Executive summary

This paper considers the case of Angola as an institutionally weak state. It is intended to contribute to the research project Institutionally Weak States: Context, Responsibilities and Responses, undertaken by the Peace, Security and Human Rights department of FRIDE.

The analysis seeks to respond to key questions about Angola posed in the project’s guiding purposes and methodology. These appear in three clusters:

1. What are the historical taproots of conflict in Angola, and of its weak uneven state and political institutions?
2. What formal and informal forces and incentives are at work in Angola’s territorial political economy that affect state and political resilience or weakness?
3. What aspects of the integration of Angola’s political economy into international systems may help explain the persistence of weak state and political institutions?

After addressing these questions, the paper suggests ways European and other international decisionmakers might look afresh at notions of state weakness in general, and at the case of Angola in particular. Studying the Angolan case may contribute to policy about weak states, but perhaps not along customary lines.

First, the Angolan case suggests the limited value of scoring and ranking states, as if they were commodities or football clubs. For example, influential think-tanks in the USA have classified post-war Angola as a completely ‘failed state’,¹ a ‘severe’ case of a lowincome country under stress² and most recently as a ‘critically weak’ state, 11^th of the world’s current worst cases.³ Yet another high-profile forum, Foreign Policy magazine, has for years rated Angola as well outside the ranks of the seriously weak and unstable. Given appeals for clarity and consensus among Western policy elites, this discord and confusion about an important client state is noteworthy.

Second, the Angolan case suggests that confining attention to politics ‘onshore’ leads to explanatory dead-ends. That is because Angola’s political economy is extraverted. Key processes take place ‘offshore’, in supra-national realms. Drawing attention to the extraversion of places like Angola is all the more important because influential ‘expert’ organisations like the World Bank consistently fail to do so.⁴

Third, Angola’s case suggests the need to probe common assumptions like the ‘resource curse’. Many hold that oil revenues trigger bad politics and instability; among cruder versions is that of a pundit of the Financial Times: ‘The very presence of oil turns law-abiders into thugs, and pushes nations backwards into chaos.’⁵ Yet recent comparative research finds that oil wealth, on the contrary, tends to stabilise regimes. Hence pursuit of general ‘laws of petro-politics’ is a dead end; it is more useful to look for patterns case by case in their social and historical settings. Angola may show signs of ‘path dependence’, but oil was only one factor laying down the path.

Fourth, and perhaps most urgently, the case of Angola calls attention to democratic deficits generated by the hydrocarbon industry not only in fragile peripheral states but also in advanced industrialised countries. It illustrates the power of the oil industry – and the national elites who depend on it – to corrupt and undermine the legitimacy of whatever political system it touches. Yet rules and institutions governing global financial flows, tax regimes and the environment continue being shaped to suit corporate interests, especially those of the hydrocarbon industry. The risks to democracies young and old are serious. This paper draws on research and commentary by others, and on information and views obtained in 2008 by the author in interviews with Angolans, and specialists working on issues such as revenue transparency and human rights.

1. USAID/Iris Center 2004, Proposed Typology in Order to Classify Countries Based on Performance and State Capacity, College Park: Iris Center, University of Maryland
2. World Bank IEG 2006, Engaging with Fragile States. An Independent Evaluation Group Review of World Bank Support to Low-Income Countries Under Stress, Washington, D.C: World Bank
3. Rice, S. and S. Patrick 2008, Index of State Weakness in the Developing World, Washington DC: Brookings Institution
4. See for example Harrison, G. 2005, ‘The World Bank, Governance and Theories of Political Action in Africa’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 7, 240–260
5. Amity Shlaes, ‘In Poorer Nations, Oil Resources Can Be a Curse Upon the People’, Financial Times, 20 June 2004