QUASI AND FAILED STATES

Quasi- states are states that are states that struggle to establish good governance, which threatens their sovereignty, to the point where they have to get help from the international systems in order to be empowered domestically. Moreover, quasi states are not ignorant of their statehood but there are still some problems that come when applying the alternatives put in place by the international system to gain back their sovereignty.   Looking at the three readings of this week, many perspectives are used to explain why quasi states lack sovereignty with the provision of possible solutions. Primarily, Jackson differentiates between negative and positive sovereignty, negative sovereignty which means that a state is free from outside intervention while positive sovereignty gives the ability to a state to be its own master, in other words act without international intervention, also provides for its citizens and enforces public policy at the national and international level.  Jackson argues that negative sovereignty and external support systems were established expressly so that third world countries will gain their independence, also that external sovereignty has to be granted at first with the hope that internal sovereignty be restored. I don’t agree with this idea, because for me if state is not able to well govern or manage the affairs of his country, how could he be an important actor in the international world, because at that point it does not involve the well -being of one nation but many. Jackson also mentioned that quasi-states did not arise today, and there were always strong states and weak states which is true, because looking back at our history even though there were not “nations” or “states” at that time as we will called it today, there were powerful empires or kingdoms who dominated over the others for instance, the Ottoman Empire, Roman Empire, Han Dynasty just to name a few.

 Stephen Krasner explained the idea of conventional sovereignty which is the recognition of juridically independent territorial entities and non-intervention in international affairs of other states. Conventional sovereignty has three elements which are international legal sovereignty which is the right given to entities when it comes to decide which treaties they will enter into, the second element is westhphalian sovereignty which is the possibility to secure decent and effective domestic sovereignty, the third element is domestic sovereignty which is the description of the nature of domestic authorities structures, and the extent to which they are able to control activities within a state borders.  The main difference between these three is that international legal sovereignty and westphalian sovereignty both have rules or norms, while domestic sovereignty has no rule or norm. Some institutional options have been developed to restore international and westhphalian sovereignty: de facto trusteeship, and shared sovereignty. De facto trusteeships is the idea of establishing a protectorate or deciding who will appoint the authority, I don’t really agree with this idea, because too much power is given to one individual or group, also looking at many nations in Africa which have diverse ethnic groups,  when appointing someone, I think the person who is choosing the leader might favor one from his ethnic group and give more privileges to the people of that specific group, while leaving the others behind, which might bring some conflicts not forgetting the various ethnic differences that are already existing in many of these African Nations, for example the conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi which led to the massive killing of thousands of people, or in  Nigeria between the Yoruba, Igbo, and the Haussa over oil revenues and military representation. However,  shared sovereignty is the engagement of external actors with internal actors for an indefinite period of time, I partially agree with this way because it involves the local leaders of the state and they know the matters of their state better so it’s a partnership, but I also believe in a long run since it’s for an indefinite period of time it might create a form of total dependency of the local actors towards the external actors to the point they might not be able to stand on their own.

Inayutallah Naeems has different point of view compared to both Jackson and Krasner, he believes that the main problem to sovereignty in quasi-states is wealth production and acquisition, the idea that most third world states are not able to produce or acquire wealth on their own, and therefore they have to depend on external sources in order to do so. For instance, many third world countries have many natural resources, but just because they don’t have the right industries or technologies to manufacture goods they have to rely on western powers, also the division of labor which affects the level of production, which means the greater the division of labor, the greater the level of production. As we all know, many third world states are not able to apply this concept rightly, because there is a lack of specialization mostly because of lack of good education and special training. In my point of view, wealth plays a big role in the sovereignty of a nation because most third world countries have a high rate of poverty and have to rely on governance assistance just as Krasner mentioned, also leaving the concept of wealth is disregarding the effects of colonialism.

To finish, one cannot say there is an ultimate way to restore sovereignty in a quasi or failed state, just as we saw with the three articles. There is always one or more complications depending on the alternatives, for instance with de-facto trusteeship and shared sovereignty there is a problem over the authority, and possible tyranny by local leaders. The division of labor, wealth production and acquisition result in the creation of a capitalist society with uneven distribution of resources which affects the working class. Restoring sovereignty is a working process, and some countries might take more time than the others depending on the ways they respond to the issue, so it is more a matter of how much time it will take, than which alternatives should be adopted.