1 00:00:00,390 --> 00:00:08,580 Our speakers, Christine Chan, now senior lecturer in war studies at King's College London, 2 00:00:08,580 --> 00:00:17,100 and she's here to talk about her new book Extralegal Troops in Post-Conflict Liberia, 3 00:00:17,100 --> 00:00:22,130 which is a winner of conflict with your society's annual report prise. 4 00:00:22,130 --> 00:00:31,290 So in recognition of her excellent work, she's also for Oxford students who are actually students together. 5 00:00:31,290 --> 00:00:37,800 The boxing tournament remember? Well. So it's a homecoming as well. 6 00:00:37,800 --> 00:00:42,480 OK. Let me be prepared for someone. Thanks. 7 00:00:42,480 --> 00:00:48,690 Thank you so much for inviting me. Well, it's such a pleasure to be back here. 8 00:00:48,690 --> 00:00:53,340 And I was just saying earlier on that I have waves of nostalgia walking down the road, 9 00:00:53,340 --> 00:00:57,760 walking down Woodstock Road and thinking of my first supervision with Dave Anderson, who's no longer here anymore. 10 00:00:57,760 --> 00:01:02,610 But it just reminded me of who I was when I first started this project. 11 00:01:02,610 --> 00:01:07,470 And the project, really, you know, I'm really bringing it right back home to where it all began, 12 00:01:07,470 --> 00:01:12,210 because at the first seminar that I ever went to in Oxford was this seminar, 13 00:01:12,210 --> 00:01:20,010 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. 14 00:01:20,010 --> 00:01:24,010 So it is an absolute honour and pleasure to come back here. 15 00:01:24,010 --> 00:01:30,000 So thank you so much. And I will pass around the book in case you're interested. 16 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:38,880 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. 17 00:01:38,880 --> 00:01:48,240 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. 18 00:01:48,240 --> 00:01:55,380 Here it is. Combatant groups that take over natural resource areas for profit after war and in doing so, 19 00:01:55,380 --> 00:02:00,930 they build autonomous, local political orders that provide basic forms of governance. 20 00:02:00,930 --> 00:02:05,730 So at this point, you can all just leave, and that's it. That's all. That's all you need to know. 21 00:02:05,730 --> 00:02:10,410 But I'm going to go deeply into what all of that means and why it matters. 22 00:02:10,410 --> 00:02:15,390 So the first thing that I'm going to do is just zoom in and close with these groups and talk about 23 00:02:15,390 --> 00:02:21,990 the dynamics and talk about why they're interesting and talk about how I come to understand them. 24 00:02:21,990 --> 00:02:29,910 The second one is just this picture of a fish tank, but it's really actually a sink, a barrier reef somewhere in Australia. 25 00:02:29,910 --> 00:02:37,560 But it's meant to represent an ecology of things and to think about the kinds 26 00:02:37,560 --> 00:02:42,000 of places that we're talking about as many different interconnected systems, 27 00:02:42,000 --> 00:02:48,000 rather than just a singular actor or even a singular group of actors that these things, 28 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:51,330 especially in a war to peace transition kind of setting, 29 00:02:51,330 --> 00:02:57,720 are operating in reaction to each other all the time and that things are constantly changing, right? 30 00:02:57,720 --> 00:03:05,040 But it's not a static thing, and we really shouldn't be looking at it as singular components. 31 00:03:05,040 --> 00:03:08,820 The last image here is just an equal test, the Rorschach test. 32 00:03:08,820 --> 00:03:12,420 So for the psychologist in the room, you know what this means, right? 33 00:03:12,420 --> 00:03:21,570 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 34 00:03:21,570 --> 00:03:26,640 psyche and your own values and norms and assumptions than it necessarily says anything about. 35 00:03:26,640 --> 00:03:31,680 You know what, this thing actually is off the face or whatever. OK, so so what do you see? 36 00:03:31,680 --> 00:03:35,820 So this is just an analogy for thinking about what you see. 37 00:03:35,820 --> 00:03:41,610 When I say the term, use the term extra legal groups. So do you see a security threat? 38 00:03:41,610 --> 00:03:46,560 Do you see bad people, people breaking the law? Do you see an informal business? 39 00:03:46,560 --> 00:03:51,270 Do you see protectors providing employment or do you see a public private partnership? 40 00:03:51,270 --> 00:03:52,470 Or do you see something else, right? 41 00:03:52,470 --> 00:04:00,750 Like all of these, things are inherent and implicit in what I'm going to be talking about and what you see really, 42 00:04:00,750 --> 00:04:06,120 I think says something about who you are and where you're coming from. 43 00:04:06,120 --> 00:04:13,320 So here's an image. And the Civil War coming into Monrovia and the rebels. 44 00:04:13,320 --> 00:04:19,590 And this is one version of the story that we typically tell about Liberia's Civil War. 45 00:04:19,590 --> 00:04:25,410 And this is a different version of the same people, but doing really different things. 46 00:04:25,410 --> 00:04:30,690 I want to show you one version of this story. Then you get a sense of, Oh, they're like that, 47 00:04:30,690 --> 00:04:36,000 and I show you this picture and get a completely different sense of who these people are and what they're doing, right? 48 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:43,590 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. 49 00:04:43,590 --> 00:04:51,150 So, I mean, offer you a bunch of propositions now, many of which you'll probably disagree with. 50 00:04:51,150 --> 00:04:57,840 But I hope that by the end of the talk, you'll come to see how I came to this proposition. 51 00:04:57,840 --> 00:05:02,880 So the first proposition is that crime is not. Actually about breaking the law. 52 00:05:02,880 --> 00:05:07,380 A second proposition is that the law is not necessarily a meaningful reference point. 53 00:05:07,380 --> 00:05:17,730 The third one is the categories can limit our understanding. So, for example, formal and informal legal and illegal state and non-state proposition. 54 00:05:17,730 --> 00:05:25,380 For that, strengthening states can actually do more harm than good. Proposition five that extra legal groups can be state builders. 55 00:05:25,380 --> 00:05:30,300 And finally, the last one is that it's trade that makes the nascent state right. 56 00:05:30,300 --> 00:05:36,540 So in contrast to the chilliest version of this story, which is that it's war that makes the state. 57 00:05:36,540 --> 00:05:40,710 So I'll tell you a little bit about the theory about the projects and definitions. 58 00:05:40,710 --> 00:05:44,460 I'll give you a research question and I'll talk through the framework. 59 00:05:44,460 --> 00:05:49,950 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. 60 00:05:49,950 --> 00:05:53,820 And then I'll talk to you about some of the probably less than the policy implications and 61 00:05:53,820 --> 00:05:59,280 just a bit as much as your question about doing research in the last chapter of the book. 62 00:05:59,280 --> 00:06:02,460 So the book is structured like this. 63 00:06:02,460 --> 00:06:13,050 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. 64 00:06:13,050 --> 00:06:18,360 But we can do that in the Q&A if you're interested or I think afterwards. 65 00:06:18,360 --> 00:06:23,400 So to bookend the story, right, most of you, if you know anything about library, 66 00:06:23,400 --> 00:06:30,420 you probably know these two personalities Charles Taylor on the one hand and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf on the other. 67 00:06:30,420 --> 00:06:37,080 At the end of the Civil War and in between, we have 14 years of intermittent conflict. 68 00:06:37,080 --> 00:06:43,170 We have about a hundred thousand people in combat related being killed in combat related tasks. 69 00:06:43,170 --> 00:06:46,170 We have one in three people displaced and on and on. Right. 70 00:06:46,170 --> 00:06:56,130 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. 71 00:06:56,130 --> 00:07:01,500 This is the highest concentration of peacekeepers, territorially and per population. 72 00:07:01,500 --> 00:07:06,060 Then, you know, basically anywhere else in the world. I think in the history of the UN, right? 73 00:07:06,060 --> 00:07:13,740 So Liberians really teeny tiny Scott, it had at that point three, three and a half million people in a very small space. 74 00:07:13,740 --> 00:07:22,770 In contrast to, for example, a couple of years later, the Congo peacekeeping mission was seventeen thousand people right for a vast, vast space. 75 00:07:22,770 --> 00:07:31,050 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. 76 00:07:31,050 --> 00:07:38,640 But it was undoubtedly extremely poor and then we have tons of aid money flowing in. 77 00:07:38,640 --> 00:07:46,890 So in many ways, when we think about a case like Liberia and what the role of external interviewers can do, 78 00:07:46,890 --> 00:07:52,080 this is about as much resource and political will as you can possibly sink 79 00:07:52,080 --> 00:07:59,440 into a space that's relatively small and a population that's relatively small. 80 00:07:59,440 --> 00:08:09,490 So this also speaks to what Liberia itself was actually like at the time and then how we talk about things that are, 81 00:08:09,490 --> 00:08:15,430 you know, quote unquote failed states, quote unquote fragile states. And what does that mean in practise and reality? 82 00:08:15,430 --> 00:08:18,820 So this police cell just gives you a sense of that. 83 00:08:18,820 --> 00:08:23,830 This is out in Greenville, in Sino county, a regional capital. 84 00:08:23,830 --> 00:08:32,500 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. 85 00:08:32,500 --> 00:08:38,980 And if you wanted to arrest somebody, you basically have to lead them by the hand right there. 86 00:08:38,980 --> 00:08:42,850 No handcuffs. Forget computers. Forget police cars. 87 00:08:42,850 --> 00:08:47,200 Forget roads. Forget computers. Forget pens and paper. 88 00:08:47,200 --> 00:08:53,560 Even if you if you needed to arrest somebody, you took them by the hand and then you basically put them in there. 89 00:08:53,560 --> 00:08:59,170 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. 90 00:08:59,170 --> 00:09:08,200 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. 91 00:09:08,200 --> 00:09:12,790 I think oftentimes, especially with policymakers, there's not a clear understanding of what that means. 92 00:09:12,790 --> 00:09:19,210 So this is what it means. And then even though I said library is actually quite teeny tiny, 93 00:09:19,210 --> 00:09:30,070 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, 94 00:09:30,070 --> 00:09:35,580 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, 95 00:09:35,580 --> 00:09:43,090 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. 96 00:09:43,090 --> 00:09:49,000 So most of Liberia actually just looked like this really, really, really difficult to get from A to B, 97 00:09:49,000 --> 00:09:53,650 and the geography of the place actually really matters for the story that I want to tell you. 98 00:09:53,650 --> 00:10:00,040 It's hard to control things from the centre, and part of that is just about moving around the country. 99 00:10:00,040 --> 00:10:05,800 So the phenomenon itself, we have a story here about smooth post-conflict transitions. 100 00:10:05,800 --> 00:10:14,260 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. 101 00:10:14,260 --> 00:10:16,420 This is what we're looking for. 102 00:10:16,420 --> 00:10:26,900 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. 103 00:10:26,900 --> 00:10:32,200 The key challenge here was really resistance to government authority in key natural resource areas. 104 00:10:32,200 --> 00:10:37,030 So ex-combatants were holding onto these areas in some cases for years, 105 00:10:37,030 --> 00:10:44,500 and they were doing so in violation theory of all sorts of laws and prohibitions that were set out by different bodies. 106 00:10:44,500 --> 00:10:51,550 So the groups became violent or threatened to become very violent when the government threatened to evacuate them. 107 00:10:51,550 --> 00:10:57,670 And so there was quite a lot of tension at the time. 108 00:10:57,670 --> 00:11:02,920 And today you don't get a sense of that at all. All of that has dissipated. 109 00:11:02,920 --> 00:11:12,760 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, 110 00:11:12,760 --> 00:11:17,170 there was a lot of tension and people were deeply worried about these groups. 111 00:11:17,170 --> 00:11:24,760 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. 112 00:11:24,760 --> 00:11:32,680 So what will happen to the simmering discontent at Guthrie becomes open clashes between former learnt generals and their stooges who are armed, 113 00:11:32,680 --> 00:11:36,640 and the deprive civilians are that scenario to the situation in the Sinai, 114 00:11:36,640 --> 00:11:44,950 a rubber plantation where one general statement of the former model rebel militias is holding out and bragging about his right over the plantation. 115 00:11:44,950 --> 00:11:56,170 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? 116 00:11:56,170 --> 00:12:01,930 Well, these groups obviously posed a threat to local and even national security. 117 00:12:01,930 --> 00:12:07,810 And if you're talking to policymakers, they have to deal with the consequences of that. 118 00:12:07,810 --> 00:12:12,580 There is a difficulty in thinking that through, though, because on the one hand, 119 00:12:12,580 --> 00:12:19,390 you have an international state building discussion about disrupting these groups 120 00:12:19,390 --> 00:12:24,640 and then you have a political stability conversation by allowing their entrenchment. 121 00:12:24,640 --> 00:12:28,180 And basically, that means a system of jobs, order and stability. 122 00:12:28,180 --> 00:12:30,610 On the one hand, 123 00:12:30,610 --> 00:12:38,670 you can arguably put corruption in there as well if you want versus this theoretical liberal framework that we all in theory, aspire to. 124 00:12:38,670 --> 00:12:41,740 Right. And those things are often working at odds, right? 125 00:12:41,740 --> 00:12:47,950 All good things do not go together in this situation, and I would argue in most post-conflict situations. 126 00:12:47,950 --> 00:12:55,660 So if we've got this trade-off between stability in the short term and then in the long term, 127 00:12:55,660 --> 00:13:01,870 arguments about the integrity of the state in the integrity of institutions and an anti-corruption agenda. 128 00:13:01,870 --> 00:13:07,030 And those two are just working at odds with each other. 129 00:13:07,030 --> 00:13:15,220 So how these things are playing against each other, I think also tell us something about ourselves and our values and assumptions. 130 00:13:15,220 --> 00:13:18,820 So why should Liberians care about this kind of obvious in so many ways? 131 00:13:18,820 --> 00:13:24,490 But for them, I think that a big key issue is corruption and why it's such a hard path dependent. 132 00:13:24,490 --> 00:13:32,350 And part of what I'm trying to do here is provide an explanation for this that makes sense to them. 133 00:13:32,350 --> 00:13:34,990 And this is sitting in contrast, of course, 134 00:13:34,990 --> 00:13:39,950 to the thinking and expectations between people who are not from Liberia and then those who are from Liberia. 135 00:13:39,950 --> 00:13:45,670 So part of what this work is trying to do is serve as a translation device between the two worlds by trying to say, 136 00:13:45,670 --> 00:13:52,120 Hey, this is how other people are thinking about you. And Hey, you folks, this is how you know they're talking about you. 137 00:13:52,120 --> 00:13:59,710 So that I think the understanding there is still deeply lacking, and I think the empathy is still deeply lacking. 138 00:13:59,710 --> 00:14:04,210 And part of what I'm trying to do there is is to provide that bridge. 139 00:14:04,210 --> 00:14:11,770 So just linking to the literature, there is a large a large discussion around warlords, organised crime groups, mafias, rebel governance. 140 00:14:11,770 --> 00:14:15,700 But the key here is that there is often a good bad dichotomy, right? 141 00:14:15,700 --> 00:14:25,870 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. 142 00:14:25,870 --> 00:14:31,900 I really wanted to understand what these groups are doing without saying, Oh, they're bad. 143 00:14:31,900 --> 00:14:37,510 That's not the intention. And then I wanted to do something to understand the complexity of this piece 144 00:14:37,510 --> 00:14:41,380 consolidation process because it didn't look to me the way that in theory, 145 00:14:41,380 --> 00:14:52,360 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. 146 00:14:52,360 --> 00:14:58,810 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, 147 00:14:58,810 --> 00:15:04,980 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. 148 00:15:04,980 --> 00:15:11,800 Right. But actually, you have spikes in violence often, and those spikes in violence can be quite localised and then they can spread, right? 149 00:15:11,800 --> 00:15:17,170 So if you're then at this point, a second peak, then you think, Oh, actually, things might get worse. 150 00:15:17,170 --> 00:15:21,820 We might go back to more violence even. But so at that moment, you can't tell. 151 00:15:21,820 --> 00:15:29,520 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. 152 00:15:29,520 --> 00:15:32,890 I talk about the quality of post-conflict peace, the variation, 153 00:15:32,890 --> 00:15:36,820 the local versus national and then what that looks like in terms of people's livelihoods. 154 00:15:36,820 --> 00:15:45,250 I speak to the state failure in state building literature and some of this ungoverned spaces discussion coming from American policymakers. 155 00:15:45,250 --> 00:15:53,770 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. 156 00:15:53,770 --> 00:16:01,450 It has a proven capacity for violence. And importantly, here it provides governance functions to further their business interests. 157 00:16:01,450 --> 00:16:07,420 So it's this key last bit that I think is what's interesting that comes out of this discussion. 158 00:16:07,420 --> 00:16:15,520 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. 159 00:16:15,520 --> 00:16:19,240 But importantly, even though I'm using the term state, 160 00:16:19,240 --> 00:16:26,890 I don't think of these this building these institutions to provide public goods as necessarily being led by the state 161 00:16:26,890 --> 00:16:38,980 or that it needs to even be state approved so that I think policymakers and U.N. folks often have difficulty with. 162 00:16:38,980 --> 00:16:41,200 So the first question is just about the groups. 163 00:16:41,200 --> 00:16:48,130 How did these groups emerge, develop and become locally entrenched after the end of Civil War and to make sense of some of that? 164 00:16:48,130 --> 00:16:53,300 I have an idea that I call. Half the capital that we had the chance to discuss earlier on. 165 00:16:53,300 --> 00:17:01,120 And so comes the capital for me is about the build up of repertoires of violence to facilitate coordinated action. 166 00:17:01,120 --> 00:17:04,210 So habits, norms and networks around violence. 167 00:17:04,210 --> 00:17:11,320 So if you all collectively witness a public act of violence, then we have shared a little bit of conflict capital. 168 00:17:11,320 --> 00:17:16,690 If some people here might have participated in that violence, then again, that is part of that. 169 00:17:16,690 --> 00:17:22,690 And then our collective response here, you can think of it as standard operating procedures or standard responses. 170 00:17:22,690 --> 00:17:27,190 Over time, they become routinised. 171 00:17:27,190 --> 00:17:30,640 So what happens at the start of wars? You don't have any. 172 00:17:30,640 --> 00:17:38,710 We don't have any conflict capital, really. And then as the war progresses, we build up more and more of it collectively. 173 00:17:38,710 --> 00:17:47,860 So this is a social phenomenon, right? And as with all social phenomenon, over time, those kinds of relationships and feelings decline. 174 00:17:47,860 --> 00:17:53,500 So if you leave conflict capital alone at the end of war, in theory, it should just decline on its own. 175 00:17:53,500 --> 00:18:00,970 It has its own Half-Life. If, however, you're trying to actively destroy it, as with just a disarmament, 176 00:18:00,970 --> 00:18:06,190 demobilisation and reintegration programmes that are commonly set up at the end of war, 177 00:18:06,190 --> 00:18:11,890 then you are really trying to do something with those social networks and destroy that conflict capital. 178 00:18:11,890 --> 00:18:17,200 Now, I don't think that works, but that is what the intention of those programmes is. 179 00:18:17,200 --> 00:18:23,500 And then, of course, if you say are recruited to go fight a war in neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire, 180 00:18:23,500 --> 00:18:29,500 then you are continuing to activate that of capital or in this case, you know, for speeding in an extra legal group. 181 00:18:29,500 --> 00:18:33,370 You are also continuing to activate that conflict. 182 00:18:33,370 --> 00:18:42,670 So that brings me to this three stage discussion of what the groups are and then understanding how they work. 183 00:18:42,670 --> 00:18:47,560 So if you think back to those images that I showed you at the beginning with those young men, 184 00:18:47,560 --> 00:18:54,790 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. 185 00:18:54,790 --> 00:18:58,270 So we have this ready supply of specialists in violence. 186 00:18:58,270 --> 00:19:05,380 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. 187 00:19:05,380 --> 00:19:11,260 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. 188 00:19:11,260 --> 00:19:15,220 And again, it is mostly young men, very, very few young women in this story. 189 00:19:15,220 --> 00:19:22,570 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? 190 00:19:22,570 --> 00:19:26,410 So given that my lack of education and a lack of skills in this case, 191 00:19:26,410 --> 00:19:32,680 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. 192 00:19:32,680 --> 00:19:40,060 And that would be like in Liberia, it is the rubber tapping industry and the diamond mining or gold mining, 193 00:19:40,060 --> 00:19:42,640 alluvial gold mining in alluvial diamond mining industries. 194 00:19:42,640 --> 00:19:50,680 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. 195 00:19:50,680 --> 00:20:00,010 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. 196 00:20:00,010 --> 00:20:04,600 So you can imagine that these people are going off and they're all showing up in the same physical place. 197 00:20:04,600 --> 00:20:11,860 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. 198 00:20:11,860 --> 00:20:14,140 They physically show up in the same places. 199 00:20:14,140 --> 00:20:22,900 And so there you see this competition leading along with this conflict capital that I've talking about people trying to do this work, 200 00:20:22,900 --> 00:20:27,010 but you have disputes. So how do you resolve those disputes between people? 201 00:20:27,010 --> 00:20:32,680 How do you do things like contract enforcement or, you know, property rights to the extent that the property exists, right? 202 00:20:32,680 --> 00:20:37,840 This is the bit that you get to mine or this is the bit that you get to tap, right? 203 00:20:37,840 --> 00:20:46,480 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. 204 00:20:46,480 --> 00:20:48,580 There's a deeper discussion about that that I can get into you, 205 00:20:48,580 --> 00:20:54,850 but effectively you have some group of people that is comfortable and respected enough and rises up 206 00:20:54,850 --> 00:21:00,800 out of the situation to do this and you need it in order for that business environment to thrive. 207 00:21:00,800 --> 00:21:08,110 Right. You can't really operate a business and have the power brokers come in and so forth in an environment that is chaotic. 208 00:21:08,110 --> 00:21:15,640 So somebody has to do that work. So there is a need for governance and a group arises out of that to provide it. 209 00:21:15,640 --> 00:21:21,560 That's the first emergence. The second stage is interesting and it's interesting in a tillet kind of way. 210 00:21:21,560 --> 00:21:27,520 Right. So this is the course of taxation stage. People figure out they actually don't need to do the physical work themselves. 211 00:21:27,520 --> 00:21:35,320 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, 212 00:21:35,320 --> 00:21:41,140 you're actually building up that organisational infrastructure and that gives you more power as a group. 213 00:21:41,140 --> 00:21:46,750 So then the group grows in the third stage. 214 00:21:46,750 --> 00:21:50,150 What you have is a system of entrenchment because people decide they want to. 215 00:21:50,150 --> 00:21:55,190 Hold on to the places that they've already got control of. Why would you want to leave? 216 00:21:55,190 --> 00:22:01,370 And in fact, you can see that back and forth between the government trying to negotiate this particular dynamic. 217 00:22:01,370 --> 00:22:09,650 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. 218 00:22:09,650 --> 00:22:13,070 So a little bit of money for going really, really long way. 219 00:22:13,070 --> 00:22:18,260 And you can basically bribe your way through whichever bit of the state you need to in order to stay in power. 220 00:22:18,260 --> 00:22:22,910 And that is exactly what happens if you want the public interest to dominate. 221 00:22:22,910 --> 00:22:28,100 You have to fight really hard against the flow. It is absolutely possible, 222 00:22:28,100 --> 00:22:37,070 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. 223 00:22:37,070 --> 00:22:42,320 Political will and names that really usually difficult to muster up in these conditions. 224 00:22:42,320 --> 00:22:46,010 So in the end, you end up with a system of entrenchment of these groups. 225 00:22:46,010 --> 00:22:52,130 And just to crystallise what that means in terms of the weakest link problem to escape entrenchment, 226 00:22:52,130 --> 00:22:56,240 you need core state institutions to be simultaneously empowered. 227 00:22:56,240 --> 00:23:04,670 So the police, the military, the courts, judges, lawyers, prisons, politicians, everybody has to be united in order to get out of that system. 228 00:23:04,670 --> 00:23:09,080 And any single one of these functions can be captured and corrected by private interests. 229 00:23:09,080 --> 00:23:12,830 And then I would go further here and say, this doesn't just apply to Liberia. 230 00:23:12,830 --> 00:23:19,550 I think this is actually the default setting for all states. This is not necessarily an elaborate story or even an African story. 231 00:23:19,550 --> 00:23:27,830 Every state started in some version of this story and then moved out of, in some cases, successfully moved out of it. 232 00:23:27,830 --> 00:23:30,860 And in other cases, not so. 233 00:23:30,860 --> 00:23:40,810 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. 234 00:23:40,810 --> 00:23:48,580 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. 235 00:23:48,580 --> 00:23:51,340 And you guys actually clearly care about the Africa bit. 236 00:23:51,340 --> 00:23:58,120 So I'm happy and I'm excited to talk about the history, society and Civil War bit of the book. 237 00:23:58,120 --> 00:24:04,120 So to say something about that social ecology also means speaking to the history of the place. 238 00:24:04,120 --> 00:24:09,220 And I think the history is really important for understanding how these groups fit into the landscape of of Liberia. 239 00:24:09,220 --> 00:24:15,700 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. 240 00:24:15,700 --> 00:24:20,470 So in the original and this part does matter. 241 00:24:20,470 --> 00:24:22,390 Just follow along with me, 242 00:24:22,390 --> 00:24:28,090 there was an impetus to reach a deal with the American Colonisation Society with these quote unquote freed slaves from America. 243 00:24:28,090 --> 00:24:33,040 Right? But of course, if you didn't do that, there was somebody pointing a gun at your head, 244 00:24:33,040 --> 00:24:38,830 an evil captain doing so, and they were going to be shot and killed if that wasn't going to happen. 245 00:24:38,830 --> 00:24:43,450 And they tried multiple times, right? So eventually they succeeded. So backed by the U.S. Navy, came on. 246 00:24:43,450 --> 00:24:51,760 Peter sold, you know, Duke land were poor in exchange for some not relevant stuff for $300. 247 00:24:51,760 --> 00:24:57,040 And again, $300 is even converted in today's money is not worth very much. 248 00:24:57,040 --> 00:25:06,040 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. 249 00:25:06,040 --> 00:25:11,560 And then in the neighbouring area, King George said, You know, we better band together. 250 00:25:11,560 --> 00:25:17,020 We have to fight them or else they will control asthe King George could see it coming. 251 00:25:17,020 --> 00:25:22,570 But the colonists, even though there are only, you know, one hundred and thirty of them or whatever it was, 252 00:25:22,570 --> 00:25:29,260 they organised, they trained, everybody trained and they actually won that battle. 253 00:25:29,260 --> 00:25:37,060 But that battle actually set the tone for future relations between the Libyan state and the American librarians and the settlers colonies, 254 00:25:37,060 --> 00:25:43,180 cargoes, whatever you want to call them and everybody else in the country. So we end up with, you know, 255 00:25:43,180 --> 00:25:48,700 there's this native settler divide where the American Liberians and we have lots of different names 256 00:25:48,700 --> 00:25:56,530 for them later on in history replicated a discriminatory political and social and economic order. 257 00:25:56,530 --> 00:26:04,690 So the Americas are really, really powerful over time, and native Liberians ended up being quite marginalised despite the fact that they were just, 258 00:26:04,690 --> 00:26:12,400 you know, the Americas were really a small fraction of that population, and the Americas basically equalled the elites, right? 259 00:26:12,400 --> 00:26:20,230 They became the professors, doctors, judges and everything else that was powerful in society in the course of time. 260 00:26:20,230 --> 00:26:24,220 You had four percent of the population holding 60 percent of the wealth in time, 261 00:26:24,220 --> 00:26:32,410 and they controlled all of the political organisations along with, you know, the full patronage machine. 262 00:26:32,410 --> 00:26:36,890 And this is just to show you what that physically will look like. 263 00:26:36,890 --> 00:26:44,710 So and you're looking at some reversion to of wanting to replicate their lives in the American South, 264 00:26:44,710 --> 00:26:49,990 but now wanting to be the heads of the household in contrast to the, 265 00:26:49,990 --> 00:26:55,790 you know, the native Liberians who this contrasted themselves with as being uncivilised and barbaric? 266 00:26:55,790 --> 00:27:02,680 Right. And they tried in so many ways to distinguish themselves physically by what they're wearing 267 00:27:02,680 --> 00:27:08,560 and where they lived and and all of the social niceties that came along with that. 268 00:27:08,560 --> 00:27:12,820 But what does this history matter that for the kind of transition that I'm talking to you about? 269 00:27:12,820 --> 00:27:16,900 Well, it really changes the nature of state society relations. 270 00:27:16,900 --> 00:27:22,830 It sets the tone for us that there are native relations and then the evolution of those state institutions over time. 271 00:27:22,830 --> 00:27:28,960 Right. So you know, my understanding here and what I see is that we end up copying what we know and it's 272 00:27:28,960 --> 00:27:33,760 hard to follow an example that doesn't exist and then get everybody to believe in it. 273 00:27:33,760 --> 00:27:42,790 How do you get these people to imagine a future, a future version of the state where everybody should be included in their settlement? 274 00:27:42,790 --> 00:27:48,280 And that starts right at the heart of how the country was, quote unquote founded? 275 00:27:48,280 --> 00:27:54,970 Right? How those relationships were set up and how those power relations were set up over time and how they were exploited over time. 276 00:27:54,970 --> 00:28:01,610 You can't get away from that in many ways, right? And if you want to, you really have to fight for it. 277 00:28:01,610 --> 00:28:08,220 So this is to say something about that weak state and indirect rule that ended up developing so political context of the 1800s, 278 00:28:08,220 --> 00:28:15,170 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. 279 00:28:15,170 --> 00:28:17,330 There's not a lot of population density there, 280 00:28:17,330 --> 00:28:25,850 but there is political contestation and there are these self-governing political entities that uneasily coexist and work together, sometimes or not. 281 00:28:25,850 --> 00:28:30,830 But the geopolitics of the hundreds is that you got all of this pressure from 282 00:28:30,830 --> 00:28:36,170 both France on the on one side and then Britain on the other trying to say, 283 00:28:36,170 --> 00:28:43,010 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. 284 00:28:43,010 --> 00:28:50,930 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. 285 00:28:50,930 --> 00:28:57,560 So the response then was to have indirect rule in the interior, basically to copy what the British were doing. 286 00:28:57,560 --> 00:29:01,580 So he created a library, military, the library and French Air Force. 287 00:29:01,580 --> 00:29:10,430 But of course, the Oliver, well, absolutely brutal. And this really changed that distribution of power and how people were used, 288 00:29:10,430 --> 00:29:20,360 and in order to force the power of the state into the rest of society, created a patronage politics machine. 289 00:29:20,360 --> 00:29:27,710 And we get end up with various forms of forced labour, partly because by 1910, the country was just really, really bankrupt. 290 00:29:27,710 --> 00:29:34,250 And the only way to get out of that bankruptcy that was available to them was to sign up with Firestone. 291 00:29:34,250 --> 00:29:38,930 Here was this magical solution. Firestone would be offered cheap land. 292 00:29:38,930 --> 00:29:42,320 They would be given a massive loan by the US government. 293 00:29:42,320 --> 00:29:49,670 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. 294 00:29:49,670 --> 00:29:54,230 And then there's very little amount, $6000 of rent to follow. 295 00:29:54,230 --> 00:30:03,420 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. 296 00:30:03,420 --> 00:30:09,860 Right. So people got really angry about this really, really angry about this, but there was nothing that they could do. 297 00:30:09,860 --> 00:30:12,320 And people are still angry about this today. 298 00:30:12,320 --> 00:30:19,040 They see that as the point at which there was a wholesale takeover of Liberia and the country was just sold. 299 00:30:19,040 --> 00:30:26,300 So the key consequences of this was that these revenues changed how power politics operated in Liberia. 300 00:30:26,300 --> 00:30:35,660 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. 301 00:30:35,660 --> 00:30:40,970 You basically are able to do whatever you want to do on your own without consulting the population. 302 00:30:40,970 --> 00:30:48,620 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. 303 00:30:48,620 --> 00:30:53,240 And then this basically looks like control without colonisation. 304 00:30:53,240 --> 00:31:02,210 So the Americans have de facto control. And the Firestone deal committed the government to procuring labour, and that meant forced labour. 305 00:31:02,210 --> 00:31:07,540 What looked like, you know, not quite slavery, but almost in some cases. 306 00:31:07,540 --> 00:31:13,270 So all of this is just to give you a sense of why Question two matters, I what purpose do these groups serve? 307 00:31:13,270 --> 00:31:17,890 And I want to say something about state building now because to understand that fully, 308 00:31:17,890 --> 00:31:24,460 I think you need the library in libraries historical approach to the state and thinking about the state. 309 00:31:24,460 --> 00:31:32,590 So part of what I want to say is that extralegal groups are unintentional stakeholders and that they contribute to state planning. 310 00:31:32,590 --> 00:31:38,530 So given that past history, so in addition to dispute resolution and contract enforcement and regulation. 311 00:31:38,530 --> 00:31:48,020 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. 312 00:31:48,020 --> 00:31:51,460 So there's quite a lot of vigilantism in Liberia, 313 00:31:51,460 --> 00:32:00,430 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, 314 00:32:00,430 --> 00:32:07,880 you know, settling those disputes violently sometimes and putting that authority into the hands of some other person or body. 315 00:32:07,880 --> 00:32:11,530 So you're establishing the role of intermediary between parties. 316 00:32:11,530 --> 00:32:16,540 And then on top of that, you're consolidating that coercive authority at the local level. 317 00:32:16,540 --> 00:32:23,170 And then the last thing is that you're socialising people into being governed because people don't necessarily want to be governed. 318 00:32:23,170 --> 00:32:27,340 I think we all come at it with the assumption that you just are governed, right? 319 00:32:27,340 --> 00:32:33,400 You have a choice in this, but this is not the same kind of setting that most of us are used to. 320 00:32:33,400 --> 00:32:38,740 And of course, that creates a repertoire of responses from both society and the state. 321 00:32:38,740 --> 00:32:44,380 And all of this is to say that there are, you know, waxing and waning of state building populations, 322 00:32:44,380 --> 00:32:51,460 be riots, revolutions, civil wars and so forth and extralegal groups, and that he do about them. 323 00:32:51,460 --> 00:32:57,700 And this is about a process, a very, very long term state building and then helping a state in theory, 324 00:32:57,700 --> 00:33:06,750 a government to develop some resilience to that right, to set up a set of responses and then to learn from past mistakes. 325 00:33:06,750 --> 00:33:12,300 So the second argument is that Canterbury State Building is driven by trade and commerce and not war. 326 00:33:12,300 --> 00:33:18,780 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, 327 00:33:18,780 --> 00:33:25,380 absolutely core state functions. So you need to be able to maintain some form of physical security and you need 328 00:33:25,380 --> 00:33:29,820 to be able to provide some form of impartial justice within a given territory. 329 00:33:29,820 --> 00:33:32,820 And for me, those two things are really the kernel of the state. 330 00:33:32,820 --> 00:33:42,630 So what this kind of environment does and what these groups do, it shows that trade was really the driver for that stable environment. 331 00:33:42,630 --> 00:33:50,220 And in order to get these folks to provide those goods, it was trade that was driving that particular dynamic, right? 332 00:33:50,220 --> 00:33:55,080 And they were providing the physical security and that consistent contract enforcement. 333 00:33:55,080 --> 00:34:00,330 But they were only doing it because they wanted to trade, not because they wanted to take over the state, 334 00:34:00,330 --> 00:34:08,730 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. 335 00:34:08,730 --> 00:34:13,170 So these groups were really motivated by profit to offer these functions. 336 00:34:13,170 --> 00:34:22,470 So the argument here is that trade is driving that provision of local governance and those public goods. 337 00:34:22,470 --> 00:34:27,590 But this leads to a difficulty, which is what do we do about this idea of the state and the primacy of the state? 338 00:34:27,590 --> 00:34:34,710 So what about places where the state has little to no presence where there aren't really any public goods and institutions? 339 00:34:34,710 --> 00:34:40,320 Do we let these kinds of groups develop because they can't provide public goods? 340 00:34:40,320 --> 00:34:45,900 So what do you do with a group like Hamas or Hezbollah or ISIS, arguably? 341 00:34:45,900 --> 00:34:57,570 Or, you know, the gangs in Rio, in the favelas who do some of this provision contract enforcement, dispute resolution, physical security stuff? 342 00:34:57,570 --> 00:35:04,620 Do we shut them down because they are not the state? Should we call them in some ways, can we even talk to them? 343 00:35:04,620 --> 00:35:09,870 And of course, if we choose to take that route, we've got problems of accountability and autonomy and, 344 00:35:09,870 --> 00:35:18,470 you know, all sorts of other things, and it gets really, really messy. But of course, this is something better than nothing. 345 00:35:18,470 --> 00:35:20,660 So at the heart of this story, right? 346 00:35:20,660 --> 00:35:30,260 I started off by saying that I think certainly I did when I started this project, the law was a very, very clear line. 347 00:35:30,260 --> 00:35:36,350 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? 348 00:35:36,350 --> 00:35:39,470 What I ended up showing you, I hope I showed you, 349 00:35:39,470 --> 00:35:47,690 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. 350 00:35:47,690 --> 00:35:56,610 And I think that. This is basically the best that we can hope for, right, that the shift is towards this, 351 00:35:56,610 --> 00:35:59,320 but effectively, I think this is impossible for any state to me. 352 00:35:59,320 --> 00:36:04,200 I don't think that this exists anywhere in the world and I'm not sure that it ever can. 353 00:36:04,200 --> 00:36:08,830 And I think this is the best that any country can ever really hope for. 354 00:36:08,830 --> 00:36:11,640 And sometimes the things that we're thinking of as being, you know, 355 00:36:11,640 --> 00:36:16,800 extra legal are really the legal lies, but they're at the heart of this definition. 356 00:36:16,800 --> 00:36:20,220 It's really about public interest and and you can see that too. 357 00:36:20,220 --> 00:36:26,670 But it's it's easier to think than about Liberia as being along a spectrum rather than, 358 00:36:26,670 --> 00:36:30,990 you know, being a bad, a bad state or a failed state in that way. 359 00:36:30,990 --> 00:36:36,550 So all of this that forced me to rethink state building and the whole process, right? 360 00:36:36,550 --> 00:36:39,690 But this is actually a really long term process, 361 00:36:39,690 --> 00:36:45,900 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 362 00:36:45,900 --> 00:36:53,280 state learning is faster for states that have come at it and were able to watch the failures that other states have gone through. 363 00:36:53,280 --> 00:36:58,270 So hopefully you don't have to make all of those same mistakes again. 364 00:36:58,270 --> 00:37:05,220 And, of course, that the model in the past of statehood isn't always planned or deliberate. 365 00:37:05,220 --> 00:37:12,480 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. 366 00:37:12,480 --> 00:37:13,710 I don't think this is well understood. 367 00:37:13,710 --> 00:37:23,130 We always think that it has to be intentional, and we forget that our own Western states never got here by being intentional, 368 00:37:23,130 --> 00:37:26,700 that the sustainability of all of this stuff and of state building. 369 00:37:26,700 --> 00:37:31,200 Finally, it has to be internally driven. It can't come from outside. 370 00:37:31,200 --> 00:37:38,010 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. 371 00:37:38,010 --> 00:37:43,380 And I would say largely, that's true for most places, although I'm open to exceptions. 372 00:37:43,380 --> 00:37:49,600 And I don't think and again, this might make people upset that all states aspire to be liberal. 373 00:37:49,600 --> 00:37:54,360 I'm really not sure about this right and I've come to this, 374 00:37:54,360 --> 00:37:59,130 and it hurts a little bit actually to say this, because I want all states aspire to be liberal, 375 00:37:59,130 --> 00:38:07,170 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. 376 00:38:07,170 --> 00:38:17,220 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. 377 00:38:17,220 --> 00:38:21,720 So each step along that State-Building path doesn't need to be liberal to arrive at a liberal end state. 378 00:38:21,720 --> 00:38:27,750 And I think the UK is really a prime example of this that if you looked at the U.K. 100 years ago, 379 00:38:27,750 --> 00:38:36,630 200 years ago, nobody would say that it is liberal by any by today's idea of what it means to be liberal. 380 00:38:36,630 --> 00:38:44,280 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. 381 00:38:44,280 --> 00:38:50,190 And eventually you get to a place where you have a little bit more power that is given over to the people. 382 00:38:50,190 --> 00:38:55,350 And then there's a little bit more backsliding and there was a back and forth there. 383 00:38:55,350 --> 00:39:00,810 And then over time, you know, you get to where you are today, but different states are at different stages of that. 384 00:39:00,810 --> 00:39:06,150 And strengthening the state is and and I think this is poorly understood, a double edged sword. 385 00:39:06,150 --> 00:39:10,980 We always think that if we improve the capacity of the state that it will benefit the people, 386 00:39:10,980 --> 00:39:15,390 the local populations, the communities, whoever you know, the vulnerable especially. 387 00:39:15,390 --> 00:39:21,540 And I don't think that that's true. If you again look at how people have been treated by the state over time. 388 00:39:21,540 --> 00:39:28,740 Why would you ever think that the state is the most predatory after the most consistently predatory actor in all of this? 389 00:39:28,740 --> 00:39:31,470 And yet our first choice is to strengthen the state. 390 00:39:31,470 --> 00:39:40,110 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. 391 00:39:40,110 --> 00:39:48,840 And this is not necessarily the answer is to re, equip and retrain the military and to dump all of the money there. 392 00:39:48,840 --> 00:39:54,390 And of course, this leads to a conclusion that that liberal template that we often use is really too rigid. 393 00:39:54,390 --> 00:39:58,680 It's quite righteous and it's absolutely ahistorical. 394 00:39:58,680 --> 00:40:03,900 But that is not to say that this isn't coming from a sociological place where this is all coming from, too, right? 395 00:40:03,900 --> 00:40:09,900 And and I came to this partly again when I was here in 2004, sitting in your seats. 396 00:40:09,900 --> 00:40:16,770 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. 397 00:40:16,770 --> 00:40:24,630 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, 398 00:40:24,630 --> 00:40:29,070 and that is because everybody who ends up at the table has benefited from the state. 399 00:40:29,070 --> 00:40:34,080 Even those at the U.N. who are purported to represent, you know, 400 00:40:34,080 --> 00:40:40,420 less developed countries or fragile states are the ones that have benefited from how their state has worked. 401 00:40:40,420 --> 00:40:46,830 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. 402 00:40:46,830 --> 00:40:50,960 But of course, you know, in fragile states for both elites in. 403 00:40:50,960 --> 00:40:58,580 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 404 00:40:58,580 --> 00:41:06,680 we can fix states and we do so and I say we me as a Canadian with my peacekeeping ideals. 405 00:41:06,680 --> 00:41:14,570 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. 406 00:41:14,570 --> 00:41:19,610 But with this ends up doing is ends up making anything that is nonstate. 407 00:41:19,610 --> 00:41:25,010 It ends up becoming shorthand for things that are bad and legitimate and must be eliminated. 408 00:41:25,010 --> 00:41:30,560 And that's not to say the things that I described are necessarily good, but it's just to say that we, 409 00:41:30,560 --> 00:41:36,290 I think, are very careful about our assumptions about how this really works. So we've got all these assumptions right. 410 00:41:36,290 --> 00:41:41,500 We've got this good bad paradigm. We've got formal and informal, legal and illegal and extralegal. 411 00:41:41,500 --> 00:41:48,830 I think that sometimes these things are not helpful for understanding that they sit on a spectrum in a continuum. 412 00:41:48,830 --> 00:41:52,730 And of course, there is a question of who governs you and that really matters. 413 00:41:52,730 --> 00:41:59,120 And we don't think about that in a practical, realistic way. We just think about speaking state to state. 414 00:41:59,120 --> 00:42:03,170 I mean, not the folks in this room, because, of course, are all compared to what's right, so. 415 00:42:03,170 --> 00:42:09,560 But on the other side, I think that is much more true. We also think that peace is the ultimate good. 416 00:42:09,560 --> 00:42:14,840 But the question is, who's peace? What is the quality of peace? Who decides? We think about national peace. 417 00:42:14,840 --> 00:42:21,560 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. 418 00:42:21,560 --> 00:42:26,240 We've got these overlapping spheres of political crime and conflict. 419 00:42:26,240 --> 00:42:31,820 And of course, we've got a problem in thinking about the personalisation of both the law and the state. 420 00:42:31,820 --> 00:42:32,060 Right. 421 00:42:32,060 --> 00:42:45,620 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. 422 00:42:45,620 --> 00:42:55,250 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, 423 00:42:55,250 --> 00:42:58,980 where people still don't have good access to justice? 424 00:42:58,980 --> 00:43:06,140 Right. If you are black or South Asian in this in this country, you don't have perfect access to justice. 425 00:43:06,140 --> 00:43:10,310 If you are poor and working class, you don't have good access to justice. Right. 426 00:43:10,310 --> 00:43:16,550 And yet we expect I think we set these standards that are completely unrealistic in how we talk about rule of law. 427 00:43:16,550 --> 00:43:22,790 It just doesn't make any sense. So there are a bunch of policy principles that come out of this, 428 00:43:22,790 --> 00:43:28,010 but I'm just going to skip through that to talk about those propositions again and and to help, 429 00:43:28,010 --> 00:43:36,680 you know, hopefully, you'll see now why I thought this problem was talking about crime as being part of the law, 430 00:43:36,680 --> 00:43:43,520 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, 431 00:43:43,520 --> 00:43:49,190 and that these kinds of categories can actually limit our understanding that strengthening states can do more harm than good. 432 00:43:49,190 --> 00:43:54,740 That extralegal groups and other groups like them can be state builders and trade. 433 00:43:54,740 --> 00:44:04,220 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. 434 00:44:04,220 --> 00:44:11,540 And now this is for the Ph.D. students in the room. So just about doing research and being honest about the research. 435 00:44:11,540 --> 00:44:15,950 So I wrote the book the way that a classic politics book is supposed to be written. 436 00:44:15,950 --> 00:44:22,490 This becomes at the very, very end, and it is a reflection of and I've hinted at this already. 437 00:44:22,490 --> 00:44:27,260 Changing my views in light of new evidence and then admitting it and it was I started it 438 00:44:27,260 --> 00:44:32,810 off with a very different kind of understanding about how I thought this stuff worked. 439 00:44:32,810 --> 00:44:41,210 And I think completely the opposite things I just told you exactly the opposite story of where I started from. 440 00:44:41,210 --> 00:44:48,890 And it was hard, right, because at the beginning of this process, I thought the world look this way. 441 00:44:48,890 --> 00:44:57,600 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. 442 00:44:57,600 --> 00:45:04,520 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. 443 00:45:04,520 --> 00:45:10,100 And, you know, forget about so the first few ones, you're like, OK, fine, whatever. 444 00:45:10,100 --> 00:45:18,440 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? 445 00:45:18,440 --> 00:45:25,400 And that was hard because the signal became more obvious to me that I couldn't really ignore that there was 446 00:45:25,400 --> 00:45:31,400 a second story and that that story was a more important version than whatever it was that I came in with. 447 00:45:31,400 --> 00:45:39,250 But if if I was right, then in the revision of my thinking, then I am part of the problem. 448 00:45:39,250 --> 00:45:46,070 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, 449 00:45:46,070 --> 00:45:51,590 about the West, about Canada peacekeeping, about the U.N. being a good actor, about Angola and all of it. 450 00:45:51,590 --> 00:45:57,740 It was just ugly and messy, and it's really disappointing. And I didn't want to do it and it was hard, right? 451 00:45:57,740 --> 00:46:04,850 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. 452 00:46:04,850 --> 00:46:09,650 And then in the, you know, five years since, I've gone the other 90 degrees. 453 00:46:09,650 --> 00:46:14,420 So now I think completely the opposite things that I started off with. And, you know, 454 00:46:14,420 --> 00:46:21,620 applying them these ideas to talking about this in that recent research design scaffolding is really about that fiction of tidy research, 455 00:46:21,620 --> 00:46:32,360 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. 456 00:46:32,360 --> 00:46:36,410 So in that last chapter, I talked about, you know, my original thinking, 457 00:46:36,410 --> 00:46:43,910 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. 458 00:46:43,910 --> 00:46:52,190 Maybe the upgrade process so that, you know, when I had to present it, I remember Richard and Andy. 459 00:46:52,190 --> 00:46:57,140 I can't even remember who it was. Richard was definitely there, and I had to present my work to them. 460 00:46:57,140 --> 00:47:02,960 And then they came back at me. And then I think I went to Yale and I came up with some of this stuff, 461 00:47:02,960 --> 00:47:07,070 and then I went into the field and I changed and sort of went back and forth, back and forth. 462 00:47:07,070 --> 00:47:11,600 And that was this is basically where I ended the. 463 00:47:11,600 --> 00:47:19,490 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. 464 00:47:19,490 --> 00:47:25,670 And yet we present this idea that, oh yes, of course, I knew what the question was going to be at the very start. 465 00:47:25,670 --> 00:47:29,540 And this is how you're supposed to present your research question. Chosen methods, findings. 466 00:47:29,540 --> 00:47:31,250 That's what I do in the first chapter. 467 00:47:31,250 --> 00:47:38,900 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. 468 00:47:38,900 --> 00:47:43,910 How do we construct our question? Why do we choose this question and not another one? 469 00:47:43,910 --> 00:47:49,850 And there is this constant back and forth and you are allowed to change your minds and we can talk about it. 470 00:47:49,850 --> 00:47:57,800 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, 471 00:47:57,800 --> 00:48:01,370 I guess, unveiled and made explicit. Right. 472 00:48:01,370 --> 00:48:10,160 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, 473 00:48:10,160 --> 00:48:15,770 the version of me that was sitting in this room all those years ago because I didn't have any of that guidance. 474 00:48:15,770 --> 00:48:19,910 And I just thought, Oh, how do people end up with this beautiful thing that seems so clear? 475 00:48:19,910 --> 00:48:24,590 And then I realised over time that there was all this stuff going on, but nobody had made it explicit. 476 00:48:24,590 --> 00:48:31,430 And in fact, we were deliberately trying to maintain a fiction that it was perfect to start with, right? 477 00:48:31,430 --> 00:48:34,430 And I just I don't think that that's very intellectually honest. 478 00:48:34,430 --> 00:48:39,290 And also, I think it's harmful because people set up these standards that just aren't realistic. 479 00:48:39,290 --> 00:48:44,240 And that's not really how things work. And so thank you. 480 00:48:44,240 --> 00:48:53,090 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, 481 00:48:53,090 --> 00:48:57,200 when I was actually at Oxford and then the things that have come after and out 482 00:48:57,200 --> 00:49:02,540 of this work that that have linked to the book that I've just presented to you. 483 00:49:02,540 --> 00:49:06,134 Thank you.