Our speakers, Christine Chan, now senior lecturer in war studies at King's College London,
and she's here to talk about her new book Extralegal Troops in Post-Conflict Liberia,
which is a winner of conflict with your society's annual report prise.
So in recognition of her excellent work, she's also for Oxford students who are actually students together.
The boxing tournament remember? Well. So it's a homecoming as well.
OK. Let me be prepared for someone. Thanks.
Thank you so much for inviting me. Well, it's such a pleasure to be back here.
And I was just saying earlier on that I have waves of nostalgia walking down the road,
walking down Woodstock Road and thinking of my first supervision with Dave Anderson, who's no longer here anymore.
But it just reminded me of who I was when I first started this project.
And the project, really, you know, I'm really bringing it right back home to where it all began,
because at the first seminar that I ever went to in Oxford was this seminar,
and it was back in 2004, and I thought about the world really, really differently back then as compared to how I think about it now.
So it is an absolute honour and pleasure to come back here.
So thank you so much. And I will pass around the book in case you're interested.
It is a lovely, well-worn copy of my own copy, so I try to ignore the sticky notes and, you know, all of the underlining.
So the title of the book is actually the book groups in post-conflict Liberia. How trade makes state if you want a one sentence version of the book.
Here it is. Combatant groups that take over natural resource areas for profit after war and in doing so,
they build autonomous, local political orders that provide basic forms of governance.
So at this point, you can all just leave, and that's it. That's all. That's all you need to know.
But I'm going to go deeply into what all of that means and why it matters.
So the first thing that I'm going to do is just zoom in and close with these groups and talk about
the dynamics and talk about why they're interesting and talk about how I come to understand them.
The second one is just this picture of a fish tank, but it's really actually a sink, a barrier reef somewhere in Australia.
But it's meant to represent an ecology of things and to think about the kinds
of places that we're talking about as many different interconnected systems,
rather than just a singular actor or even a singular group of actors that these things,
especially in a war to peace transition kind of setting,
are operating in reaction to each other all the time and that things are constantly changing, right?
But it's not a static thing, and we really shouldn't be looking at it as singular components.
The last image here is just an equal test, the Rorschach test.
So for the psychologist in the room, you know what this means, right?
It means you take a look at this and this picture, and your reaction and reflection on it actually tells the rest of us more about your own
psyche and your own values and norms and assumptions than it necessarily says anything about.
You know what, this thing actually is off the face or whatever. OK, so so what do you see?
So this is just an analogy for thinking about what you see.
When I say the term, use the term extra legal groups. So do you see a security threat?
Do you see bad people, people breaking the law? Do you see an informal business?
Do you see protectors providing employment or do you see a public private partnership?
Or do you see something else, right?
Like all of these, things are inherent and implicit in what I'm going to be talking about and what you see really,
I think says something about who you are and where you're coming from.
So here's an image. And the Civil War coming into Monrovia and the rebels.
And this is one version of the story that we typically tell about Liberia's Civil War.
And this is a different version of the same people, but doing really different things.
I want to show you one version of this story. Then you get a sense of, Oh, they're like that,
and I show you this picture and get a completely different sense of who these people are and what they're doing, right?
This is a story about livelihoods here, and the other picture was really a story about war, and the framing of it really, really matters.
So, I mean, offer you a bunch of propositions now, many of which you'll probably disagree with.
But I hope that by the end of the talk, you'll come to see how I came to this proposition.
So the first proposition is that crime is not. Actually about breaking the law.
A second proposition is that the law is not necessarily a meaningful reference point.
The third one is the categories can limit our understanding. So, for example, formal and informal legal and illegal state and non-state proposition.
For that, strengthening states can actually do more harm than good. Proposition five that extra legal groups can be state builders.
And finally, the last one is that it's trade that makes the nascent state right.
So in contrast to the chilliest version of this story, which is that it's war that makes the state.
So I'll tell you a little bit about the theory about the projects and definitions.
I'll give you a research question and I'll talk through the framework.
I'll give you a little bit of the history and then set up the second question and I'll talk to you about state building.
And then I'll talk to you about some of the probably less than the policy implications and
just a bit as much as your question about doing research in the last chapter of the book.
So the book is structured like this.
I'm going to go through actually the History Society bit as well, and I'll leave out, and I just don't have time, sadly, to go deeply into the places.
But we can do that in the Q&A if you're interested or I think afterwards.
So to bookend the story, right, most of you, if you know anything about library,
you probably know these two personalities Charles Taylor on the one hand and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf on the other.
At the end of the Civil War and in between, we have 14 years of intermittent conflict.
We have about a hundred thousand people in combat related being killed in combat related tasks.
We have one in three people displaced and on and on. Right.
But what you need to know in terms of the politics version and the ER version of this story is that we have a lot of peacekeepers in the country.
This is the highest concentration of peacekeepers, territorially and per population.
Then, you know, basically anywhere else in the world. I think in the history of the UN, right?
So Liberians really teeny tiny Scott, it had at that point three, three and a half million people in a very small space.
In contrast to, for example, a couple of years later, the Congo peacekeeping mission was seventeen thousand people right for a vast, vast space.
So you can imagine what that looks like. So in many ways, this is a very poor country and you can, you know, question these figures.
But it was undoubtedly extremely poor and then we have tons of aid money flowing in.
So in many ways, when we think about a case like Liberia and what the role of external interviewers can do,
this is about as much resource and political will as you can possibly sink
into a space that's relatively small and a population that's relatively small.
So this also speaks to what Liberia itself was actually like at the time and then how we talk about things that are,
you know, quote unquote failed states, quote unquote fragile states. And what does that mean in practise and reality?
So this police cell just gives you a sense of that.
This is out in Greenville, in Sino county, a regional capital.
And this is the little lock on the door. It's not even a walk, really a nail if you for at the police station.
And if you wanted to arrest somebody, you basically have to lead them by the hand right there.
No handcuffs. Forget computers. Forget police cars.
Forget roads. Forget computers. Forget pens and paper.
Even if you if you needed to arrest somebody, you took them by the hand and then you basically put them in there.
And if they chose to stay, then great. And if they didn't then go well, they didn't even have food for people who were in the jail cell.
You had to actually have somebody bring food to you and water to you. So that's when we have a conversation about state capacity and state failure.
I think oftentimes, especially with policymakers, there's not a clear understanding of what that means.
So this is what it means. And then even though I said library is actually quite teeny tiny,
it's still relatively difficult to get around because it's hugely greeting and getting, you know, going 100 kilometres could take you between three,
you know, two hours if you've got a section of paved road and there wasn't a lot of paved road or during the rainy season,
and it could take, you know, 10 hours, right? And if you're not an SUV with stuff, then you could be there for a while longer.
So most of Liberia actually just looked like this really, really, really difficult to get from A to B,
and the geography of the place actually really matters for the story that I want to tell you.
It's hard to control things from the centre, and part of that is just about moving around the country.
So the phenomenon itself, we have a story here about smooth post-conflict transitions.
Liberia is the poster child of the U.N. Everybody was looking at it back in 2005 and saying, actually, things are going relatively well.
This is what we're looking for.
But of course, beneath the surface of that national peace accord, we've got a lot of variation in terms of what peace looks like.
The key challenge here was really resistance to government authority in key natural resource areas.
So ex-combatants were holding onto these areas in some cases for years,
and they were doing so in violation theory of all sorts of laws and prohibitions that were set out by different bodies.
So the groups became violent or threatened to become very violent when the government threatened to evacuate them.
And so there was quite a lot of tension at the time.
And today you don't get a sense of that at all. All of that has dissipated.
You just it feels much more relaxed. But back in 2005 and even in 2007, and I would say, you know, quite a bit later as well,
there was a lot of tension and people were deeply worried about these groups.
And this is just a quote from the paper. But there's tons of this kind of stuff just talking about these groups and why they still posed a threat.
So what will happen to the simmering discontent at Guthrie becomes open clashes between former learnt generals and their stooges who are armed,
and the deprive civilians are that scenario to the situation in the Sinai,
a rubber plantation where one general statement of the former model rebel militias is holding out and bragging about his right over the plantation.
We have a potentially explosive situation at hand in those plantations. So if you're not from Liberia, why should you care about any of this?
Well, these groups obviously posed a threat to local and even national security.
And if you're talking to policymakers, they have to deal with the consequences of that.
There is a difficulty in thinking that through, though, because on the one hand,
you have an international state building discussion about disrupting these groups
and then you have a political stability conversation by allowing their entrenchment.
And basically, that means a system of jobs, order and stability.
On the one hand,
you can arguably put corruption in there as well if you want versus this theoretical liberal framework that we all in theory, aspire to.
Right. And those things are often working at odds, right?
All good things do not go together in this situation, and I would argue in most post-conflict situations.
So if we've got this trade-off between stability in the short term and then in the long term,
arguments about the integrity of the state in the integrity of institutions and an anti-corruption agenda.
And those two are just working at odds with each other.
So how these things are playing against each other, I think also tell us something about ourselves and our values and assumptions.
So why should Liberians care about this kind of obvious in so many ways?
But for them, I think that a big key issue is corruption and why it's such a hard path dependent.
And part of what I'm trying to do here is provide an explanation for this that makes sense to them.
And this is sitting in contrast, of course,
to the thinking and expectations between people who are not from Liberia and then those who are from Liberia.
So part of what this work is trying to do is serve as a translation device between the two worlds by trying to say,
Hey, this is how other people are thinking about you. And Hey, you folks, this is how you know they're talking about you.
So that I think the understanding there is still deeply lacking, and I think the empathy is still deeply lacking.
And part of what I'm trying to do there is is to provide that bridge.
So just linking to the literature, there is a large a large discussion around warlords, organised crime groups, mafias, rebel governance.
But the key here is that there is often a good bad dichotomy, right?
These are all words that are associated quite negatively, and I would say they were loaded terms, and I don't want this idea to be that.
I really wanted to understand what these groups are doing without saying, Oh, they're bad.
That's not the intention. And then I wanted to do something to understand the complexity of this piece
consolidation process because it didn't look to me the way that in theory,
I thought about it, which was the end of war, a drop off in violence. And then we move on and instead at the end of war is quite unpredictable.
We don't even know that it's the end of war when it's ending, right? So in theory, if you look at this, you if you were at this point, you know,
you think you've signed your peace agreement or whatever, it may be a cease fire and then you think that it should drop off.
Right. But actually, you have spikes in violence often, and those spikes in violence can be quite localised and then they can spread, right?
So if you're then at this point, a second peak, then you think, Oh, actually, things might get worse.
We might go back to more violence even. But so at that moment, you can't tell.
And then at the end, you know, it tapers off into something else. And I think part of that is trying to show what that looks like in real time.
I talk about the quality of post-conflict peace, the variation,
the local versus national and then what that looks like in terms of people's livelihoods.
I speak to the state failure in state building literature and some of this ungoverned spaces discussion coming from American policymakers.
And, of course, many African and Liberian politics. OK, so now I can give you a definition which is an extralegal group exists outside the law.
It has a proven capacity for violence. And importantly, here it provides governance functions to further their business interests.
So it's this key last bit that I think is what's interesting that comes out of this discussion.
And I think about all of this in the framework of a statement that this is about a process of building institutions to provide public goods.
But importantly, even though I'm using the term state,
I don't think of these this building these institutions to provide public goods as necessarily being led by the state
or that it needs to even be state approved so that I think policymakers and U.N. folks often have difficulty with.
So the first question is just about the groups.
How did these groups emerge, develop and become locally entrenched after the end of Civil War and to make sense of some of that?
I have an idea that I call. Half the capital that we had the chance to discuss earlier on.
And so comes the capital for me is about the build up of repertoires of violence to facilitate coordinated action.
So habits, norms and networks around violence.
So if you all collectively witness a public act of violence, then we have shared a little bit of conflict capital.
If some people here might have participated in that violence, then again, that is part of that.
And then our collective response here, you can think of it as standard operating procedures or standard responses.
Over time, they become routinised.
So what happens at the start of wars? You don't have any.
We don't have any conflict capital, really. And then as the war progresses, we build up more and more of it collectively.
So this is a social phenomenon, right? And as with all social phenomenon, over time, those kinds of relationships and feelings decline.
So if you leave conflict capital alone at the end of war, in theory, it should just decline on its own.
It has its own Half-Life. If, however, you're trying to actively destroy it, as with just a disarmament,
demobilisation and reintegration programmes that are commonly set up at the end of war,
then you are really trying to do something with those social networks and destroy that conflict capital.
Now, I don't think that works, but that is what the intention of those programmes is.
And then, of course, if you say are recruited to go fight a war in neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire,
then you are continuing to activate that of capital or in this case, you know, for speeding in an extra legal group.
You are also continuing to activate that conflict.
So that brings me to this three stage discussion of what the groups are and then understanding how they work.
So if you think back to those images that I showed you at the beginning with those young men,
we are at the end of war now and you've got a large number of people who in some way are familiar with violence.
So we have this ready supply of specialists in violence.
And then you have a large pool of unskilled labour and people are thinking about how they're going to survive after the end of war.
Where are they going to make their living and how are they going to do it? So if I was one of those young men, I would.
And again, it is mostly young men, very, very few young women in this story.
If you are trying to make your way now, you're going to go to the place with the lowest barriers to entry economically, right?
So given that my lack of education and a lack of skills in this case,
I end up in a few physical locations because those are the places that are going to offer me a chance to make some money.
And that would be like in Liberia, it is the rubber tapping industry and the diamond mining or gold mining,
alluvial gold mining in alluvial diamond mining industries.
And if you have a bit more money and maybe you end up doing logging, if you can afford to buy a chainsaw or rent one or share one with somebody.
So those are basically your options. There are a few more around the edges of that, but those are some of the basic options that are open to people.
So you can imagine that these people are going off and they're all showing up in the same physical place.
There aren't a ton of rubber plantations in Liberia. There are some scattered in different places, but they basically show up in the same.
They physically show up in the same places.
And so there you see this competition leading along with this conflict capital that I've talking about people trying to do this work,
but you have disputes. So how do you resolve those disputes between people?
How do you do things like contract enforcement or, you know, property rights to the extent that the property exists, right?
This is the bit that you get to mine or this is the bit that you get to tap, right?
You need somebody to actually create some order here. And what I argue happens is that a group emerges to provide some of that order.
There's a deeper discussion about that that I can get into you,
but effectively you have some group of people that is comfortable and respected enough and rises up
out of the situation to do this and you need it in order for that business environment to thrive.
Right. You can't really operate a business and have the power brokers come in and so forth in an environment that is chaotic.
So somebody has to do that work. So there is a need for governance and a group arises out of that to provide it.
That's the first emergence. The second stage is interesting and it's interesting in a tillet kind of way.
Right. So this is the course of taxation stage. People figure out they actually don't need to do the physical work themselves.
They can just tax. But the interesting about the process of taxation, of course, is that over time, we're not just getting money out of the situation,
you're actually building up that organisational infrastructure and that gives you more power as a group.
So then the group grows in the third stage.
What you have is a system of entrenchment because people decide they want to.
Hold on to the places that they've already got control of. Why would you want to leave?
And in fact, you can see that back and forth between the government trying to negotiate this particular dynamic.
But the entrenchment becomes difficult because this is, as I showed you before, a place with not a lot of state capacity and not a lot of money.
So a little bit of money for going really, really long way.
And you can basically bribe your way through whichever bit of the state you need to in order to stay in power.
And that is exactly what happens if you want the public interest to dominate.
You have to fight really hard against the flow. It is absolutely possible,
but you really need to go at it with some kind of coordinated action and a lot of political will and all sorts of and I guess.
Political will and names that really usually difficult to muster up in these conditions.
So in the end, you end up with a system of entrenchment of these groups.
And just to crystallise what that means in terms of the weakest link problem to escape entrenchment,
you need core state institutions to be simultaneously empowered.
So the police, the military, the courts, judges, lawyers, prisons, politicians, everybody has to be united in order to get out of that system.
And any single one of these functions can be captured and corrected by private interests.
And then I would go further here and say, this doesn't just apply to Liberia.
I think this is actually the default setting for all states. This is not necessarily an elaborate story or even an African story.
Every state started in some version of this story and then moved out of, in some cases, successfully moved out of it.
And in other cases, not so.
But I think this is actually a helpful way of thinking about state building and Liberia in comparison, say to the rest of the world.
So how did Liberia actually get here and I just want to do a little bit of scene setting because I don't get to do the Africa part of this too often.
And you guys actually clearly care about the Africa bit.
So I'm happy and I'm excited to talk about the history, society and Civil War bit of the book.
So to say something about that social ecology also means speaking to the history of the place.
And I think the history is really important for understanding how these groups fit into the landscape of of Liberia.
So there is a myth out there. That library was founded by freed slaves from America, and the truth is, of course, much, much uglier than that.
So in the original and this part does matter.
Just follow along with me,
there was an impetus to reach a deal with the American Colonisation Society with these quote unquote freed slaves from America.
Right? But of course, if you didn't do that, there was somebody pointing a gun at your head,
an evil captain doing so, and they were going to be shot and killed if that wasn't going to happen.
And they tried multiple times, right? So eventually they succeeded. So backed by the U.S. Navy, came on.
Peter sold, you know, Duke land were poor in exchange for some not relevant stuff for $300.
And again, $300 is even converted in today's money is not worth very much.
So when the colonists then tried to claim that land the day threatened them with swords and guns and said, you better hand it over or else.
And then in the neighbouring area, King George said, You know, we better band together.
We have to fight them or else they will control asthe King George could see it coming.
But the colonists, even though there are only, you know, one hundred and thirty of them or whatever it was,
they organised, they trained, everybody trained and they actually won that battle.
But that battle actually set the tone for future relations between the Libyan state and the American librarians and the settlers colonies,
cargoes, whatever you want to call them and everybody else in the country. So we end up with, you know,
there's this native settler divide where the American Liberians and we have lots of different names
for them later on in history replicated a discriminatory political and social and economic order.
So the Americas are really, really powerful over time, and native Liberians ended up being quite marginalised despite the fact that they were just,
you know, the Americas were really a small fraction of that population, and the Americas basically equalled the elites, right?
They became the professors, doctors, judges and everything else that was powerful in society in the course of time.
You had four percent of the population holding 60 percent of the wealth in time,
and they controlled all of the political organisations along with, you know, the full patronage machine.
And this is just to show you what that physically will look like.
So and you're looking at some reversion to of wanting to replicate their lives in the American South,
but now wanting to be the heads of the household in contrast to the,
you know, the native Liberians who this contrasted themselves with as being uncivilised and barbaric?
Right. And they tried in so many ways to distinguish themselves physically by what they're wearing
and where they lived and and all of the social niceties that came along with that.
But what does this history matter that for the kind of transition that I'm talking to you about?
Well, it really changes the nature of state society relations.
It sets the tone for us that there are native relations and then the evolution of those state institutions over time.
Right. So you know, my understanding here and what I see is that we end up copying what we know and it's
hard to follow an example that doesn't exist and then get everybody to believe in it.
How do you get these people to imagine a future, a future version of the state where everybody should be included in their settlement?
And that starts right at the heart of how the country was, quote unquote founded?
Right? How those relationships were set up and how those power relations were set up over time and how they were exploited over time.
You can't get away from that in many ways, right? And if you want to, you really have to fight for it.
So this is to say something about that weak state and indirect rule that ended up developing so political context of the 1800s,
there's not really any state and I don't mean that in in a pejorative way, it's just that there were a lot of people.
There's not a lot of population density there,
but there is political contestation and there are these self-governing political entities that uneasily coexist and work together, sometimes or not.
But the geopolitics of the hundreds is that you got all of this pressure from
both France on the on one side and then Britain on the other trying to say,
Hey, we want some of a piece of what you've got and we're going to come into your space if you don't try and hold on to it.
So President at the time, Berkeley wanted a robust bureaucratic system and he wanted a well defended border but didn't have the funds to carry it out.
So the response then was to have indirect rule in the interior, basically to copy what the British were doing.
So he created a library, military, the library and French Air Force.
But of course, the Oliver, well, absolutely brutal. And this really changed that distribution of power and how people were used,
and in order to force the power of the state into the rest of society, created a patronage politics machine.
And we get end up with various forms of forced labour, partly because by 1910, the country was just really, really bankrupt.
And the only way to get out of that bankruptcy that was available to them was to sign up with Firestone.
Here was this magical solution. Firestone would be offered cheap land.
They would be given a massive loan by the US government.
And you know, the second contract was the first contract, but the second contract is that they would pay a dollar an acre for the first year.
And then there's very little amount, $6000 of rent to follow.
The second contract also had the right to lease one million acres for 99 years, at five cents for each acre developed in the first six years.
Right. So people got really angry about this really, really angry about this, but there was nothing that they could do.
And people are still angry about this today.
They see that as the point at which there was a wholesale takeover of Liberia and the country was just sold.
So the key consequences of this was that these revenues changed how power politics operated in Liberia.
You had now the elite able to rule by taking the funds and taxes from Liberia without actually having to talk to the population at all.
You basically are able to do whatever you want to do on your own without consulting the population.
There's just no need to because the money is coming from elsewhere, so it ends up creating a patronage machine, very powerful patronage machine.
And then this basically looks like control without colonisation.
So the Americans have de facto control. And the Firestone deal committed the government to procuring labour, and that meant forced labour.
What looked like, you know, not quite slavery, but almost in some cases.
So all of this is just to give you a sense of why Question two matters, I what purpose do these groups serve?
And I want to say something about state building now because to understand that fully,
I think you need the library in libraries historical approach to the state and thinking about the state.
So part of what I want to say is that extralegal groups are unintentional stakeholders and that they contribute to state planning.
So given that past history, so in addition to dispute resolution and contract enforcement and regulation.
Part of what these groups are unintentionally trying to do is they're trying to remove the right to judge and enforce disputes by individuals.
So there's quite a lot of vigilantism in Liberia,
and part of what is going on here is taking the authority of that ability to just do whatever it is that you want in terms of,
you know, settling those disputes violently sometimes and putting that authority into the hands of some other person or body.
So you're establishing the role of intermediary between parties.
And then on top of that, you're consolidating that coercive authority at the local level.
And then the last thing is that you're socialising people into being governed because people don't necessarily want to be governed.
I think we all come at it with the assumption that you just are governed, right?
You have a choice in this, but this is not the same kind of setting that most of us are used to.
And of course, that creates a repertoire of responses from both society and the state.
And all of this is to say that there are, you know, waxing and waning of state building populations,
be riots, revolutions, civil wars and so forth and extralegal groups, and that he do about them.
And this is about a process, a very, very long term state building and then helping a state in theory,
a government to develop some resilience to that right, to set up a set of responses and then to learn from past mistakes.
So the second argument is that Canterbury State Building is driven by trade and commerce and not war.
And the heart of what I'm talking about here and I've got two pieces that I think of as being the kernel of the state and core,
absolutely core state functions. So you need to be able to maintain some form of physical security and you need
to be able to provide some form of impartial justice within a given territory.
And for me, those two things are really the kernel of the state.
So what this kind of environment does and what these groups do, it shows that trade was really the driver for that stable environment.
And in order to get these folks to provide those goods, it was trade that was driving that particular dynamic, right?
And they were providing the physical security and that consistent contract enforcement.
But they were only doing it because they wanted to trade, not because they wanted to take over the state,
not because they wanted political power, per say, but they just needed to do it right in order to in order to provide that stable environment.
So these groups were really motivated by profit to offer these functions.
So the argument here is that trade is driving that provision of local governance and those public goods.
But this leads to a difficulty, which is what do we do about this idea of the state and the primacy of the state?
So what about places where the state has little to no presence where there aren't really any public goods and institutions?
Do we let these kinds of groups develop because they can't provide public goods?
So what do you do with a group like Hamas or Hezbollah or ISIS, arguably?
Or, you know, the gangs in Rio, in the favelas who do some of this provision contract enforcement, dispute resolution, physical security stuff?
Do we shut them down because they are not the state? Should we call them in some ways, can we even talk to them?
And of course, if we choose to take that route, we've got problems of accountability and autonomy and,
you know, all sorts of other things, and it gets really, really messy. But of course, this is something better than nothing.
So at the heart of this story, right?
I started off by saying that I think certainly I did when I started this project, the law was a very, very clear line.
And on the one side, you would have something like an extra legal group, and on the other side, you would have a state, right?
What I ended up showing you, I hope I showed you,
is that the actual legal groups that right at the heart of the state in that period of Liberia's history, in that post-conflict period.
And I think that. This is basically the best that we can hope for, right, that the shift is towards this,
but effectively, I think this is impossible for any state to me.
I don't think that this exists anywhere in the world and I'm not sure that it ever can.
And I think this is the best that any country can ever really hope for.
And sometimes the things that we're thinking of as being, you know,
extra legal are really the legal lies, but they're at the heart of this definition.
It's really about public interest and and you can see that too.
But it's it's easier to think than about Liberia as being along a spectrum rather than,
you know, being a bad, a bad state or a failed state in that way.
So all of this that forced me to rethink state building and the whole process, right?
But this is actually a really long term process,
and that takes different amounts of time for different places in the world to build that kind of the state and that the rate of
state learning is faster for states that have come at it and were able to watch the failures that other states have gone through.
So hopefully you don't have to make all of those same mistakes again.
And, of course, that the model in the past of statehood isn't always planned or deliberate.
And I think that's something that policymakers, especially the ones that I talk to you in the West and at the U.N. and so forth.
I don't think this is well understood.
We always think that it has to be intentional, and we forget that our own Western states never got here by being intentional,
that the sustainability of all of this stuff and of state building.
Finally, it has to be internally driven. It can't come from outside.
It can't really be imposed in order for it to be lasting. I mean, certainly not in the case of Liberia, I don't think.
And I would say largely, that's true for most places, although I'm open to exceptions.
And I don't think and again, this might make people upset that all states aspire to be liberal.
I'm really not sure about this right and I've come to this,
and it hurts a little bit actually to say this, because I want all states aspire to be liberal,
but I've come to the conclusion that I don't think that this is necessarily true and it depends on who you're asking and what point in time.
But I think this is a difficult one, and it's a difficult one for people who are trying to intervene in places like Liberia.
So each step along that State-Building path doesn't need to be liberal to arrive at a liberal end state.
And I think the UK is really a prime example of this that if you looked at the U.K. 100 years ago,
200 years ago, nobody would say that it is liberal by any by today's idea of what it means to be liberal.
And yet, you know, there are waxing and waning and power is taken and power is given and there are fights and revolutions and so forth.
And eventually you get to a place where you have a little bit more power that is given over to the people.
And then there's a little bit more backsliding and there was a back and forth there.
And then over time, you know, you get to where you are today, but different states are at different stages of that.
And strengthening the state is and and I think this is poorly understood, a double edged sword.
We always think that if we improve the capacity of the state that it will benefit the people,
the local populations, the communities, whoever you know, the vulnerable especially.
And I don't think that that's true. If you again look at how people have been treated by the state over time.
Why would you ever think that the state is the most predatory after the most consistently predatory actor in all of this?
And yet our first choice is to strengthen the state.
So I would say to people, you know, I often say to people on the military side, you know, rethink what you think of the security sector reform.
And this is not necessarily the answer is to re, equip and retrain the military and to dump all of the money there.
And of course, this leads to a conclusion that that liberal template that we often use is really too rigid.
It's quite righteous and it's absolutely ahistorical.
But that is not to say that this isn't coming from a sociological place where this is all coming from, too, right?
And and I came to this partly again when I was here in 2004, sitting in your seats.
I thought of the status quo, and what I've realised is that everybody else around me also really thinks that the state is good.
And that is a basic assumption, right? That the default setting for everybody in the quote unquote international community is that the state is good,
and that is because everybody who ends up at the table has benefited from the state.
Even those at the U.N. who are purported to represent, you know,
less developed countries or fragile states are the ones that have benefited from how their state has worked.
Right. So the state has always worked for them. And so people think know the state is good and that's what we should do.
But of course, you know, in fragile states for both elites in.
I think that's just not true. But the problem with thinking about the good state as the default setting is that we then think
we can fix states and we do so and I say we me as a Canadian with my peacekeeping ideals.
We want to do this from a good place in our hearts. We think we can fix things and then we think we can formalise the informal and things will be OK.
But with this ends up doing is ends up making anything that is nonstate.
It ends up becoming shorthand for things that are bad and legitimate and must be eliminated.
And that's not to say the things that I described are necessarily good, but it's just to say that we,
I think, are very careful about our assumptions about how this really works. So we've got all these assumptions right.
We've got this good bad paradigm. We've got formal and informal, legal and illegal and extralegal.
I think that sometimes these things are not helpful for understanding that they sit on a spectrum in a continuum.
And of course, there is a question of who governs you and that really matters.
And we don't think about that in a practical, realistic way. We just think about speaking state to state.
I mean, not the folks in this room, because, of course, are all compared to what's right, so.
But on the other side, I think that is much more true. We also think that peace is the ultimate good.
But the question is, who's peace? What is the quality of peace? Who decides? We think about national peace.
We often don't think about local peace, and we've got problems with how we think about resources in the role of civil wars.
We've got these overlapping spheres of political crime and conflict.
And of course, we've got a problem in thinking about the personalisation of both the law and the state.
Right.
And even if we think back to how we talk about rule of law after war, we think it can be fixed in 10 years, in five years, 10 years, maybe 20 years.
And then I say to folks, Hey, look, how long did it take us to get from the Magna Carta to the point where we are now in the UK,
where people still don't have good access to justice?
Right. If you are black or South Asian in this in this country, you don't have perfect access to justice.
If you are poor and working class, you don't have good access to justice. Right.
And yet we expect I think we set these standards that are completely unrealistic in how we talk about rule of law.
It just doesn't make any sense. So there are a bunch of policy principles that come out of this,
but I'm just going to skip through that to talk about those propositions again and and to help,
you know, hopefully, you'll see now why I thought this problem was talking about crime as being part of the law,
as about breaking the law, and that the law is not necessarily that meaningful reference point that I think I thought it was 15 years ago,
and that these kinds of categories can actually limit our understanding that strengthening states can do more harm than good.
That extralegal groups and other groups like them can be state builders and trade.
That makes that very nice and state in that process. So here's some other places where people have said the kind of dynamics I've talked about apply.
And now this is for the Ph.D. students in the room. So just about doing research and being honest about the research.
So I wrote the book the way that a classic politics book is supposed to be written.
This becomes at the very, very end, and it is a reflection of and I've hinted at this already.
Changing my views in light of new evidence and then admitting it and it was I started it
off with a very different kind of understanding about how I thought this stuff worked.
And I think completely the opposite things I just told you exactly the opposite story of where I started from.
And it was hard, right, because at the beginning of this process, I thought the world look this way.
And then there was a bunch of things that happened and that I saw that came out of it, that didn't fit my framework.
And then the question is, what do you do with that? And when things don't fit your framework, it's just easy to ignore them and to dismiss them.
And, you know, forget about so the first few ones, you're like, OK, fine, whatever.
But then at what point do you does that noise start becoming a signal that there is something there that I really need to pay attention to?
And that was hard because the signal became more obvious to me that I couldn't really ignore that there was
a second story and that that story was a more important version than whatever it was that I came in with.
But if if I was right, then in the revision of my thinking, then I am part of the problem.
And I didn't want to be part of the problem. So then I had to go back to thinking about my own values and assumptions and belief systems,
about the West, about Canada peacekeeping, about the U.N. being a good actor, about Angola and all of it.
It was just ugly and messy, and it's really disappointing. And I didn't want to do it and it was hard, right?
So I think that that process took about 10 years really. In total, I probably got halfway through at the DPhil point when I finished.
And then in the, you know, five years since, I've gone the other 90 degrees.
So now I think completely the opposite things that I started off with. And, you know,
applying them these ideas to talking about this in that recent research design scaffolding is really about that fiction of tidy research,
which is, I think we do a disservice to ourselves as scholars to not talk explicitly about how iterative the nature of research really is.
So in that last chapter, I talked about, you know, my original thinking,
this is the DPhil proposal that I showed Dave when I first walked in and then, you know, I can't remember what point this was.
Maybe the upgrade process so that, you know, when I had to present it, I remember Richard and Andy.
I can't even remember who it was. Richard was definitely there, and I had to present my work to them.
And then they came back at me. And then I think I went to Yale and I came up with some of this stuff,
and then I went into the field and I changed and sort of went back and forth, back and forth.
And that was this is basically where I ended the.
Right. But it went on and it changed again. But this is just to give folks a sense of how much projects change over time.
And yet we present this idea that, oh yes, of course, I knew what the question was going to be at the very start.
And this is how you're supposed to present your research question. Chosen methods, findings.
That's what I do in the first chapter.
And then I think what doesn't happen is that we don't talk about this back and forth between the question and the methods and all that.
How do we construct our question? Why do we choose this question and not another one?
And there is this constant back and forth and you are allowed to change your minds and we can talk about it.
And sometimes the the stuff that is crossed out is actually useful for people to understand the process of what is going on and the things that were,
I guess, unveiled and made explicit. Right.
So that's what I basically tried to do at the end of the process so that I wrote that chapter for the, you know,
the version of me that was sitting in this room all those years ago because I didn't have any of that guidance.
And I just thought, Oh, how do people end up with this beautiful thing that seems so clear?
And then I realised over time that there was all this stuff going on, but nobody had made it explicit.
And in fact, we were deliberately trying to maintain a fiction that it was perfect to start with, right?
And I just I don't think that that's very intellectually honest.
And also, I think it's harmful because people set up these standards that just aren't realistic.
And that's not really how things work. And so thank you.
Thank you for welcoming you back here. And yeah, these are just some of the other building blocks, too that have come and both before this,
when I was actually at Oxford and then the things that have come after and out
of this work that that have linked to the book that I've just presented to you.
Thank you.