Learn what motivates the restive Muslim youth from Tunis to Tehran, what political positions Islamists from Mali to Chechnya are fighting for, where the seeming obsession with Islamic law comes from, where the secularists have vanished to, and whether it makes sense to speak of an Islamic state. Since 2009 there has been a renewed wave of popular unrest sweeping throughout much of the Muslim world. Secular, but generally repressive and inefficient autocracies have come under pressure or been swept aside entirely. At the same, the various Islamic Republics have not fared much better, but been convulsed by internal unrest, economic and social decline. Throughout the Muslim lands, existing constitutional arrangements are being challenged, often very violently. This course is a survey of the constitutional ideas and institutions that have developed since the mid 19th century throughout predominantly Muslim countries, but its focus will lie on the actors that have dominated this discourse and shaped its outcomes. We will look at the large body of classical writings on the Islamic state only in so far as it is necessary to understand the contemporary debate, but concentrate on the legal and political developments of the 20th and 21st centuries. Three common themes will characterise the course: We privilege the study of the legal and social reality and seek to highlight where it is at odds with dogmatic stipulations, be they religious or constitutional. We seek to illustrate the practical tensions posed by limited administrative capabilities and political legitimacy that resulted from the incomplete reception of modern bureaucratic statehood. We seek to examine how popular dissatisfaction with the practical performance of Muslim governments has fuelled demands for greater accountability under the guise of cultural authenticity. Ultimately, the course aims to equip participants to better understand Muslim contemporary discourse about the res publica, better contextualise the demands for religious law in public life, and to better ascertain the theoretical and practical feasibility of postulated religious alternatives to the still-dominant secular model of governance.
9.5 Post-Independence Instability
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來自 University of Copenhagen 的課程
穆斯林世界的基本冲突
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從本節課中
Sub-Saharan Africa
This week, we will look at sub-saharan Africa and the particular challenges faced by Muslim-majority societies there. For obvious reasons, colonialism plays a very large role here and so we will return to many of the same issues already touched upon in earlier classes. But perhaps even more important is the endemic weakness of institutions. For more on those African nations that have successfully broken out of the vicious cycle of weak institutions, endemic poverty, bad governance, and domestic conflict, please see this week's readings.
與講師見面
Dr. Ebrahim AfsahAssociate Professor
Faculty of Law
[MUSIC]
In the previous lecture, we discussed how the dynamics of a weak
institutional legacy with the very considerable practical
problems of governance in the post colonial states,
leads to the susceptibility of these new states to coup's and
counter coup's and instability.
And in this lecture, just as a means of illustrating this,
I will look at four different countries out of the region that we will look at
this week, and give you a very rough overview of the instability that existed.
So, this is not a comprehensive view of the whole region,
but the view is representative of the region.
So what you will hear about these four countries
is mirrored in the other countries.
We have chosen these four countries because Nigeria is by far
the most populous nation in Africa, and therefore by definition, important.
Sudan is important because it has led to the secession of one part of it, and
a very considerable international problem in the last couple of years.
And also through the international mediation,
to the end of a very long and very bloody civil war.
Somalia likewise, is one of those countries where this structural
inherent tendency to instability has actually led to state failure,
a complete collapse of the state with all the accompanying problems,
social, but also international that this accompanies.
You probably have heard about the problem of piracy, for example.
So that's one of the reasons we will look at Somalia.
And then finally, we will also look at Mali for two reasons.
One is that at the beginning of last year,
you might remember that Mali itself experienced an internal uprising,
a struggle with Islamist forces that then led to an international intervention.
So putting Mali on the international map for awhile, but,
perhaps more importantly, if you remember the last video.
Mali is actually one of the emerging countries that Radelet's book has
identified as one of those countries that have emerged from this period of turmoil,
and have now started to put sensible socioeconomic policies in place.
And we like to look at how this is reflected in the economic
performance of all of these four countries, and
then Mali serves a little bit as a contrast to the other three.
So let's start with Nigeria, very briefly.
Nigeria becomes independent in 1960.
Just in the wave of many of the other countries that we have already discussed,
and then you have here the first Prime MInister of independent Nigeria,
is Sir Abubakar Balewa, and Nigeria is at
that time a federal arrangement.
Following the Westminster Democracy model that Britain bequeathed
to most of its colonies, and then you might have heard in
1967, Nigeria suffers a very bloody secessionist civil war.
Here the three Eastern states try to secede as the Republic of Biafra.
So here you have the map and the flag that this impending republic gave itself,
and it was a very bloody armed struggle in the course of which,
very large numbers of civilians died.
Up to 3 million died of starvation,
because of the blockade by the federal forces to the republic.
There was strong interference from both sides, but ultimately this secessionist
region was reintegrated into Nigeria,
and now we see Nigeria played out exactly what we discussed in the last video.
There is throughout the 70's, 80's, and 90's,
the country experiences coup after coup, after coup.
There is, the military is s absolutely dominant and
the different factions in the military, exactly what we referred to.
Due primarily to the absence of other competing institutions.
And now, you also might have followed
that in 99, the period of military rule came to an end.
We have the, Mr. Obasanjo here is now elected in a civilian
take over of power, but what this is now, for the time being,
has been the last military coup, but we don't know whether it will remain.
Nigeria since then, has experienced a period of liberalization,
both economically and politically.
And, perhaps seemingly paradoxically,
this liberalization has led to increased inter ethnic tensions.
Remember, it's a story not totally dissimilar to what we
learned when we looked at Indonesia.
So military rule, central rule, is now relaxed, and
the impending political space is filled by different groups competing
primarily along ethnic and religious lines, and I'll come to that in a minute.
But before we do that, you know that Nigeria has tremendous oil weath,
and so it's probably a good idea to look at this chart that shows GDP growth per
capita over time, and what is surprising for those of you who are not economists.
These are in constant, I think, 2005 dollars, and if you look at these figures,
it's constant dollars per year in yearly income,
from 1960 to 2012 roughly, and there's very, very little increase.
It's basically a stagnant line from here, right up to the 2000 years,
and then we see a modest increase since then.
And that is an extremely disappointing performance for a country with as much oil
as Nigeria, and that already hints to the vast
corruption and theft that is taking place with the national wealth.
And these graphs, we show these graphs now for all the other countries,
just as we did for Malaysia and Indonesia.
So if you look at the green relatively stagnant graph,
that shows population growth over time in percentage time, and
you see it's a relatively high rate of annual population growth.
And just as with the others, you see the blue line shows the GDP growth
in percentage terms annually, and the red line is the GDP growth per capita,
and it's offset precisely by the population rate of increase.
And what you see here now are these enormous shifts, these waves in
economic performance, here In the late 60's that coincides
with the war in Biafra and the very steep decrease, and an increase again.
But then you see, as the country is experiencing turmoil,
the economy tanks each time there is turmoil,
and then it recovers slightly, but by and large,
we see a history that is not at all impressive.
GDP performance that is more or less stagnant, it's not at all convincing,
and that's precisely what I tried to tell you in the earlier lectures here.
That the political turmoil, the equality of your institutions has a direct effect
on your quality of life, and that is shown in these graphs
that the average Nigerian is not seeing a lot of the benefits in oil.
Now here the other story is related to it because it
shows the quality, the lack of functioning institutions.
This is the map we had discussed earlier on
about the religious divide in the country.
And it's in the area where the Muslim North and the Christian South meet,
where we see most of the tension happening.
And it's precisely because of the attempt by the northern states,
now particularly, after the period of liberalization after 99, to impose
Sharia law, where we see strong resistance.
And the fact of ethnic division of the country is
nicely illustrated in this map from the 2011 presidential elections, that show
you that the support for each candidate, this is what the colors represent here,
is neatly divided along ethnic and that coincides with religious lines.
And that is obviously a problem that shows you the Nigerian political system has not
been able to reach out to all of its citizens properly.
Let's now look at Sudan.
That is a very large country and
that has had a very active conflict that was ultimately resolved through
international mediation, reasons enough to pay attention to it.
If you remember,
Sudan achieved independence from the Anglo Egyptian condominium in 1956.
Here's a picture of the flag raising at independence.
And already two years later we have the first military coup,
following the pattern that we discussed in the last video.
And two years again after this, we have the civil war.
In 1962, starts a civil war in the South.
That civil war isn't ended but ten years later.
But while we see series of military led governments in the center
in Khartoum in the south, the grievances of
the Christian animist Bantu people in the South
are not responded to effectively by the central government in the North.
Rather, the opposite,
we see these military led governments in the North following opportunistic
Islamization processes to bolster their otherwise rather shallow legitimacy.
Again, try to think what we discussed when we
talked about General Zia-ul-Haq coming to power in Pakistan.
It's the same idea.
You come to power, your basis for legitimacy is
basically nonexistent simply because you had a few soldiers under command, and
then you try to appeal to the population,
try to appeal to existing normative values, in this case Islam.
And we see a concerted effort of Islamization particularly under
Nimeiry after 69 onwards.
And that is obviously fuels the resentment in the South,
we have the Civil War breaks out again in 1983, and
then lasts right up to present year until the present era when it's finally then
a negotiated agreement is created in 2005.
Indeed, the comprehensive peace agreement that ends this civil war.
And here we see the flag of this new entity in the South, and that's
something that I'd like to highlight now that I mentioned in the last video.
Here we see a government that inherits a state,
inherits population that is fractured, that pursues
policies that are very narrow-minded, gear ed to only one part of the population.
And this map actually shows it rather well the distribution of the country
into different groups.
So basically the northern central government was pursuing policies only for
the benefit of the northern Sudanese people, here highlighted in orange.
And we don't need the full details of the comprehensive peace agreement, but
in short, what the peace agreement does is the acknowledgement of the central
government that it can no longer keep the people in the South in the center.
So they agree on a transitionary period, after which the South will
have a referendum, and the north agrees to accept the outcome of the referendum.
And it's clear to everybody involved that they will vote for independence.
And that's exactly what they did in 2011, when then South Sudan becomes
independent and has been recognized now as an independent state.
And just like in many of the other places we looked at,
it's the existence of oil wealth, particularly in the central region.
You see one of the areas that is still disputed is the yellow area that is
still a bone of contention where fighting still exists.
The comprehensive peace agreement has a wealth sharing component.
So they now try to settle the disagreement and
try to distribute the benefits more equally.
And what I'd like you to now consider, if more far sighted,
more constructive policies had been adopted 40 years earlier,
this country did not have to reach the stage of separation and
let alone the civil war that devastated it for decades.
They've now reached exactly the position that they could have come up with
already shortly after independence.
But they probably didn't come up with because the institutions didn't allow
moderate, reasonable people to come to power.
Instead you had self interested military leaders with very,
very narrow, very short sighted agendas.
And that ultimately leads to the destruction, or in this case,
the separation of the state.
And this rather sorry
state of affairs is reflected now in the economic performance of the country.
Again, it's a country that has oil wealth, and not insignificant oil wealth.
And if you look at this chart shows you per capita,
GP per capita in absolute dollars.
And this is a country that is dramatically underperforming economically, and
this underperformance is also reflected in these charts, that we've shown you before.
They've followed the same model before.
You have a very high population.
The rate of population growth and an extremely
varied and overall not particularly impressive rate of economic growth.
And interesting here is the last part of the chart.
If you see, now with the loss off Southern Sudan,
you see that the overall GDP of the country dramatically falls,
obviously, because the oil wealth in the South is now gone and
that's the price of the central government had to pay for
foolish policies it pursued in the 40 years before.
And, that's perhaps the one thing I'd like you to consider.
Foolish policies impose costs that you have then to bear and
in this case both in Nigeria and in Somalia.
These are not costs that can be attributed to colonial forces.
It's our decisions taken by the local elites and the local population as well.
Which brings us to another place that is not doing particularly well,
which is Somalia.
You'll remember, as we discussed a number of lectures back,
Somalia was created as the union from the former British protectorate and
the formerly Italian held Trust territory.
They form a union in 1960 and become independent.
You remember that little video we showed you about the independence celebrations.
And it's a reasonably stable,
relatively, it's not particularly rich but it's doing okay.
It's a society that is relatively at ease with itself.
And here you see a contemporary image of the city of Mogadishu at the time.
And then, just as in the other places, you have, in 1969,
this gentleman, Muhammed Siad Barre, putsches himself to power,
instigates a left-leaning socialist oriented regime,
with very far reaching attempts at social engineering.
Not dissimilar to what we hear in Afghanistan ,after
the republic is pronounced in 73 under Daoud and
particularly after 78, so the Communists take over.
So we see not a dissimilar thing here.
And again think of the context of the Cold War.
He's heavily supported by the Soviet Union and obviously the Americans and
everybody else are heavily supporting his opponents.
But the country remains relatively stable for significant parts of his
reign, it's just that it's not doing particularly well economically.
But in 1991 he is ousted from power, and
basically then the country descends into chaos.
Warlords take over.
This story not dissimilar to what we saw in Afghanistan and
that is basically the result.
The country, whatever existed there in forms of full institutions and
physical infrastructure is completely destroyed.
And if you look at the economic indicators, already you see
here that the data is simply not available in a country where a state has collapsed.
So much of the data stops here when Siad Barre is ousted.
But also you see the population growth is extremely high.
Following perhaps the end of conflict in the internal conflict.
But also you see these extreme shifts in economic performance under Siad Barre.
So this is a country that is dramatically underperforming, and
as we all know, once he's ousted from power in '91, we have this
very long period now of fratricidal, clan-based fighting,
where in the early 90s you see foreign forces trying to impose power,
led by the Americans that fails dramatically.
Which shows you generally the limits of an external force
it's ability to bring stability into a place and
then ultimately in the last few years we have seen the rise of very dramatic,
very radical, Islamist movements in Somalia, but in the last few years,
hopefully we see, a certain degree of consolidation of the central government.
Here's so, we see under the impact of African union forces
together with the government in exile, they have,
as you see on the right hand side of this map, they've now extended the reach
of the claim by the central government, the areas in blue with
the corresponding reduction in the area claimed by the Islamist forces.
Now as a side note, or the third side note,
you see the yellow area named Somaliland.
This is the former British part of the formerly British protectorate
that had seceded in the turmoil of the 1990s from the chaos in
Somalia, and is actually experiencing decent degrees of stability.
So it's almost an island of stability in this otherwise imploding
failed state, but it's an area, it's an entity,
that is not recognized by anybody in legal terms, but it enjoys de facto autonomy.
And just as a last thing, we have, now, in 2012, for
the first time since '67 presidential elections that were reasonably successful.
And now, you can, I leave you to the newspapers and
following the media, to see how this story in Somalia will play out.
But the thing I'd like you to remember is that
failed decisions by Somali leaders after
gaining independence have led to the disintegration of the state.
It's not an external force that came and destroyed the state.
That's the take home, I think.
Finally, what I'd like to talk to you is Mali, and
the somewhat conflicting story we get from it
because on the one hand, it started off reasonably well into independence.
You remember, it joined the Union with Senegal.
It had an equally skilled first president,
Modibo Keita, equally skilled to Leopold Senghor.
And it quickly becomes a one party state, a socialist oriented one party state.
He leaves the French Currency union, and
it follows the economic model of the Soviet Union,
not dissimilar to what we discussed when we looked at the, at Syria or
Iraq or Egypt, so that was the model in vogue at the time.
Now Mali, like the other countries we looked at,
experiences very large
numbers of authoritarian interventions in the politics.
It's not a democratic system as we would like to see.
But after the end of the cold war we see now a shift in
'92 towards a multi-party system.
In '92, for the first time we have multi-party elections,
the first democratically elected president is chosen.
And since then, we have a period that induces
observers like Radelet to describe Mali as now one of the emerging countries.
It is, as you see here, it's now beginning,
you know after a rather stagnant policy, it begins now in the early
90s a process of relatively modest but sustained economic growth.
And that is a result of the end of Soviet support that
allowed the government to pursue these,
kind of to buying off opposition, but instead turn to reform.
That's exactly the the logic that we had described.
And it's, As
part of this reform movement, it also tries to come to an agreement with
the Tuareg minority in the north that were seeking greater autonomy.
It's signs, in 2006, an Algerian-brokered peace agreement with them, and
we see now a period of decent stability and decent economic growth happening here.
Again, you see the economic picture that existed before is very, very,
varied and shifting and continues to be quite problematic right up into the 90's.
But there's here, the shift becomes a lot smaller and
it becomes moderately but sustained positive.
But what now happens in the wake of the Libyan Civil War
is that heavily armed fighters that were defeated in
the Libyan Civil War, they now moved south into Mali.
The Tuareg's become rearmed,
they recommence that struggle against the government.
And they form an alliance with very extreme Islamist groups,
and it's a short lived alliance.
They fall out quickly after, I showed to you some while before,
once these extremist groups turn to destroying the heritage,
the Islamic heritage that existed in cities like Timbuktu and elsewhere.
And ultimately we have a French military intervention that reinstalls
the government in place and extends the government's reach over the north.
And now we can hope that this cautiously,
hopeful optimistic view that we saw from the early 1990s,
whether that could extend or recommence now after this conflict has ended.
But, What this
short overview was hoped to show you is the practical implications of
the weak institutional structures that these government inherited,
the problematic nature of the political systems, and
how this then affects the socioeconomic well-being of people in these places.
And what places like Mali give us reason for
cautious optimism, but as you see the history is by far not clear yet.
And there are other places in Africa that have shown a much better
response to the changed global environment.
Ultimately, in the Muslim African states that we are looking at here,
we see a sustained debate over the constitutional order.
And that's something we will now look in the final video of this week when we
look at the struggles that concerned the constitutional order, not least
of which is the position of religion and Islamic law in the constitutional order.
[MUSIC]
