War, Markets, and the Reconfiguration of West Africa's Weak States

In recent book, I. William Zartman declares that Africa's collapsed suffer a long-term degenerative disease and offers that cure and remission are possible.' This and other analyses of conflict and declining bureaucratic capacity in African countries take the prevailing system of sovereign states as inevitable. Related govemance approaches to African political economies often prescribe social and territorial boundaries of sovereign states. That is, they focus on the development of linkages between states and societies to increase taxing capabilities, identify distinct public interest, and build competent bureaucracies accountable to popular needs.2 Alternatively, readers are warned that societal disengagement would, if carried out to its logical conclusion, result in the dissolution of the political community, as it has done in contemporary Somalia and Liberia.3 But this conclusion is not true.