Conquests, rents and state collapse

In his book Conquests and Rents, Faisal Ahmed attempts to present a political economy argument for the collapse of the Somali state.

Hi everyone, it’s been a while! As I mentioned, I’ll have fewer opportunities to post here, as I’m currently editing Geeska, an East African magazine, still working as a journalist, and writing a weekly newsletter on East Africa called Acacia—which you should all subscribe to!

I have recently been reading Faisal Ahmed’s relatively new book, Conquests and Rents: A Political Economy of Dictatorship and Violence in Muslim Societies. In it, Ahmed presents a novel argument—based on both qualitative and quantitative data—about why Muslim countries are more prone to civil war and why they tend, overall, to be less democratic than their non-Muslim counterparts. He focuses on a few key variables which, according to his research and analysis of the data, are the principal determinants of the quality of democracy in Muslim countries and their likelihood of experiencing civil war. Ahmed is grappling with a rather sobering reality, but not by appealing to notions of congenital flaws or culturalist explanations which were popular at the beginning of the so-called War on Terror.

Table from Ahmed’s Conquests and Rents (2023) comparing Muslim and non-Muslim majority countries in terms of civil war likelihood and democratic quality. (Credit: Conquests and Rents, Faisal Ahmed)

The variables he examines include whether the country or territory was conquered by Muslim armies prior to conversion (his cut off point is the year 1100 – which he calls “conquest societies”)—which he argues led to the emergence of autocratic and centralised institutions—and the extent to which a country’s elite relies on unearned income for public spending, which he terms “rents” (such as oil revenues, foreign aid, and similar sources). Ahmed attempts to develop a model incorporating these variables to account for why different regimes evolve in different directions—becoming more or less democratic, and more or less prone to conflict. For example, how do more centralised and less coherent regimes respond to fluctuations in rents? What factors drive democratisation, and in which cases does a decline in rents trigger conflict? Why is Norway—a kind of petro-state—democratic, while Saudi Arabia, which also relies heavily on oil revenues, is not? Why did a reduction in aid lead to civil war in Somalia but not in Pakistan? These are the kinds of questions Ahmed seeks to answer.

One of the case studies he discusses is Somalia, which was profoundly undemocratic and ultimately descended into civil war and state collapse after 1991, just thirty years after gaining independence. All Somalis are acutely aware that their country is often held up as a cautionary example of state failure. The New Yorker has even labelled it the “Most Failed State”. It is therefore no surprise that Somalia features as a significant case study in Ahmed’s book.

Most accounts of Somalia’s state collapse—including my own recent essay for New Lines—tend not to focus heavily on the country’s political economy during the Siad Barre regime, nor do they consider how it may have contributed to the eventual collapse of the government in 1991. It’s not that this aspect isn’t important—I believe it certainly is—but I’m generally cautious of deterministic analytical frameworks that portray repression and violence as inevitable outcomes of fiscal factors. Meanwhile, many historians tend to interpret Somalia’s collapse through the lens of clan dynamics. The typical narrative goes something like this: the civilian government was corrupt; the military overthrew it; things initially improved; Somalia then invaded Ethiopia and lost; and, without the unifying force of an external enemy, Somalis turned on one another, while the government responded with brutal repression and violence. This is why Faisal Ahmed’s perspective feels both refreshing and insightful—and I’ve included it below. In summary, he argues that Somalia was a state with low national cohesion, deeply undemocratic institutions, and a narrow elite base, all unfolding in a context of declining rents. According to his model, these factors inevitably lead to conflict.

This section can be found in the third chapter, under the heading Aiding Political Violence (pages 212–213). I’ve removed the references to make my life easier. Ahmed uses the POLITY score to measure democratic-ness which is a measure used in political science to assess the level of democracy in a country.

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A Case Vignette: Somalia

The relationship between foreign aid and political violence that I analyze cross-nationally in this chapter is starkly apparent in the case of General Siad Barre’s Somalia. While ethnically diverse, Somalia has been predominately Muslim-majority since at least 1100. The country’s proximity to the Arabian Peninsula, facilitated its conquest by Muslim armies, where by 1100, 84% of its modern territory was “exposed” to Islam and its initial governing institutions.

With regard to foreign aid, since its independence from colonial rule in 1960, Somalia has received considerable sums of foreign assistance. From 1969 through 1990, Somalia received, on average, foreign aid equal to 18.5% of its GDP – from the Soviet Union, then the United States, plus the Arab League and the United Nations, among others. Following the loss of Soviet support, Barre dropped a scientific socialist platform and adopted clannism as a method for maintaining power. With increasing foreign aid (with a large share coming from Gulf donors), Barre favoured the clans in his inner circle and bombed his rival clan’s strongholds. Correspondingly, the regime became increasingly repressive and consolidated its nondemocratic rule. During the 1970s and 1980s, Siad Barre ruled with “unlimited” political authority (based on the executive constraints index from POLITY) where political and civil liberties were ranked at the lowest possible levels of “not free” (according to Freedom House). The average normalised POLITY score was 0.15 (out of 1), falling well below the conservative threshold for democratic governance of 0.5. As the price of oil fell in the mid-1980s and Gulf aid declined, Barre’s policy of divide and rule (called clan-klatura) would ultimately lead to his destruction as the excluded clans expressed their dissatisfaction through armed insurgency. “Foreign aid,” observed one Somalia scholar, “provided the glue that held the system together in spite of internal waste and corruption”. Similar dynamics unfolded in other Muslim aid recipients, as I documented in the empirical analysis below.