
Pierre EnglebertPomona College · Department of International Relations
Pierre Englebert
Professor
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51
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Introduction
Current project 1: Understanding variations in the responses of African countries to security threats in the Horn and the Sahel. A project with Jessica Piombo (Naval Postgraduate School), financed by a MINERVA grant.
Current project 2: Studying governance and statehood in the DR Congo.
Publications
Publications (51)
African regimes commonly use strategies of balanced ethnic representation to build support. Decentralisation reforms, often promoted in order to improve political representation and state access, can undermine such strategies. In this article we use the example of the DR Congo to show the extent to which the multiplication of decentralised province...
La République démocratique du Congo, décentralisée depuis 2006, s'est vue davantage découpée en 2015, avec la partition de six de ses onze provinces en vingt et une nouvelles unités, pour un total de vingt-six provinces. Cet ouvrage collectif analyse plusieurs dimensions du découpage depuis 2015, avec une attention particulière aux relations politi...
The sovereignty of postcolonial African states is largely derived from their recognition by other states and by the United Nations, irrespective of their actual effectiveness. Such international legal sovereignty has been a resource to weak African states, allowing them to endure against the odds, and to their rulers who have instrumentalized it to...
Expectations that decentralisation in DRC would result in improved provincial governance were predicated upon an understanding of provincial elites as autonomous from Kinshasa. In reality, they are deeply embedded in informal patronage networks that reach out across the country, emanating from the presidency outwards. These networks are highly cent...
While international law stands on the side of the territorial integrity of African states, maintaining their colonially inherited boundaries and entertaining the right of self-determination in contexts of decolonization only, we show in this conclusion that its implementation has been inconsistent, before being overturned with the independence of S...
This chapter offers four interpretations of Africa’s secessionism: aspiration, grievance, performance, and disenchantment. Secessionism remains a fundamental theme of African politics, despite being largely removed from the realm of the thinkable. Yet, South Sudan’s independence against all odds shows that African secessionism is also contradictory...
Secessionism perseveres as a complex political phenomenon in Africa, yet often a more in-depth analysis is overshadowed by the aspirational simplicity of pursuing a new state. Using historical and contemporary approaches, this edited volume offers the most exhaustive collection of empirical studies of African secessionism to date. The respected exp...
Despite significant reconstruction efforts in the wake its 2012–13 collapse, Mali remains mired in crisis: violence is on the rise; institutions are dysfunctional; the military is inefficient; investments are few; and corruption is rampant. We suggest that Mali’s reconstruction’s failure is but the latest iteration of a general failure at building...
The DR Congo embarked upon decentralization reforms in 2006 to improve governance and accountability, undermine predation, corruption, and personal rule, bring government closer to the people, and promote local development. As of 2014, despite some regional variations, Congolese decentralization had instead increased the degree to which the state e...
This paper first discusses the actual sequence of events that led to the fall of the President Blaise Compaore in Burkina Faso in October 2014. We then identify some deeper trends that weakened the regime, including the dilemma of succession in a semi-authoritarian regime, the rise of youth and cultural elites as opposition actors who placed themse...
Identity, Citizenship, and Political Conflict in Africa. By Keller Edmond J. . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. 222p. $70.00 cloth, $21.99 paper. - Volume 13 Issue 1 - Pierre Englebert
Michael Bratton, Afrobarometer’s founder and now one of its senior advisors, has written a powerful and deeply personal book about Zimbabwean politics that also yields considerable comparative insights for students of democracy in other parts of Africa. Bratton was born in 1949 in what was then called Rhodesia, and spent his formative years there....
In seeking to maintain their power, many African regimes rely on strategies of extraversion, converting their dependent relations
with the external world into domestic resources and authority. This article assesses the relationship between extraversion
and political liberalization, a dimension of African democratization that has been somewhat under...
Uncertainty, autonomy and parasitism : decentralized territorial entities and the state in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Decentralization reforms in the DR Congo have taken place in a context of widespread uncertainty characterized by simultaneous recentralization, legal and institutional profusion, fiscal arbitrariness and the vulnerability of...
For scholars of Africa's political economy, an important problem has been explaining and understanding how a country escapes rule by criminals and warlords and instead comes to be directed by a set of lower-key kleptocrats who operate within a set of institutions which on the whole promote incentives and preferences for good "governance". In this p...
Postconflict state reconstruction has become a priority of donors in Africa. Yet, externally sponsored reconstruction efforts have met with limited achievements in the region. This is partly due to three flawed assumptions on which reconstruction efforts are predicated. The first is that Western state institutions can be transferred to Africa. The...
Wherever one looks, many elements conspire to suggest that the Democratic Republic of Congo should have collapsed some time ago under the multiple assaults of its own inadequacies as a state, the extreme heterogeneity and polarization of its populations, and the dislocations of globalization and foreign occupation. Yet Congo has gone on defying suc...
Over the last 40 years, Africa has experienced relatively fewer secessionist conflicts than most other regions of the world,
even though it is otherwise plagued with political violence and its countries tend to display a higher prevalence of many
of the factors usually associated with separatism. After empirically establishing Africa’s secessionist...
Dark Age: the political odyssey of Emperor Bokassa by BRIAN TITLEY Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. Pp. 272. £17.50 (pbk.). - - Volume 43 Issue 1 - PIERRE ENGLEBERT
What determines whether peripheral regions in Africa comply with the national integration project? Why do some regional elites, outside the core "fusion of elites", willingly partake in the state while others promote separate paths for their communities? This paper suggests some answers, based on a comparison between Barotseland - where the Lozi le...
Abstract (112 words) This article empirically tests and theoretically qualifies prevailing theories linking natural primary commodities and civil war. Drawing on interviews with ex-militia and politicians, we find that oil did contribute to civil war in the Republic of Congo. At the same time, however, we also conclude that conflict would never hav...
Sovereignty, under-development, and Congo’s nationalist paradox
Wherever one looks, many elements conspire to suggest that the Democratic Republic of Congo should have collapsed some time ago under the multiple assaults of its own inadequacies as a state, the extreme heterogeneity and polarization of its populations, and the dislocations of globali...
Wherever one looks, many elements conspire to suggest that the Democratic Republic of Congo should have collapsed some time ago under the multiple assaults of its own inadequacies as a state, the extreme heterogeneity and polarization of its populations, and the dislocations of globalization and foreign occupation. Yet, Congo has gone on defying su...
Wherever one looks, many elements conspire to suggest that the Democratic Republic of Congo should have collapsed some time ago under the multiple assaults of its own inadequacies as a state, the extreme heterogeneity and polarization of its populations, and the dislocations of globalization and foreign occupation. Yet, Congo has gone on defying su...
Do African countries suffer from their arbitrary boundaries? The authors test several hypotheses from the debate on this question. They differentiate, one by one, the degree of arbitrariness of African boundaries along two axes: the extent to which they partition preexisting political groupings (dismemberment) and the degree to which they bring tog...
Since the restoration of traditional leaders in Uganda in 1993, the Kingdom of Buganda has developed unusually effective institutions, financing mechanisms and policy tools, re-building itself as a quasi-state. The reinforcement of Buganda's empirical statehood provides one of the farthest-reaching examples of the current trend of traditional resur...
Africa has witnessed a rise tradition-based political action since the beginning of the 1990s. Rather than a mere return to hypothetical pre-colonial forms in the wake of the weakening of the African state, this resurgence appears to be the opportunistic by-product of several other trends that have characterized this period, including democratizati...
Most empirical studies have reported a negative effect on growth of being an African country, even when accounting for ethnic heterogeneity. Modeling policy choices has reduced this effect in recent studies, but these have begged the question of why Africa appears adverse to developmental policies. This paper uses a cross-sectional data set to show...
It is well known that Africa's development lags behind that of other regions. Lesser known is the substantial variance in development fortunes within Africa, with "miracle"economies compensating for the region's development disasters. Prevailing theories of Africa's average performance fail to account for intra-African disparities. Using empirical...
Although plagued by political instability since gaining independence from France in 1960, Burkina Faso has been fortunate to have little ethnic conflict and has done fairly well with its meager assets of cotton, gold, and livestock. Highlighting the historical and contemporary factors behind Burkinas instability, Englebert considers the contours of...
Over the past three decades, per capita GDP has increased worldwide. The authors examine whether this has resulted in better quality of life in developing countries. This paper documents the evolution of social indicators (health, education, nutrition), private consumption, and government expenditure on the social sectors. They conclude that develo...
In this paper, we try to explain variations in African democratization trajectories by looking at the determinants of changes in civil liberties and human rights between the five-year period preceding 1990 and the five-year period ending in 2008. We find that the civil liberties and human rights performances of African governments respond to differ...