Undergraduate Research Applied to International Development

ArticulAte
Volume IV Issue I Fall 2011

articulate / -v., (of an idea or feeling) to express or state clearly.

iii b

iiii

educAte

motivAte

ActivAte

Articulate:UndergraduateResearchAppliedtoInternationalDevelopment isanundergraduatescholarlyjournalthatpublishesacademicpapers and writings online and in-print on issues concerning international development and health care in Africa. Articulate is a sub-division and publication of the non-profit SCOUT BANANA, which seeks to educate, motivate, and activate the public aboutdevelopmentissues,especiallythehealthcarecrisis,inAfrica.This journal will act as a forum for students to contribute to, as well as make, thedebatesininternationaldevelopment.Webelieveundergraduate studentsareavital,untappedforcetobringfreshideas,perspectives,and conceptsintothedevelopmentdialogue.Ourgoalistospark,share,and spread knowledge for the sake of innovative change now. SCOUT BANANA Mission: To combine efforts to save lives. We seek to build a domestic and international movement dedicated to fundamental social change in which global health is everyones responsibility and every individuals human right. Articulate operates under a Creative Commons (CC) Attribution Noncommercial No derivative license. Anyone is free to make use ofallmaterialsfoundinthisissue,aslongassuchusecomplieswiththe terms of the license. More detailed information can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.

issn

1943-6742

ii

ArticulAte
editor-in-chief
Ke Ding Dartmouth College

UndergraduateResearchAppliedtoInternationalDevelopment

Volume IV Issue I Fall 2011

editoriAl BoArd
Amelia Raether Dartmouth College Bryce Colquitt Michigan State University Ashley Herzovi Michigan State University

fAculty Advisors
John Metzler, Outreach Director Michigan State University metzler@msu.edu Mary Anne Walker, Director Michigan State University mawalker@msu.edu

Peer reviewers
Ariadna Ginez Michigan State University Kevin Dean Michigan State University Sarah Pomeroy Michigan State University Sophia Mosher Michigan State University

designer
Ken J. Hansen

lAyout

editor

Amelia Raether Dartmouth College

The opinions expressed within this journal are exlusively those of the individual authors and do not represent the views of the editorial board, SCOUT BANANA, or any of the organizations chapters, advisors, or affiliates. Current and past issues of Articulate can be accessed at http://scoutbanana.org/articulate.

iii

iv iii iv

Letter From the Editor

Dear Readers, First off, the thank yous to those who made this issue possible. First and foremost, to the Michigan State University African Studies Center and James Madison College, whose generous support allows us to continue to do what we do. Thank you to the editors, the peer reviewers. We take great pride in working together with authors to make sure that the best possible pieces are the ones published, and we wouldnt be able to do so without you guys. Thanks to all the support staff, the designer (it took a long time and free pizza, but your work really paid off ), and especially Alex for helping me figure all this out when I first started. And above all, thank you to all the colleges and universities across the countries, and the faculty and students associated with them, who responded to our Call for Papers and either supported us or put forth their work on development. That said, I am really excited to be part of this issue of Articulate. It was a hard decision to pick out the best papers from all the submissions, but in the end some stood out. Its a diverse group of work when you look at the subject matter, but not so much when you look at other characteristics. We were looking for perception, for quality, for earnestness in the voice of the author. Its the key belief of Articulate that theres a surprising amount of knowledge lying in young people at universities and out in the field. This knowledge is often ignored by conventional NGOs and scientific journals, but we believe that this should be the case. By taping these sources, we could, without irony, make the world a better place. We were looking for these ideas, those things that really drive change in the world. Within these pages youll find a hard look at why foreign aid hasnt been as effective as it should have been, using the example of Zambia. Youll find reflections written about in-the-field experiences, questioning the relationship in development that so often, perhaps tragically, is marked by an us (the helpers) and they (the helped). Youll also find an interesting analysis on effect a rising China is having on the African continent. And youll find more. It goes without saying that this was something that I enjoyed doing tremendously. And it is my hope that it is something that you will enjoy reading, just as much. Without further ado, it is with great pride that I present this volume, of Articulate. Ke Ding Editor-in-Chief January 2011

UAD GNA C IA- F IA HN A RC

Rh a am n

Li n o oo c D ii er h tc

ZM I AB A

Mee yr

H rs ai r

viii

Foreword
The year since the last edition of Articulate has involved some significant shifts in the way that aid and development interventions are viewed. Microfinance was shaken by the crisis in Andhra Pradesh, the ousting of Nobel Prize winning economist Muhammad Yunus from Grameen Bank, and a Danish documentary called The Micro Debt. South Sudan is a new country which now means the conflict with Sudan will be between two nations rather than regions in the same country, while Darfur is still far from resolved. In health research, there are promising results that the use of ARVs can reduce the spread of HIV and the fight to eradicate polio is within reach. The list goes on and the debate between how do address poverty continues while known solutions are not gaining enough support. This can be attributed to two challenges. First, there is a resistance to admit that some aid and development interventions have done harm. Second, a challenge exists in communicating the complexity of the solutions in a way that captures the attention of people but is not misleading. Do No Harm Advocates, trying to motivate people to act, will put together bumper sticker phrases that amount to saying that every positive, no matter how small, can make a difference. They are absolutely right when taking the phrase literally, but the intended definition of make a difference is to affect positive change on ones own life and/or the lives of others. Every dollar counts and every minute you can give will help for the greater cause. It taps into collective action for change and can be a powerful message. What is missing from the discussion is that when you make a difference it can be for better or for worse. Humanitarian work gets to be the exception to the rule when it comes to failure and causing harm. A student who miserably fails an exam does not get a pat on the back for trying really hard. The same goes for the basketball player who misses the game winning shot and the inventor that tries to start a business around an idea that is utterly terrible. In these examples the stakes are very low. A missed basketball shot happens and people go about living their lives. What does happen is that failures are identified as such. This mechanism of accountability encourages the player and team to improve so that they succeed the next time. Continuing to make the same mistakes or to underperform will lead to boos and calls for a change. This is the space where donors and stakeholders can work in unison to hold actors and interventions accountable. Mistakes and poorly designed programs can be the difference between life and death for some people. The inability to adequately prepare for drought in Southern Somalia means that tens of thousands of children under the age of 5 will die. The international community knew that a drought would happen and what it would take to prepare. For a host of reasons, Somalia was not ready for this drought and is suffering for it. On the other hand, Kenya and Ethiopia are examples of countries that learned from their last famines and have done the necessary preparation. They are far from being in a perfect position and will continue to improve so that the next drought will be even easier to overcome.

Failure will happen and mistakes will be made, but it should not be given a free pass. If we hold our favorite athlete to perform at a high level, then we should do the same of aid and development. That starts with the basic admission that actions can lead to both positive and negative outcomes and it is of the utmost importance to mitigate negative outcomes and support what works. Health has experienced two new studies that challenge how commonly accepted solutions are seen. The first is a study in Senegal on insecticide treated bed nets that found malaria incidence fell for the first eighteen months but then rose above previous levels after the two year mark. The second found that HIV positive people on ARV treatment are less likely to spread HIV. Bed nets have been used to reduce the spread of malaria and there is no doubt that it does it in the short term. By taking a long term look at the impact, the study urges for people to think about how they are used. This will lead to further studies and hopefully innovations. If the study is right, we can start thinking of ways to make bed nets more effective and improve on the intervention. The ARV study shows an unplanned outcome that does helps to address the spread of HIV. We now know that the drugs used to treat patients can also reduce the likelihood of HIV being passed from one partner to the next. Learning through rigorous evaluations has caused ARVs and bed nets to be thought of in different ways that will move us closer to the elimination of HIV and malaria. Embracing Complexity Rigorous research about the success and failures of interventions must be not only be ongoing, but continuously fine-tuned. Social media has been an excellent force in connecting the aid community, but it has also shortened the space for a sound bite to catch the attention of people. Twitter is the most limiting with NGOs needing to reach out in less than 140 characters. This has encouraged the use of statements such as this quote used by President Clinton: Women perform 66 percent of the worlds work, and produce 50 percent of the food, yet earn only 10 percent of the income. It would be a really powerful indicator of global gender inequality if only it were true. Alas, the data needed to pull it together is far too disparate and not nearly as certain as that sentence appears. The reason for this is complicated, but part of it is the result of the incentives for development to sound less complicated. In order to get people to act or donate, an organization will rely on guilt-drive communication or attention-grabbing statistics. This leads to statements which claim a percentage increase in a given population will lead to a positive result also measured in a percentage. Aside from how hard it is to put together the evidence for such a claim, it ignores the many forces that contribute to the status quo. Solutions will be found aware of this complexity, not ignoring it. One present example is the attempt to connect the issue of the mineral trade in the Kivus region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the regions ongoing violence. The short argument made by some advocates is that groups who are perpetrating the violence are making money off the minerals that are sold to be used in electronics such as cell phones and laptop computers. They say that ensuring the trade is conflict free will cut off a significant source of income for these groups and will eventually lead to the decrease in violent acts, specifically the rape of women and young girls.

A brief understanding of the Congo reveals that the problem of violence in the region is much deeper than access to money from mineral trade. Poor institutions, an ineffective army, and shoddy infrastructure are all contributors to insecurity. Focusing on conflict minerals could end up causing more harm to the artisanal miners who will lose jobs than the militias deriving an income from the trade. The mineral trade is a part of the discussion but its role is not nearly as clear as some have said. Part of this is rooted in the need to make a humanitarian crisis matter to the international community. Advocates have tried to tell the story of the crimes committed in the region, but it has been the conflict mineral story that has allowed for the issue to reach college campuses, state legislatures, and to be included in the Dodd-Frank bill. Accomplishing that deserves recognition. The problems of raising awareness and explaining a complex situation have been at odds when it comes to the DRC, but conflict mineral advocates have found a way to connect the DRC to the United States and Europe. The challenge is then how to maintain engagement and begin to introduce complexity into the conversation. Failing Forward What we think is doing good very well may be doing harm. By communicating that poverty alleviation is a very hard and complex endeavor, the totality of interventions can be discussed. Having such an understanding will help innovations, support programs that work, increase accountability, and minimize any harm. This will also encourage the greater inclusion of stakeholders and foster a bottom up approach. Fortunately, there are thoughtful young people who want to minimize the harm and maximize how aid and development can support the movement of one billion people out of extreme poverty. The essays in this issue challenge commonly held ideas through well researched work and personal experiences. These young people are the future innovators and practitioners that will bring about exciting change through learning and the constant drive to improve.

scholArly Articles

The Failure of Foreign Aid in Africa: The Case of Zambia

eConoMiCs AbstrAct
This paper outlines the historical and geopolitical justifications for allocating official development assistance and multilateral aid (often referred to collectively as foreign aid) in Africa. Self-interest on the part of both the donor and recipient governments plays an immeasurable role in the failure of allocations over the past sixty years to cause economic growth or decrease poverty. While it is certain that both problems are political in nature and cannot be easily resolved, it is in learning about the reality of the application (not examining econometric patterns) that we can be better equipped to address the motives which propel them. Over the past sixty years, one billion dollars has been transferred from the United States alone, propelling what economist Dambisa Moyo calls a culture of aid, and fueling dependence, corruption, and complacence in recipient countries. Summaries of the models used to justify aid allocations and the historical construction that aid could solve underdevelopment and poverty are practically applied to the case study of Zambia, a least developed African country whose per capita income levels, had the aid models been correct, had the potential to reach $20,000; yet, despite structural adjustment lending and millions of dollars, Zambias per capita income level in the 1990s hovered around a mere $500. Instead, as this case study attests, salvation rests in increased economic liberalization, the development of institutions, and the improvement of economic and political environment.

Courtney Meyer and international studies Major albion College

ExpEnsivE DictAtors

For many African dictators, foreign aid is nothing short of a personal gift. Jean Bedel Bokassa, head of state of the Central African Republic from 1966 until 1979, admitted once: Everything around here is financed by the French government. We ask the French for money, get it, and waste it. During the 1970s, when France happily provided its former colony with $38 million annually, Bokassa wasted no less than $20 million on a ceremony transforming him from a president into an emperor wearing a $2 million crown and $145,000 Guiselin robes. His country had less than 170 miles of paved roads and a population immersed in abject poverty, with average percapita incomes hovering around $250 a year.1 And even though Zaire in 1987 was considered the worlds eighthpoorest country (but as of 2009, the poorest), with a life expectancy of a mere 50 years of age, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko then held a personal fortune worth near $3 or $4 billion, including hotels, castles, mansions, and luxury apartments in across Europe, Australia, and the United States. According to Erwin Blumenthal, a German banker sent to Zaire by the International Monetary Fund, 18% of the national budget was routinely earmarked for his personal use. Since being brought to power in a CIA-backed coup dtat in 1965, he reportedly helped himself to 20 cents of every dollar of
1 Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business, (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989), 177.

foreign assistance. The prevalence of corruption was so high that a new phrase was coined to describe it, reportedly by Sese Seko himself: le mal Zairois, or the Zairean sickness. (Although Blumenthal warned the IMF of this behavior, in 1986, a loan worth $200 million was agreed upon, the eighth debt rescheduling of prior debts was helpfully arranged, and new loans totaling $370 million were released.) Mobutu Sese Seko, then an American ally, enjoyed the high life in France and Switzerland while the Democratic Republic of Congo descended into civil war. Until the conflict forced him to flee in 1997, he stashed millions into Swiss bank accounts and bought a getaway home on Lake Geneva with sixteen bedrooms, a Mercedes in the garage, and gold-plated faucets. 2 These stories are the rule, not the exception. Plied with cash loans from the East and West in return for their Cold War allegiance, Africas new rulers built themselves personal monuments and amassed excessive debt levels with little regard for the future of their country or its population. While it is simple to see that this was not the intended outcome, placing the blame, and then taking responsibility to reconcile the problem does not lie only with their often corrupt actions, but also with those who distribute the aid. The combination of these two dimensions has further multiplied what economic theory demonstrates was an idea doomed to fail even from its conceptualization. Aid is allocated in the face of increasing evidence that the world as a whole will not meet the eight targets of the 2015 Millennium Development Goals, each specifically identified as catalysts whose achievement would significantly impact the prospects and success rate for all subsequent development efforts. Aid is allocated perhaps because of the persistence of politicians like Gordon Brown, economists like Jeffrey Sachs, and rock stars like Bono, who insist that increased amounts of financing can bring peace, democracy, equality, and dignity for the worlds poor.3 Aid is allocated as a result of misrepresented economic models, donor self-interest, and a moral sense that more action is better than none. Yet, sixty years of history, billions of dollars, and hundreds of African families can attest to one fact which is becoming only increasing accepted with time: The puzzle of underdevelopment cannot be solved with increasing amounts of aid.
our culturE HistoricAl bAckgrounD: WHy DoEs AiD continuE
to

FloW?

In the sixty years spent adjusting what economist Dambisa Moyo calls a culture of aid, $1 trillion has been transferred from the United
2 Roger Thurow & Scott Kilman, Enough: Why the Worlds Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, (New York: United States Public Affair, 2009), 42. 3 Millennium Project. 2006. Millennium Development Goals. UNMillenniumProject.org.

oF

AiD: DEFining

AnD

unDErstAnDing

it

States alone over the past sixty years, and yet, one-sixth of humanity still lives precariously on one dollar a day.4 This practice continues because it satisfies the geopolitical or economic objectives of the developed world, but all it has created in Africa is dependence and a need for additional plans. David Karanja, a former Kenyan member of parliament, stated: Foreign aid has done more harm to Africa than we care to admit. It has led to a situation where Africa has failed to set its own pace and direction of development free of external interference. Today, Africas development plans are drawn thousands of miles away in the corridors of the IMF and World Bank.5 An end to poverty cannot result from continued check-writing, but from the abandonment of such counterproductive and utopian ideas for feasible practices and solutions which demand feedback and accountability. Yet because the bureaucrats pledging to alleviate their suffering are not elected by the citizens of the developing world, their promises remained unaccounted for. Despite spending trillions on foreign aid, the twelve cent medicines and four dollar bed nets which could prevent malarial deaths are not being distributed and economic growth is not increasing.6 Perhaps poverty alleviation only requires a change of thinking, toward a mindset which allows for the possibility that developing countries could help themselves. This is not to suggest that development and humanitarian assistance programs are not still necessary to resolve emergency situations of conflict or malnutrition, but that the long term solutions aimed at fostering growth should come from within. While it is not the objective of this submission to pursue that thought process, it seems to be nevertheless deeply ingrained within the conclusions that arise. Thus, to understand this proposition, it is necessary to first clarify the types of aid which are allocated and received, and the objectives that each carries with it. Ranging from the humanitarian assistance provided by the neutral and impartial Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies designed to protect the lives and dignity of individuals, the emergency aid provided by the non-governmental organization Mdecins sans Frontires to alleviate malnutrition after a natural disaster, and several classifications of governmental aid, a plethora of classifications exist to explain the types of as4 Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2009), 1. 5 Ayodele, Thompson, Franklin Cudjoe, Temba Nolutshungu, & Charles Sunwabe. 2005, September 14. African Perspectives on Aid: Foreign Assistance Will Not Pull Africa Out of Poverty. Economic Development Bulletin. 6 William R. Easterly, The White Mans Burden: Why the Wests Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and so Little Good, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 2 & 16.

sistance given by one country or organization to another country. It is not my intention to evaluate the effectiveness of emergency or humanitarian assistance programs conducted by nongovernmental organizations. Their work, whether the objective is relief or development, revolves around accountability and results, and their efforts have tangible effects which can be seen in the ground in the countries they serve. Instead, what I will address is: 1) That which the OECDs Development Assistance Committee refers to as official development assistance, which may be allocated by a government to either governments or multilateral organizations; and 2) Multilateral assistance. First, as defined by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), official development assistance (ODA) is composed of flows to countries and territories on the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) List of ODA Recipients and to multilateral development institutions which are: 1. Provided by official agencies, including state and local governments, or by their executive agencies; and 2. Each transaction of which: a. is administered with the promotion of the economic development and welfare of developing countries as its main objective; and b. is concessional in character and conveys a grant element of at least 25 per cent (calculated at a rate of discount of 10 per cent) (OECD 2008). Official development assistance, to summarize, is given directly from one government to another, and exists in many types. Although the primary purpose of ODA must be development, this classification also includes food and relief aid. Second, multilateral aid is provided to a designated country by an intergovernmental organization, and is most often in the form of loans from the World Bank or International Monetary Fund. In the case of the World Bank, they are often specifically directed toward a given project or economic sector, while the International Monetary Fund tends to apply conditionalities on its provisions, requiring that certain changes in economic policy or governance are made before the money can be utilized.
litErAturE rEviEW: tHE EFFEcts

The following review of development economics and foreign aid literature is provided to demonstrate the variation in thinking patterns which have evolved over the years. I present this both to inform the reader and to provide myself a coherent frame of reference to apply to Africa. Although it is by no means comprehensive, the arguments and conclusions represented here first explore the perspectives of aid supporters, followed by those of 8

oF

ForEign AiD

researchers who oppose its use as a tool for economic growth. Collectively, the studies demonstrate that evidence as to the effectiveness of aid, as well as the effectiveness of the econometric methods used to determine the effectiveness of aid itself, is mixed. An analysis conducted during the 1980s by the World Banks David Dollar and his colleague Craig Burnside concluded that the efficacy of aid provisions to raise growth increases with improvements to the policy environment. In 1999, the World Banks Paul Collier and Dollar presumed that poverty continued not because aid was ineffective, but because allocations did not follow the existence of poverty. They speculated that shifting the worlds allocations of aid then to ensure that funds were allocated to low income and perhaps some lower-middle income countries would have lifted an additional 51 million people from their $2 a day threshold of poverty.7 When another study by Burnside and Dollar in 2000 repeated the existence of a positive correlation between the type of policy environment into which aid was distributed and economic growth found in the 1980s, international agencies seized the results to justify increases in aid. As a result of heavy criticism, Burnside & Dollars study was revised in 2004 to examine data from the 1990s. In one such criticism, closer examination of Burnside and Dollars definitions of economic growth in a 2003 study by Easterly, Levine, and Roodman expanded the range of countries and years examined, and demonstrated a connection value between aid and growth not significantly different from zero.89 Furthermore, in the 2000 study, the economists defined aid only as distributions in the form of grants (i.e., effective development assistance), excluding concessional loans made at low interest rates, which the OECDs Development Assistance Committee includes in the official definition. Aside of their 2003 publication, Easterly and Roodman reconsidered the 0.933 out of 1 positive correlation that Burnside and Dollar found using instead the standard OECD definition, and again delegitimized the results.10 After replacing the earlier scrutinized policy interaction term with one for institutional quality, the authors still asserted that aid allocated to poor policy environments has a negative impact, while aid given to countries with good policies has a positive impact.11 This
7 Paul Collier & David Dollar, Aid Allocations and Poverty Reduction, (World Bank Working Papers, 1999). 8 Craig Burnside & David Dollar, Aid, Policies, and Growth, (The American Economic Review, 2000), 19. 9 William Easterly, Ruth Levine, & David Roodman, New Data, New Doubts: Revisiting Aid, Policies, and Growth.(Center for Global Development, 2003), 9. 10 William Easterly, Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth? (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2003), 2-3 & 9-12. 11 Craig Burnside & David Dollar. Aid, Policies, and Growth, (World Bank Working Papers, 2004), 5.

conclusion has not been accepted across the literature. Clemens, Radelet, and Bhavnani suggest another reason for the mixed reviews that aids level of effectiveness has received. The method that most researchers utilize, cross-country econometric regressions based on four year observations, is not necessarily informative, because not all aid types are meant to encourage economic growth. In situations where humanitarian aid is provided for the purpose of disaster relief, high allocations of aid and lower levels of growth as a result of the destruction should be expected. Project or program aid flows (i.e., aid intended to build infrastructure or support agricultural or trade efforts) should show results within this time frame, but aid directed at social sectors or given to alter technical concerns (i.e., aid meant to strengthen primary education systems) often requires an excess of four years to produce results. The focus on the 53% of aid flows which can be classified as short-impact (which they divide with help from the classifications given to aid commitments by the OECDs Creditor Reporting Service) causes them to reach a conclusion slightly different from that of Burnside and Dollar. The basic result does not depend on levels of income, the strength of institutions, or the quality of policies; we find that short-impact aid causes growth, on average, across countries regardless of these characteristics. A parabola-like relationship is observed with the level of aid allocated, with the maximum point being reached when aggregate ODA composes approximately 17% of GDP, or where short-impact aid composes approximately 8.8% of GDP. 12 Skepticism about the effectiveness of foreign aid can be traced all the way back to the 1950s in Peter Bauer and Milton Friedmans boisterous dissents even as the models justifying aid were being developed. Skepticism within development organizations began a few decades later, as a result of the negative feedback being collected from the structural adjustment program. Separate examinations conducted by Brumm and Ovaska based from the Burnside and Dollar study of 2000 demonstrated that aid had negative effects on growth, even for recipients with sound economic policies. Since aid dependency disincentivizes policy improvements, the latter study indicated that a 1 percent increase in aid as a percentage of GDP in the 86 countries sampled between 1975 and 1998 decreased annual real GDP per capita growth by 3.65 percent.1314 Higher aid flows, according to Knacks 2001 analysis, weaken governmental accountability in the institutions proven to be crucial to development by encouraging corruption and rent-seeking from supporters; recipient countries displayed lower bureaucratic quality
12 Michael Clemens, Steven Radelet, & Rikhil Bhavnani, Counting Chickens When They Hatch: The Short-Term Effect of Aid on Growth, (The Center for Global Development, 2004), 1-2, 14, & 36. 13 Harold Brumm, Aid, Policies, and Growth: Bauer was Right, (Cato Journal, 2009), 2 & 8. 14 Tomi Ovaska, The Failure of Development Aid, (Cato Journal, 2003), 10.

10

and weaker rule of law. The study also outlines a general consensus in the literature that conditioning aid on policy and governance reform is ineffective at inducing change, since aid reduces incentives for both effective and ineffective governments to establish efficient policies and institutions and thus attract foreign direct investment. 15 In 1995, Peter Boone considered whether aid given as a result of political motivations promoted investment or caused higher economic growth in the recipient country, and found neither to be the case. Instead, the study determined that aid allocations only increased government resources. Although Boone selected several key indicators of improvement in the economic conditions of the poor, since they respond quickly to higher consumption and improved health services, he identified no improvement stemming from increased aid on infant mortality, primary schooling ratios, or life expectancy.16 (Although he noted 30% lower infant mortality rates in the liberal political regimes and democracies, he attributed this to the potential for greater empowerment of the poor making governments more willing to provide basic social services, not specifically to aid allocations themselves.) Boones results have since been scrutinized by others; some concluded that his findings demonstrated a micro-macro paradox, in that aid-funded projects were reporting positive micro-level economic returns that were undetectable at the macro-level. For the past decade, researchers have attempted to discern variables upon which the effect of aid allocations could be conditional, suggesting inflation, budget balance, and openness in trade (Burnside & Dollar, 2000); an index of economic freedom (Ovaska, 2003), institutional quality (Burnside & Dollar, 2004), among others, but the work of Easterly, Levine, and Roodman in 2004 introduced a significant level of doubt in this idea.17 Surrounded by severe scrutiny concerning the development industrys effectiveness, Dollar and Harvard Universitys Alberto Alesina questioned in 2000 whether perhaps the odd allocational patterns initially noted by Collier and Dollar were significantly impacting aids ability to reduce poverty. Were donors responding to the types of incentives which would help to reduce poverty when they allocated funds, or, were the pattern of aid flows instead dictated in large part by political and strategic considerations which have little to do with rewarding good policies and helping the more efficient and less corrupt regimes? Their answer was a resounding affirmative to the latter position, and significant evidence was assembled to demonstrate the significance of such political and strategic considerations.
15 Stephen Knack, Aid Dependence and the Quality of Governance: A Cross Country Analysis, (World Bank Working Papers, 2003), 7-8. 16 Peter T. Boone, Politics and the Effectiveness of Foreign Aid, (Center for Economic Performance, 1995), 21-31. 17 Clemens, Radelet, & Bhavnani, 7.

11

Although the Nordic countries appear to respond more frequently to the income level, quality of institutions, and openness of their recipients, France gives to former colonies tied by political alliances regardless of their poverty level or politico-economic regime. The United States is most often influenced by its interests in the Middle East. These allocations may be effective at promoting strategic interests, but only weak correlations exist between poverty, democracy, and good policy.18 A subsequent study by Alesina and Weder in 2002 indicated that most allocations flow to corrupt governments in environments where they are not effective.19 Additional studies have indicated that regardless of whether aid is allocated to an impoverished area, the relationship between investment and growth used to justify allocations is weak. Econometric regressions conducted by William Easterly in 2001 concerning the validity of the financing gap model examined the economies of eighty-eight countries using OECD data from 1965 until 1995. Only seventeen of those countries showed a positive statistical correlation between aid and increased investment, and of those, only six of them showed the expected one percent increase of GDP in investment. (Two of the six countries, however, received insignificant amounts of aid: China, which received aid totaling .2% of GDP, and Hong Kong, which received .07%.) Easterly continued his analysis by examining the ability of the investment to translate into growth in 138 countries, but found this result in only four countries.20 Further analysis by Rajan and Subramanian, provoked by the Clemens, Radelet, and Bhavnani study, indicated that no aid provision, neither bilateral nor multilateral, regardless of the intention to spur a short or long term impact, and no matter the sector, can establish economic growth.21 Finally, consideration must be given to the idea of a poverty trap which leaves countries unable to escape poverty without external assistance. Statistical data compiled by economist Angus Maddison for 137 countries (ranked according to their per capita incomes from 1950 to 2001) was examined by Easterly. This data showed that the poorest fifth of countries (excluding communist and Persian Gulf oil-producing countries) increased their income over the five decades in question by 2.25%, while the remaining four-fifths of countries saw a per capita income change of 2.47%. Although countries unable to escape poverty would have displayed per
18 Alberto Alesina & David Dollar, Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?, (Journal of Economic Growth, 2000), 24, 40-41 & 46-47. 19 Peter T. Leeson, Escaping Poverty: Foreign Aid, Private Property, and Economic Development, (Journal of Private Enterprise, 2008), 13. 20 William Easterly, How to Assess the Needs for Aid? The Answer: Dont Ask, (Paper prepared for the Third AFD/EUDN Conference, 2005), 28-39 & 42. 21 Raghuram G. Rajan & Arvind Subramanian, Aid and Growth: What does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show?, (IMF, 2005), 14.

12

capita incomes fluctuating around or remaining at zero, the study indicated that even low income countries could generate growth increases. Countries with above average amounts of foreign aid compared to those with below average aid receipts displayed similar growth rates, again reinforcing the conclusion that aid does not play a significant role in stimulating growth. An isolated examination of the period from 1985 to 2001, shown to have produced less economic growth for the poorest fifth, proved that eleven of the twenty-eight countries were not the original poorest countries, meaning that some of them had fallen from above while others had escaped their supposed stagnant growth. Although each of these countries was also found to have received increasing amounts of foreign aid as a percentage of their income, it did not provide assistance in breaking their cycle of poverty and stimulating growth; their growth rates remained low in spite of its presence. The poorest fifth was not ensnared in a poverty trap, but the trap of poor government, as the 1.3% decline in growth rates stemmed from increased corruption and decreased democracy.22 In sum, econometric evidence about whether or not aid promotes growth is mixed. Researchers continue to dispute whether the condition of institutions and the policy environment into which aid is funneled affects its probability of success. Despite this lack of consensus, a few points do not appear to be disputable across the literature. Providing large amounts of financial aid to a country with poor economic institutions and policies is not likely to stimulate reform, and may actually retard it, as Brumm and Ovaska explained. Most development economists believe that differences in institutions and state policies across countries are at the root of large differences in income per capita, as both play a significant role in generating long-term growth. As was expressed by Knack in 2001, there is also considerable skepticism about the effects that aid can have on the condition of institutions. Although the conclusion drawn by Clemens, Radelet, and Bhavnani about the failure of most researchers to categorize aid before running regressions about whether it will cause economic growth complicates efforts to seek out the truth, another conclusion is repeated by supporters (Burnside & Dollar, 2000, as well as Clemens, Radelet, & Bhavnani, 2004) and opponents (Boone, 1995): allocations unequivocally increase government consumption. However, it is difficult to suggest that patterns of numbers can accurately depict the political and economic reality within countries. Econometric conclusions, most of which are tentative at best, should be interpreted cautiously where policy is concerned.
MoDEls

Justifications for providing foreign aid stem from several economic growth models which were once widely accepted as growth mechanisms in the
22 Easterly, 15-20.

For

EconoMic groWtH: briEFly consiDEring

tHE

EconoMic tHEoriEs

13

developed world. The Harrod-Domar model, Rostows Stages of Growth, and Chenery and Strouts two gap model all revolve around using aid to fill a financing gap created from a deficit of savings and investment. By providing funds for the purchase of capital, these theories suggest that economic productivity can subsequently increase. Although these models have since been discredited in developed countries for their failure to explain true relationships between the variables they discuss (i.e., the relationship between investment and growth is weak), this revelation has not become commonplace in the minds of most development economists, who still use them to derive explanations for inter-country differences in income between the developing and developed world. Despite revisions made by World Bank economists, the revised minimum standard model (as the adaptation of these past models is now known) still allocates aid proportional to the last years investment per GDP to obtain an expected growth rate. To determine the aid needed, the model measures the excess of estimated required investment over actual savings.23 (For a summary of the relevance and usage of each model which has been used over the past 60 years to justify aid, please see Chart I in the appendix.)
tHE rolE

Though the self-interest of a few greedy dictators has already been considered, blame must also be placed on the governments allocating development assistance. Despite having the largest number of poor countries, Africa is often not the priority recipient for aid allocations, as this chart derived from the statistical databases at the OECD indicates. While it may be argued that given the consequences that aid has been demonstrated to have, this could perhaps be a positive outcome. However, this same self-interest often leads donor countries to support dictators like Zaires Mobutu, and multiply the effects of their damage with food aid allocations derived from the excess production quotas they impose on their agricultural industries which promote dependence and complacence.

oF

sElF-intErEst

23 Easterly, 28-36.

14

OECD Country Aid Allocations by Regions, from 1960-2008 [in USD millions]
Year 1960-1964 1965-1969 1970-1974 1975-1979 1980-1984 1985-1989 1990-1994 1995-1999 2000-2004 2005-2008 E. Eur. 7% 4% 2% 1% 2% 1% 2% 2% 3% 2% N.A. 2% 1% 1% 2% 2% 1% 1% 1% 1% 0% S.S.A. 9% 14% 12% 15% 17% 19% 18% 16% 18% 21% L.A. &C 2% 3% 2% 2% 4% 5% 4% 3% 3% 2% S.Am. 2% 2% 2% 2% 3% 6% 6% 6% 8% 11% S&SE Asia 3% 5% 5% 2% 2% 3% 2% 3% 1% 1% C. Asia 25% 25% 15% 12% 9% 8% 6% 6% 7% 7% M. East 5% 3% 2% 6% 5% 5% 4% 3% 4% 13% Ocean. 0% 3% 4% 4% 3% 3% 2% 3% 1% 1% Unspec. 4% 3% 5% 6% 7% 9% 10% 12% 14% 14%

Abbreviations: E.Eur.: Eastern Europe N.A.: North Africa S.S.A.: Sub-Saharan Africa L.A. & C.: Latin America and the Caribbean S.Am.: South America S & SE Asia: South and Southeast Asia C. Asia: Central Asia M. East: Middle East Ocean.: Oceania Unspec.: Unspecified countries

*Note: Rows do not add to 100% because this chart does not account for ODA allocations made to multilateral organizations and agencies.
cAsE stuDy: ZAMbiA

The case study of Zambia provides a much-needed escape from econometrics to examine the reality of aid allocations. Northern Rhodesia declared British independence in 1964, and amidst strong copper prices, the countrys historical dependence on the mining industry to fuel economic growth was left unquestioned. In 1970, the mining sector accounted for 97% of gross export revenues and 36% of GDP, but revenues allowed the government controlled by President Kenneth Kaunda to allocate funding to education and health needs. Following a decade of growth, economic performance inevitably declined with the world price of copper, causing the share of mining in GDP to fall by half its previous level at the same time 15

that prices of imported oil rose. Foreign exchange became short, and the failure of copper prices to recover as expected created additional strains on development efforts.24 Economic policy in Zambia continued to decline in the period between 1970 and 1973, yet the amount of aid the country received rose continuously, reaching 11% of real GDP by the early 1990s25. With underutilized agricultural resources, extensive consumer subsidies, growing levels of unsustainable debt, an overly protected manufacturing sector financed by imports purchased from export finances, and a heavily government-managed commercial sector, the economy required drastic fiscal and monetary contractionary policies. Due to growing political polarization, Kaunda feared the implementation of excessive reforms, but when private sources of capital were lost from the failure to privatize key industries, he was forced to accept the conditionalities set by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in order to receive more loans to offset debt payments. Despite substantial aid flows, as evidenced by $3 billion of debt in 1980 and interest payments exceeding annual GDP growth, standards of living plummeted. Chronic malnutrition affected 45% of the population, infant mortality rates increased to 105 per thousand births, and life expectancy at birth fell to a mere 48 years in 1992 from declining standards and the rising incidence of AIDS. Excessive aid allocations come with a high opportunity cost, as they require scarce resources which should be allocated toward realistic promotions of growth to pay off loans which did not do so. Zambian spending on debt accumulation exceeded educational spending by thirty times in 1994. Though this example is drastic, the phenomenon is widely shared in surrounding countries, as a 1996 Oxfam report noted that, For less than is currently being spent on debt, it would be possible by the year 2000 to make social investments which would save the lives of around 21 million African children, and provide 90 million girls with access to primary education.26 Fifteen intermittent years of structural adjustment under the watchful eyes of the World Bank and IMF ensued, interrupted by failures to meet conditionalities and elections. A lack of sincerity due to continued rentseeking activities on the part of government prolonged needed currency devaluations, privatization, and discontinuations of subsidies. Attempts to postpone debt repayments created revenue for supply-side constraints, and continued lending from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund was made conditional on crisis control, adoption of effective reforms, and
24 Gladstone G. Bonnick, Zambia Country Assistance Review: Turning an economy around, (World Bank, 1997), 48-49. 25 David Dollar & William Easterly, The search for the key: Aid, investment, and policies in Africa, (World Bank Working Papers, 1999), 23. 26 James M. Cypher & James L. Dietz, The Process of Economic Development, (Routledge, 1997), 538 & 551.

16

economic diversification. World Bank loan distribution designed to address infrastructural, energy, agricultural, financial, and educational constraints increased from $12 million a year before 1972, to $55 million a year in 1973-1982, beginning a cycle which resulted in the 2005 receipt of the title Highly Indebted Poor Country.2728 Aid composed 19.98% of the countrys gross domestic product from 1980 until 200229, despite evidence from several studies that allocations exceeding 8% (or by Clemens, Radelet, & Bhavnanis account, 17% if the aid is not categorized) produce negative effects on growth.30 When lending amounts are examined to establish a projected investment rate, the failure of the economy to grow as anticipated devastates the effectiveness of the financing gap model. The gross failure of the projections made using the incremental capital output ratio (ICOR), the ratio of investment needed against the desired GDP growth, to materialize as expected in the below graph leads to the conclusion that physical and human capital investments cannot translate into economic growth. The inability of aid to do this only further contributes to the non-development, as it does not allow citizens to work toward a middle class standing, but toward inheriting excessive and unsustainable country debt. As is demonstrated, while the model expected aid allocations to significantly increase economic growth, the trajectory of GDP follows not the curve, but rather the circumstances occurring endogenously as a result of the decline in copper prices and their effects on the related productive industries. If Zambia had converted all of its aid receipts into economic growth, it would have sustained a per capita income of $20,000 in the 1990s, instead of one which hovered around a mere $500.31 Despite receiving 18 adjustment loans, Zambia still showed negative growth rates, large current account and budget deficits, excessive inflation, a negative interest rate, and exchange rate overvaluation32. Four such loans totaled $212 million, and all but 2% of allocations were disbursed, even though the government did not implement the requested reforms, a result now regarded as largely predictable because of the amount of time the president had remained in power.33 Instead, economic recovery appears only to be associated with the governments slow fiscal and monetary liberaliza27 Bonnick, 49-53. 28 Andrew Mwaba, Fiscal Consolidation and Adjustment: Lessons from Zambia and Uganda, (African Development Bank Economic Research Papers, 1997), 11-25. 29 Dollar & Easterly, 11. 30 Easterly, 347. 31 Easterly, 17. 32 William Easterly, What Did Structural Adjustment Adjust: The Association of Policies and Growth with Repeated IMF and World Bank Adjustment Loans, (Journal of Development Economics, 2004), 9 & 11. 33 Dollar & Easterly, 42

17

tion efforts, not the lending receipts themselves, as their receipt may have slowed governmental perception of a need for reform. These changes allowed for the creation of income which could be fueled into production, because aid allocations do not seem to translate into investment. The haphazard discontinuations and continuations of loans did not produce a significant effect on growth, and it cannot be concluded that the circumstances were different as a result of the slow transition to a more positive environment for implementation. This conclusion remains valid when Boones study is reconsidered, as it found that liberal economic regimes do not utilize aid any differently than those who control more restrictive policy environments, as both allocate their receipts toward additional governmental consumption.34 In 1986, with GDP growth near zero, rising inflation, and budgetary and trade deficits, the need for liberalization became clear, and reductions to food subsidies and trade diversification began to decrease the imbalances. Numerous monetary devaluation and stabilization attempts decreased inflation rates, and further subsidy removal reduced distortions. While it may be said that the conditionalities required for loan receipts during the structural adjustment programs existence helped to influence governmental liberalization efforts, growth clearly followed the re-expansion of trading activities, and stability stemmed from the currency and exchange rate depreciation. These fiscal policies, the decrease of the welfare state, and the privatization of industries increased economic efficiency, reduced market distortions and inflation, and increased industry productivity. Poverty remains a significant concern today, but inflation has stayed in the single digits, the currency is still stable, and interest rates have remained low.35 Recovery in the copper industry was fueled by long-awaited privatization efforts and increases in world copper prices and foreign investment, allowing real GDP growth to reach 6% between 2005 and 2008. The happy ending in this story resulted from relative political stability and, despite the electoral consequences, the ultimate embrace of a more liberal capitalist system over a centrally planned commercial sector. Economic growth, then, can be attributed to the fiscal and monetary stability created from governmental reform efforts, and the ability to translate those achievements into production and trade. This conclusion is also drawn by the 1999 study by Dollar and Easterly, who attribute Africas poor growth record to macroeconomic mismanagement, poor quality of public services, financial repression, and closed trading regimes.36 Similarly to the 1930s, when the economic transition from a colony to a country began, the development which allowed the country to reach middle income status occurred through
34 Boone, 32 35 CIA World Factbook, Zambia (2009). 36 Dollar & Easterly, 42.

18

its own resources and internally generated income, just as Bauer predicted. Thus, there is no reason to conclude that aid allocations played a hand in the recovered economic performance of Zambia. Aid allocations, instead, promoted rent-seeking by the political elite, and created dependency on continued monetary flows to pay off past debts. Continuous receipts of aid create an attitude that citizens must wait for outsiders to help them, and the destruction of incentives and institutions which could otherwise help to promote growth also literally creates dependency, especially when countries require more loans to pay off the debt of previous ones.3738 These concerns, especially as illustrated in the case study of Zambia, make it clear that while aid satisfies political objectives, it cannot fulfill economic ones, and it cannot change the circumstances surrounding economic growth. Continuing allocations only lengthen the list of problems hindering development, as resources which could be otherwise allocated toward production have to be instead directed toward debt. Additional examination of the right hand side of the following graph of African aid allocations and growth shows that the decrease in allocations that began in the mid-1990s has allowed for increasing per capita income. Yet, even then, despite increasing acceptance of the danger of large allocations, the majority of African countries still received 15% of their income from aid allocations.39 Despite increased acceptance that aid is not aiding the poor and is simply increasing government consumption, the convoluted motives that propel foreign aid allocations will ensure that they continue. Hope for improved economic performance of developing economies and increased empowerment of the worlds poorest citizens must rest not in official development assistance, but in the efforts of nongovernmental organizations like SCOUT BANANA, Oxfam International, or Action Against Hunger, organizations whose missions and donors ensure their accountability and action against the causes which perpetuate poverty, underdevelopment, and malnutrition. Though many economists have identified the importance of the economic and political environment in aid effectiveness, rather it is that the condition of the environment itself, as Zambia demonstrates, which causes change and development. African development is not contingent on the receipt of more aid allocations, but on the contrary, the reduction of such dependence. Long-run growth and sustainable efforts toward development
37 David B. Skarbek & Peter T. Leeson, What Can Aid Do?, (Cato Journal, 2009), 3-6. 38 Claudia R. Williamson, Exploring the Failure of Foreign Aid: The Role of Incentives and Information, (Development Research Institute of New York University, 2009), 11 & 14. 39 Easterly 46 & 50.

rEFlEctions

AnD

conclusions

19

must be endogenously generated, and although the assistance of NGOs will be instrumental in overcoming obstacles, sustainability and progress is not possible without increased governmental and institutional accountability.

Courtney is currently a senior at Albion College, where she is working towards a major in Economics & International Studies. She may be contacted at CMM16@albion.edu.

Works citED

Alesina, Alberto. & David Dollar. 2000. Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why? Journal of Economic Growth. 5:33-63. Accessed June 1, 2010. JSTOR database. Ayodele, Thompson, Franklin Cudjoe, Temba Nolutshungu, & Charles Sunwabe. 2005, September 14. African Perspectives on Aid: Foreign Assistance Will Not Pull Africa Out of Poverty. Economic Development Bulletin. Accessed November 9, 2009. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9292 Bonnick, Gladstone G. 1997. Zambia Country Assistance Review: Turning 20

an economy around. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Boone, Peter T. 1995, December. Politics and the Effectiveness of Foreign Aid. Center for Economic Performance. Accessed November 18, 2009. http:// cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0272.pdf Brumm, Harold 2003. Aid, Policies, and Growth: Bauer was Right. Cato Journal. Accessed November 11, 2009. http://www.cato.org/ pubs/journal/ cj23n2/cj23n2-1.pdf Burnside, Craig., & David Dollar. 2000, September. Aid, Policies, and Growth. The American Economic Review .90. Accessed November 11, 2009. http://www.jstor.org/stable/117311 Burnside, C., & Dollar, D. 2004, March. Aid, Policies, and Growth. World Bank Working Papers. Accessed December 20, 2010, from http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContent Server/WDSP/ IB/2004/04/21/000009486_20040421103444/Rendered/PDF/wp s3251Aid.pdf Clemens, Michael, Steven Radelet, & Rikhil Bhavnani. 2004. Counting Chickens When They Hatch: The Short-Term Effect of Aid on Growth. The Center for Global Development. Accessed November 17, 2009. http://www.cgdev.org/ content/ publications/detail/2744 Collier, Paul, & David Dollar. 1999. Aid Allocations and Poverty Reduc tion. World Bank Working Papers. Accessed October 27, 2009. United Nations of Geneva library. Cypher, James M., & James L. Dietz 1997. The Process of Economic De velopment. London: Routledge. Dollar, David, & William R. Easterly. 1999, March. The Search for the Key: Aid, Investment, and Policies in Africa. World Bank Working Papers. Accessed November 4, 2009. http://econ.worldbank.org/ex ternal/default/main?pagePK =64165259&theSitePK= 469372&piPK =64165421&menuPK=64166093&entity ID=000094946_9903250559010 Easterly, William R. 2001. The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists Ad ventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge, MA: Mas sachusetts Institute of Technology Press. 21

Easterly, William R. 2003, summer. Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth? Journal of Economic Perspectives. 17. Accessed October 28, 2009. http:// www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/ Easterly/File/can%20foreign%20 aid%20buy%20growth.pdf Easterly, William R. 2004. What Did Structural Adjustment Adjust: The Association of Policies and Growth with Repeated IMF and World Bank Adjustment Loans. Journal of Development Economics. Easterly, William R. 2005, December. How to Assess the Needs for Aid? The Answer: Dont Ask. Paper prepared for the Third AFD/EUDN Conference, Financing Development: What are the Challenges in Expanding Aid Flows?: Paris. Easterly, William R. 2006. The White Mans Burden: Why the Wests Ef forts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and so Little Good. New York: The Penguin Press. Easterly, William R., Ruth Levine, & David Roodman. 2003, June. New Data, New Doubts: Revisiting Aid, Policies, and Growth. Ac cessed November 9, 2009. http://www.cgdev.org/content/publica tions/detail/2764 Hancock, Graham. 1989. Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Cor ruption of the International Aid Business. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press. Knack, Stephen. 2001. Aid Dependence and the Quality of Governance: A Cross Country Analysis. World Bank Working Papers. Accessed November 11, 2009. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/ex ternal/default/WDSContent Server/WDSP/IB/2000/08/26/0000 94946_00081406502627/Rendered/PDF/multi_page.pdf Leeson, Peter .T. 2008. Escaping Poverty: Foreign Aid, Private Property, and Economic Development. Journal of Private Enterprise. 22. Ac cessed November 8, 2009. http://www.peterleeson.com/Papers.html Millennium Project. 2006. Millennium Development Goals. UNMillenni umProject.org. Accessed March 9, 2010. http://www.unmillennium project.org/ Moyo, Dambisa. 2009. Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 22

Mwaba, Andrew. 1997. Fiscal Consolidation and Adjustment: Lessons from Zambia and Uganda. African Development Bank Economic Research Papers. No. 30. Cte dIvoire: African Development Bank. OECD. 2008, November. Is it ODA? Organisation of Economic Coopera tion and Development. Accessed September 5, 2010. http://www. oecd.org/dataoecd/21/21/34086975.pdf Ovaska, Tomi. 2003. The Failure of Development Aid. Cato Journal. Ac cessed November 11, 2009. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/ cj23n2/ cj23n2-2.pdf Rajan, Rhaguram G. & Arvind Subramanian. 2005. Aid and Growth: What does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show?. International Mon etary Fund. Skarbek, David B., & Peter T. Leeson. 2009, fall. What Can Aid Do? Cato Journal. 29. Accessed November 9, 2009. http://www.cato.org/pubs/ journal/ cj29n3/cj29n3-2.pdf Thurow, Roger. & Scott Kilman. 2009. Enough: Why the Worlds Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. New York: United States Public Affairs. Williamson, Claudia R. 2009. Exploring the Failure of Foreign Aid: The Role of Incentives and Information. Development Research Institute of New York University. Accessed November 4, 2009. http://dri. as.nyu.edu/object/dri. publications.williamsonfailure Zambia. CIA World Factbook. Accessed November 16, 2009. https:// www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/za.html

23

AppEnDix

Models Original Objective HarrodDomar:

Adaptation to Development
Output depends on capital Countries are poor because they have surplus of labor and deficit of capital Used to determine investment rate necessary for given growth rate Technological change is catalyst for growth, which is not sustained by savings Recognizes importance of diminishing returns Theory adapted to explain income differences between countries: countries are poor because they have little machinery, so gaining technology provides an incentive for growth Countries can take off into sustainable growth with assistance

Counter-Arguments/Disproof
Investment is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for growth Correlation between investment and growth weaker than anticipated, and changes in ratio can be explained through other factors impacting investment or growth probabilities, such as corruption, kleptocracy, or instability International capital did not flow to these areas, even though they have the highest rate of return because they are unstable Romer: Demonstration of negative or zero growth rate in developing countries De Long: Economists believed that countries could converge because they were examining the historical growth patterns of developed countries when making predictions Lucas: Capital accumulation is not necessary for growth Kuznets: Investment is not the key to growth Only 3 of his cited 15 countries [one being socialist Russia] follow the model

Intended to describe shortterm recessions and investments in the United States

Solow Growth:
Meant to explain growth patterns in United States

Rostows Stages:

Designed to explain pattern of growth necessary to develop Chenery & Strouts TwoGap: Created to

West provides aid to fill financing gap between investment and savings Fill gap between investment and saving Investment (and then income) would increase at a greater pace with assistance Savings rate could increase, allowing the country to delay enough current consumption to finance its own investment, sustain itself, and pay back loans Harrod-Domar: Growth rate proportional to last years investment/GDP Two-Gap: Foreign aid and private finance fill the financing gap between saving and investment

demonstrate how aid flows would translate into growth

Connection between investment and growth is not secure, but ICOR [investment-to-capital output ratio] is main gauge of financing need Easterly: Connection between aid-investment exists between 17 of 88 tested countries; connection between investment-growth exists for 4 of 138

Revised Minimum Standard: Computerized version of Two- Gap and HarrodDomar

See Chenery & Strouts Two Gap model criticisms

cHArt 1: suMMAry

oF tHEoriEs justiFy ForEign AssistAncE AllocAtions

24

Win-Win Relations or Neo-Colonialism in Disguise? Analyzing China-Africas South-South Cooperation

PeaCe AbstrAct
Complex transformations in recent history have provided an interesting backdrop for 21st century international relations. New ideas are being put forward, and new world leaders look poised to emerge on the international stage to shift the melting pot of development. With the advent of this new world order and the rise of nations such as China and India who are gradually climbing towards a global political and economic power a novel idea is taking precedence over the much-discussed North-South development ideology.1 These ambitious developing-world nations in the global south are poised to bypass rich northern states in this dynamic new shift towards development particularly, the development of the African continent. But how successful is this new South-South cooperation? (Isnt China part of the northern hemisphere?) Does it provide greater opportunities for development for Africa or do significant challenges remain? Since the onset of her independence, Africa has been the focal point of much interest of foreign strategic interest, with China playing a key influential role in the much-discussed development strategy across the continent.2 Chinas deep-rooted and vested involvement in the continent has provided an alternative to the traditional Western paternalism of the early part of this century.3 This paper argues that Chinas success for development in the region through her economic impact may prove to be a mixed blessing however, that Sino-African relations may in fact be less of a win-win partnership unless Africa plays a more nuanced role in ensuring its own development.This paper begins by looking at the underlying objectives and strategies for Chinese foreign policy towards Africa and how the dynamics of development have shifted through the emergence of South-South relations. It will then examine the context of the emerging Sino-African trade and economic relationship through the position of dependency theory. Finally, the extent to which trade and regional integration provide an interesting alternative to Africas current development strategy will be discussed. How much of a win-win relationship is really possible, or is it much more complicated than it seems?
and

Farhana rahMan ConFliCt studies, international relations university oF toronto

Over the last few decades, Chinas position on the world-power stage has imploded to near-world power status, and the remarkable transformation of the countrys foreign policy over the past 10-15 years has certainly been a cautious awakening to current world powers in the West.4 While close southern counterparts such as India and Brazil have also gained confidence, gradually making headway to increased relations with countries of the developing world, Chinas growing relationship with Africa is a prime example of South-South cooperation at its finest.5 The dependency
1 German Development Institute. http://www.die-gdi.de/CMS-Homepage/openwebcms3_e.nsf/ (ynDK_contentByKey)/ADMR-7BLF2V/$FILE/9%202007%20EN.pdf. 2 Garth Shelton, China, Africa and Asia Advancing South-South Co-operation, in Politics and Social Movements in a Hegemonic World: Lessons from Africa, Asia and Latin America June (2005): pg. 347. 3 ibid. 4 Assessing the Growing Role and Developmental Impact of China in Africa: An African Perspective, in South-South Cooperation: A Challenge to the Aid System? (Philippines: IBON Foundation, Inc., 2010). 5 ibid.

HistoricAl bAckgrounD

25

school advocates this novel form of relations between dependent states as it allows for the possibility of enhancing their bargaining position with the North. In part, the market for each state could be enlarged through a larger regional market.6 Seemingly viewed as a new paradigm of development, this type of cooperation is said to be not an option but an imperative for developing countries to meet their common challenges.7 Dependency theorists have further addressed South-South cooperation be a possible way out for developing countries to break away from the exploitative economic stronghold imposed by the North. This is based primarily on the function of underdevelopment that is, resources are consumed to benefit the dominant state, while the peripheral states are disadvantaged.8 Africa has long appeared to be the perfect player in the new dynamics of South-South trade and cooperation with China her key partner. Chinas more expansive role and assertion as a growing economic giant has been initiated through a distinct period of economic reform and restructuring by extending its involvement in multilateral organizations and trade.9 As a result, Chinas foreign policy as a whole is by and large considered to be more dynamic, constructive, flexible and self-confident than was the case during the preceding decades as she is clearly assimilating into the international system.10 With a cautious Western world weary of Chinas emergence, China attempted to align herself with and increase assistance substantially to developing countries (particularly African) in an effort to create a North-South divide that binds the southern countries together against a paternalistic West.11 This only further solidified Chinas ascendency to strategic economic relations with Africa to be viewed as a major force of development for the continent, ultimately becoming a definite part of her foreign policy.
6 Tavis D. Jules and Michelle Morais de s e Silva, How Different Disciplines have Approached South-South Cooperation and Transfer, Society for International Education Journal 5:1 (2008): pg. 52. 7 ibid. 8 Inye Briggs, South-South Co-operation and Regional Integration Perspectives from Africa (paper presented at the multi-year expert meeting on international cooperation, Trade and Development Board: Investment, Enterprise and Development Commission, Geneva, Switzerland, February 2-9, 2009). 9 Jean-Claude Maswana. China-Africas Emerging Economic Links: A Review Under the CorePeriphery Perspective (paper presented at the annual conference of the World Association for the Political Economy (WAPE), Shimane, Japan, October 27-28, 2007). 10 Inye Briggs, South-South Co-operation and Regional Integration Perspectives from Africa (paper presented at the multi-year expert meeting on international cooperation, Trade and Development Board: Investment, Enterprise and Development Commission, Geneva, Switzerland, February 2-9, 2009). 11 ibid.

AFricAs rolE

26

African countries have in return warmly welcomed China (and even India) for similar reasons. Disillusioned by lack of Western development attempts post-independence and with the Wests strings-attached form of aid, African states pursued alternatives to their development agenda.12 Chinas outstretched arm as a fellow southern country offering mutual respect, concern for diversity, common prosperity, and similar rhetoric, looked all the more appealing to a continent fighting to progress.13 The rapid entry into African markets was, in comparison to the Western form of development, as a result of Chinas no strings attached foreign policy and somewhat enthusiastic approach to development aid that increased relations between the two players. This soft power diplomacy used so strategically by the Eastern nation that has intertwined political and economic incentives allowed Chinas engagement with Africa [to intensify] simultaneously in the four dimensions of trade, investment, aid, and immigration.14 This active promotion of economic interaction with Africa has significantly contributed to the impressive growth rates of bilateral trade. Thus, creating a win-win relationship would be simple and effective as both countries would comply by these South-South terms.15 In his article entitled China in Africa: Affirming Dependency Theory, Matthew C. Junker explains this phenomenon thus: [On the one hand,] China can gather raw materials to fuel its development, access export markets to sustain development, attain political alliances to isolate Taiwan, and gain the trust of developing countries in its ascendancy to superpower status. Having the largest single block of votes in both the United Nations and the World trade Organization, Africa plays an important role in facilitating Chinas rise to superpower status... 16 On the other hand, in return, Chinas good will and support for African countries has allowed South Africa and Nigeria to each get temporary positions on the UN Security Council thereby improving their global status, access [to] a large market for agricultural exports, and ability to develop.17
12 Sanusha Naidu, China-African relations in the 21st Century: A Win-Win Relationship, in China in Africa. Compiled by Henning Muelber. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. 13 Sanusha Naidu, China-African relations in the 21st Century: A Win-Win Relationship, in China in Africa. Compiled by Henning Muelber. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. 14 ibid. 15 Development Bank of Southern Africa & The Centre for Chinese Studies. China as a Driver of Regional Integration in Africa: Prospects for the Future. Conference Report. http://www.ccs.org.za/ downloads/DBSA%20Conference%20Report.pdf. 16 Asia Institute for Political and Economic Research. http://aisper.org/files/ChinaInAfrica.pdf 17 Ibid.

27

However, with this increased form of integration and trade between Southern states, much of the vulnerability in this symbiotic relationship is also apparent. This South-South trade has been apparent in the form of a substantial increase in the access and demand for Africas natural resources, particularly oil, and the import of Chinas low-price export goods such as textiles and clothing, electronic devices and machines, which find a huge and soaring demand in Africa.18 The question remains whether or not this form of strategic involvement by China is actually neo-colonialism in disguise as the extraction of raw materials has been an effective factor in Chinas rapid industrialization. While China has certainly prospered from this Sino-African partnership, Africa has witnessed mixed results, including structural strategic disadvantage as well as asymmetries in the trade policies maintained with China.19 The South-South resource flow may create opportunities for Africa to develop and take advantage from Chinas presence on the continent, but the risk associated with blind faith in this alternative strategy to development may in actuality, pose significant threats to development. It cannot be denied that Chinas investment in vital infrastructure could strategically provide vast economic opportunities for Africas development prospects, however, for this to be a truly win-win partnership where there are mutual gains for both sides.20 Africa must set the rules of engagement with China and not vice versa.21 This means that African states but be actively involved in the negotiation process. Chinas current foreign trade policies have not been driven entirely on altruistic motives. Much of the exports to China are by and large limited to capitalintensive commodities that create more jobs for those in China, while imports coming into Africa are mostly manufactured goods, and the imbalance does not create a job market for Africans.22 South-South dynamism is certainly evident in the increased inflows of resources that benefits the developing countries, but increased pressure and competition from Asian countries in this case China poses a great threat to this development cooperation. An increase in the resource dependency of African and in an attempt
18 Jean-Claude Maswana. China-Africas Emerging Economic Links: A Review Under the CorePeriphery Perspective (paper presented at the annual conference of the World Association for the Political Economy (WAPE), Shimane, Japan, October 27-28, 2007). 19 Sanusha Naidu, China-African relations in the 21st Century: A Win-Win Relationship, in China in Africa. Compiled by Henning Muelber. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. 20 ibid. 21 ibid. 22 Assessing the Growing Role and Developmental Impact of China in Africa: An African Perspective, in South-South Cooperation: A Challenge to the Aid System? (Philippines: IBON Foundation, Inc., 2010).

MixED rEsults

28

to understand the underdevelopment through the lens of dependency theory, two country-specific cases Angola and Sudan will be briefly explained to illustrate this point. Some may argue that Chinas status as a semi-periphery state and that certain aspects of its development strategy is inadequate for explaining the complex political and economic relationships of African states with China with regards to dependency theory.23 However, a close examination shows that Chinas benevolent mutually-beneficial rhetoric is far less convincing in light of the realities present at bay. Chinas strategic soft power diplomacy and political non-interference and nonalignment ideologies must be viewed in light of Chinas underlying motives and policies in Africa.24 The over-exuberance of African governments in rejecting Western aid and increasingly relying on China has generated a dependency among many African states that will inevitably intensify as the global economy declines.25 While a South-South partnership in its true sense is possible albeit with some key challenged dependency is still a valid concern, hindering prospects for a successful win-win relationship. Through these two brief case studies, viewing this policy at a practical level will make evident the extent to which South-South relations can be analysed and whether or not a win-win relationship is possible.
AngolA

Angola has received significant international aid from China to allow the country to expand its oil refinery business which should have [enabled] Angola to meet increasing domestic demand and increase supply to regional markets within the Southern African Development Community (SADC).26 However, this capital-intensive oil sector has failed to create many jobs only further perpetuating inequalities. Furthermore, Chinas policy of non-interference in an attempt to maintain state sovereignty has denied Angola the necessary democratization it requires to increase accountability and transparency.27 Thus, those at the top of the social hierarchy benefit and underdevelopment and resource dependency remains. Lack of increased African involvement in the negotiation process forces the relationship to remain a one-sided affair, with China having the upper hand, countering the mutual benefit relationship so often touted by the Eastern nation. Junker writes that:
23 Asia Institute for Political and Economic Research. http://aisper.org/files/ChinaInAfrica.pdf. 24 ibid. 25 ibid. 26 Development Bank of Southern Africa & The Centre for Chinese Studies. China as a Driver of Regional Integration in Africa: Prospects for the Future. Conference Report. http://www.ccs.org.za/ downloads/DBSA%20Conference%20Report.pdf. 27 Sanusha Naidu, China-African relations in the 21st Century: A Win-Win Relationship, in China in Africa. Compiled by Henning Muelber. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.

AnD

suDAn

As

ExAMplEs

29

by driving the national interest from a class perspective and concern for the poor, dependency theory leads observers to conclude that Chinas support for Angolas...elite has created a less than optimal allocation of resources to serve the national interest. 28 African elites undoubtedly swayed by Chinas soft power diplomacy misuse resource revenues generated from oil, only to leave Angola with a lack of necessary infrastructure for development, by [reinforcing] traditional inequalities and certain aspects of underdevelopment.29 These elites have benefited from this type of symbiotic relationship with China as it is reminiscent of the neopatrimonial ideology still apparent in post-colonial Africa. Angolas heavily-dependent economy is only further perpetuated into the resources dependency curse, hindering economic growth and development impeding the countrys necessary step towards democratic accountability and better governance. Thus, Chinas attempt at harnessing a win-win relationship proves futile in the case of Angola as the elites not the citizens remain the main beneficiaries of this partnership.30 Another oil hub in the heart of Africa is the Sudan. At first glance, the China-Sudan relationship may seem like a sure-fire win-win situation considering the Western world has refused to engage in a partnership with the conflict-ridden nation. However, elite preference, like that of Angola, is a key concern that comes into play. Lack of economic diversity within the country plagued by the North-South divide has concentrated much economic development within the capital, Khartoum where the Sudanese elites benefit the most.31 In addition, with oil constituting 97% of Sudans revenue, this replicates a core tenet of dependency an economy surrounding the export of a single commodity, making it highly vulnerable to the fluctuations of global capitalism.32 Chinas involvement with oil exploitation and elite appeasement has led to much of the underdevelopment in the South where development is stagnant. Infrastructure projects introduced by China have not met with much success either as they depend on the ability of the ruling elite to provide protection and security, presumably against antagonistic classes, according to Ding Zhengguo, Manager of the Merowe dam project in northern Sudan.33 Furthermore, Chinas soft power diplomacy and mutually beneficial cooperation rhetoric in the guise of advancing personal interests provides insight onto her dominant no matter what
28 Asia Institute for Political and Economic Research. http://aisper.org/files/ChinaInAfrica.pdf. 29 ibid. 30 Sanusha Naidu, China-African relations in the 21st Century: A Win-Win Relationship, in China in Africa. Compiled by Henning Muelber. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. 31 Asia Institute for Political and Economic Research. http://aisper.org/files/ChinaInAfrica.pdf. 32 ibid. 33 ibid.

30

it takes attitude to protect economic interests.34 The latter rhetoric that has certainly generated positive spin-offs for many African countries is not without its flaws. Chinas role in Sudan is a clear example of this where, as in the case of Angola, Sudanese elite interests and involvement have been a factor in Sudans underdevelopment. While this may seem like a win-win situation at first glance, the scale is tipped heavily in favour of China. Chinas emergence on Africas economic landscape has further tied her to Africas hope for regional integration, which is noted as a vital factor to facilitate and progress economic development in Africa. The New Partnership for Africas Development Programme (NEPAD) views the role of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) as the building blocks in advancing sustainable development in Africa.35 The lack of stable infrastructure have, for the most part, constrained economic development particularly because doing business in Africa has a high cost, making intraregional trade that much more expensive.36 However, in order for both partners to benefit from their cooperation, China and Africa should be placed in a bid for African regional integration. As a strategy for achieving the broader objective of continental integration, some experts believe that the Sino-African partnership should be placed within the regional context given the importance of regional integration.37 Policies and programs to deal effectively with the economic imbalances between China and Africa have to be comprehensive. In the past, with the exception of the East African Community, regional economic groups in Africa have come out weakened from EPA [economic partnership agreement] negotiations, so far.38 For example, NEPADs interests driven by externally-oriented African elites have forced their countries into a situation where their own collective blueprint for development is explicitly committed to creating a conducive environment for unrestricted and unchecked operation of market forces. This has allowed largeswath of African economic landscape to be swallowed by Chinese enterprises, and with the explicit consent of parasitic and
34 Sanusha Naidu, China-African relations in the 21st Century: A Win-Win Relationship, in China in Africa. Compiled by Henning Muelber. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. 35 Development Bank of Southern Africa & The Centre for Chinese Studies. China as a Driver of Regional Integration in Africa: Prospects for the Future. Conference Report. http://www.ccs.org.za/ downloads/DBSA%20Conference%20Report.pdf. 36 UCLA International Institute. http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/files/83.pdf. 37 ibid. 38 Helmut Asche, Contours of Chinas Africa Mode and Who May Benefit, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 3 (2008): pg. 174.

cAvEAts

in tHE

rElAtionsHip

31

unaccountable African elites who continue to profit from such unbalanced relationship. At the moment, the scramble for Africas resources passes through the doorsteps of governing elites where concessions are sold and royalties are collected. 39 This approach only benefits China and strengthens her economic prospects while African states, already weakened by their lack of economic might in this unbalanced relationship, still enters into an EPA with China. Thus, Africas ability of individual African countries to negotiate with China from a strong platform is weakened further.40 It becomes apparent that while regional integration is a positive prospect through the South-South cooperation of China and Africa, the process can only be initiated and developed through the active engagement of Africans themselves. Fantu Cheru in his article Love at First Sight: Or Confused Priorities? Decoding the Evolving China-Africa Relations suggests that the NEPAD agenda and its constituent parts should be redefined as well.41 He argues that the organization should embrace a development integration approach which gives priority to the integration of systems of investment, production and trade, including promoting the freer trade.42 This regional approach will help African states negotiate from a strong position and take on an active role. Without this active role, Africans are at a vulnerable position allowing China to benefit at their expense. The move towards regional integration will be a move beyond the current bilateral agreements in place with China which limit any benefits to surrounding countries.43 This type of integration can only help to address key infrastructure problems within the continent and are key in the promotion of South-South cooperation. This integration is most likely to benefit all the parties involved, allowing them to avoid from simply the rhetoric of a win-win relationship that only benefits China and African elites to one solid action that adequately ensures true mutual gains. As in any dialectic relationship, a win-win success in the ChinaAfrica endeavor can only be achieved if both parties have an equal hand in the set rules of engagement in the partnership. In her article Chile-African Relations in the 21st Century: A Win-Win Relationship, Sanusha Naidu argues that Africa must develop:

39 UCLA International Institute. http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/files/83.pdf. 40 Helmut Asche, Contours of Chinas Africa Mode and Who May Benefit, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 3 (2008): pg. 174. 41 UCLA International Institute. http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/files/83.pdf. 42 ibid. 43 ibid.

32

a consensus regarding the relationship with China, ensuring that the rule of law and an effective monitoring and regulatory framework are in place to oversee that investment practices are conducted appropriately and legally, and most of all that their citizens are the main beneficiaries of this win-win partnership, not only state and economic elites. 44 For a winning partnership to sustain, China must work to put the citizen and the development of the nation at the forefront of its South-South cooperation policy. In spite of the challenges and obstacles hindering success, Chinas quick, inexpensive, and (for the most part) no strings attached policy has been a blessing for Africas development pursuits and effective engagement in the global economy for both parties.45 Proponents of dependency theory argue that success in South-South relations can only be realized through the leadership of the oppressed. Regional integration and cooperation can also help peripheral states make a stronger case for themselves as an alternative to South-elite relations that only benefit a select few. Development integration and democratic reform and its consolidation can help African states negotiate a sustainable formula so both parties benefit in the China-Africa win-win partnership.46
concluDing tHougHts

Chinas deepening political and economic footprint in the African continent forces us to reevaluate the new South-South paradigm an alternative to the oft-analyzed North-South relations of the past few decades. While the Eastern nation claims to uphold ethics of mutual benefit and common development between the two regions, significant concerns still remain for both parties. Dependency theory and the concept of regional integration make apparent the flaws underlying China-Africas supposed win-win partnership. At the core of its foreign policy in Africa, China should focus on the interests of the citizen and do away with preferential development so as to benefit society as a whole. If China fails to do so, it may become increasingly difficult to see the fine line between the rhetoric of win-win partnerships and the concept of neocolonialism in disguise. Farhana is currently a fourth-year student at the University of Toronto, where she is working towards a specialist in International Relations and Peace and Conflict Studies. She may be contacted at farhana.rahman@utoronto.ca.
44 Sanusha Naidu, China-African relations in the 21st Century: A Win-Win Relationship, in China in Africa. Compiled by Henning Muelber. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. 45 ibid. 46 UCLA International Institute. http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/files/83.pdf.

33

Works citED

Assessing the Growing Role and Developmental Impact of China in Af rica: An African Perspective. In South-South Cooperation: A Chal lenge to the Aid System? Philippines: IBON Foundation, Inc., 2010. Asche, Helmut. Contours of Chinas Africa Mode and Who May Ben efit. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 3 (2008): 165-180. Asia Institute for Political and Economic Research. http://aisper.org/files/ ChinaInAfrica.pdf. Briggs, Inye. South-South Co-operation and Regional Integration Per spectives from Africa. Paper presented at the multi-year expert meeting on international cooperation, Trade and Development Board: Investment, Enterprise and Development Commission, Ge neva, Switzerland, February 2-9, 2009. Development Bank of Southern Africa & The Centre for Chinese Stud ies, China as a Driver of Regional Integration in Africa: Prospects for the Future. Conference Report. http://www.ccs.org.za/down loads/DBSA%20Conference%20Report.pdf. Edinger, Hannah, Hayley Herman, and Johanna Jansson, ed. New Impulses from the South: Chinas Engagement of Africa. Stellenbosch: Centre for Chinese Studies, 2008. German Development Institute. http://www.die-gdi.de/CMS-Homepage/ openwebcms3_e.nsf/(ynDK_contentByKey)/ADMR7BLF2V/$FILE/9%202007%20EN.pdf. Jules, Tavis D., and Michelle Morais de s e Silva. How Different Disci plines have Approached South-South Cooperation and Transfer. Society for International Education Journal 5:1 (2008): 45-64. Maswana, Jean-Claude. China-Africas Emerging Economic Links: A Re view Under the Core-Periphery Perspective. Paper presented at the annual conference of the World Association for the Political Economy (WAPE), Shimane, Japan, October 27-28, 2007. Naidu, Sanusha. China-African relations in the 21st Century: A Win-Win Relationship. In China in Africa. Compiled by Henning Muelber. 34

Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Shelton, Garth. China, Africa and Asia Advancing South-South Co-oper ation. In Politics and Social Movements in a Hegemonic World: Lessons from Africa, Asia and Latin America June (2005): 347-383. UCLA International Institute. http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/ files/83.pdf.

35

Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development: A Study of Uganda

College AbstrAct
International development is inextricably tied to recovery from conflict; no country ravaged by war can develop its economic and human capacity without first escaping violence and instability. Today, ninety percent of all war and conflict occur in the global south, yet attention to the intricacies of development in a post-conflict setting remains limited. It is essential that development actors acknowledge the difference between reconstruction and development as usual in order to achieve significant progress in the many areas where violence poses an impediment to progress. This paper begins by examining the theoretical approaches to post-conflict reconstruction; the separation between a return to security and the economic and social recovery that follows is highlighted. Ugandas struggle to recuperate from a thirty-year civil war in the northern regions is then discussed as a case study. Finally, the paper addresses the need to incorporate the strengths and weaknesses of the main actors in Ugandas recovery: large international organizations, the Ugandan government, and grassroots organizations. By acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, these actors will be better equip to work together. The paper concludes by chronicling the efforts of Peace Together Uganda, one such small community organization working to contribute to Ugandas recovery and development.

oF

liberal

jessiCa loiaCono international studies Major arts and sCienCes, university oF illinois ChaMPaign

at

urbana-

introDuction

Todays international conflicts are systemically different from those in the past. Though colossal interstate wars are fortunately a thing of the past, modern warfare has evolved to something more alarming and deadly. Since World War II, there have been 122 civil wars and only 25 interstate wars. Ninety percent of these occurred in the global south, the vast majority in Africa. Civil wars are characterized by massive displacement of communities, political turmoil, and economic stagnation in regions already suffering from low human development and economic indicators. Faced with the aftermath of these deadly conflicts, national governments and the international community are given the daunting task of reconstruction. Since the inception of the Bretton Woods international financial institutions in 1946 and the advent of international development as it is known today, postconflict reconstruction has seen many changes. It is imperative that local, national, and international actors evolve their strategies in order to make reconstruction successful and lasting for all stakeholders. This paper first identifies the current theoretical framework of post-conflict reconstruction. These principles are then applied to Uganda to illustrate the challenges of reconstruction after a near thirty-year civil war in the north of the country. National reconstruction strategies have important implications for small community organizations working on post-conflict development. By examining one such community-based organization, Peace Together Uganda, and 36

its structure and challenges, one can interpret post-conflict reconstruction at a level that is easier to grasp.
post-conFlict rEconstruction

The theoretical framework for post-conflict reconstruction has been slowly expanding, with a new push to move from development as usual to a calculated strategy for sensitive reconstruction after political, social, and economic disaster. Whether this new theory has carried through into policy and implementation will be examined further, but most literature leads one to believe that conflict-sensitive development has been universally well accepted in academic circles. Generally speaking, reconstruction must be broad to be effective, covering a wide range of issue areas and tackling the breakdown caused by conflict. Writing for UN/WIDER, Tony Addison makes the distinction between providing lives for those affected by conflict and providing livelihoods. The end of conflict ends the loss of lives, but does not inherently improve livelihoods. While rebuilding infrastructure and reinstating essential services are necessary components of reconstruction, it is necessary to examine the less obvious factors involved in ones livelihood. For example, war destroys the human and physical capital of the poor and undermines the bonds of family and kinship that are central to the livelihoods of Africas communities1. In her book Rebuilding War-Torn States, Graciana del Castillo addresses the need for broad-based recovery by separating reconstruction into four separate transitions: the security transition, the political transition, the social transition, and the economic transition. The security transition is the basis for all those that follow, and is characterized by disarmament, peace negotiations, and a general move from violence and terror to peace and improved security. If the security transition has not been achieved, the following three will not have lasting success. Often, the security transition has been completed in only one area of a country, and continued tension in certain areas inhibit the successful implementation of political, economic, and/ or social security in the future. Generally, the political transition follows the security transition. A return to effective democracy and functioning government institutions requires a respect for the rule of law, human rights, and property rights. These are the bases on which successful reconstruction can be built upon to ensure improved livelihoods throughout the country. Often, political exclusion is either the reason for conflict or an exacerbating factor. Therefore, to avoid a return to conflict there must be a general acceptance of the new government. Hence, a move towards participative democracy and civilian involvement is key. While the government bears the responsibility
1 Tony Addison, Africas recovery from conflict making peace work for the poor (Helsinki: United Nations University/WIDER, 2003), 1.

in

tHEory

37

of reconstruction policies, it is the will of the people that will ensure these policies carry through and create true change.2 The social transition is essential in reconstructing livelihoods. Perhaps less tangible than any other transition, the social transition involves a myriad of considerations. War accentuates the polarization between community members, such as between opposing factions of the war, between those who remained in the communities and the returnees from external and internal displacement at the end of the war and perpetrators and victims of the atrocities committed in the midst of conflict.3 Addressing this polarization can include the reintegration of past combatants into society, resettlement of refugees and internally displaced persons, rectifying tension between ethnic, religious, class, and ideological groups, and rebuilding communities and community trust. Without reconciliation and rebuilding of social capital, [other] recovery can be undermined as the lack of social capital could prevent cooperation between community members and the formation of other social and business networks.4 The economic transition often proves the most difficult transition to achieve and can be understood as the culmination of the previous three transitions. One theory contends that reconstruction can be divided into two periods: the first lasting 2-5 years in which immediate priorities such as caring for refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) and stabilizing the political situation are addressed. This is followed by a second period of deeper economic reforms when investments in human development can be implemented. Despite its merit in highlighting priorities, this argument that economic reform is best left for later is often taken too far.5 Rather, economic recovery needs to begin as soon as possible, not only because this is essential to maintaining political and social stability, but also because donors will not be willing to support peace transitions unless countries do their part to create an environment conducive to ensuring their sustainability. This is the most challenging in the midst of the political, social, and institutional vulnerabilities and damage to human and physical infrastructure that are the legacy of conflict.6 Addison also highlights that economic activity does not remain on hold during wartime or in the early years of peace, and to assume that this economic activity does not require immediate attention is unrealistic.7 Separation of reconstruction into a primarily stabilizing period and another focused on economic growth could also lend
2 Graciana Del Castillo, Rebuilding War-torn States: the Challenge of Post-conflict Economic Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). 3 Eugenia Date-Bah, Challenges of Post-Conflict Reconstruction (Accra: Pagelinks, 2008), 42. 4 Ibid. 5 Tony Addison, Africas Recovery From Conflict, 16. 6 Graciana Del Castillo, Rebuilding War-torn States, 19. 7 Addison, 19

38

itself to an economic policy of development as usual.8 In a post-conflict setting, such a discourse lends itself to not only continued underdevelopment, but also a return to conflict if the conflict itself is not directly addressed in economic reconstruction. A return to conflict is in fact a primary concern when dealing with reconstruction. According to the United Nations, countries in post-conflict reconstruction have a 50 per cent chance of returning to war or chaos. In order to ensure that this does not occur, it is important to identify the original causes of the conflict. By addressing these roots of conflict, the incidence of civil war breaking out once again is significantly diminished. Paul Collier of the World Bank and Anke Hoeffler of the Centre for the Study of African Economies identify the reason for the high occurrence of civil wars in Africa by identifying the structure of risk for an outbreak of conflict. The Collier-Hoeffler econometric model of civil war postulates that in any given country the incidence of civil war is dictated by the likelihood of a rebellion being established, and that this is determined by finance, grievance, military viability, and history. The relationship is fairly straightforward: some grievance incites young men to fight, the ratio of the said men to military forces must be positive, there must be some source of income to arm the rebel army, and a history of past hatred and conflict increases the likelihood that people will rally to increase the other factors. By correctly identifying the interplay and degree of these factors, reconstruction can be effectively targeted to decrease the probability of a return to conflict.9 Finally, the importance of nationally driven reconstruction cannot be underestimated. While some view this as an idealistic model, history has shown that only reconstruction controlled by stakeholders will have long-term success. After World War II, debate about who was in control of the Marshall Plan reconstruction was heated. Yet, the majority favored domestic ownership, thus ensuring that despite US/UN financing and support, control of programs were always in the hands of recipient countries. Today, however, little debate remains and the UN, international financial institutions (World Bank and International Monetary Fund [IMF]-IFIs), and donors now often dictate the parameters of development solutions that are neither post-conflict sensitive nor often in line with the goals of the states themselves. The role of foreign finance and administration is critical in postconflict states, but should play a supporting rather than directing role. As del Castillo states, ideally reconstruction would be characterized by war-topeace transitions in which the sovereign government would be in the front seat designing and implementing policies, with the UN system and the IFIs in the back seat, facilitating, coordinating, and monitoring the international
8 Ibid. 9 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, On the Incidence of Civil War in Africa, The Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, no. 1 (2002): 13-28.

39

communitys technical and financial support.10 The negative consequences of foreign controlled development are clear in the criticisms of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and IMF. It is clear that successful reconstruction is dependent on the interplay of the security, political, social, and economic transitions. Such interplay, however, is nearly impossible to measure and it becomes the goal of those rebuilding society to address all four factors in as efficient a manner as possible. Thus, the discussion of Ugandas reconstruction will be structured around these four transitions, while keeping in mind the causes of conflict and the actors involved. Since independence in 1962, Uganda, like many other post-colonial African nations, has been plagued by political conflict, violence, and economic disparity. After current President Yoweri Musevenis ascendance to power in 1986, however, Ugandas situation has improved dramatically. As anthropologist Sverker Finnstrm, who has done extensive research in northern Uganda, states, The postcolonial nightmare is finally over, so the widespread feel goes, and Uganda is held to be a success story of economic liberalization, development, progress, and increasing political stability, celebrated for its fight against HIV/AIDS.11 Indeed, Uganda has seen annual growth rates as high as 12% since 1986. However, ravaged by twenty years of war, the Acholi [of northern Uganda] have not shared in any part of this story of success.12 Therefore, reconstruction in northern Uganda remains a challenge, struggling to succeed and truly return the country as a whole to stability and overarching growth. For example, the Human Development Index for northern Uganda in 2001 was 0.35, compared to 0.55 for the central region and 0.45 for the country as a whole13. Addressing merely economic indicators, the northern region had the highest incidence of poverty at 63.3 percent in 2002-2003, compared to the national average of 37.7 percent.14 Clearly, socio-economic divides have yet to be properly tackled. It has been established that successful reconstruction strategies must be preceded by a comprehensive examination of the root causes of conflict. In Ugandas case, history plays a central role in the collapse into civil war, both in regard to its colonial legacy and post-independence leadership. Like
10 Graciana Del Castillo, Rebuilding War-torn States, 13. 11 Sverker Finnstrm, Living With Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in northern Uganda, (Durham: Duke UP, 2008), 63. 12 Ibid. 13 Leonce Ndikumana and Justine Nannyonjo, From Failed State to Good Performer? The Case of Uganda, in Peace and the Public Purse: Economic Policies for Postwar State-Building, edited by James K. Boyce and Madalene ODonnell (New York: Lynne Rienner, 2007), 22. 14 Ibid

ugAnDA: An illusion

oF

succEss?

40

the Belgians in Rwanda, the British favored certain tribes within Uganda depending on what was needed to maintain their own control. Initially, British support and development initiatives were concentrated in the south of the country, where the Kingdom of Baganda was given significant autonomy in maintaining control of the country. Northern Uganda was systematically neglected until, to counter anti-colonial sentiments in the south, the British concentrated military power in the north of the country based on their observation of the Acholis warlike nature.15 This classification and introduction to a martial lifestyle would have serious consequences for northern Ugandas role in future power struggles as well as their support of the rebel groups that would eventually terrorize the region. Colonial preferences thus set the stage for the fragmentation that would continue to plague Uganda. Independence from Great Britain was achieved in 1962, and selfinterested leaders who, at best, favored their own ethnic and regional groups and at worst eliminated anyone who got in their way characterized the regimes that followed. Milton Obote was the first to come to power after independence. A northerner, Obote favored his own region by consolidating the military strength of the north and systematically butchering political opponents and any civilians caught in the fray. In 1971, Ida Amin, who hailed from the west of the country, was a beacon of hope not only for war-weary Ugandans but also Westerners seeking sympathizers in the midst of the Cold War. However, Amins plans to take ownership and revitalize Ugandas economy quickly proved disastrous; after expelling the successful Indian business community and redistributing their assets to his own supporters, Ugandas economy collapsed.16 Amin also became infamous internationally for his brutality towards the Baganda and Acholi; during the early years of his violent rule, Idi Amin ordered mass killings of Acholi army personnel as well as executions of prominent Acholi intellectuals and politicians, including the Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum.17 A brief transitional government after Amins overthrow in 1979 offered little improvement, and by 1980 Obote had returned to power. The Obote II regime made childs play of Obote I in its brutality as Acholi enacted retribution for Amins slaughter. The violence further widened the political and social stratification of Ugandas many ethnic and regional groups. A small group of northern commanders eventually overthrew Obote in 1985, but without a clear policy strategy their leadership was short-lived. As result of the massive public outcry against Obote and his regime, Yoweri Museveni, a former member of the Military Commission who had run for a
15 Sverker Finnstrm, Living with Bad Surroundings, 61, 75, 79-82. 16 Leonce Ndikumana and Justine Nannyonjo, From Failed State to Good Performer? The Case of Uganda, 19. 17 Sverker Finnstrm, Living With Bad Surroundings, 65.

41

parliamentary seat in the 1980 elections,18 had been quickly building strong military and civilian support for his own National Resistance Movement (NRM) and successfully overthrew the interim military government in January of 1986.19 However, Museveni was not to be the great Ugandan savior many hoped he would be; some twenty-seven different rebel groups were reportedly resisting Musevenis new government within two years of his takeover.20 Dissent was especially heavy in the north, where the NRA (National Resistance Army, the military leg of the NRM) is documented to have committed civilian executions, massacres, and rape.21 The Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (HSMF) led by Alice Lakwena was the first movement to be successful in Acholiland. Alice Lakwena proclaimed herself to be inhabited by a spirit messenger that gave the HSMF special powers against government forces. The HSMF appealed to the spiritualism of the Acholi people and garnered enough support to be quite successful, even coming within 100 kilometers of Kampala before its final defeat.22 However, it was the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) led by Joseph Kony that become responsible for the 22 years of civil war that would follow Musevenis ascension to power. The mass suffering resulting from the LRAs reign of terror has been labeled by UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland as among the worst humanitarian disasters in the world;23 since 1986, UNICEF estimates that the LRA has abducted more than 25,000 children, some 90 percent of Acholi (1.8 million) were forced into IDP camps, up to 100,000 civilians were killed by rebel and government forces, and as recently as 2005 some 1,000 people a week were still dying as a result of violence, disease, and poor conditions.24 Today, the LRA is no longer wreaking havoc in northern Uganda and the security situation is dramatically improved. However, northern
18 Geoffrey B. Tukahebwa, Governance and the Democratisation Process in Uganda under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) 1986-2003 in Ugandas Fundamental Change: Domestics and External Dynamics of Conflicts and Development, edited by Aaron K. Kabweru Mukwaya (Kampala: Makerere University Printing, 2005), 18. 19 Leonce Ndikumana and Justine Nannyonjo, From Failed State to Good Performer? The Case of Uganda, 20. 20 Sverker Finnstrm, Living With Bad Surroundings, 69. 21 Kate Halff, Uganda: Returns outpace recovery planning, International Displacement Monitoring Center (Norwegian Refugee Council), 19 Aug. 2009, http://www.internal-displacement.org/80257 08F004CE90B/%28httpCountries%29/04678346A648C087802570A7004B9719?OpenDocument, 3. 22 Ibid, 4. 23 International Crisis Group (ICG), Northern Uganda: Understanding and Solving the Conflict, Report 77th edition, 2004, i. 24 Tim Large, Crisis Profile: Whats Going On In Northern Uganda? Reuters AlertNet, Thomson Reuters Foundation, 23 Feb. 2006, http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/111996997351. html.

42

Ugandas security transition is in no way complete. For many years, any hopes of a peace settlement between the government of Uganda and the LRA were shaky at best. The government showed a lack of political will, focusing instead on military intervention despite the catastrophic consequences on Acholi civilians. Furthermore, after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Joseph Kony and other LRA leaders in 2005, the LRA were even less willing to negotiate or even appear in public for fear of arrest. By 2006 the government had shown a dramatic increase in commitment to solving the conflict, and a series of peace talks began in Juba mediated by the Sudanese government. Although a ceasefire was signed in 2006 (Cessation of Hostilities Agreement), peace talks continued until February 2008. The Juba peace talks are politically considered a failure, but their impact on the daily lives of Acholi cannot be discredited. There is no longer violent conflict between the LRA and government forces, and many have been able to return to life as normal. Most living within areas that were, until 2006, considered the most dangerous contend that they are no longer fearful of LRA attacks. Yet, the LRA continue to be active in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and southern Sudan. Peace in Northern Uganda is still very fragile and should not be taken for granted.25 As a result of the decreasing security threat, economic underdevelopment is now indisputably the most pressing concern for Northern Uganda. Acknowledgement of northern Ugandas economic predisposition to conflict has important implications for possible solutions. For example, the misuse of public resources, elite control of economic opportunities, or horizontal inequalities in a countrys economic base can all fuel grievances and even cause violent conflict to break out.26 Such is certainly the case in Northern Uganda; as previously illustrated, public resources and control of wealth have historically been concentrated in the south. This disparity has propelled Northern Uganda to an economic structure dependent on agriculture, exports and the consequent vulnerability to shocks. Clearly, northern Ugandas poor economic history is closely tied to political economy. The political transition in Uganda is unique from other post-conflict countries because of its regional nature. Uganda as a whole has seen a significant political transition from dictatorships to what is technically known as a representative democracy. However, the true representation of Musevenis government is contested on various levels. Firstly, until 2005 Museveni restricted the space of action for political parties in favor of the nonparty Movement system that he introduced, by some celebrated but described by his critics and political opponents as a virtual one-party
25 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda: Conflict-sensitive approaches to recovery and growth (London: International Alert, 2008), 8-9. 26 Ibid, 9.

43

state.27 Though the 2005 elections in Uganda marked a transition to a constitutional system with political parties, the long-established Movement had accumulated enormous military, numerical, and other advantages over other parties.28 Ugandas government is extremely centralized, both geographically in the South and around its charismatic leader Yoweri Museveni. Geoffrey Tukahebwa, a professor of political science at Makerere University in Kampala, affirms, while several elections have been organized under the NRM, it does not mean that Uganda is democratic.29 Indeed, there is little support for Museveni and his Movement in the North. Museveni received a mere 8.5% of the vote in Gulu during the 1996 elections, and only 11.5% in the 2001 elections.30 Rather than an indication of religious or ethnic politics, these elections rather illustrate a remarkably widespread protest against the NRM.31 Since the beginning of Musevenis government, a deep-felt suspicion and mistrust of the government throughout the North has been prevalent. This is usually due to the governments failure to apply its stated objectives to the North (some argued intentionally)32, but also [their failure] to protect civilians adequately during the long years of the LRA conflict.33 Reconstruction of the north is dependent on renewed government commitment, but without support from the Acholi many of the root causes of the conflict will remain. Government-led reconstruction alone will do much to restore Acholi confidence in the government. However, strong political will has waned once again and Acholi dissent remains. The role of government in current reconstruction efforts will be discussed in more detail later in this paper. While northern Ugandas political economy has been a hindrance to economic growth for decades, a more immediate post-conflict barrier is the IDP question and its implications for agricultural production (or lack thereof). At the height of the conflict, the government of Uganda forced 1.8 million Acholi (some 90% of the total population) into IDP camps. The government claimed that these moves were for the Acholis own protection from the LRA. Crowding locals into camps also made it easier for the UPDF (Ugandan Peoples Defense Forces, the government army) to try and rid the countryside of the LRA, who were difficult to distinguish from villagers. People were literally given less than a days notice and forced to
27 Sverker Finnstrm, Living With Bad Surroundings, 68. 28 Ibid. 29 Geoffrey B. Tukahebwa, Governance and the Democratisation Process in Uganda under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) 1986-2003, 27. 30 International Crisis Group (ICG), Northern Uganda: Understanding and Solving the Conflict, Report 77th edition, 2004, 10. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid, 3. 33 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda, 13.

44

abandon their homes, livestock, and entire livelihoods for camps prone to disease, violence, and in many cases even further attacks from the LRA, who hoped to break up the camps.34 As of February 2008, 784,376 people were still resident in IDP camps, 536,717 had returned to their villages of origin, and 372,439 were residing in locations other than the IDP camps in the areas of return35. By May 2009, the number of IDPs in camps and transit sites had been reduced to 378,000 and 244,000, respectively.36 Despite this marked improvement, problems remain both for those still in IDP camps and those whove returned home. The mass displacement of northern Uganda has completely disrupted both social and economic structure in the region. Sverker Finnstrm proposes that the individual and collective suffering37 of displacement has diminished the cultural and social agency of those displaced, as the logic of domination and violence enter the most private spheres of everyday life38. Those who remain in the camps are overwhelmingly those physically unable to return to their previous lives, i.e. severely traumatized people, female-headed households, orphans and child-headed households, and elderly people without family support.39 With the exception of large cities like Gulu and Kitgum, little work has been done to identify how to address the needs of such people. However, re-integrating all people into society is a necessary step of the social transition and must occur for life to return to normalcy. A second factor holding people in the camps are land disputes; 59% of respondents of a World Bank study reported to having experienced significant threats to tenure security since return movements began.40 Essentially, the first families to return have taken advantage of abandoned land and moved their own land boundaries. Currently, 93% of land in northern Uganda is held by means of customary law with no registration of land boundaries,41 and the resolution mechanisms under Ugandas land act are limited42. An already weak system is exacerbated an erosion of authority and outreach of traditional dispute mechanisms43. Female-headed households are particularly vulnerable to land disputes, given the substandard position of women in society. Land disputes are not limited to home areas: owners of the land where displaced persons are currently settled (often fam34 Sverker Finnstrm, Living With Bad Surroundings, 37. 35 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda, 8. 36 Kate Halff, Uganda: Returns outpace recovery planning, 4. 37 Sverker Finnstrm, Living With Bad Surroundings,132. 38 Ibid, 133. 39 Kate Half, Uganda: Returns outpace recovery planning, 5. 40 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda, 37. 41 Kate Half, Uganda: Returns outpace recovery planning, 6. 42 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda, 37. 43 Ibid.

45

ily members or friends) are increasing pressure for IDPs to return home, despite their inability to do so. As a result, forced evictions are becoming more common.44 If some kind of efficient land resolution mechanism is not instated, in the face of increasing destitution and food insecurity, small disagreements could escalate into widespread violence. Food insecurity is encroaching quickly in northern Uganda due to a variety of factors. The loss of land and livestock during the conflict (see Finnstrm 71-75, Hernon 23) has proven economic disaster for the agrarian Acholi. Many have begun to sell agricultural labor to make ends meet,45 but such a strategy neither provides sufficient income nor is sustainable. Currently, only 34% of available land in Acholi districts is even being cultivated as a result of land disputes, difficulty in clearing previously abandoned overgrown land, and lack of appropriate access to agricultural tools, seed and fertilizer46. For those who are planting, drought has diminished crop yields; for many small-scale farmers, even small decreases in returns can be devastating. However, current predictions are that harvests will probably be under 40% of normal yields for the next growing season, increasing already high food prices and presenting a further obstacle to food security for returnee households who are unable to grow their own food.47 In light of the many challenges to reconstruction in the North, a myriad of international aid agencies are now active in the region. Ranging from private nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like World Vision to CARE International to official government agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) to the various arms of the United Nations, it seems there is no project occurring in Northern Uganda that doesnt bear the colorful slogan of an international agency. The positive work of these agencies is undeniable. However, they have been criticized both on ideological and operational bases. For example, in his book The Wizard of the Nile, Matthew Green suggests that the World Food Programme (WFP) inadvertently supported a misguided initiative by agreeing to feed people forced into IDP camps by the government.48 Furthermore, he criticizes many aid agencies as being a band-aid solution rather than mobiliz[ing] the political will in Western capitals to try to do something about it.49 This paper
44 Ibid. 45 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda, 22. 46 Kate Half, Uganda: Returns outpace recovery planning, 6. 47 Kate Half, Uganda: Returns outpace recovery planning, 7. 48 Quoted by Emma Bath in Have Aid Agencies Prolonged Ugandas War?, UWIRE, 3 Mar. 2008, <http://ugandagenocide.info/?p=49>. 49 Ibid.

Actors

in

ugAnDAs post-conFlict rEconstruction

46

will not delve into the ideological arguments for and against aid agencies, but rather hopes to take a critical view of all actors working towards reconstruction in an effort to highlight the need for cooperation. While aid agencies have operated in the past despite a lack of adequate government support, as was demonstrated previously any further action must involve cooperation between aid agencies, the government of Uganda, and Acholi themselves if it is to be successful. Government strategy for development of northern Uganda is primarily illustrated through the Peace, Recovery, and Development Plan (PRDP). The strategic objectives of PRDP are as follows: (1) consolidation of state authority, (2) rebuilding and empowering communities, (3) revitalization of the economy, and (4) peace building and reconstruction. Within these objectives, the PRDP specifically highlights the need to address many issues already highlighted in this paper (see Figure 1). Figure 1:50

50 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda, 27.

47

Despite that the PRDP represents a significant opportunity for moving towards a greater parity and integration between the economies of Ugandas north and south, implementation of the PRDP has seen a slow start.51 The Refugee Law Project by Makerere University in Kampala outlines several reasons for the overall failure of the PRDP: 1. The [government of Ugandas] funding commitment to the PRDP is below what was initially promised; 2. The Office of the Prime Minister does not have the capacity to perform its required monitoring and oversight responsibilities as outlined in the PRDP; 3. PRDP projects currently being implemented lack a coherent focus and may be affected by personal interests of political elites; 4. The failure to coordinate and communicate the PRDP objectives at a national level has left district leaders confused about the PRDPs implications for them and their constituents; and 5. Knowledge about PRDP at the grassroots level is low and often inaccurate52. Hernon highlights further limitations such as corruption and embezzlement by northern officials, controversy over specific industrialization objectives, and an overall mistrust of the government by Acholi.53 Despite, or perhaps in light of these government shortcomings, the need for cooperation between aid organizations and the Ugandan government is increasingly recognized in Northern Uganda. Hernon highlights the move by development organizations to plan for longer-term development as a result of the decrease in violence after the Juba Peace Talks, as well as trying to realign themselves to integrate assistance in Northern Uganda into broader national frameworks.54 For example, The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs states on their website that 2009 will see significant efforts to transition cluster coordination into existing government sector working groups and national mechanisms, to increase the Governments responsibility for coordinationWhile OCHA will continue to advocate for increased recovery programming, it is vital that the national PDRP for Northern Uganda offers adequate recovery assistance to the north. Progress on the transition from humanitarian assistance through recovery to development will be contingent on operationalizing the plan and ensuring it is fully resourced.55 Despite this encouraging aim towards cooperation, some confusion, and competition, about roles and responsibilities between humanitarian and development agencies has now emerged as agencies try to transition
51 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda, 26. 52 Quoted in USAID/OTI Uganda Annual Summary Report, USAID, Jan. 2009, http://www.usaid. gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/countries/uganda/. 53 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda, 28. 54 Ibid, 29. 55 Coordination Activities in the Field: Uganda, OCHA in 2009, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, http://ochaonline.un.org/ocha2009/uganda.html.

48

through emergency handout aid and more long term, market-driven economic development strategies.56 The apparent paradox in this transitional situation is that often the very same donor agencies are funding both types of intervention through their different desks, sometimes in the same communities, demonstrating a lack of coherence57. The confusion brought on by the sheer volume of development partner activity, technicality of discourse, and plethora of different issue working groups and acronyms are a serious disadvantage to Acholi themselves.58 Within this development climate, smaller community-based organizations are eager to absorb as much benefit as possible. Peace Together (PTU) is one such organization. Established in 2007 by Fr. Leonsyo Akena, a Roman Catholic Priest, PTU is the epitome of a community organization because it is made up solely of residents of Pajule, a trading village between Gulu and Kitgum. PTUs was created in an effort to address the needs of orphans and vulnerable children within Pajule and the two IDP camps that surround it. Therefore, its most visible activity is providing school fees for twenty such children. Small community organizations (known as grassroots organizations in much contemporary literature) such as PTU are often championed for their ability to interact more completely with stakeholders, develop innovative programs, and sustain their activities through constant evaluation and modification. PTU has certainly exemplified these positive qualities. For example, the children of the program were chosen through a comprehensive needs-assessment and analysis by the local parish priest to ensure that only the most needy were targeted. Furthermore, all of PTUs new programs were proposed by the childrens guardians during community meetings. The most ambitious of these projects is the construction of a piggery to provide income for the organization. This project was proposed as a result of its high profit margin, as well as the absence of any similar business in the area. However, PTU has encountered numerous roadblocks in construction of the piggery and realization of many other similar initiatives. As a small organization, it is not surprising that PTU faces numerous challenges in spite of its strengths. As Sheldon Annis, a prominent American analyst of NGO performance, states, in the face of pervasive poverty, small scale can merely mean insignificant, politically independent can mean powerless or disconnected, low cost can mean underfinanced or poor quality, and innovative can mean simply temporary or unsustainable.59 Indeed, access to resources has been the largest barrier for PTU to date and as a result, PTU is constantly reaching to expand its
56 P. Hernon and E. Altman, Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda, 30. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Quoted in J. Clark, Democratising Development (London: Earthscan Publications Ltd., 1991).

49

scope and make a name for itself among larger organizations in the hope of capturing more resources for the community. If not for an early partnership with students at an American university it is questionable whether PTU would have ever gotten off the ground. However, the resources of these students are limited and PTU has been forced to expand. For example, PTU has drafted numerous grant applications to large aid agencies such as USAID and the International Organization for Migration. Such outsourcing of projects by such large organizations is common and in many cases allows for a more community-driven implementation without sacrificing the financial support of a large international agency. Yet, such partnership usually entails the official aid agency contracting to implement a component of its project, rather than supporting [local organizations] to expand their own programmes.60 Such a judgment is undoubtedly generalized, however it is important to recognize the compromises that are often made in order to obtain financial support. For example, PTU has modified many plans (including the piggery and another income-generating project involving the construction of a grinding mill) in order to meet the standards of the agency to which they appeal for funds. Furthermore, much time and energy is arguably wasted in the obtaining of specific documents required by such grants. While the reasoning for requiring such documentation is understandable, the wasted manpower and operational expenses can be frustrating for organizations like PTU already facing shortages. Indeed, the general notion of accountability towards large agencies in order to maintain legitimacy is a complicated dilemma for a myriad of reasons (see Clark 72-73). The precarious land tenure situation in northern Uganda is also central to Peace Togethers work and discussions of its longevity. Pajule originated as a regional trading hub due to its strategic location between Lira, Kitgum, and Gulu, three large cities in Northwest Uganda. Pajules population mushroomed during the conflict as a result of the creation of two IDP camps on either side and community dynamics were fundamentally changed. While many of Pajules residents have returned home, its composition is still markedly different than it was ten years ago. In fact, all the beneficiaries of PTUs scholarship program are not originally from Pajule city center and in an informal survey, most of their guardians expressed a wish to return home to their villages as soon as would be possible. Those who did not were hesitant either due to disabilities or lack of adequate schooling in their original villages. This brings significant questions for PTU. Is it wise to invest large sums in a substantial project like the piggery, if those guardians who have committed to working in it return home within a few years? In contrast, the viability of any kind of agricultural solution is questioned as a result of changing climate in northern Uganda and the pre60 J. Clark, Democratising Development, 9.

50

viously mentioned food security concerns. Is returning IDPs home to their villages and encouraging them to return to agricultural subsistence living in their long-term interest? If crop yields continue to be low, will this drive rural residents to become reliant once again on aid? An in-depth discussion of Peace Togethers strengths and weaknesses would likely be lengthy. However, use of Peace Together Uganda as an example of the difficult interplay between Ugandas government, large aid agencies, and small community organizations is illustrative. The questions posed earlier are not easy and perhaps do not have a definite answer. However, issues of sustainability cannot be ignored if a lasting peace is to be achieved. In this paper, the theoretical basis of post-conflict reconstruction strategies has been explored. In pursuing the security, political, social, and economic transitions while constantly considering all actors, root causes, and potential outcomes, Northern Uganda may finally find real peace. This paper is in no way a comprehensive study of Ugandas reconstruction. However, in providing a basic overview of the situation and the interplay of those at work in reconstruction, it serves as an example of the theoretical strengths, but also limits, of post-conflict reconstruction in general. A return to real peace will depend on the will of those within Uganda, creative strategies to address the many aspects of post-conflict development, and dedication from all involved. Jessica is currently a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is working towards a major in International Studies. She may be contacted at loiacono.j@gmail.com.

Works citED

Addison, Tony. Africas recovery from conflict making peace work for the poor. Helsinki: United Nations University, WIDER, 2003. Batha, Emma. Have Aid Agencies Prolonged Ugandas War? UWIRE. UgandaGenocide.info, 3 Mar. 2008. <http://ugandagenocide. info/?p=49>. Clark, J. Democratising Development. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd., 1991. Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffler. On the Incidence of Civil War in Africa. The Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, no 1 (2002): 13-28.

51

Coordination Activities in the Field: Uganda. OCHA in 2009. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. <http://ochaonline. un.org/ocha2009/uganda.html>. Date-Bah, Eugenia. Challenges of Post-Conflict Reconstruction. Accra: Pagelinks, 2008. Del Castillo, Graciana. Rebuilding war-torn states the challenge of postconflict economic reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Finnstrm, Sverker. Living with bad surroundings war, history, and every day moments in northern Uganda. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Hernon, P., and E. Altman. Building a Peace Economy in Northern Uganda: Conflict-sensitive approaches to recovery and growth. London: In ternational Alert, 2008. International Crisis Group (ICG). Northern Uganda: Understanding and Solving the Conflict. Rep. 77th ed. 2004. Large, Tim. Crisis Profile: Whats Going On In Northern Uganda? Reuters AlertNet. Thomson Reuters Foundation, 23 Feb. 2006. <http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/111996997351. htm>. Ndikumana, Leonce, and Justine Nannyonjo. From Failed State to Good Performer? The Case of Uganda. In Peace and the Public Purse: Economic Policies for Postwar Statebuilding, edited by James K. Boyce and Madalene ODonnell. New York: Lynne Rienner, 2007. Tukahebwa, Geoffrey B. Governance and the Democratisation Process in Uganda under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) 19862003. In Ugandas Fundamental Change: Domestics and External Dynamics of Conflicts and Development, edited by Aaron K. Kabweru Mukwaya, 15-28. Kampala: Makerere University Printing, 2005. Halff, Kate. Uganda: Returns outpace recovery planning. Report by the In ternational Displacement Monitoring Center (Norwegian Refugee Council), 19 Aug. 2009. <http://www.internal-displacement.org/802 5708F004CE90B/%28httpCountries%29/04678346A648C08780257 0A7004B9719?OpenDocument>. 52

USAID/OTI Uganda Annual Summary Report. Rep. USAID, Jan. 2009. <http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/countries/ugan da/>. World Bank. (2009). Data retrieved December 12, 2009, from World Development Indicators Online (WDI) database.
otHEr rEsourcEs consultED

Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. DeNora, Tia, Jessica Banfield, and Jana Naujoks. Uganda: Enabling peace economies through early recovery. Publication. London: Internation al Alert, 2009. Goldfarb, Zachary A., Alcira Kreimer, Paul Collier, Margaret Arnold, and Colin S. Scott. Uganda: Post Conflict Reconstruction. Washington D.C.: The World Bank, 2000. Kabweru Mukwaya, Aaron K. Ugandas Fundamental Change: Domestics and External Dynamics of Conflicts and Development. Kampala: Makerere University Printing, 2005. Nhema, Alfred, and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, eds. The Resolution of African Conflicts: The Management of Conflict Resolution and Post-Conflict Resolution. Athens: Ohio UP, 2008. Reinikka, Ritva. Ugandas recovery the role of farms, firms, and govern ment. Ed. Paul Collier. Washington, D.C: World Bank, 2001.

53

Various Vulnerabilities: Reconsidering Refugee Typologies in Cape Town, South Africa

Matthew harris CoMParative Cultures and PolitiCs MiChigan state university
Major

AbstrAct
As one of the most stable countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa receives tens of thousands of refugee migrants each year. These migrants flee from conflict-ridden zones as diverse as Somalia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, but each one faces an entirely new set of development challenges upon arrival in South Africa. While much contemporary refugee scholarship frames forced displacement within the domain of these separate domestic and international security issues, there is an increased effort by other scholars to reflect the affective consequences of the contemporary international refugee regime: both the cultural expectations of refugee authenticity that are necessary to receive displacement assistance and the political capital refugees accrue on any societys visual radar. The very term refugee proves problematic given its delimiting discursive totality but fails to be expendable given its ability to distinguish refugee-specific development needs. Ranking individual migrants based on degree of vulnerability has been one method proffered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and affiliated organisations to differentiate neediness amongst this otherwise diverse group of individuals. Using the Cape Town Refugee Centre (a South Africanbased, UNHCR implementing partner) as exemplification of such a methodology, this paper broaches the benefits, assumptions, and pitfalls of the vulnerability paradigm in light of its relation to gender issues, political performativity, and the construction of refugee space.

sEcuritiZing

tHE

rEFugEE

Despite thousands of years of global displacement, the refugee as we know it today did not come into being until after World War II. The most accepted definition comes from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in its 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Anyone who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country qualifies for political status as such.1 In the South African context, the Department of Home Affairs adopts this internationally sanctioned clause but also specifies persecution for reasons of tribe as an acceptable claim.2 The overall benchmark has therefore been set as a politicized migration of people justified by primarily social, cultural, and/or personal security concerns.
1 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Who we help: refugees, http://www. unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c125.html add access date if possible 2 South African Department of Home Affairs, Who is a refugee? http://www.home-affairs.gov.za/ RBC/Who%20is%20a%20refugee.pdf add access date if possible

54

The exact nature of these security concerns, moreover, is the subject of much contemporary debate. More traditional notions of international security, wherein the state fulfills the privileged position as static guarantor and protector of rights, are being rapidly challenged by both individual and community level conceptualizations.3 Human security, for instance, adopts a transnational human rights framework, which extends security to individuals otherwise neglected by state-centered approaches. This approach rests upon a multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach to critical welfare issues and questions of survival, which Edward Newman claims, must focus on the individual or people collectively.4 Human security lends itself quite well to the plight of refugees, as it is their uprooted bodies that form the central core of concern and not state-to-state military threats. Even those who are less willing to accept the sphere of the individual human being as the new building block of security studies often acknowledge a plurality of non-state actors in the equation. Mohammed Ayoob claims that the changing nature of conflict in the global South should also shift the framing of possible policy solutions: The political realm must be informed by other realms of human activitywhen developments in other realms ranging from the economic to the ecological threaten to have immediate political consequencesthese other variables must be taken into account as part of a states security calculus.5 This approach maintains the legitimacy of states, governing structures, and political institutions while reformulating them to encapsulate otherwise ulterior threats. One of the benefits of a human security approach is a greater ability to identify threatsat subnational, national, and transnational levels.6 Unlike many other policy issues, the problem of forced migration is at its very essence a multi-tiered, multi-jurisdictional disenfranchisement of political boundaries. Refugees are the direct results of conflict in their source countries as well as a factor in complicating the dynamics of their host countries. In security terms, refugees are viewed not only as people in need of protection and assistance but also as potential threats to national security and even as a potential source of armed terror.7 Their existence is reflective of an initial conflict, in other words, while their presence creates
3 Edward Newman, Refugees, international security, and human vulnerability: Introduction and survey, in Refugees and Forced Displacement, ed. Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003), 7. 4 Ibid, 15 5 James Milner, Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa, (Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 70. 6 Hussein Solomon, Of Myths and Migration: Illegal Immigration into South Africa, (Pretoria: Unisa Press University of South Africa, 2003), 28. 7 Newman, 17.

55

additional ones. Refugee-driven conflicts within host countries do indeed extend beyond the potential threat of armed terror. Sudden and gradual influxes of populations can throw the local economy off kilter. They can wreak havoc on the environment, bring foreign ethnic conflicts into a new country, or dramatically alter domestic political balances.8 Astri Suhrke borrows from the Copenhagen schools understanding of security to argue that displaced populations are sometimes also perceived to pose a threat to societal security. Therein she refers to societal security as the core values in the identity of human collectivity.9 She continues by critiquing these notions, since social identity is constantly evolving in a mutually (though uneven) interactive process and a singular societal security seems to gloss over pertinent distinctions between subcultures.10 Nevertheless, migration invokes a definitive societal shift that components of the receiving society may resist, and conflict is often created. Like Newman, Surhke seems to cautiously accept a human security approach to issues of forced displacement. Whereas societal security might examine the influence of refugees and asylum seekers in a receiving society and traditional, Cold War-era security examines the nature of state-to-state conflict, human security provides a much needed return to the displaced individuals themselves. These uprooted human beings, after all, form the core locus of concern regardless of the manner in which they are politicized. For James Milner, the contours of human security revolve around two primary characteristics: safety from chronic threats such as disease and repression, and protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the pattern of daily life.11 The 1994 UNDP annual report has quite complementarily advocated the notion of human security as a starting point for a successful development strategy, which includes employment, health, education, and environmental sectors as critical components.12 Both Milners and the UNDPs conceptions of human security illustrate the dual faces of the individual refugee experience. Those sudden and hurtful disruptions in the pattern of daily life invite securitization efforts in refugee-producing countries. In the words of South African social scientist Hussein Solomon, only by addressing problems of civil and ethnic strife, poverty, war, and environmental degradation that is, the push factors that generate population displacements can one hope to resolve such
8 Astri Suhrke, Human security and the protection of refugees, in Refugees and Forced Displacement, ed. Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm, (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003), 97. 9 Ibid, 95. 10 Ibid, 96. 11 Milner, 73. 12 Suhrke, 100-101.

56

mass migrations effectively.13 These burdens intrude on the daily lives of individuals and eventually move them to move themselves. While such fleeing resolves the human security concerns at hand, it also instigates new ones. They flee because they are afraid; and in fleeing they start a precarious existence, High Commissioner Sadako Ogata bluntly explained in a 1999 keynote address.14 The sorts of human security challenges that the UNDP highlighted in 1994 become extremely pertinent to refugees when they cultivate new lives in host countries. Security is clearly a nuanced, conflict-ridden, concept in refugee studies; its variations traverse individual, community, national, and international levels of application. For all cases, however, the 1951 Convention has easily lent the notion of the refugee to political science and international relations security discourses. Far less clear is the implication that this has on the subject: what are the effects of approaching refugee issues, and more importantly, refugees themselves in this manner? In a political sense, Edward Newman warns that, By securitizing refugees, a pretext is provided for states to interdict and deter them.15 States certainly might situate refugees within the realm of international and/or domestic security policies, but Newmans comment also suggests an entire set of cultural, social, and phenomenological ramifications. While he is speaking within the confines of political discourse, his treatment of the refugee as a reified, reflexively identified category supposes its established discursive reality and resultant susceptibility. The Convention definition discursively produces the refugee as a human being identified by a close relationship with the human emotion of fear, asserts Peter Nyers in the eye-opening Rethinking Refugees.16 In order to achieve refugee status, an individual must literally convince a foreign state of his/her own fearfulness. A refugee can only become a refugee based on a politicized emotional state, and if the appropriate legal body (the Department of Home Affairs in the South African case) is sufficiently convinced of this state, it will attribute the official status. This seemingly unnatural marriage of assumedly logical politics and subjective human emotions leads Nyers to develop the concept of refugeeness, a loosely bounded, admittedly ambiguous social construction meant to capture the overall experience of being, or rather, becoming a refugee.17 One becomes a refugee through an enactment of not only political but also social and cultural processes. Nyers rejects the idea that moving from citizen to refugee is a dramatic shift from one static state to another
13 Solomon, 33. 14 Suhrke, 102. 15 Newman, 16. 16 Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, (New York: Routledge, 2006), xvii. 17 Ibid, xv.

57

but rather a site of struggle, a continual process of identity construction.18 Just as a citizen affirms his/her citizenship by engaging in civic processes like voting, the refugee affirms his/her own refugeeness by exhibiting an appropriately necessitated fearfulness and silenced lack of citizenship. His/her body becomes a paradoxical political canvas for a depoliticized body politic. Disavowing oneself of state affiliation marks the ultimate self-depoliticization in the contemporary Westphalian global order. On the other hand, humanity [becomes] the ordering principle, which places the new refugee self under the auspices of an ostensibly global human rights regime.19 In short, refugees challenge the presumptive norm of state sovereignty. Their individual sovereignty, in turn, is predicated upon the ability to construct identities of fearfulness and victimization according to globally defined standards. Refugeeness provides a crucial insight into the treatment of refugees by constructing an identifiable, albeit ambiguous, commonality. Conceptualizing refugees within the security discourse, on the contrary, reduces them to historically path dependent connotations: enemy, threat, or we/they. Astri Suhrke asserts that this is highly problematic because it associates change with threat and insecurity while in actuality it might also be construed as growth and enrichment.20 A large degree of its interpretation depends on the ability of the changing component (e.g. refugees) to positively interact with the existing population, and because of this, the ultimate goal for many refugee policies is successful re-integration within the host society. There must be sufficient sociopolitical space for the integration of difference, but more often than not, very little space is available without first isolating the particular development challenges refugees face. In this sense, one must establish difference in order to consummate the eventuality of re-integration and sameness. Many scholars explain this contradiction in terms of visibility. What refugees need, claims Michel Agier, is fame.21 They are all emblematic of a human condition that is shaped and fixed on the margins of the world, one of its most tenacious foundations being our own ignorance of it.22 According to this line of thinking, refugees are victimized, dehumanized, and all but completely forgotten. Their identity is predicated upon erasure and voicelessness, as it is in dispossession and flight that they acquire refugee status. Agier even claims that their shared existential exodus creates a new community, neither ethnic nor religious nor national. Only from the em18 Ibid. 19 Ibid, xvi. 20 Suhrke, 96. 21 Michel Agier, On the Margins of the World, translated by David Fernbach, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 103. 22 Ibid, 3.

58

powerment of testimonies, narratives, and experiences might they be able to voice themselves into socialization as sovereign subjects. 23 Agiers analysis hence proposes political speech and political space as the means through which those who are nameless and voiceless might return to our common world.24 While political voice is undoubtedly crucial to the eventual empowerment of refugees, Agiers liberation model seems to presuppose a certain invisibility with which others disagree. Astri Suhrke, for instance, argues that refugees are highly visualized, though lacking agency in this politicization: The visible nature of newly arrived refugees and migrationsmakes them likely scapegoats for resentment over more invisible sources of change and felt insecurities.25 We need only examine the recent xenophobic attacks throughout South African townships to invoke a tangible example of this controversial visibility. It is not refugees marginalization from South African society that disadvantages them but their very real presence in the common world of poor South Africans, which means competition for common world resources. Refugeeness proves demonstrably complex. The refugees disenfranchisement of source state citizenship and physio-political exodus render them invisible wherein this presupposed powerlessness legitimizes a claim for international humanitarian visibility. Contrarily, their visibility constructs a site for potential conflict wherein invisibility can also suggest conflict-free integration into a new environment. Increased political speech and space for an entire refugee community only contribute towards the general aim of refugee agency. Public awareness of refugee presence and narratives certainly expands the possibility of increased tolerance, understanding, and acceptance; what it fails to accomplish is real progress towards such important issues as employment, health, or education: three major development components highlighted in the UNDPs 1994 human security paradigm. Displaced individuals do face very real challenges associated with their physical acquisition of a new social, cultural, and political environment. As refugees are [to varying degrees] forced into this situation, their personal responsibility in readjusting should arguably be less than other migrant types. For this reason, the very category of refugee is crucial in distinguishing these individuals from other migrant typologies, especially in light of the particular development quandaries raised in a human security approach. Its discursive reality is not expendable. And yet, as both Michel Agier and Peter Nyers demonstrate [albeit in completely different manners] the category of refugee as illustrative totality is entirely problematic. The involuntarily uprooted, argues anthropologist Liisa Malkki,
23 Ibid, 74. 24 Ibid, 103. 25 Suhrke, 97.

59

 do not constitute a naturally self-delimiting domain of anthropological knowledge since their uprooting is due to extraordinarily diverse historical and political causes and involve people who while all displaced, find themselves in qualitatively different situations. 26 Malkkis turn in the debate undermines Agiers community of displaced individuals in an attempt to re-anthropologize the refugee. Though a critical factor, displacement cannot essentialize the entire experience of an individual, who embodies an idiosyncratic, personalized utterance of what it means to be a human being. This shift in the debate is a largely normative one, however, as Nyers counters that despite the multiplicity of refugee experiences and reasons for flight, conventional analyses of the subject remain committed to a hierarchical mode of interpretation that works to efface this multiplicity.27 Thus arises a precarious balance between commonality and differentiation, a need to delineate individuals who, on the one hand, legally and practically fall within a shared domain of displacement, and on the other hand, represent a broad spectrum of human experiences. If normative, policy-oriented models that focus on the needs and rights of refugees were to be constructed, Astri Suhrke proffers, the concept of vulnerability would arguably serve as a more appropriate foundation stone than human security.28 She continues her proposal by claiming that the model of vulnerability is inherently geared towards the [refugee] recipient and that it is already the model in place for countless international policy institutions that assist refugees.29 The economic reality of providing assistance, whether financially or temporally driven, is that under conditions of resource scarcity, the benefit claims by some individuals will in some measure affect claims made by other individuals.30 To this end, Shurhkes vulnerability model enacts the very hierarchization of individuals that Nyers has warned works to efface multiplicity via means of personal interpretation. The mise-en-place of such a system politicizes displacement multiplicities, wherein politicization in this case refers to concrete power structures of distributed capital. Vulnerability hierarchization is indeed a prominent refugee development strategy. It is often the system of choice for the UNHCRs host country re-integration initiatives and a mandate for such implementing partners as the Cape Town Refugee Centre, which receives the bulk of its funding directly from the UNHCR. The following portions of this paper will seek to explore the implications of privileging such a model in field-based,
26 Liisa Malkki as cited by Elizabeth Colson in Forced Migration and the Anthropological Response, Journal of Refugee Studies 16(1), 2003, 2. 27 Nyers, xiv. 28 Suhrke, 105. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid, 104.

60

humanitarian refugee assistance. Vulnerability determination requires a judgment ordering of numerous life-based variables. While many of these social factors (such as age, health condition, and psychological state) fall within the realm of common sense social welfare determinations, other factors are far from readily discernible. For this reason, the ensuing fieldbased discussion of the Cape Town Refugee Centre will also engage the factors of gender and geography as they inform contemporary discourses on security, visibility, and refugeeness; both problematize and solidify the vulnerability model within a South African context; and collide messily at the interstices of culture, politics, sociology, anthropology, and development studies.
FiElD MoDEl: cApE toWn rEFugEE cEntrE AnD tHE notion oF vulnErAbility

Cape Town Refugee Centre makes no secret about its commitment to vulnerability as the centerpiece of refugee and asylum seeker assistance. In fact, the concept is clearly articulated in the organisations basic mission statement: The Cape Town Refugee Centre (CTRC) is a South African non-profit organisation that works with vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers in the Western Cape. We strive to improve the quality of life of refugees and asylum seekers by meeting their basic needs on a short-term basis, and enabling them to become self-reliant and self sufficient through various empowerment opportunities. 31

The very first sentence delineates those refugees and asylum seekers who are vulnerable from the refugee community at large, claiming it is only the vulnerable ones who qualify as objects of assistance. Already a bar is set. Refugee or asylum seeker status is not, in and of itself, enough for a refugee to receive aid from the organisation.32 Just as the U.N. definition requires the individual to appear fearful in order to acquire refugee status, so must the refugee then solidify this perceived susceptibility if he/she wants to receive CTRC assistance. Assistance in this case refers to a breadth of development initiatives within CTRCs three distinct, yet cross-functioning departments. The Psycho-Social Services Programme forms the backbone of the organisation. This programme provides material forms of assistance, such as food vouch31 Cape Town Refugee Centre, http://www.ctrc.co.za/mc/home.html if at all possible, add access date 32 N.B.: For the purpose of syntactic cohesion, application of the term refugee will also refer to asylum seekers, as CTRC applies its policies indistinguishably between the two groups except in special circumstances.

61

ers, rent contribution, clothes, and blankets; it is run by a team of social workers and counselors who also counsel clients on their most pressing needs, make necessary referrals to other institutions, and promote holistic assistance on a case-by-case basis. The Education Programme encourages all refugee children to enroll in the South African school system. The education officer has the power to distribute UNHCR educational funds, which are all geared toward school fees, uniforms, and transportation needs. Finally, the Empowerment and Self-Reliance Programme focuses on longer term re-integration strategies. Candidates can apply for income generation funding, wherein they submit a small business proposal [for work within the informal economy] and are considered for a one-time contribution of startup capital. The Empowerment and Self-Reliance Programme also offers successful candidates a financial contribution for third-party skills training courses and free translations of foreign language academic qualification certificates received outside of South Africa.33 The type of development at work within the CTRC is at once complex and multi-pronged. Contributions are client-driven, as they are needs focused, but they are also distributed with the utmost dedication to equity from one client to the next. Yet, the idea of assisted clients as vulnerable recurs in each of the three programmes. With such a breadth of programmes, is it possible that vulnerability beckon the same sort of refugee in each scenario? Merriam-Webster offers the following two definitions for the word vulnerable: capable of being physically or emotionally wounded; open to attack or damage.34 Even those seemingly basic denotations open up the concept to a plurality of interpretations. While the physical sphere includes innumerable possibilities of attack or damage, it must also be countered with the emotional sphere of human existence. Negotiating the two spheres is sufficiently difficult, but balancing one against the other might be construed as the equivalent of a proverbial comparison between apples and oranges. The concept might be more fruitful, then, as applied in each of the CTRCs three programmes. Of the three, the Education Programme is least dependent upon the vulnerability benchmark. South Africa has a strong commitment to childrens rights, which is strongly evidenced by the progressive childrens rights section [28] of its constitution. As four South African refugee scholars explain, Most of the South African laws and policies concerning children are not exclusive to South African citizens and indeed extend to all children in [the] country, including refugee children.35 This means that all
33 Cape Town Refugee Centre, Services, http://www.ctrc.co.za/mc/services.html access date needed 34 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vulnerable title of website and access date needed 35 Victoria Mayer et al, Protecting the Most Vulnerable: Using the Existing Policy Framework to Strengthen Protection for Refugee Children, in Advancing Refugee Protection in South

62

refugee children have the right to basic education and are required to attend school. In fact, the Education Programmes main determination of vulnerability merely relies upon whether or not clients are receiving assistance from other programmes or institutions. The Empowerment and Self-Reliance Programme statement justifies its initiatives in light of the particular challenges that vulnerable refugees face, the majority [of which] reside in marginalized and deprived communities which have a legacy of high unemployment and a lack of socioeconomic progress.36 These individuals are susceptible to economic attack and damage because of their socio-political and economic geographies. As the programme statement continues, a faint hierarchization pertaining to this sort of vulnerability becomes evident: Even those who live with their friends or relatives in the suburbs are faced with high levels of unemployment and no source of income. Owing to limited employment and selfemployment opportunities, even the highly educated and skilled refugees/ asylum seekers find it difficult to survive.37 No refugee escapes vulnerability completely according to these statements. All are at risk of damage from the detrimental economic climate. Given this inclination, the Empowerment and Self-Reliance Programme constructs a competitive, yet non-exclusive client-base. Applicants are also judged on feasibility of sustainable business ventures, so successful candidates must transcend an analytical Catch 22. To be chosen they must appear vulnerable, more in need than competitor applicants. Yet, they must also appear strong and reliable, more determined and able than other applicants to make their business a longterm success. The contradiction couched in these terms makes equitable application of standards virtually unachievable. As the broadest program, Psycho-Social Services perhaps faces the greatest challenge regarding vulnerability determination. In short, the psycho-social intervention team (PSIT) has a finite supply of food and rent money and a much larger number of visiting clients. Several dozen refugees and asylum seekers visit the Cape Town Refugee Centre on any given workday, and they are all first directed to the Psycho-Social Services Programme. Each is given an approximately 15-20 minute interview during which a PSIT social counselor attempts to capture the general circumstances of the visiting refugee client: name, age, gender, country of origin, date of arrival in South Africa, living situation, marital status, academic qualifications, status of children, and condition of employment. Only once this outline of information is completed do the social counselor and refugee client have a few minutes to discuss the clients biggest problems and plans for the
Africa, ed. Jeff Handmaker et al (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008),187. 36 http://www.ctrc.co.za/mc/services.html website title needed 37 Ibid.

63

future. Emphasis is placed upon the clients biggest pressing need so that time and resources do not go to waste. CTRC has limited resources available to assist incoming clients, and each minute spent in discussion is time lost for another, possibly more vulnerable client. The PSIT thus relies heavily upon efficient probing and the blunt articulation of why a particular client came to CTRC on a given day. Red flags of physical or emotional problems beyond the ordinary scope of most refugees elicit a follow-up appointment on a day of the week when incoming clients are not seen, followed most often by a referral to another, more pertinent institution. Given the fast-paced interviewing process, the PSIT has determined a preset rubric of vulnerable conditions, which are thought to automatically render particular refugees more susceptible than their peers. Since Cape Town Refugee Centre is an implementing partner for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), most of these guidelines actually stem from the UNHCRs operational ideology and donor standards. NGOs like the Cape Town Refugee Centre practically function as an operating arm of the UNHCR, implies long-term NGO administrator Mark Raper, since the UNHCR now has a far greater need of the NGOs in order to accomplish its traditional tasks.38 In this case, grants are brokered for four specific categories of refugees via the Psycho-Social Services Programme: unaccompanied minors, special needs children, chronically ill/disabled adults, and elderly persons. UNHCR contributes a certain amount of funds only to be used for the purpose of helping these people. Just as with CTRC, the UNHCR constructs a linguistic regime that focalizes on the susceptibility akin to these refugee typologies. People with disabilities are specifically vulnerable, the UNHCR establishes, to physical, sexual and emotional abuse and may require additional protection.39 Likewise, the portion of the UNHCRs website that outlines the particular needs of elderly persons individualizes vulnerability as its core conceptual foundation. Older people can be particularly vulnerable during conflict or natural disasters, the web page states underneath an emboldened subtitle, which simply reads: Old and Vulnerable.40 Whilst the web page dedicated to refugee children is less blatant in its language, the correlative subtitle reads: Young and Innocent.41 Vulnerability may
38 Mark Raper. Changing roles of NGOs in refugee assistance, in Refugees and Forced Displacement, ed. Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm, (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003), 355. 39 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Who we help: people with disabilities, http://www.unhcr.org/pages/4a0c310c6.html access date 40 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Who we help: older people, http://www. unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c11f.html access date 41 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Who we help: children, http://www. unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c1e8.html access date

64

not be explicit in the language, but young and innocent surely implies a certain openness to physical and emotional wound signified by the Merriam Webster definition of vulnerability. The UNHCRs specific attribution of vulnerability to various categories of refugees is not necessarily erroneous. In fact, few would argue that the disabled, elderly persons, or children do not merit special attention as displaced individuals. Their individualization reaffirms the notion that the refugee is ultimately a human being, divisible into social categories made possible by an undergirding global human rights regime or human security approach. Nonetheless, the above examples are meant to illustrate the omnipresence of vulnerability within UNHCR and CTRC discourses. The foundation of vulnerability as legitimized principle in assisting these social groups sets a clear precedent for the evaluation of the remainder of the Western Cape refugee populace. Cape Town Refugee Centre receives an emergency budget from UNHCR intended to allocate food vouchers, rental assistance, and other shortterm material needs. Since these funds do not correspond to well-defined international grants, recipients are highly variable and must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The constraints of constantly fluctuating budget lines necessitate the consequential re-strategizing of resource allocation, but for the most part CTRC enjoys a greater deal of autonomy in distributing these funds as compared with the grant system. Certain factors have been established over time as instigators of susceptibility, which have helped construct the psycho-social intervention teams vulnerability rubric. These are not hard and fast rules, per se, but strong guidelines. They are always applied as factors that affect a family unit in-context with the purpose of streamlining funding distribution in a high-pressure environment. According to CTRC and the PSIT, critical components of the vulnerability formula revolve around gender, children, health, and arrival date. All incoming clients are granted an exploratory interview for possible assistance, but it is most often single women, families with children, new arrivals (0-6 months in South Africa) and the sick who are deemed most vulnerable and therefore qualify. The formula is somewhat successful but limited. There is logic in assisting new arrivals, since they are the most recently displaced and have not had as long a period of time to recover lost assets (be they economic, psychological, or cultural). The sick are at a comparative disadvantage for job hunting, finding a new residence, and attaining food. Children are an additional financial strain on families, and their wellbeing is ultimately defended by the South African state. Women, according to UNHCR and CTRC, are also at a disadvantage in the public sphere: Stripped of the protection of their homes, their government and often their family structurethey face the rigours of long journeys into exile, official harassment or indifference and frequent sexual abuse - even after reaching 65

an apparent place of safety.42 CTRC specifies single women in particular because of its commitment to the social work principle that each case be treated as a family unit, while most scenarios involving single women lack this underlying family structure. In short, refugees are considered more vulnerable if their circumstances blight their livelihoods beyond the realm of challenges most refugees already face. The benchmark of vulnerability affords these social groups opportunities for assistance based on the nature of their increased challenges. Similar to the four grant categories, these criteria help to determine primary allocations of UNHCR-donated financial assistance. There is little wrong with identifying these groups as vulnerable. What is at stake, rather, is the set of assumptions that results from Cape Town Refugee Centres vulnerability benchmark. Perhaps more of concern should be the act of omission (those who are left out) and the consequential motivation for the discursive production of self as more vulnerable. Once particular social categories are affirmed as the privileged recipients of international aid, a certain political impetus develops. Vulnerability is predicated upon a set of social expectations, and appearing vulnerable proves highly desirable. What happens, then, to the rest of the refugee community? What happens to the socially excluded category of refugee men? How does Cape Town Refugee Centres methodology and political geography contribute to the development equation?
tHE gEnDEr QuEstion: ExpAnDing
tHE

vulnErAbility ForMulA

All our clients are equal. Our services are rendered in such a manner that the dignity of a client is honoured. Our services are made accessible to all those who qualify for them. Our services are people-centred.43 So reads the core set of values to which the Cape Town Refugee Centre so strongly adheres. Unfortunately, all refugee clients are not equal. Recall Liisa Malkkis critique that displaced persons, despite that commonality, find themselves in qualitatively different situations and predicaments.44 The stipulation that problematizes client equality is found
42 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Who we help: women, http://www. unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c1d9.html access date 43 Cape Town Refugee Centre, Objectives and Values, http://www.ctrc.co.za/mc/objectives_values.html access date 44 Colson, 2.

66

in clause three. Just as in George Orwells political satire Animal Farm, all clients are equal, while some are more equal than others. Incoming refugees might be deemed as equals, but only certain amongst them are prioritized for development assistance. This is perhaps most glaringly apparent in the Cape Town Refugee Centres differentiation between refugee men and refugee women. Gender plays a crucial role in the overall South African refugee experience. Based on the current rubric, men and women are not only evaluated differently for aid, but they are also eligible for different amounts of aid. Consider food vouchers, for instance. Men are first and foremost more critically assessed for acquisition of food aid than are women. If accepted, men are then eligible to receive up to 200 South African Rands. Single women, if qualified for aid, receive 250 Rands and possibly 300 Rands upwards should they also be taking care of children. In this context, men are automatically considered to be less vulnerable than are women. Men can supposedly fend for themselves in public better than can women. When there are children involved, women are also presumed to be their primary caregivers. Child rearing is traditionally a female task in Western society, but in many African societies it is an almost entirely female responsibility. One of the most substantial manifestations of an educational gap between male/female refugees is the inability of many female refugees to communicate in English as easily as their husbands and brothers. Even many of the refugees who have been in South Africa for more than three years struggle profusely. Often the men depart during the day to search for work opportunities, which naturally puts them into contact with Englishspeaking South Africans and allows them to develop their new language skills. Wives, sisters, and mothers are frequently left at home to occupy themselves with domestic work, all the while conversing with one another in Lingala, Kinyarwanda, or Somali. In 2003, almost 80% of refugees worldwide were women and children.45 From a practical standpoint alone, then, refugee reintegration development does need to be enacted via gender sensitive policies. Female refugees do face challenges that male refugees do not, whether this entails gender-based violence, culturally based ostracism in cases of physical abuse, or the limited economic sphere of delegation to domestic and womens work.46 It is not rare for refugee women who come to the Cape Town Refuge Centre to cite the threat of rape as one of the principal reasons for fleeing their former countries.47 The stories invoke similar narrative patterns: militant groups invade their home regions, burn and pillage homes,
45 Julie Mertus, Sovereignty, gender, and displacement, in Refugees and Forced Displacement, ed. Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm, (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003), 257. 46 Ibid, 258. 47 Matthew Harris, Interviews, Cape Town Refugee Centre, 8 Feb. 2010 23 Apr. 2010

67

and strategically rape significant amounts of female peers. These women are at risk sexually in a way that most men simply are not. The viewpoint that women are more susceptible in the societies of asylum countries also reflects theoretical backing. Critical gender theorist R.W. Connell utilizes the term hegemonic masculinity to describe the patriarchal, male-biased nature of the public domain.48 Most major businesses, government structures, and law enforcement are run by men, making society far from a gender-neutral place. This is particularly acute within the South African refugee regime, one that advantages the refugee who is male, mobile, unencumbered by children, and who has some financial resources or prospects, according to some scholars.49 Women are considered at a disadvantage because they are culturally cursed with less resources, independence, and mobility. One practical application of Connells hegemonic masculinity is the lack of action among South African law enforcement officials when women come forth complaining of genderbased violence (especially in the township settings). Others might include inaccessibility to serious business ventures and the threat of sexual violence when traveling alone at night. Indeed women seem to warrant special attention in refugee development schemes. Though seeming to support women, these development initiatives do not necessarily coalesce with many contemporary feminist inquiries. If feminism is truly about gender equality (as it so often claims to be) how do we account for single male refugees who feel the same hunger pangs, suffer from the same displacement, and lack the same work as their sisters, yet fail to receive assistance as less vulnerable subjects? Singling out women as more aid dependant than men suggests other theoretical concerns as well, such as the fear that feminine privileging re-inscribes damnation of such dependency and works counter to the global strive for increased gender equality. Should it not be development-based NGOs responsibility to implement, educate, and advocate for more equitable gender regimes? Regardless, refugee men face their own set of particular needs, the UNHCR contends, and are often neglected in discussions of forced displacement.50 Men and boys are more susceptible to direct military conflict related to refugee movements, can be forced into militia groups, frequently fall victim to psycho-physical exploitation in receiving countries, and are often prevented from entering labour markets.51 When refugee men
48 R.W. Connell, Masculinities, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 49 Nahla Valji et al, Protecting the invisible: the status of women refugees in southern Africa, in Advancing Refugee Protection in South Africa, ed. Jeff Handmaker et al, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 216. 50 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Who we help: men, http://www.unhcr. org/pages/4a6872836.html access date 51 Ibid.

68

lose the ability to provide for their families upon displacement, their gender role shifts significantly, and many feel powerless in a new environment. This creates an interesting dilemma for the Empowerment and Self-Reliancy Programme, which reviews business plans from hundreds of refugees yet must find a balance between vulnerability and viability within the approval criteria. Following the approval rubric strictly would likely yield all female entrepreneurs. Perhaps the support of female businesses could be considered a type of gender affirmative action programme, but work is scarce in South Africa and men are often as dependent upon opportunities as women. Moreover, in almost all refugee-producing cultures of Central Africa men are expected to fulfill a sense of provision for their families. They, too, need opportunities for success. Contrarily, there have also been instances of men squandering food vouchers on beers, cigarettes, and personal desires with CTRC-based funds instead of providing for their families.52 Because of this the CTRC often feels uncomfortable giving food vouchers straight to father figures. To generalize a policy based on the presumption that men are biologically more prone to this sort of behavior seems backwards and barbaric, but how does one account for the statistical reality driving such a policy? A gender-sensitive lens is needed to promote effective refugee development programmes, but what this gender-sensitive lens ought to look like reveals a much greater ongoing struggle. Even if they differ from those made available to women, channels must be constructed for refugee men to invoke both self and familial, short-term and long-term development schemes.
politicAl gEogrApHiEs

The refugee is, in theory and praxis, constantly negotiating his/her relationship with space. Most spaces are related to flight: the left and the lost, the transitory exile, the newness of reception, and the gradually diminishing unknown tied to the re-integration process. One might also speak of discursive and performative spaces: self-vocalization, communicative networking, and the enacted performance of ongoing refugeeness. Just as the refugee cannot escape the consequences of attribution to a particular physical sex, so his/her embodied relationship to the surrounding world propels refugee-informed selfhood into a dizzying array of inconsistent, multi-temporal spatialities. Feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz espouses such a body-centered view of refugee geographies, positing that refugee bodies can be active cultural political signs rather than impotent recipients of signification. These bodies, she writes, actively reconfigure, reinscribe, and resist as they move through, across, and between political spaces.53 Each
52 Christina Henda and Anell Olivier, Informal Speech, Cape Town Refugee Centre, March 2010 53 Nyers, x.

AnD

Doing vulnErAbility

69

individual that walks into CTRC is not a de-historicized vessel but a person who enacts a former home, a certain cultural competency, and an incongruent re-placement post displacement. He or she speaks with a human voice, without the voice of a citizen, and of multiple circumstances. Academic qualifications stand as written proof of skill and worth, but these words are semantically revoked as the ghostly memoir of a former life until they can be justified in Pretoria as worthy of a South African existence. Cape Town Refugee Centres standards for determining vulnerability all but bury these multi-temporal significances in the sand. Suddenly, the individual is defined within a present space, in the present time. Interview processes within the Psycho-Social Services Programme turn a blind eye to narratives of flight and exile. Clients are merely evaluated in the here and now. Where are they currently living? How long have they been in South Africa? If anything, time is re-oriented towards the future. What are your plans for the future? each psycho-social intervention team member asks refugee clients. Political spaces such as Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Somalia, from which many South Africa-based refugees hail, all equate some mutual past space of alterity. These spaces are compartmentalized in the South African Department of Home Affairs for aptly determining refugee and asylum seeker status. All incoming CTRC clients have already passed this phase, since the organisation only serves those with valid refugee/asylum seeker documentation. Those acquired customs, ethics, languages, or practices which have migrated along with the refugee body to South Africa do not have any direct salience in the internationally presumed development needs distributed from the UNHCR via institutions like CTRC. Indeed, a client is predominantly analyzed in light of his/her negotiations with the present political space of the relevant host community: What is the nature of the familys living situation? How is the family interacting within the job market? Are the children enrolled in nearby South African schools? Assistance is mediated according to these conditions with little to no consideration of linguistic, cultural, or past geographies. The result is a much more governable, streamlined refugee of the present. Despite how each refugee eventually ended up in South Africa, he or she is nonetheless present, in a certain situation, with contemporary needs. These needs, in turn, are determined through the vulnerability rubric, an analytical device whose stringent regulation is only effective insofar as its de facto application: the interviewing process. Determination of whether or not refugees fall into the category of most vulnerable depends upon the results of a one-on-one interview. Since the Cape Town Refugee Centre, at its very core, seeks to promote holistic development, the interview also provides an opportunity for those more idiosyncratic aspects of vulnerability to surface. 70

The interview that results is a partly constructed, partly impromptu performative space. Cape Town Refugee Centres interviewing goal is to determine as quickly and professionally as possible whether or not an individual with asylum seeker/refugee status constitutes an especially vulnerable individual. The interviewer has a pre-established list of questions and always wants to maintain control of the interviewing direction. Baseline factors of age, health, number of children, and amount of time in South Africa are umbrella criteria that allow easy comparison of client to client. The refugee, on the other hand, has more than likely arrived at CTRC to request concrete forms of aid. His/her goal, then, is to appear as though he/she warrants said assistance. In order to succeed, the refugee must perform identity in a way that constructs authentic refugeeness, predicated upon fearfulness (the UNHCR impetus). An interview endows the voiceless non-citizen that is the refugee with an institutionalized voice. Unfortunately for the refugee, this voice is constricted to a controlled space: both physically and discursively. Within a tiny office, what can be said is epistemically limited to the guiding set of present-minded questions. A refugees most effective tools in conveying his/her lived experience revolve around language and body language. How tattered are his/her clothes? Must he/she rely upon an interpreter to answer the questions posed in basic English? Where are family members during the interview: also in the office, out looking for work, or perhaps run off? Clients invoke a number of strategies, both honest and deceitful, to construct their own refugee vulnerability. Women constantly come into the office alone claiming that their husbands deserted them. Interpreters manipulate and are manipulated in order to mystify and muddy a clients circumstances. Blanket statements like there are no jobs and life is really hard as a refugee recur, as do allusions to hot-button political issues such as association with the specter of xenophobia. Refugees are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, so their interviews are exceedingly important. A rubric is only so useful, then, to determine which refugees are the most vulnerable. Does the successful articulation of vulnerability on the part of a client truly merit assistance, or are those who are veritably more vulnerable perhaps less able to successfully articulate these circumstances? The experience of fear, claims Peter Nyers, can have a silencing effect, making once eloquent political dissidents mute.54 Linguistic performance, especially, is a precarious issue. Inability to communicate effectively in English can hardly be denied as a barrier to societal reintegration and an instigator of personal vulnerability. Still, an organisation that works with individuals from numerous nationalities and language backgrounds would confront many obstacles in privileging assis54 Nyers, 60.

71

tance for non-English speakers. Not only might this encourage suppression of efforts to learn English, but it could also induce widespread critiques of ethnic preferencing and national prejudices. CTRC seems ill positioned overall to incorporate language into its assistance paradigm. Language differentials construct an ostensible barrier during the interview process, one that de-voices these refugees even more than their Anglophone counterparts. If these individuals attempt to respond to interview questions in English, they must explain with basic diction and often fail to explicate as completely as they conceive. Once an interpreter is present, the interviewee is mediated, distanced, and privy to the often limited interpretive ability of the third party. A highly curious consequence of this performed linguistic geography is its dual interpretive possibility: vulnerability might be deemed increased or decreased according to the interviewer. It also beckons a paradoxical binary evident throughout contemporary refugee discourse, one which Peter Nyers terms: human hospitality / animal animosity.55 The human rights framework incorporated into UNHCR and affiliated refugeeserving ideologies often conflicts with those security risks pertaining to refugee-producing state failure and seemingly sub-human non-citizenship. Language, writes Nyers, has a performative aspect that can work toward stabilizing a properly human subjectivity through the identification of an animal-difference.56 The distanced, unintelligible language of non-Anglophone refugees further emphasizes their outsider, animal-like qualities. Animality suggests an inability to self-civilize, or vulnerability vis--vis the human (South African) world. On the other hand, inaudible language can also lead to unsuccessful communication, and the interviewer might ultimately fail to deem the refugee in question as sufficiently vulnerable. The human/animal binary is evident beyond just the interview space. In fact, the entire construction of space at CTRC entrenches it. Upon arrival, refugee clients must present identity documentation to the security guard. If accepted, they then pass by a protected receptionist booth and take a seat in the cramped waiting room. A number of small offices line the back hallways of the building, and clients are called back one-by-one as if visiting a psycho-medical clinic. They are constantly under surveillance, both under the gaze of the security guard and from a one-way window located in the reception booth. The waiting room is often so packed together that clients have the appearance of dehumanized species needing to be contained. Yet, their problems as refugees are treated as pseudo-medical symptoms in need of doctor-patient clinical hospitality. The refugee clinic authorizes objectification (sub-human animality) of the individual in order to trans55 Ibid, 69. 56 Ibid, 77.

72

form vulnerable refugee objects into discernible, analyzable sociopolitical diseases, replete with identifiable symptoms, and thus worthy of rehumanizing remedy. The Centre constructs a Foucauldian clinic par excellence, one which makes possible the summation of the essential in knowledge: in fact, variations cancel each other out, and the effect of the repetition of constant phenomena outlines spontaneously the fundamental conjunctions.57 In this case, the summation of the essential in knowledge must refer to the delimiting symptoms of vulnerability nosology that the current regime employs, which seriously constrain the transcendence of clinical object into subjectivity. That privileged knowledge of self that the medical patient should normally be thought to possess about ones own body, or in this case lived circumstances, is distorted through the clinical lens of internationally regulated vulnerability benchmarks. Whereas a patient suffering from influenza-like symptoms might receive medication to treat those particular symptoms, the clinical refugee is often construed as less-than-sufficiently able to identify self as appropriately vulnerable subject in light of pre-sanctioned diagnoses. The refugees relationship to both time and space constitutes a conflictive enterprise along two plains, unequal though they may be, of coexistence. That knowledge which refugees possess about themselves, past histories and places, how truly vulnerable each feels when he/she wakes up in the morning, exerts an undeniable presence in each ones own socioconsciousness. The more dominant plain is that of institutionalized development and governance. Therein the refugee is no longer sovereign subject but constituted object within that overarching discourse which constructs ad hoc knowledges of gendered neediness and social vulnerability (in the hierarchized singular). The ultimate development goals need not necessarily bridge the gap between these two spheres but at very least allow outlets for both.
bEyonD
tHE pArADigMs

Even the briefest stint in a refugee camp reveals how messy the social context of humanitarian assistance can be- so messy, in fact, that it precludes absolutist, reductionist, and exclusivist conceptualizations, policies, and practices. A clear ethical imperative exists to think outside the box of entrenched positions, admit that no one approach suits all situations, and adopt a multisectoral strategy for advocating ethical responsibilities towards forced migrants. A multisectoral strategy
57 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, (New York: Routledge, 1989), 135.

73

recognizes the presence and validity of various refugee-serving actors, each of whom approached the problem of forced migration from a unique perspective, possesses a comparative advantage, and makes meaningful contributions to the overall goal and duty to protect the rights of58the displaced. Though South Africa has no formal refugee camp settlements, Agbonkhianmeghe Orobators above-cited call for multisectoral strategizing retains all argumentative salience. There is no possible way that small, grassroots NGOs like the Cape Town Refugee Centre can assist refugees and asylum seekers with the diverse array of personal and political needs that they bring to the development table. While extraordinarily important, assisting the vulnerable only achieves that which it proclaims: assisting the small percentage of asylum seekers who are personally, biologically, performatively, and institutionally constructed as sufficiently vulnerable and thus aid-worthy objects. There are, of course, other organisations working in the Western Cape region of South Africa who provide additional services to the refugee community. Whereas Cape Town Refugee Centre only assists refugees and asylum seekers who possess proper government-issued permits, another grassroots NGO called Adonis Musati strives to assist those who have not yet completed that bureaucratic process. The organisation was formed in 2007 and named after a young Zimbabwean who died of starvation on the streets of Cape Town while waiting to get his asylum papers.59 The Scalabrini Centre fosters personal empowerment for any migrants via such needs specific programs as an employment help desk, digital literacy training, an English school, a sewing studio, and various workshops.60 Still, the reach of these programmes is virtually eclipsed by the massive community of asylum seekers residing in the area and its steady flow of newcomers. South Africas relatively open door policy for migrants and asylum seekers accomplishes little for its newest residents once they arrive. As the Adonis Musati website reads, In South Africa there is very little assistance given by the government for refugees. In fact they often face hostility from government officials. Therefore the little help that they get comes from NPOs.61 Agbonkhianmeghe Orobators proposed multi58 Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator, Key Ethical Issues in the Practices and Policies of RefugeeServing NGOs and Churches, in Refugee Rights, ed. David Hollenbach, (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2008), 237. 59 The Adonis Musati Project, About Us, http://adonismusatiproject.org/about.shtml access date 60 Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town, About Us, http://www.scalabrini.org.za/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=28 access date needed 61 http://adonismusatiproject.org/about.shtml website title/access date needed

74

sectoral approach hardly refers to a few hardworking nonprofit groups but an agglomeration of state, international, public, and private involvement. When any of these sectors lacks sufficient contribution, as most so blatantly do in South Africa, a certain burden falls upon the others to deepen their consideration of all refugee typologies. The laudable work of Cape Town Refugee Centre and the entire Western Cape NGO community need nonetheless be wary of its contribution to the ever-evolving discourse of refugeeness. Ever lurking in this branch of work is the dubious specter of authenticity and the shadowy political economics of typological hierarchies. Who gets helped and who gets seen? Ontological claims to refugee-hood are ultimately validated by state and international regimes, though their social and cultural realities reorient notions of self and place according to prevalent means of securitizing the human being, gendering the experience of flight, and controlling the construction of space. Cape Town Refugee Centre is especially privy to these asymmetrical negotiations given its intermediary positionality as both implementing partner of UNHCR policies and grassroots empiricist. Thus stands an institutional episteme bereft of the complete spectrum of development challenges that refugees and asylum seekers do confront. In the absence of a multisectoral approach, finding measures to promote refugee subjectivity is evermore important. Otherwise refugee times, genders, places, and personhoods become engulfed in the institutional Weltanschauung of South African refugeeness. The nature of this increased subjectivity is surely a topic ripe for further analytical and practical exploration, but it would likely fall along sides the currently specified paradigms of social vulnerability and political security. Even still, efforts to re-anthropologize the refugee individual expand the range of voices crying out in a cacophonous chorus of lived migratory experience. Each voice proclaims its own existence, gradually redefining the reality of what it means to be a refugee. Only with these efforts can the refugee hope to transcend its own definitional niceties, steeped in socio-cultural politics, and regain subjectivity not only as refugee but as human being. Matthew graduated in 2010 from Michigan State University, where he completed a double Major in Comparative Cultures and Politics and French. He may be contacted at matthew.harris.w@gmail.com.
Works citED

Agier, Michel. On the Margins of the World, translated by David Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.

75

The Adonis Musati Project. http://adonismusatiproject.org/about.shtml (Accessed July 2010). Cape Town Refugee Centre. http://www.ctrc.co.za/mc/home.html (Accessed May 2010). Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. New York: Routledge, 1989. Harris, Matthew. Cape Town Refugee Centre. Interviews. (8 February 2010 23 April 2010). Henda, Christina and Anell Olivier. Cape Town Refugee Centre. Conversations. (March 2010). Malkki, Liisa. Cited by Elizabeth Colson in Forced Migration and the Anthropological Response. Journal of Refugee Studies 16 (January 2003): 1-18. Mayer, Victoria, Jacob van Garderen, Jeff Handmaker, and Lee Anne de la Hunt. Protecting the Most Vulnerable: Using the Existing Policy Framework to Strengthen Protection for Refugee Children. In Advancing Refugee Protection in South Africa, edited by Jeff Handmaker, Lee Anne de la Hunt, and Jonathan Klaaren. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Mertus, Julie. Sovereignty, gender, and displacement. In Refugees and Forced Displacement, edited by Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm, Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003. Milner, James. Refugees, the State, and the Politics of Asylum in Africa. Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Newman, Edward. Refugees, international security, and human vulnerability: Introduction and survey. In Refugees and Forced Displacement, edited by Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003. Nyers, Peter. Rethinking Refugees. New York: Routledge, 2006. 76

Orobator, Agbonkhianmeghe E. Key Ethical Issues in the Practices and Policies of Refugee-Serving NGOs and Churches. In Refugee Rights, edited by David Hollenbach. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2008. Raper, Mark. Changing roles of NGOs in refugee assistance. In Refugees and Forced Displacement, edited by Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003. Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town. About Us. http://www.scalabrini.org.za/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=28 (Accessed July 2010). Solomon, Hussein. Of Myths and Migration: Illegal Immigration into South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press University of South Africa, 2003. South African Department of Home Affairs. Who is a refugee? http://www.home-affairs.gov.za/RBC/Who%20is%20a%20refugee. pdf (Accessed May 2010). Suhrke, Astri. Human security and the protection of refugees. In Refugees and Forced Displacement, edited by Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Who we help. http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c11c.html (Accessed June 2010). Valji, Nahla, Lee Anne de la Hunt, and Helen Moffett. Protecting the invisible: the status of women refugees in southern Africa. In Advancing Refugee Protection in South Africa, edited by Jeff Handmaker, Lee Anne de la Hunt, and Jonathan Klaaren. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.

77

young PeoPle in the field

78

Journeying Beyond the Cliches: What I Learned from my Research Experience in Uganda
Monika dietriCh

For eight hours my friend and I sat cemented to our seats on a bus from the Ugandan capital Kampala to the Kanungu District in southwestern Uganda, bombarded by foreign sights, sounds and people. Men and women carried loaves of bread wrapped in black plastic bags, a big-city staple they were bringing to their families in the more rural villages. They tied the bags to the luggage racks, causing the bread to swing erratically above my head with each curve and pothole in the bumpy road. My fascination was not unrequited: just as I spent the bus ride observing Ugandans, many spent a good portion of the hours staring at me. When I finally arrived at the Nyaka AIDS Orphans School I was overwhelmed. I looked around the school grounds, and beyond to the gorgeous view of verdant rolling hills and farm land, and realization dawned. What I had been studying, learning and reading about for years transformed from an intangible concept into a solid reality. It was distinctly shocking; I had anticipated this very moment for so long that its actual arrival became all the stranger. I could no longer broadly generalize Africa, or apply sweeping stereotypes to populations of people on the continent, because I was physically sitting there, looking out onto a Ugandan village. From Ben, who quietly (but expertly!) drove the van, to Headmaster Stephen, who professionally and warmly welcomed us, I was already meeting individuals that would break many stereotypes I had of Africa. I couldnt clearly categorize and analyze anymore, all I could do was watch and learn. As a student from the Global North I learned about Sub-Saharan Africa from books, articles and stories filtered through the media. All my life the dominating impression of the continent had been of sad, depressing images of starving children, of an unrelenting virus that infected much of the continent, and of statistics so grave they seem unreal. Can I be blamed, then, when I was utterly surprised by the smiling, happy faces I saw everywhere I went, by the people working so hard to feed their families instead of being beaten down by their situation, by the extreme generosity and goodheartedness I encountered in every village I visited? I dont know what it is I expected, but learning about Africa from a foreign perspective had somehow made me forget that, no matter where you are or in what situation, people still have lives to live, just like every single person on this Earth. Life is more complex than an excerpt in the news, a statistic in a textbook, a protest on a banner, an opinion in the paper. There are two sides to every coin, an idea that needs to be better understood back home in the Global North. However clichd it may seem, it really hit me that we are not Ugan79

dans or Americans, and we are not wealthy or poor: we are people. We are sad, we are happy, we mourn, we celebrate, we laugh and we cry. As a student conducting research, this juxtaposition of expectation and reality was definitely a challenge. A difficult lesson for me to learn was the importance of flexibility. Upon arrival in Nyaka, I quickly realized how much research is dependant upon the dynamics and attributes of the community in which one is working. The most important part of my trip was not collecting data, but rather observing and absorbing the culture through constant interaction with community members. Since I had never traveled to anywhere in Africa before, I had no way of knowing exactly what to expect. This meant, as a visitor to the Global South, I was naive and incapable of doing even many basic tasks without relying heavily on those around me. Even buying basic supplies in the village nearby involved communications with numerous people! Instead of carrying out what I had thought was an independent project I had entered into a collaboration that extended into many different levels of the community. The more people I needed to communicate and work with, though, the richer my experience became. Working and living in a culture so different from my own meant discovering something new and exciting every day. Furthermore, I really believe it not just enhanced, but was actually the most critical aspect of my research. Data is nothing without the context in which it was collected. The purpose of my project focused on understanding the nutritional status of children in the area, and the anthropometric data I gathered helped me achieve that. What can possibly be understood from my results, however, without at least a basic understanding of the environment in which the subjects lived? How could I even begin to learn about the family members that care for the children, the fields from which the food is harvested, the social structure within the villages, without immersing myself into the community? There are many things I wish someone had told me before I went; perhaps a warning about the insane condition of the roads, the overwhelming feeling that exists of being the only foreigners in a very rural village, or how happy, helpful and welcoming everybody would be. I am convinced, though, that even if someone had sat down and told me about everything I would encounter in depth, it wouldnt have changed a thing. Much of what I was expecting was indeed present, including undernutrition among children, a community hard hit by AIDS, and ubiquitous poverty. The key lesson from my travels was that preconceptions arent everything. No experience can match the six weeks I spent in Nyaka, or teach me as much as I learned about Africa, or even about research. I realized that research, especially in a foreign setting, is not about what I achieve or the data I collect, but about what I learn. Data is simply a conduit toward increasing knowledge, 80

towards which context, environment, community and people also greatly contribute. My six weeks in Nyaka invaluably connected my perceptions with reality. I want to work in international settings in the future, and understanding that there will be a disconnect between the two is tremendously important. One of those realities is the vibrancy of life that exists wherever in the world you go. I thought I would be consumed in sadness to be surrounded by so many children who had lost parents to unforgiving disease, who had gone through so much. Instead on the first day of school I saw smiling children running into the school grounds, sitting together and chatting under the shade of trees, or playing a thrilling game of football and screaming with joy at every goal. With all of the negativity we encounter regarding Africa in the United States, I think it is easy to forget this humanity, which we need to keep in mind. This humanity is exactly why schools like Nyaka are so important and good. My time at Nyaka was amazing in many ways, and the lessons I learned will stay with me, and will come back to me when I am thinking of those living in areas of the world so different from my own. Monika graduated with a degree in Nutritional Sciences from Michigan State University, and is currently working towards an M.D. at the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University. She may be contacted at moni5@msu.edu.

81

The White Womans Burden

jessiCa loiCono

A photo blog called Gurl Goes to Africa at gurlgoestoafrica. tumblr.com dedicates itself to poking fun at the legions of white kids who go discover Africa in any capacity, whether it is for study abroad, volunteer work, or delivery of aid. The following introduction welcomes visitors: So. You go to one of those fabulously elitist schools where everyone talks about privilege, classism, racism, sexism, etc. as if they dont practice it in real life. But in order to really see the world, they decide to go somewhere where they can understand what their privilege looks like. So they choose AFRICA! Yay! A whole continent dedicated to helping white people understand what it means to be poor and undeveloped. This is for all you fabulous biddies who decided that Africa was the right place for you. Theres nothing like good ole exotification to fill up your time while basking in the hot Saharan sun, wearing your traditional African clothes, eating weird foods and taking as many photos of black children as possible. You go, Gurl with lots of privilege! This is dedicated to you. Photos of blond girls in short shorts carrying buckets on their heads, hugging little African children, getting their hair braided, or dancing with the locals are captioned with bitingly sarcastic comments and satires of photos that, home in the United States, would be met with shrieks of excitement and pats on the shoulder. I initially reacted to these photos and the accompanying comments with snide laughter. As someone who has been to Africa several times in various capacities, I felt above these people who romanticize the continent and belittle it into clichs. I loved the blog; the fact that I understood the viewpoint and rationale of its authors left me confident of my own intellectual position amongst them. I certainly knew people such as those demonized in the photo captions; they were the same as the many missionaries and tourists I had met in various countries. Had I not sneered at the couple in Sipi, who refused to head to Gulu because there is a war there? Hadnt I held myself above the other missionaries in Peru, who only stayed for a week and left after their guilt became overwhelming? I remember my anger at the Facebook album of a high school acquaintance who spent two weeks rebuilding in Haiti, and the comments full of praise and congratulations that accompanied it. Such people traveled, usually under the guidance of some large organization, to make a difference, change the world, andchallenge themselves. While I admittedly 82

resembled such people when I first became interested in international issues and was indeed driven to save the world, Id had enough experiences by now to know better. Or had I? I realized my own travel blog was plastered with a giant picture or myself in Uganda, looking behind me to a crowd of primary school students looking up at me with giant smiles on their faces. I imagine the caption could have been something like Look at me! Guiding the flock of illiterate African children to a future of development and prosperity! Needless to say, I changed the layout of my blog immediately. I was embarrassed: Was I a hypocrite? I spent ten weeks last summer working with a start-up communitybased organization in rural northern Uganda. Fr. Leonsyo Akena established Peace Together Uganda (PTU) in his home village of Pajule with the aim of encouraging community-led reconstruction after the end of a near thirty year civil war. PTUs first and largest initiative was a student scholarship program of ten primary students and ten secondary students who were orphaned either by Konys war or HIV/AIDS. PTU also had an afterschool soccer program, Wamare Kids League, for some seventy other students. PTU had accomplished a lot, but there was much room to grow. As president of the campus-based organization that was currently funding Peace Together Ugandas activities, I left Chicago with big plans for establishing an accountability network between PTU and its donors, initiating income-generating projects to secure PTUs sustainability, and making lasting bonds with the community. However, nothing went the way I had planned. Even simple things like meeting with people for needs assessments couldnt seem to get done. There were hardly roads and little to no communication; infrastructure was basically non-existent. I knew to expect these conditions because Id read about it millions of times in my development classes. Yet, underdevelopment really hit home when I was stuck in Pajule writing a grant due in the capital, a six hour bus ride away, in two days. Mailing was not an option, and no one had the extra money to pay for someone to deliver it personally. I left Uganda discouraged, despondent, and terrified that development was nothing more than some pipedream rich people talked about in their air conditioned offices. After returning from Uganda, collaborating with other students and being awarded a USAID grant to build a piggery in Pajule, I began to regain hope. This August, I found myself back in Africa to study development. One of twenty in a development study abroad program in the heart of one of Africas largest and most cosmopolitan cities, I am faced with a new kind of discouragement and self-doubt. I find myself asking the following questions. What exactly am I doing in Africa? In Senegal? I am here to study and understand the culture so that I might help, or rather improve, said culture. Are my life and career goals nothing more than a new kind of 83

racism, a new kind of Us vs. Them? Us--the rich white people-- have a duty to help Them-- Africa and the rest of the developing world-- be more like us. I scoff at the idea of neo-imperialism; I certainly do not fit into this camp because I am culturally sensitive, I understand the importance of grassroots, and I am driven only by my desire to correct the mistakes of my colonial ancestors and make the world a more equitable place. Yet, who am I to guide others and tell them what is right? Are there not malnourished children on the South side of Chicago, people suffering without access to medical care in the suburbs? Who can, in good conscience, say that the United States, or any developed economy, has it right, anyway? Despite my insecurities, I still aspire to enter the field of development. People are not perfect, and neither is international aid. Yet, I cling to notion that something in the quagmire of development has value and improves peoples lives. At the end of the day, I find it unacceptable that mothers cannot feed their children, or that young girls cannot attend school. It is therefore equally condemnable to do nothing on account of fear. By constantly asking questions and reading the thoughts and opinions of those with more experience than I, I hope to keep from succumbing to some kind of White Womans Burden while still working on one of the worlds great problems. Jessica is currently a Senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is working towards a major in International Studies. She may be contacted at loiacono.j@gmail.com.

84

Articulate Style Sheet

Documentation Guidelines Articulate adheres to the Chicago Manual of Styles humanities, or notebibliography, format system. All citations and references of a submission to the journal must align with the guidelines outlined here. For more detailed information, please refer to the most recent edition of the manual.
rEFErEncEs

This page should appear at the end of the paper, but before any figures and appendixes, and should be arranged in alphabetical order according to the authors last names. All entries with no author should be placed before those with authors, and should be arranged alphabetically according to the title of the work (keep in mind that an organization can act as an author). In the examples that follow below, the first entry shows the format of the first note as it should appear in the text proper. These should be placed in footnotes, and ordered sequentially by number. After the first note entry for a work, all subsequent references to that work should be formatted as Authors last name, page number. If you have referenced several works from the same author, include the title in secondary notes, as in, Authors last name, title of work, page number. If no author is given, include the title and page number. If there is no page number (e.g., a website), simply include the title of the reference. The second entry shows the format of the note as it should appear in the references page. Note that each line after the first is indented. Also note that there is no use of italics or underlining: book titles are left as regular, plain text, while everything else sections of books, websites, articles, papers, presentations, etc. are placed within quotation marks.
book

One author 1. Ferdinand Oyono, Houseboy (London: Heinemann, 1980), 27. Ake, Claude. Democracy and Development in Africa. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1996. Two authors 2. Toyin Falola and Matthew Heaton, Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2008), 94-97. 87

Feierman, Steven and John Janzen. The Social basis of health and healing in Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Three or more authors 3. Edward O. Laumann et al., The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 262. Laumann, Edward O., John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels. The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Chapter or other part of a book 4. Gustavo Esteva, Development, in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed Books, 1992), 6-25. Hoogvelt, Ankie. Globalization, Imperialism and Exclusion: The Case of Sub-Saharan Africa. In Africa in Crisis, edited by Tunde ZackWilliams, Diane Frost, and Alex Thomson, 15-28. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Preface, foreword, introduction, or similar part of a book 5. Nancy Birdsall, introduction to Reinventing Aid, ed. William Easterly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), xix. Keim, Curtis. Preface to Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind, by Curtis Keim, xixii. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009.
journAl
ArticlE

6. Sally Matthews, Post-development Theory and the Question of Alternatives: A View from Africa, Third World Quarterly 25.2 (April 2004): 373-384. Cohen, Michael A., Maria Figueroa Kp, and Parag Khanna. The New Colonialists. Foreign Policy 167 (July-August 2008): 74-76.
populAr
MAgAZinE ArticlE

7. Russ Hoyle, A Continent Gone Wrong, Time Magazine, January 16, 1984, 26. 88

Sachs, Jeffrey. A Deadline on Malaria. Scientific American, July 29, 2008.

nEWspApEr
ArticlE

Newspaper articles may be cited in running text (As William Niederkorn noted in a New York Times article on June 20, 2002, . . . ) instead of in a note, and they are commonly omitted from a works cited as well. The following examples show the more formal versions of the citations. 8. Mangoa Mosota, Report: Recession will affect HIV plans, The East African Standard, July 9, 2009, Health section, Kenya edition. Timberg, Craig. How AIDS in Africa was Overstated; Reliance on Data From Urban Prenatal Clinics Skewed Early Projections. Washington Post, April 6, 2006, section A, Final edition.
book
or

MoviE

rEviEW

9. William Easterly, The Big Push Dj vu, review of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time, by Jeffrey Sachs, Journal of Economic Literature 76.1 (February 2005), 1-22. Seitz, Matt Zoller. Healing Cultural Wounds. Review of A Walk to Beautiful, directed by Mary Olive Smith and Amy Bucher. New York Times Movie Review, February 8, 2008.
tHEsis
or DissErtAtion

10. Nic Cheeseman, The Rise and Fall of Civil Authoritarianism in Africa: Patronage, Participation in Political Parties in Kenya and Zambia (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 2008), 31-37. Almeida, Edgar F. Was the Colonial Policy of Ethnic Self-Rule Responsible for the Divided Polity in Uganda? MA thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2000.
pApEr
prEsEntED At A MEEting or conFErEncE

11. C. Everett Koop, Health policy working group briefing: the Surgeon Generals report on AIDS (presented in Washington D.C., 89

September 24, 1986). Sen, Amartya. Health in Development. Keynote address presented to the Fifty-fifth World Health Assembly, Geneva, Switzerland, May 18, 1999.
WEbsitE
or

blog

Web sites may be cited in running text (On its Web site, the Evanston Public Library Board of Trustees states . . .) instead of in a note, and they are commonly omitted from a works cited as well. The following examples show the more formal versions of the citations. 12. Hans Rosling, Hans Rosling on HIV: New facts and stunning data visuals, TED, http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_truth_ about_hiv.html. Stiglitz, Joseph. Making Globalization Work. Project Syndicate. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz74 (Accessed July 27, 2009).

90

91

Articulate is supported generously by:

African Studies Center Michigan State University

issn

1943-6742

92