR theories, which rethought
the concepts of state, sovereignty, anarchy and the international, and which could
produce models of international order based on different assumptions which are
more flexible and historically open. It would be, in effect, a call for theoretical
approaches which allow Africa to be analysed as a serious historical subject. In places
this is what Dunn appears to be arguing for.18 However, the way in which both he
and others frame their critique also seems to imply something different – not the
further development of IR theory per se, but the development of new IR theories for
Africa because it is Africa, not Europe or North America, which these authors tell us
makes existing IR theories problematic. In this latter sense, the claim is not just that
Africa be taken seriously analytically, but that this can only happen via a radical
theoretical divorce from what are seen as oppressive Western ideas. Both options
demand that we at least reconsider what is and is not assumed in our theoretical
models of the international system, and on what units and relationships such
models are built, as well as what our theories are for. However, the danger is that a
total dismissal of the relevance of existing IR theories in Africa, while implicitly
accepting their applicability to the developed world, risks undermining one of the
chief aims of the critics (to challenge Africa’s marginalisation in the discipline of IR)
by demarcating the continent into a relativist isolation. I will argue that we need not,
14
Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-state (London: James
Currey, 1992).
15
Ofuho, ‘Legitimacy and Sovereignty’, p. 106.
16
Ibid., p. 107.
17
Malaquias, ‘Reformulating International Relations Theory’, p. 13.
18
and should not, go this far. Such a move misidentifies the problem being discussed.
For, many of the issues which critics cite as problems of ‘IR theory’ in Africa, are in
fact problems in IR theory wherever it is applied.
In what follows I will first make some general and fairly broad comments about
some of the uses of theory in the study of international relations. I will then advance
three lines of counter-critique to the challenge to IR theory: the historical narratives
on which the critique of IR theory is based; the idea of statelessness in Africa; and the
understandings and criticisms of the concept of anarchy. This falls somewhat short
of a full defence of the applicability of ‘IR theory’ in Africa for, as I hope to show,
IR theories are in some senses in question everywhere.
Theory and international relations
The case against ‘traditional IR’ is an important one as it presents a challenge to the
discipline of IR, dominated as it is by scholars from the North Atlantic. It challenges
its pretensions to be a discipline of the international as a whole, and to its existing
efforts to provide theoretical frameworks within which to conceptualise and analyse
different, and particularly non-Western and post-colonial regions of the international
system. If theories of the international system are hidebound by the dominance of the
North Atlantic, then of what use is the discipline to analysts of, and those living in,
other parts of the world? However, as currently formulated, it is unclear in what
direction critics would wish to see IR theory develop in order to meet the challenges
they raise. In part, this lack of clarity is a result of the absence of any explicit
consideration of what the uses of theories of international relations could or should
be, nor of the relationship between abstract models of the international system and
more focused, concrete analysis of particular issue areas or geographical regions
within it. The bulk of this article will assess the rather more focused problems of
history, anarchy and statehood which the critics raise. However, I will offer here a few
broad, general, and incomplete considerations on the role of IR theory in analysing
the international system.
The first point to make is that there needs, at times, to be a lowering of
expectations as to what IR theories can do. Africanist critics of IR do not present
any explicit discussion of the desired uses of IR theory, but implicitly their
arguments appear to assume that for theory to be useful, a theoretical model should
‘look like’ the reality to which it relates. Because African reality doesn’t look very
much like the images of international order received from the mainstream of the
discipline, then the theories must be faulty: if IR theory presupposes functioning
states and these don’t exist in parts of Africa, then the IR theory can’t apply; if IR
theory is focused on relations between states, and there are international social
processes crossing state borders that are in some sense non-state, then alternative
theories are needed, and so on. There is indeed some mileage in this approach, but it
is badly overstated.
The key problem with this starting point is that it risks mistaking theories for exact
descriptions of reality. Given, as I argue below, that the critics’ main target is in fact
neorealism, it is interesting to note that this very point is made by Waltz himself.
Waltz argues that in constructing theories that seek to explain reality, the theory itself
124 William Brown
is necessarily at some remove from reality and involves some necessary simplification
of reality:
A theory is a picture, mentally formed, of a bounded realm or domain of activity. A theory
is a depiction of the organization of the domain and of the connections among its parts . . .
In reality everything is related to everything else, and one domain cannot be separated from
others. Theory isolates one realm in order to deal with it intellectually . . . The question, as
ever with theories is not whether the isolation of a realm is realistic, but whether it is
useful.19
Notwithstanding some caveats about Waltz’s methodology (introduced below), and
without getting diverted into a more far-reaching methodological discussion, this
seems a reasonable point to make. While theories of the international system should
bear some relation to the reality of the subject matter (otherwise how can they be
useful?) we cannot expect theories to include everything that we observe. Indeed, that
is partly why theories are useful as well as why their usefulness is inherently limited:
they reduce the complexity of the world in order to highlight certain important
features above others, they rely on conceptual abstractions such as ‘state’ and
‘anarchy’ to refer to real aspects of the world but in a necessarily imperfect,
generalised way. Theories then go on to identify relations among these elements
based on limiting assumptions about the real world. They necessarily take some
things for granted in order to explore others. The test of the usefulness of theory
therefore lies more in questions such as whether the abstractions on which it is built
generate interesting insights, whether it is a coherent formulation, whether the
assumptions on which it is based are reasonable, whether it can explain significant
issues, and whether it generates interesting hypotheses for future research. In this
respect, theories are only ever starting points for analysis. We should not be surprised
if neorealism fails to provide everything we need to know about west Africa, or
western Europe for that matter. The question is, does it provide some useful insights?
Of course, if the conceptual abstractions and assumptions on which a theory is built
are so distant from what is known about a particular region, then its usefulness is
commensurately more limited. Perhaps this is what the critics are getting at and I will
come to whether this argument holds for two conceptual abstractions – the state and
anarchy – in later sections. To claim that mainstream IR theory doesn’t account for
all the actors, processes and interactions which occur in Africa, is rather to miss the
point.
It is worth remarking here that I do not go along with those who argue that a
specifically ‘international’ theory is redundant either due to a general process of
‘globalisation’ or, in African guise, of state collapse. As will be discussed further
below, some discussions of African politics, particularly focusing on the state and
state collapse, proceed as if all practical borders between the internal and the external
had broken down. In such a circumstance, the role of any specifically ‘international’
theory would indeed come into question and international relations would ‘disappear
into sociology’20 or some kind of global social studies. If, following Justin
Rosenberg,21 international relations refers, in its most general abstraction, to
19
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 8.
20
The phrase is from Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: a Critique of Realist Theory of
International Relations (London: Verso), p. 46.
21
Justin Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory: Polemical Essays (London: Verso, 2000),
pp. 65–85.
relations between politically-organised societies, then I see no reason to doubt its

continuing relevance in either the African or global context. While this definition
does indeed reaffirm the centrality of the political, it neither necessitates a radical
separation between the internal and the external, nor between the political and
other – economic, cultural, ideational – aspects of social life in any particular histori-
cal example. If we thus define ‘international system’ as referring to more or less
regularised patterns of political, economic, cultural interaction between coexisting
politically organised societies, then the question of what might be included in
theoretical formulations or models of the international system, or sub-regions of it,
comes to the fore.
The problem of how to define the pertinent content of any particular international
system has been addressed by Buzan and Little who have provided us with a useful
framework.22 Because they are concerned to define an approach to international
systems which is open enough to encompass a wide historical range of different
systems, Buzan and Little’s is an approach which is particularly relevant to my
current discussion of critics who argue that African international relations are
somehow different from the Western norm. I do not need to go into Buzan and
Little’s framework in any depth for the purposes of the current discussion, suffice to
note that it endeavours to encompass a range of ‘levels’ (systems, units, subunits); a
range of ‘sectors’ within which systems might be said to exist (military, political,
economic, sociocultural and environmental); and a range of sources of explanation
(processes, interaction capacity and structures). With this toolkit, it is argued, a wide
array of different historical systems can be analysed. Put in terms of the above
discussion, there is a wide range of aspects of reality which can be selected in order
to construct theories and models of different systems of international relations.
Two key points flow from this. First, it becomes obvious that some kind of
international theory which can offer useful explanations of Africa’s international
politics is at least possible. Even if we were to accept the critics’ claim that the
traditional focus of ‘Western’ IR on states and anarchy is misplaced, alternative
constructions of a theory of the international for Africa should be possible focusing
on ethnic groupings as ‘units’, for example, or transboundary migration as ‘process’.
In contrast to those who argue that there is almost no discernible international
dimension at all, other critics, such as Dunn, seem to imply that some kinds of
political organisation remain, just that they are not like Western states. The implica-
tion of this latter argument is either that Africa would be seen to be removed from the
modern, state-based, Western international system into some kind of system or
sub-system of its own, or that our conceptualisations of the modern Western system
need to be made considerably more complex and all-encompassing to accommodate
African difference. I will argue below that I think we only need to go part way down
this road, although such opening up may also carry with it an explanatory price.
Second, these considerations, and Buzan and Little’s framework, also highlight
the fact that what is being criticised is not some single, generic body of thought called
‘western IR theory’, but actually one approach within it – neorealism. It soon
becomes clear that when critics argue that IR theory is inadequate for Africa –
because it focuses on states and not other actors, that it limits itself to interstate
22
Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of
International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
126 William Brown
relations and ignores other transnational processes, or that it operates as if there were
no connection between what goes on within states and what goes on between
them – they are actually talking about neorealism and not some of the other
theoretical approaches in the IR canon which question some or all of these
dimensions of realism. In discussions of IR theory and Africa, this fact is too often
hidden behind reference to a target labelled ‘western IR theory’ as if that were a
single, unified body of work. In this the critics are in fact accepting neorealism’s
hegemonic claims within the discipline. It should hardly need saying that ‘western IR
theory’ amounts to rather more than this. While Rosenberg may be right to argue
that because realism sits on the political foundations of international relations ‘there
is no way beyond realism by going around it’, this does not mean we have to accept
its transhistorical claims, nor its overly limiting assumptions.23 Other theoretical
approaches, all with their own traditional, Western credentials, remain very much in
the game.
We might make one further note here. Consideration of critical social theories
alerts us to the fact that the selection and construction of theories, and their impact
in the real world, is never an entirely neutral or value-free exercise.24 Implicit in the
Africanist critique is an idea that ‘western IR’ helps to reinforce Western dominance
in the international system through, for example, aid donors’ insistence on the
adoption of particular political reforms in Africa, centred on Western conceptions of
the nation state. It is perhaps one of the more laudable aims of the Africanist critique
to seek to break free from what are perceived as self-serving Western theoretical
constructions and to open up discussion of alternative political futures for the
continent. This aim is most explicit in Davidson’s writing.25 However, I will argue
below that we should retain a strong dose of scepticism as to whether an analytical
or normative focus on the non-state (whether that be ‘ethnic’ identifications or
‘warlord’ political formations) really offers a viable or desirable way past the state,
although a questioning of an exclusive focus on the state as established fact certainly
is useful. In addition, once one moves away from neorealist assumptions of statehood
to a more relational understanding, a greater opening up of the potential for change
becomes possible in any case.26
In the following sections I am going to take issue with two of the claims which are
used to reject traditional (that is, realist) IR theory – statehood and anarchy – and
argue that a recognisable theory of international politics can still be a valuable
starting point for analysis of Africa’s international relations. However, first I want to
offer some comments on the damage to historical understanding to which this misuse
of theory leads.
23
Rosenberg, Follies of Globalisation Theory.
24
Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995); Robert Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International
Relations Theory’, Millennium, 10:2 (1981), pp. 126–55; Andrew Linklater, ‘The Achievements of
Critical Theory’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds.), International Theory:
Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 279–98.
25
Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden.
26
The highly circumscribed scope for social change allowed for in Realism limits the extent to which
it can be viewed as a critical theory – a comment which does not apply to other ‘western’
approaches such as Liberalism and Marxism. Simon Bromley and Mark Smith, ‘Transforming
International Order?’, in William Brown, Simon Bromley and Suma Athreye (eds.), Ordering the
International: History, Change and Transformation (London: Pluto Press in association with the
Open University, 2004), pp. 523–68.
Essentialising histories
In implicitly assuming that theoretical models of international relations can provide

accurate, detailed descriptions of the real world of international relations, rather than
simplified metaphors of reality to be used as a starting point for analysis, the critics
of traditional IR are guilty of gross misrepresentations of history. Indeed, perhaps
one of the most glaring inadequacies of the ‘Africanist critique’ of IR theory is
the historical parallel which it uses to promulgate its argument. Far from using the
contrasting and complex histories of European and African participation in the
international system as a way to open up avenues to a more historically-oriented
theory of the international, the critique actually ‘essentialises’ both European and
African history.
The first essentialisation relates to the claimed compatibility of notions of the state
and state system taken directly from realist theory with the actual historical reality of
state formation and interaction in Europe. For the claim that IR theory is
inapplicable in Africa in fact accepts with a breathtaking complacency the idea that
such abstractions easily accord with the European experience and shows a grossly
oversimplified portrayal of Europe. While it may indeed be correct to argue, like
Dunn, that to take an ‘unproblematised’ notion of the state and hold it up to African
reality will necessarily produce a distorted picture, the implication is that this is not
so in the case of Europe.27 Apparently, the Westphalian ideal, ‘. . . worked well for
Europe . . .’.28 As I have noted above, the assumption is that in Europe there was
some kind of simple, natural affinity between the emerging nation-states and the
communities, cultures, identities and territories around which they were constructed.
The history of the European states system, and the scholarly debates within and
without IR about it, show this notion to be absurd. Yet it goes almost unremarked
that the complex reality of the European states system might raise questions about
the formulation and use of theories of international relations which take states for
granted, as if these problems only arise when the apparently more difficult issue of
Africa is addressed.
Indeed, in this respect, the critique of IR seemingly ignores the very real debates
about the origins and nature of the European states system and the place within it of
the Peace of Westphalia, and of the social processes of war, revolution, industrialis-
ation, modernisation and capitalist transition which accompanied and shaped state
formation.29 A passing knowledge of the history would alert us to the fact that the
Western state has neither been ‘unproblematic’ nor ‘taken for granted’ at virtually
27
Kevin Dunn, ‘MadLib #32: The (Blank) African State: Rethinking State Sovereignty in
International Relations Theory’, in Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy M. Shaw (eds.), Africa’s Challenge
to IR Theory, p. 55.
28
29
There are too many possible citations here. To get an idea of the range of debates, an eclectic
selection might include: Paul Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation
as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since
1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Stephen D.
Krasner, ‘Rethinking the Sovereign State Model’, Review of International Studies, 27 Special Issue
(December 2001), pp. 17–42; Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: a
Sociological Introduction (London: Hutchinson, 1978); John G. Ruggie, Constructing the World
Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization (London: Routledge, 1998); Benno Teschke The
Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso,
2003); Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
128 William Brown
any point in its history. It is perhaps useful to remind oneself that what might be
taken for granted as the ‘European state system’ today was, as recently as 1945, in a
condition of near total collapse. Indeed, the rebuilding of it involved the creation of
entirely novel forms of international political, economic and security apparatuses –
the EU, NATO, Warsaw Pact and Communist bloc, and the like – which themselves
do not easily fit into received theories of IR, as the debates over the nature of these
very institutions amply shows. The characterisation of traditional IR which is offered
by the Africanist critique would be pretty limited in explaining much about
international relations anywhere in the world, including North America and Europe.
The second essentialism is the other side of this coin, that is, an ‘African reality’
which is contrasted with the ‘western ideal’. Thus while European history is
essentialised as fitting the ideal types offered by IR theory, African history is
portrayed as essentially different from them. While it is unquestionably correct to
point out that the African situation was and is different to Europe, this is hardly
news. What is much more problematic – and requires a good deal more justification
than it receives in much of the literature – is to argue that there is something so
essentially different about Africa in the modern world as to make core concepts like
the state (which may indeed originate in Western thought) irrelevant. That is, not
only is it claimed that there are contradictions and conflicts around and arising from
state formation in Africa, and that the easy use of distinctions such as domestic and
international is problematic, but that these will not, indeed cannot, be overcome and
statehood, and the associated concepts used by realism and other IR theories which
flow from it, are therefore redundant.
Joining these two essentialisations, many of the critics operate with a simplistic
notion of a one-way process of imposition of the Western ideal-state onto Africa as
if Africans themselves had little to do with it. Thus: ‘The state-centric model . . .
worked well for Europe [while] the grafting of the Westphalian system onto Africa
brought war and conflict . . .’ because it ‘represented European ideas, not the wishes
and aspirations of African peoples’.30 Or as Dunn puts it, ‘African states had no
authorship in the construction of the international state system . . . The international
system was born in Westphalia and exported across the globe by Western coloniz-
ation and hegemony.’31 In fact, not only was the course of colonisation shaped by the
interaction between Africans and Europeans32 but decolonisation and the foundation
of independent states was a process in which Africans were actors, not simply acted
upon.33 The critics’ account also grossly over-simplifies the complex processes which
have gone to shape the international system. It is as if the basic structure of the
system was erected in seventeenth century Europe and has remained untouched and
unchanged by the passing years of war, revolution, social transformation, state
collapse and formation, international expansion and revolt.34
30
31
Dunn, ‘Tales from the Dark Side’, pp. 66–7.
32
See Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official
Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1970).
33
For example, see Tony Chafer’s excellent history, The End of Empire in French West Africa:
France’s Successful Decolonization? (Oxford: Berg, 2002).
34
With respect to the charge of ignoring Africa, it is worth noting here that some strands of
‘traditional IR’ such as the English School have in fact given the changes in the international
system around the expansion of statehood a great deal of attention. See for example, Hedley Bull
and Adam Watson (eds.), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon).
Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, the critique in fact fails to achieve one of
its key aims – to undermine the marginalisation of Africa in IR. The double act of a
portrayal of Europe as essentially in accord with received theories, and of an African
reality which is essentially different, cannot help but to exoticise Africa and only
widens the gulf between the IR mainstream and Africanist writings. The theoretical
pluralism hinted at by Dunn35 is all very well, but if it leaves ‘traditional IR’
untouched in its North Atlantic heartland and emphasises its non-applicability to
Africa, then it is unlikely to garner any greater attention to the continent in
mainstream IR teaching or theory. Indeed, Africa will be left outside of such
scholarly arenas in a relativist isolation, dismissed as it so often is, as ‘devoid of
meaningful politics’.36 As Mahmood Mamdani put it in a slightly different context,
both the uncritical adherence to ‘western’ universals and the assertion of an essential
African particularism leaves both Europe and Africa ‘robbed of their history’.37
‘I would bet on the states, perhaps even on Uganda’38
I argued above that even if one accepted the view that international relations in
Africa were not ‘state-centric’ one could in principle construct alternative theories of
IR based on alternative units and sectors of international order. However, I do not
think we need to do this, or not, at least, to the extent that the critics seem to imply.
Here I want to argue that theoretical approaches from within IR remain useful
starting points for analysis of Africa’s international relations. As already noted,
behind the critics’ professed target of ‘traditional IR theory’ lies neorealism, the real
object of discussion. The central conceptual bases of neorealism are the closely
intertwined distinctions between an internal, hierarchical politics based on the state
and an external, anarchic international system comprised of states. In Buzan and
Little’s framework, these two define the units of the system (states) and the structure
of relations between the units (anarchy structured by a balance of power). And
indeed, it is these two which are seen to be most problematic for scholars of African
international politics. My argument in this section and the next is as follows. The
critics of ‘traditional IR theory’ implicitly accept neorealism’s definition of the state
and of anarchy and then go on to point out the shortcomings of these conceptuali-
sations once the reality on the ground in Africa is encountered. ‘IR theory’ is then
dismissed as of limited relevance. Notwithstanding the cautions above (as to how far
one should try to read off abstract theories in this way) this is a false move for other
reasons. I will argue that the realist conceptualisation of the state and of anarchy are
to be found wanting in and of themselves – the problems do not arise only once one
moves to substantive analysis of Africa. With a modified understanding of the units
of the international system, and of the structure of relations between them, the extent
of African difference could be reduced from a difference of kind, as one side or other
of a dichotomy, to a matter of degree. Africa could then be seen to exist within the
35
Dunn, ‘Introduction: Africa and IR Theory’.
36
Ibid., citing Gourevitch, p. 1.
37
Mahmmod Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 10.
38
As we shall see later, the phrase is Waltz’s, ‘Theory of International Politics’, p. 95.
130 William Brown
same analytical and real, historical world as the West while allowing space for the
particularities of the continent to be understood. However, the critics in fact retain
neorealist conceptualisations of the state and anarchy but invert the picture. Far from
going beyond realism, this is in fact a step backwards.
I will begin my discussion with the state, and will make three main arguments.
First, I argue that the rather crude historical portrayals highlighted in the previous
section combine with a rather misleading realist idea of the state to enable a dismissal
of the state as an essential building block of analysis of Africa’s international
relations. Second, I show that a more relational understanding of states makes for a
more open IR which has greater nuance in the understanding of the units of the
international system, one which is potentially compatible with other theoretical
traditions in IR.39 Third, I argue that thus armed, it becomes easier to judge the
actual absence or not of the state in Africa and indeed to place the strictly political
dimension of the international in a broader social context. I argue that state absence
is overstated by the critics, a move which is in fact made possible by their acceptance
of realist-Weberian abstractions as actual fact.
State-centrism is ingrained in neorealism and much other international relations
theory. As Waltz put it: ‘States set the scene in which they, along with non-state
actors, stage their dramas or carry on their humdrum affairs . . . States are the units
whose interactions form the structure of international political systems’.40 For
neorealism, the centrality of states to the political structure of the international
system is one of its limiting assumptions – it is the existence of multiple domestic
hierarchies which defines the structure of the system and thus sets the context in
which other actors, those pushed to the periphery of this analytical model, act. Yet
in Africa, we are told, this centrality of the state is an assumption which is not
useful – Africa is an arena where state absence demands alternative theoretical
constructions. Kevin Dunn is explicit on this:
I am questioning the relevance of the African state as the primary unit of analysis in
understanding politics in Africa . . .
The nation-state arose in Western Europe due to specific historical and societal pressures.
The nation-state as an institution reflected the needs and demands of a specific time and
place. Its exportation and imposition in Africa (and elsewhere) meant that traditional
socio-political structures (which had emerged to meet the needs of the indigenous ‘civil’
society) were displaced and/or replaced by an alien institution.41
I have already indicated that I regard the historical portrayals contained in the above
quote as seriously flawed. However, it is worth noting here that the analytical
criticism is also serving broader aims. Analytically, we are told, the study of Africa’s
international relations should focus on the non-state, and historically should
highlight the alternative political forms on which pre-colonial African societies were
based. For Malaquias, this means ‘confronting the hegemonic position of the
state-centric approach . . .’ in IR theory.42 Dunn, citing Christopher Clapham,43
39
In particular I will use Moravcsik’s liberalism to offer some limited illustration of the difference this
shift makes. Andrew Moravcsik, ‘A Liberal Theory of International Politics’, International
Organization, 51:4 (1997), pp. 513–53.
40
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 94–5.
41
Dunn, ‘Tales from the Dark Side’, p. 76.
42
Malaquias, ‘Reformulating International Relations Theory’, pp. 15–16.
43
Dunn, ‘The (Blank) African State’; Christopher Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, Review of
International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 143–57.
supports this, arguing that, because and to the extent that states in Africa have not
achieved ‘domination over society’, the need to focus on other, non-state, actors to
analyse Africa’s place in the international system, increases. More concretely, some
argue that the contemporary political crises in Africa should not be addressed
through state-centric lenses. The nation-state, according to Davidson, was a ‘curse’:
‘. . . the postcolonial nation-state had become a shackle on progress . . .’44 and crisis
arises ‘. . . from the social and political institutions within which decolonized
Africans have lived and tried to survive. Primarily this is a crisis of institutions . . .
with the nationalism that became nation-statism.’45 Bakut criticises the fact that
‘Afrikan [sic] governments are still holding on tightly to the obsolescent state system
even though it is quite clear that it has failed in Afrika . . .’.46 And Dunn claims that
we should stop seeing state failure as ‘temporary aberrations rather than as
alternative structures and practices to the dominant Westphalian system’.47
However, this argument goes deeper than a call for better explanations based on
better theory. Here the critics are making a claim that statism in Africa was an
external imposition just as theories of IR based on states are an external, intellectual
imposition. By debunking state-centred IR, the critics seek to open up alternative,
‘non-state’ political futures, free of such Western impositions. As a result, directly
political injunctions are made. Davidson’s argument that a reconstruction of politics
in Africa should be built on deeper, pre-colonial political roots is based on a claim
about the present-day relevance of pre-colonial African political systems. Bakut too,
argues that ‘. . . the loyalties of individuals to tribal or national groups (arguably) is
the nature of Afrikan societies, Afrikan governments are burdened with internal
divisions, which hinder their attempts to create inclusive states’,48 thus the need to
create different, non-state political structures (Bakut interprets the proposal for an
African Economic Community as one such) which accommodate this reality. For
Chabal and Daloz, most spectacularly, international aid donors’ concern with
political crises in Africa is misplaced for these are not really crises at all, it is just how
‘Africa works’.49
Although linked, I will take the analytical case being made here first before
offering some sceptical comments on the political futures which are entailed in this
theoretical challenge. The critics’ argument – to take the state back out – rests on a
series of analytical moves, all of which are at best questionable. The argument goes
something like this. First, it is accepted that the state is an established fact – an
‘irreducible actor’ whose international standing is based primarily on its total
domination over domestic society. Second, analysis proceeds on the basis that
theoretical abstractions of such an entity look something like historical reality. Third,
it is argued that there is an essentially different African reality to the European one
from whence such abstractions came. Finally, it is claimed that the abstractions don’t
fit an African reality which is encapsulated by the experiences of internal conflict and
44
Davidson, Black Man’s Burden, p. 290.
45
Ibid., p. 10.
46
Bakut tswah Bakut, ‘The African Economic Community (AEC): A Step Towards Achieving the
Pan-African Ideal’, in Bakut tswah Bakut and Sagarika Dutt (eds.), Africa at the Millennium: An
Agenda for Mature Development (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 79–100.
47
48
Bakut, ‘The African Economic Community’, p. 79, emphasis added.
49
Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (London:
International African Institute with James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1999).
132 William Brown
state collapse of countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia (two of the most frequently
cited instances of state absence). The state should therefore be dismissed as the
building block of international relations theories in Africa.
I have rehearsed already why I think that the second and third steps in this
argument are problematic, so here I will concentrate on the first and the last. If the
Africanist critics were simply using the example of Africa to raise questions about the
validity of realist conceptualisations of the state, then one wouldn’t have many
objections other than to point out that other case studies, including European and
North American ones, could also have been used. At times, this is what Dunn
appears to be hinting at – in urging IR theorists to use the African experience to
question their concepts and develop better ones.50 However, too often, this slips over
into the position quoted above – of actually dismissing the concept of the state as in
and of itself peripheral to a useful theory. Indeed, we find that an adherence to realist
conceptualisations of the state is in fact necessary for this dismissal to have any
plausibility.
It is worth remembering that for Waltz, state-centrism is a founding assumption.
In defence of neorealism, the question should therefore be whether this is a reason-
able and useful assumption to make in order to generate explanation, not whether the
resulting model gives an accurate, detailed description of reality.51 Unfortunately,
this seems to be forgotten both by some realists as well as some of their critics. At
some times, and for some analytical purposes, it may be reasonable to assume that
statehood is an established fact, at other times this will leave so much out of the
picture as to be misleading. But the case for taking the state back out in terms of
African international politics needs to be made in rather more detail than it has
hitherto, a point I’ll return to below. Furthermore, this really only tackles the
neorealist strand in ‘traditional’ IR theory. Certainly, state-centrism is also present to
an extent in liberal, constructivist and Marxist writings on international relations in
that they all take states as key, if not the only, units in the modern international
system. But for these approaches, the assumption of statehood is much more
qualified and, one might add, more useful. For Moravcsik’s liberalism, for instance,
the fundamental actors in international politics are not states per se but individuals
and groups and it is their interests, mediated in various ways through states, which
create the patterns of international interdependence which sit alongside anarchy to
give us the character of the international system.52 Writing from a Marxist perspec-
tive, Rosenberg has argued that in overcoming the realist insistence on a purely
international, interstate level of theorisation, by reconnecting the internal and exter-
nal, it not only enables better explanations of substantive issues to be given, but
allows IR theories to be reconnected with the broader canvas of the social sciences.53
There is certainly an argument, therefore, in favour of taking a more relational
view of the state. Rather than accept realist assumptions as descriptions and claim
that the theory doesn’t fit the facts, might it not be more profitable to explore more
developed theories of the state than realism has to offer, and only then judge the
extent to which states should or should not be at the centre of theories of African
50
51
52
Moravcsik, ‘A Liberal Theory of International Politics’.
53
Justin Rosenberg, ‘The International Imagination: IR Theory and ‘‘Classic Social Analysis’’ ’,
Millennium, 23:1 (1994), pp. 85–108.
international politics? The problems with the realist-Weberian approach were well
put by the political theorist, John Dunn. He points out that the Weberian idea of the
state as ‘factual entity’ defines it as an entity which ‘successfully upholds the claim to
the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ in enforcing its rule over a given
territory.54 However, as he goes on to note:
What is elusive in Weber’s conception is the proviso that the claim in question should be
successful. States certainly vary today . . . in just how successfully they realize this claim in
practice. Some states confront more thoroughly pacified populations than others. But no
state has ever confronted a wholly pacified or subjected population.55
The difference between some Western states at particular times and some African
states at particular times, here becomes a matter of degree, not one side or other of
a dichotomy. The concept of the state is germane to both, however, as is the
problematic of how and how far the state’s claims to legitimacy and capacity to
control are realised, and the form of political rule they exercise over society. As
Rosenberg put it, ‘before the state is a thing it is a social relation’56 and that:
. . . if one cannot look at those social relations [which compose the state], then one must
treat the state as an irreducible actor. And to do this is to invest the specifically modern
Western form of the state with an elemental status which abstracts it from its social and
historical reality.57
If one then transposes this ‘elemental state’ onto Africa, it is not surprising that the
fit is imperfect! Realists and their critics should take note.
We might be better, therefore, bringing into our theory an idea of the state-society
relationships which inform what statehood means in the international system. That
means paying some serious attention to the particular ways in which political
authority is constructed, the particular claims to sovereignty which are extended
within and without, the relationships between political order and economic interests
and the ways in which the legitimacy of political rule is sought to be upheld.
However, we must also bear in mind that each of these features are relational, not
elemental. We can therefore be attuned to the idea that in actual instances under
consideration, in Clapham’s terms, statehood may be a matter of ‘degree’ rather than
present or absent,58 but also that statehood will mean and entail different things in
different historical and social settings – forms of state will vary. This is something
which realism necessarily leaves out of its model. Bearing in mind John Dunn’s
assertion above, we also need to keep present the idea that this is true whether we are
looking at Africa or Europe: these are not features which only pertain to Africa while
Europe adheres to a Weberian ideal-type.
The issue of how to understand Africa’s international politics and the kinds of
futures which are possible, then becomes a matter of more serious study. It might be
that in some circumstances and for some analytical purposes, realist assumptions
might be a useful starting point. But it is also clear that other traditions in IR theory
also have different claims on our attention and that the usefulness or not of one
54
Weber, cited by John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (London: Harper
Collins, 2000), p. 67.
55
John Dunn, Cunning of Unreason, pp. 67–8, emphasis added.
56
Justin Rosenberg, ‘A Non-Realist Theory of Sovereignty?: Giddens’ The Nation State and
Violence’, Millennium, 19:2 (1990), p. 251.
57
Justin Rosenberg, ‘The International Imagination’, p. 94.
58
Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’.
134 William Brown
approach should not be used to dismiss them all. By moving away from realist
assumptions about the state we actually have to be a bit more circumspect in judging
how far statehood is or is not a relevant factor in theorising Africa’s international
relations and how far non-state political forms really offer an alternative.
Let us consider the celebrated cases of state collapse in west Africa as an
illustration of this discussion. For many writers on Africa, the images which inform
discussions are often the weak states, disintegrating regimes and social conflict in
Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s. Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy article59 sets the
tone here in what Chris Allen rightly called an ‘inglorious wallow in prejudice and
misinformation’.60 However, perceiving social breakdown within the state is not in
itself a reason to jettison consideration of the international nor sideline the state as
a crucial component of the political landscape.
In the case of Liberia, the civil war initiated by Charles Taylor’s invasion in 1989
came after a prolonged process of social and economic change which weakened the
existing relationships through which state power had previously been consolidated.61
However, this process was both internal and international. Throughout the 1980s the
regime of Samuel Doe struggled to patch up a declining support base through the
manipulation of inflows of foreign investment and support from Liberia’s US
backers.62 With the decline of the latter, as Cold War priorities in US policy waned,
the regime set in train a restructuring of the state which ultimately failed to provide
Doe with the political backing he needed and in fact empowered his rivals. However,
Taylor’s rebellion was frustrated by a lack of international recognition and by the
intervention of outside powers, notably the Economic Community of West Africa
Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), led by Nigeria. And it was international pressure,
and military intervention, which contributed to Taylor’s exile in 2003 and the start of
a process of political reconstruction. In neighbouring Sierra Leone, the ability of
Presidents Momoh and Strasser to reorganise political and economic relationships
within and outside of the country for a time frustrated the efforts of rebels of
Revolutionary United Front (RUF) to seize control of the country in the early
1990s.63 However, again it was the intervention of other states and organisations –
ECOMOG, the UN and Britain – which played an important role in eventually
bringing warfare to an end in 2002 and in rebuilding the state.
The critics of traditional IR would be on fairly safe ground if they argued that the
analytical tools of neorealism would give us a very limited explanation of these
events. However, once we relax our assumption of statehood and instead perceive the
state as a social relationship which faces both inwards and outwards, then the canvas
opens up considerably. For instance we can see how, for both of these countries,
statehood is based on a combination of both domestic and international relationships
and that shifts in these had profound consequences for the stability of the state.
Looked at the other way around one can see that what both of these states sought to
‘do’ in the international arena – for example Doe’s courting of US backing in the
1980s, or the diplomatic initiatives of Sierra Leone’s President Kabbah in the late
59
Robert Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, Atlantic Monthly (February 1994), pp. 44–76.
60
Chris Allen, ‘Understanding African Politics’, Review of African Political Economy, 22:65 (1995),
p. 318.
61
William Reno (1998), Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
62
Reno, Warlord Politics, ch. 3.
63
Ibid., ch. 4.
1990s – can be explained by looking at their domestic political relationships and the
way these dovetailed (or failed to dovetail) with the preferences of powerful external
actors (both state and non-state). So long as one is prepared to integrate an
understanding of ‘what goes on within states’ with ‘what goes on between them’, it
would be possible to knit together a variety of accounts of these and other
developments which get beyond the idea simply that the state doesn’t ‘fit’ in Africa.
Indeed, it is not just that it is hard to see how an account could be given which doesn’t
have the state as one of its building blocks, but in many ways the nature of statehood
and the control of the state are what these conflicts are actually about. The analytical
focus on the state is therefore not simply an academic affectation.
Both of these cases also seem to show that, rather too often, the worst cases of
political breakdown are cited as if they are permanent characteristics of the countries
concerned and representative of the entire continent. Neither should be assumed to be
the case. Kevin Dunn argues that ‘. . . IR observers tend to treat the development of
‘‘warlordism’’ in countries such as Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone as temporary
aberrations rather than alternative structures and practices to the dominant West-
phalian state system’.64 However, we might in fact be better seeing warlordism as
‘final manoeuverings in the dying years of a type of political system’ than as a viable
and enduring form of politics.65 We should not assume that the political and
economic relationships which emerge in conditions of social breakdown are more
solid and enduring than the forms of organised politics which preceded them, nor
those which may succeed them.
In this context we might also do well to remember that in defending the
state-centrism of his theory, Waltz claimed: ‘Who is likely to be around 100 years
from now – the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Egypt, Thailand, and
Uganda? Or Ford, IBM, Shell, Unilever, and Massey-Ferguson? I would bet on the
states, perhaps even on Uganda’.66 Of course, at the time he was writing, conditions
inside Uganda were, as far as Waltz could see, approximating something of a
Hobbesian nightmare.67 Yet not ten years later Uganda was on the road to a fairly
remarkable process of political reconstruction.68 Many other African states, for all
the economic and political crises that may have occurred, appear to be fairly durable
entities. For every Sierra Leone, Liberia and Somalia, there is a Botswana, Tanzania
and Kenya. Not only do the critics overstate the irrelevance of the state, they also
underestimate the magnitude of what is being proposed. For it is the very
particularity of state authority and sovereign recognition as a unique form of power
which gives statehood its power and presence in the international system. Yet, in
Africa, we are told, seemingly alone out of the continents of the world, modern
statehood does not exercise this unique role in politics.
Of course it is an open question as to whether the efforts at state reconstruction in
Sierra Leone and Liberia do in fact overcome the political dynamics which led to
breakdown in the first place. But it does raise a rather important normative question
64
65
Chris Allen, ‘Warfare, Endemic Violence and State Collapse in Africa’, Review of African Political
Economy, 26:81 (1999), pp. 381–2.
66
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 95.
67
Ibid., p. 103.
68
Of course, it is not the African states, not even Uganda, one of the more solid examples of state
reconstruction in Africa, which have given us reason to doubt Waltz’s certainty, but one of the
great powers, the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist.
136 William Brown
as to what kind of political forms one would want to see created. Buzan has expressed
scepticism of the value of exploring ‘the arcadian mine of social and political
constructions that existed before European imposition’69 but the prospect of
present-day warlordism is rather more sanguinary. For if warlordism ‘fits’ Africa
better than statehood, as the critics claim, it is a bleak future indeed. In fact, away
from the safety of academia, few see this as a desirable outcome, as is witnessed by
the considerable and ongoing struggles by Africans, and Western powers, towards
state reconstruction. These actors would seem to agree with Christopher Clapham
who, even while arguing for the state to be brought into question analytically,
concluded that ‘. . . there has been little in the experience of failed states to cast
doubt on the proposition that statehood remains an essential prerequisite for
order, representation and the improvement of human welfare within the present
international order’.70
Misunderstanding anarchy
Moving away from a simple dichotomy of state/non-state in the manner suggested

above, we can also gain a better perspective to judge the other key claim of the critics
of traditional IR, namely that the image of an international anarchy in the external
relations between states and an internal hierarchy within states, is inapplicable in
Africa. I argue that, like the existence or otherwise of statehood, a hard and fast
distinction between anarchy and hierarchy – either within or between states – is
rather more problematic in practice than the critics acknowledge. Attempts to
theorise the international system which recognise the mixes of anarchy and inter-
dependence between states allow both more nuance in our understanding of the
character of relations between the units, and a more sensible grasp of the internal and
external dimensions of international order.
Neorealism is based on a clear distinction of types of political system defined by
their ordering principles: hierarchy or anarchy. Political orders may in practice show
mixes of these two, Waltz argues, but there remain only two options for ordering
principles.71 For theories which seek to explain rather than describe, that is theories
which are based on abstractions which are ‘some distance from reality’ rather than
ever more detailed descriptions of reality, a choice has to be made as to whether the
system under consideration is structured by anarchy or hierarchy: ‘. . . our expecta-
tions about the fate of those areas differ wildly depending on which answer to the
structural question becomes the right one’.72 It is an assumption of neorealism that
politics within states is hierarchical while politics between states is anarchic. This
distinction also provides the dividing line which separates the internal from the
external, domestic politics from international.
It is this assertion that draws the critics’ fire. For instance, Neuman argues, ‘For
many LDCs, then, the realist focus on a sharp boundary between domestic ‘‘order’’
and international ‘‘anarchy’’ may be applicable, but in reverse. It is the hierarchical
69
Barry Buzan, ‘Conclusions: Systems versus Units in Theorizing about the Third World’, in
Stephanie G. Neuman (ed.), International Relations Theory and the Third World, p. 219.
70
Clapham, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, p. 156.
71
72
Ibid., p. 116.
structure of the world that provides them with an ordered reality, and a ‘‘condition
of un-settled rules’’ that afflicts them at home’.73 Similarly Ayoob claims, ‘Neither the
clear-cut distinction between anarchy outside and order inside the state correspond to
the reality in much of the international system outside of North America, Western
Europe, and Japan’.74 Notice that the claim here implies that this distinction does
correspond to reality in the global North.
However, the critics here make two errors. The first is to confuse a distinction
between anarchy and hierarchy on the one hand with the distinction between order
and disorder on the other. This allows them to claim, given the existence of violence
within African states, that politics within those states is anarchic. The usefulness of
neorealism’s assumptions (and those of other IR theories which view international
politics as anarchic) is seemingly put in question. But this is to make a fundamental
mistake. Buzan is surely right to argue that in neorealism, anarchy is defined in
formal political terms as a product of the equality of multiple sovereign claims and
mutual recognition, while order may or may not exist internationally arising from the
distribution of power between states.75
In fact Waltz is quite clear that for him the distinction between hierarchy and
anarchy is not determined by the level of violence. Indeed, he points out that the
struggle to maintain and uphold hierarchical rule within states may well be bloodier
and more violent than conflicts between units in a state of anarchy.76 The presence or
absence of violence therefore cannot be used to distinguish between the domestic and
international, the hierarchical and the anarchic. Instead it is the ordering principle
which gives the context in which violence is used which distinguishes the two: in the
domestic arena there is a legitimate authority which seeks to police the use of
violence, in the international sphere there is none. ‘If anarchy is identified with chaos,
destruction and death’ Waltz maintains, ‘then the distinction between anarchy and
government does not tell us much’.77 For Waltz, so long as there is a legitimate
authority attempting to uphold its right to monopolise legitimate force, then the
assumption of domestic hierarchy may still be useful. The critics here miss their mark
by some distance. Violence within African states does not necessarily mean that the
ordering principle of that society ceases to be hierarchical.
However, the second error is that the critics still cling to a fairly rigid dichotomy
of anarchy and hierarchy, simply inverting it. In place of hierarchy within states, we
have an African anarchy. But internationally, it is maintained, there is a hierarchy
created from the massive power imbalance between north and south. Thus Kevin
Dunn argues that:
There is strong evidence to suggest that the international system is hierarchically ordered
. . . For Africa, the hierarchical state system was produced by European materialism and is
currently maintained through the continued economic oversight of Western interests and
hegemonic institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. Therefore, including African
experiences into the discussion illustrates how the current state system was and remains
hierarchically ordered.78
73
Neuman, ‘International Relations Theory and the Third World’, p. 3.
74
Ayoob, ‘Subaltern Realism’, p. 37.
75
Buzan, ‘Conclusions’, pp. 215–16.
76
77
Ibid., p. 103.
78
Dunn, ‘Tales from the Dark Side’, pp. 66–7.
138 William Brown
Yet he goes on to argue that such international order is contrasted with the cases
where ‘. . . African countries have collapsed into domestic anarchy’.79 It is a mark of
the confusion that prevails that while claiming that the state has all but disappeared
as a significant actor, leaving a ‘domestic’ anarchy, it is then claimed that inter-
nationally, in relations between states (some of which have all but disappeared,
remember) there is a hierarchy! Quite what the subordinate units of this hierarchy
are, therefore, remains rather opaque. To be able to do this while also claiming to
question the internal/external dichotomy is indeed puzzling.
In fact, the anarchic/hierarchic dichotomy is more troubling than the critics, or
neorealists, recognise, as Milner has argued.80 Milner begins with a point alluded to
above, that while many take international politics to be anarchic, there is some
confusion as to what anarchy means. Rather than disorder, Milner argues that
ultimately anarchy refers to the absence of centralised authority and legitimacy in the
use of force and rule enforcement.81 However, Milner points out that the extent to
which authority is centralised, and the extent to which legitimacy exists, vary to a
considerable extent both within states and internationally – there exist examples of
internationally-legitimated uses of force and internationally-authoritative rules, and
of decentralised systems of domestic governance. Instead of a rigid dichotomy of
anarchy and hierarchy, Milner maintains that viewing each as ends of a continuum
is more useful. As with the discussion of statehood above, this relaxing of the rigid
categories of neorealism may provide both a more fruitful basis for characteris-
ing international order, and allow us to have theoretical approaches which can
accommodate more easily the African experience.
Indeed, we might go further. Milner also argues persuasively that the international
system should be seen as both anarchic and interdependent. Dismissing the idea that
anarchy and interdependence are opposites, Milner maintains that ‘While anarchy is
an important condition of world politics, it is not the only one. Strategic inter-
dependence is at least as important’.82 Like other writers,83 Milner points out that
even in systems which tend, as the international system generally does, towards the
anarchic end of the spectrum, order can still be generated within an anarchy by
patterns of interdependence between the units. This claim is used by IR theorists who
do not share all of neorealism’s assumptions to build alternative models of
international order. In this regard, Moravcsik has argued that recognition of how
international order is shaped by different patterns of interdependence, combined with
a liberal perspective on the formation of state preferences, allows us both to reach
beyond an image of international politics as simply anarchy plus the balance of
power, and to break down the internal/external dichotomy.84
Surely, here we have potentially better explanations of the critics’ claim that
African states exist in an ‘orderly’ international environment. Such order at the
international level between north and south is not a signal of the absence of anarchy,
nor is it product of a hierarchical, centralised authority, so much as patterns of often
79
Ibid., p. 68.
80
Helen Milner, ‘The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: A Critique’, in
David A. Baldwin (ed.), Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 143–69.
81
Milner, ‘The Assumption of Anarchy’, pp. 152–3.
82
Ibid., p. 167.
83
In particular see Moravcsik, ‘A Liberal Theory of International Politics’.
84
Ibid.
highly asymmetric interdependence, particularly in the economic field. The criticism

that an asymmetric distribution of power in favour of the imperial states creates a
hierarchical system, defined as an opposite of anarchy, is thus to confuse two distinct
sources of international order (formal hierarchy and interdependence). It would be
hard to maintain that, however uneven, the power preponderance of the northern
states has created a legitimated authority at the international level vis-à-vis the
developing world. In sum, while Dunn maintains that ‘bringing African experience
into the picture’ highlights the problems of central notions of IR theory’85 in fact,
as Buzan notes, the ‘anarchy-hierarchy distinction is not just troubling to
those interested in the third world. It is also one of the main bones of contention
between neorealists and several other schools of thought in IR.’86 Recognition of
this fact allows space to remain for some of the key theoretical approaches of
‘western’ international relations to be used in analysing Africa’s international
politics.
The liberal approach alluded to already can be used to illustrate this point. The
relationship between African states and international aid donors is perhaps one of
the most important aspects of African international politics. In formal terms, there
seems little reason to question the notion that this is based on interstate relations
in an anarchic international system. Nevertheless, the preferences of African states
who seek inward flows of funds, and those of external states who seek to promote
particular kinds of economic and political change in Africa, coincide, providing
the basis for ‘development cooperation’. Note here that these state preferences do
not sit easily in a realist account based on the overriding importance of a zero-sum
pursuit of state survival.87 Furthermore, the international order which exists in this
field is shaped also by the existence of inter-governmental institutions (primarily
the World Bank and the IMF, although the European Union also plays a
significant role in Africa) and by the asymmetry of this interdependence of
preferences which allows the donors largely to dictate the terms of cooperation.
However, while other sources of international order are therefore important to
explaining this relationship, we should not go so far as to argue that anarchy and
hierarchy cease to be important. Hierarchy within states is important to the
authorisation of aid donors’ activities in African states, indeed such involvement
exists on the basis of the authority of both the African state concerned and the
donor states. And anarchy without plays a role alongside interdependence,
particularly in how it limits the extent of global governance – it is precisely because
IMF and World Bank power is not seen as the product of a legitimated
hierarchical order, that their actions are so contested.
This discussion of different understandings of anarchy also raises an interesting
irony. As noted, even if the Africanist critics define anarchy as chaos instead of the
absence of centralised authority, they nevertheless maintain the neorealist
hierarchy/anarchy dichotomy, merely using it to argue for African difference. Yet
as Sampson has persuasively argued, Waltz’s own distinction between anarchic
and hierarchical political systems is in fact based on ideas drawn from British,
85
86
Buzan, ‘Conclusions’, p. 216.
87
Though see Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism
(Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1985) for a realist account of this relationship and a
counter to the charge that realists always ignore the ‘Third World’.
140 William Brown
colonial-era anthropological studies of African political systems.88 Sampson argues

that Waltz imagines the anarchic international system as a ‘primitive’ political
system. While others89 have also done this, with Waltz it goes deeper. For Waltz’s
understanding of structure is, Sampson maintains, taken directly from S.F. Nadel’s
structural-functionalism. Sampson highlights how anthropological studies in the
interwar years shifted away from the approach of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, whose
definitions of structure had mainly been applied to small population, Oceanic
island communities, and had as a result been ‘only a little way removed from
reality’.90 Instead, in studying the much larger population African communities,
Fortes, Nadel and Evans-Pritchard redefined social structure in much more
abstract terms – likening the contrast in approaches to that between ‘grammar and
syntax, not the spoken word’.91 For Nadel, social structure was to be specified in
positional terms, of relationships between abstract roles rather than individuals.
Two contrasting principles of structure are then developed, one in which roles are
dependent – the role is defined in terms of relationships to actors in other
roles – the other in which there is no dependency and in which different roles relate
to each other on the basis of differential command over resources.92 Here, as
Sampson illustrates, we have Waltz’s hierarchical and anarchical systems: one in
which ‘some are entitled to command, others are required to obey’;93 the other in
which no such requirements obtain and in which command over material capabili-
ties rather than role functions determine the structure. Here too, we have the three
elements of structure used by Waltz: ordering principles, functional differentiation
and distribution of material capabilities.94 And here too we have a ‘purely
positional’ picture of society focusing not on ‘how units relate to one another’ but
‘how they stand in relation to one another’, the first being a property of the units,
the latter a property of the system.95 As Sampson concludes:
Not only is Waltz’s definition of structure derived from Nadel, but the structure Waltz
employs is Nadel’s . . . By setting up international politics as an anarchic system of
functionally undifferentiated units governed by the principle of self-help and the
distribution of material capabilities, Waltz’s system mirrors social anthropology’s
representation of primitive African political systems.96
Fortes, Evans-Pritchard and Nadel used this approach to divide African political
systems into two kinds: ‘Group A’ which had some kind of government (occasionally
extensive), and ‘Group B’ which were stateless, anarchic societies.97 To illustrate the
similarities of this approach to Waltz’s, consider for example Evans-Pritchard’s
characterisation of the Nuer of southern Sudan, a Group B society, as an ‘ordered
88
Aaron B. Sampson, ‘Tropical Anarchy: Waltz, Wendt, and the Way We Imagine International
Politics’, Alternatives, 27 (2002), pp. 429–57.
89
Roger D. Masters, ‘World Politics as a Primitive System’, World Politics, 16:4 (1964), pp. 595–619.
90
Sampson, ‘Tropical Anarchy’, p. 436; Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Preface’, in M. Fortes and E. E.
Evans-Pritchard (eds.), African Political Systems (London: Oxford University Press, 1963),
pp. i–xxiii.
91
Fortes, cited in Sampson, ‘Tropical Anarchy’, p. 437.
92
Sampson, ‘Tropical Anarchy’, pp. 437–8.
93
94
Sampson, ‘Tropical Anarchy’, p. 440.
95
Ibid., p. 438.
96
Ibid., p. 444.
97
M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Introduction’, in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (eds.), African
Political Systems, pp. 1–23.
anarchy’98 resting on the right of self-help and ‘sustained by the distribution of the
command of force . . .’99 However, this approach to African political systems
meant that social change in this schema could only be registered in terms of either
the maintenance or transformation of system. Indeed, to reinforce the point that
theories are never value-neutral, Sampson maintains that Waltz chooses social
anthropology as the basis for his theory of international politics precisely because
it fits with the policy predilections for maintenance of the status quo already
present in realist theory.100 For Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, African Political
Systems also had a practical aim – to help inform British colonial rulers embarked
on the policy of indirect rule, a policy which emphasised the maintenance of order
in African colonies above the transformation of them.101 And just as the British
became obsessed with ‘holding the line’ and creating order, in place of transform-
ing colonised societies within an empire of liberty,102 so the great powers are
entrusted with system maintenance in Waltz’s theory in place of liberal ideals of
system transformation.
There may be a host of theoretical and methodological problems with Waltz’s
structural-functionalist approach. However, for our purposes, the key is that it
represents the international political system as a primitive political system and
operates with a clear dichotomy of anarchic/hierarchic which is in turn based on
anthropological dichotomies of primitive/civilised. Yet this very approach had been
abandoned decades earlier by the very social anthropology on which Waltz’s theory
is based.103 In fact what Sampson demonstrates are the theoretical origins of the very
weaknesses in neorealism which Milner’s discussion identifies. It is a supreme irony
that in arguing that African international politics are characterised by international
hierarchy and domestic anarchy, the Africanist critics are actually re-importing into
African polities dichotomous interpretations of political systems dating from the
days of the British empire! The irony is all the more revealing given that the work of
Nadel, Evans-Pritchard and Fortes was, as Sampson maintains, applied anthropol-
ogy, seeking to understand African political systems in order to maintain or establish
order in the context of indirect rule.
In this sense, the criticisms of ‘traditional IR’ thus represent a real step backwards.
In theoretical terms, they seemingly ignore many of the developments which have
sought to take theories of international relations beyond neorealism. However,
perhaps as worrying, we seem to have gone backwards in terms of the characteris-
ation of African societies. It was, after all, British colonial officials who, as a
justification of indirect rule and as an excuse for the maintenance of the authoritarian
forms of power on which it rested, argued that Africans were innately ill-suited to the
modern world.104 In a parallel of colonial officialdom seeking to ‘protect’ supposedly
98
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘The Nuer of the Southern Sudan’, in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (eds.),
African Political Systems, pp. 272–96.
99
Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, ‘Introduction: African Political Systems’, pp. 14–15; also see Sampson,
‘Tropical Anarchy’, p. 437.
100
101
M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.), African Political Systems (London: Oxford University
Press, 1963 [1940]).
102
Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.
103
104
Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and
Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993).
142 William Brown
authentic African societies (‘developing the African along his own lines’),105 safe from
modernisation, urbanisation and industrialisation, we have today’s critics of IR
seeking to protect an African autonomy from the ravages of ‘western’ statehood and
international relations theory.
Conclusion
From the colonial encounter to the present day’s Commissions, Partnerships and
Initiatives,106 through conquest, independence, developmentalism and adjustment,
the relationship with Western states has been of crucial importance to social change
within Africa and for the continent’s position in the international system. And while
perspectives vary on whether the history of that relationship is interpreted as
essentially top-down, or bottom-up, or some mix of the two,107 it is hard to see how
it can be properly conceived without some working notion of the nature of the system
of which it is a part. I have argued above that the state, anarchy and interdependence
should remain key elements in any such conceptualisation. A more thorough
exposition of how an IR account of this relationship could be developed is simply
beyond the scope of this article. However, let me give three indications as to what
might be possible, drawing on three different traditions within IR.
In a claim to which I have alluded to above, Morvacsik argues that one can
analyse patterns of conflict and cooperation in an interdependent international
system within a liberal theory of international relations.108 Not only might this notion
provide some interesting lines of explanation and research relating to the initial
colonial encounter,109 but it also provides a useful basis for analysing the struggles
over aid and conditionality and the wider governance of Africa’s insertion into the
world economy, as I indicated above. Such an account would not only need to
incorporate an explanation of the social origins of preferences over economic policy
and regulation on each side, but also an account of the nature of the institutions
governing development cooperation. From a different standpoint, the nature of the
colonial relationship, and in particular the prevalent norms operating among the
colonial powers which served to justify it, has been the focus of writing associated
with the English School, as has the transformation of those norms as independence
replaced empire.110 In a world where military and humanitarian intervention is a
central political issue both within Africa and more generally, consideration of the
105
Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development, pp. 168–9.
106
See: Commission for Africa; New Partnership for African Development; Highly Indebted Poor
Countries Initiative.
107
As well as the critics cited above, Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Nairobi,
Kenya: EAEP, 1989) is an example of an essentially top-down approach; while Jean-Francois
Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London: Longman, 1993) is more bottom-up;
and Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, is more mixed.
108
Andrew Moravcsik, ‘A Liberal Theory of International Politics’.
109
And an account which might support Robinson and Gallagher’s characterisation of the course of
colonialism as a product of the interaction between Europeans and the societies with which they
came into contact – Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians.
110
Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds.), The Expansion of International Society; Robert H. Jackson,
Quasi States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
content and meaning of state sovereignty, as well as the extent to which international
norms mitigate a formal international anarchy and constrain or empower Western
states, is a crucial issue.111 Finally, one might wish to ask in what ways the social
transformations within Africa – democratisation, political reform, economic
growth, urbanisation – can be interpreted as one part of an international process of
modernisation.112 Does the encounter between Africa and the West demonstrate the
continuing spread of capitalist modernity, the failure of Europe to transform Africa,
or the successful resistance to globalisation? And how will such social change remake
the relationship between Africa and the international system as Africans seek to
overcome the legacies of colonisation and subordination? It seems to me that neither
neorealism, with its emphasis on an invariant effects of anarchy and system-only
approach, nor the critics’ inversion of this into an African anarchy, can really
offer useful starting places to pursue these and other questions. Other characteris-
ations of the international system and associated concepts of state, anarchy and
interdependence must, however, play some role.
111
See, for example, Robert H. Jackson, ‘Armed Humanitarianism’, International Journal, 48:3 (1990),
pp. 579–606.
112
Justin Rosenberg, ‘The International Imagination’.

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Review of International Studies (2006), 32, 119–143 Copyright British International Studies Association