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| Title: | African Weak States and Commercial Alliances |
| Author: | Reno, William S.K. |
| Year: | 1997 |
| Periodical: | African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society |
| Volume: | 96 |
| Issue: | 383 |
| Period: | April |
| Pages: | 165-185 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Sierra Leone Angola South Africa |
| Subjects: | State foreign enterprises Inter-African Relations international relations Economics and Trade |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/723857 |
| Abstract: | This article shows how after the end of the Cold War, rulers of weak States in Africa find new ways to preserve their regimes as external support dwindles. Rulers in Angola, Sierra Leone, and other States with regimes once dependent upon support from Cold War patrons, re-work old ties to gain access to new resources and manipulate apparently harsher demands from outsiders who still assist weak State regimes. These strategies make even more unlikely that a weak State regime will opt for State building strategies that rely upon strong bureaucracies serving popular needs in exchange for popular support. Rulers of some weak States use creditor demands to privatize State agencies and liberalize markets as excuses to hire foreign firms that field mercenaries. These foreign soldiers serve the joint interests of foreign firms and weak States' rulers to control resources and deny them to independent strongmen. Furthermore, weak States' rulers cultivate tacit arrangements with aid agencies that accept this new political alliance of vulnerable regimes and outsiders. The article shows how postapartheid changes in South Africa support new firms that are adept at doing business in difficult places. The cases of Sierra Leone and Angola then provide illustrations of the operation of these new political alliances. Ref., sum. |
