State and security in Africa

For more than a decade, work on security management in Africa has multiplied and the work of Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos has offered a useful synthesis, especially since the author is based on field expertise in many African countries. This book is aimed at a various readership: academics of course, but also diplomats and members of many NGO And Oig present on the African continent. The author has an intimate and ancient knowledge of the subject, which sometimes leads him to derive towards the writing style of the test, thus making the reading always stimulating.

This book studies the various organizations that participate in security management, mainly police, private security companies and militias, which many authors analyze separately. He dissects their relations with the state he characterizes as “ weak », An often frustrating labeling but which here allows comparatism on a continental scale. His political approach first led him to assess the main issues of public policies on the subject. After recalling that in Africa the sharing between public and private is relatively vague, he refutes the liberal theory of communicating vases which wants the deficiencies of the public security sector to be immediately offset by the development of the private sector. Pérouse de Montclos notably takes up the arguments of pluralist theory which underline that the strong growth of private structures reflects less a state of state than new collaborations between public and private operators. We would thus witness a reformulation of the state monopoly on violence ; Throughout the chapters that follow, the author is working to describe the modes of organization that this fragmentation of the state monopoly on violence brings.

The first chapters relate to the police forces, the author of which evaluates the dysfunctions with regard to various registers. It strives to characterize the “ tropical fonts In relation to the historical trajectories of the African armies. Through a detour through the colonial era, he shows that these fonts have not developed as a public service but above all as an instrument of repression, often endowed with a paramilitary function, sometimes at the service of private interests. This detour through history makes it possible to better understand the repository and the modes of action of contemporary police. Pérouse de Montclos nuances approaches that underline the role of democratizations in the current dynamics of the police. We can regret that the author is not based on the very rich social history of British Africanists like Andrew Burton and J. Lewis on the management of public order in urban spaces. These historians emphasize the specificities of the police register in cities compared to rural areas, and they notably emphasize the role of the police colonial state in the social structuring of urban spaces.

The following chapters are devoted to private organizations which participate in security management. Pérouse de Montclos offers a classification of these groups from two entries: organizations “ alternative “And the sector” private For profit. In the first set, he distinguishes individual self -defense initiatives from collective self -defense initiatives. In the second category, he differentiates the defensive organizations from offensive organizations. The heuristic scope of this classification is not explained because the author is first interested in the analysis of some of these groups. It thus makes a useful historical link of the main multinational guarding found in Africa. He recalls the involvement of major private military companies in multiple recent conflicts (for example in Liberia or Sierra Leone) – and their participation in what he calls a “ Proxy diplomacy ». Its approach is intended to be descriptive and it avoids entering the theoretical debates on the supposed “ new wars ».

The chapter on self -defense groups brings Pérouse de Montclos back to its departure problem. From the very rich literature on militias and groups of vigilants, it reads a stato-centered. It strives to locate their roles in political space, especially in times of partial and unfinished democratization. He sees structures that are hardly in competition with the state and which are all the more essential since it hardly believes in the police reforms. He would establish risky partnerships, with mafia drifts, but which rely on a moral order “ neo-traditional -This qualifier recalls that the militias willingly refer to the role of warrior of young people of the pre-colonial-rather legitimate time. He therefore calls for control if not to regulation by the public authority which he strives to identify the contours by studying in particular some attempts to institutionalize States/Militas.

We guess that certain forms of states are more conducive than others to these types of collaboration. Why is Kenya so reluctant to these forms of institutionalization while Tanzania organizes pragmatic cooperation between the police and the militias ? The sociogenesis of these states brings some responses (in particular through the trauma of the Mau Mau crisis and the persistence of a hierarchical clientelist always effective in the case of Kenya). Pérouse de Montclos suggests many ways of research but that he renounces to clear. He remains in political science issues and does not seek to integrate into his reflection the many anthropology works on militias, in particular those of Claire Médard on their role in the appearance of new identity platforms and the affirmation of nested identities in the Rift Valley Kenyane.