The Outcast Majority by Marc Sommers

Author:Marc Sommers [Sommers, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Poverty & Homelessness, Political Science, World, African, Comparative Politics
ISBN: 9780820348834
Google: CwDaCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2015-12-01T03:42:55+00:00

Part One: Sectors and Statistics

SCRATCHING BENEATH THE SURFACE: THE INTERNATIONAL AID SETUP

Reflecting on the aftereffects of economic globalization, Stiglitz argues that “privatization without the necessary institutional infrastructure in transition countries led to asset stripping rather than wealth creation” (2003: 220). The case of wartime Liberia, with its weak institutional infrastructure and expert asset stripper, Liberia’s former rebel leader and president Charles Taylor, supports this statement. During his nation’s civil war, particularly in the early and mid-1990s, Taylor absolutely thrived. He called his wartime territory “Greater Liberia,” which, at its peak, included “virtually all of Liberia and parts of Guinea and Sierra Leone” (Harris 1999: 434). Indeed, it appears that Taylor accepted a reduction in the territory he ruled when he was elected as Liberia’s president, by an overwhelming landslide, in 1997. Greater Liberia was a privatization scheme that West African scholar William Reno called “Taylor’s Shadow State” (1993: 178). A very raw form of globalization flourished in Greater Liberia (popularly and appropriately known as Taylorland), where foreign firms paid Taylor for access to the region’s diamonds, timber, rubber, and iron ore. In Taylorland’s first five years alone (1990–1994), “the total yields of Taylor’s warlord economy approached $200–250 million a year” (Reno 1998: 99).

The astonishing success of Taylorland (for Charles Taylor) obviously is not the sort of scheme that proponents of globalization and neoliberal economics have envisioned. Yet Taylor’s wholesale exploitation of Liberia during wartime is a component of today’s global economy. Valuable raw materials routinely exit war zones and enter the global market. A popular example is eastern DRC, where neither the Congolese state nor anything approximating a regulated, formal economic sector has yet to affect the lucrative trade in what are known as “conflict minerals” (such as gold, wolframite, coltan, and cassiterite; see, for example, Vircoulon 2011).12 Illicit economies, in fact, may be much larger than legitimate economies in war-affected African states, among others. Nordstrom, for instance, reports that United Nations economists based in postwar Angola “estimate that over three-quarters of the [Angolan] economy runs outside of formal state and legal channels” (2007: 15). But she also concludes that “reputable multi-national corporations most commonly violate the laws controlling trade” (206), which helps explain how Charles Taylor could make a fortune before he unceremoniously exited Liberia’s presidency in August 2003 and left his nation in a phenomenal state of ruin. Taylor’s profiteering received direct support from many economic actors. As Duffield notes, “War economies are highly criminalized.… Today’s so-called warlords or failed states may act locally, but to survive they have to think globally. In this respect, a high level of complicity among international companies, offshore banking facilities, and Northern governments has assisted the development of war economies.… In the early 1990s, for example, the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor . . . was supplying, among other things, a third of France’s tropical hardwood requirements through French companies” (2000: 84).

The manipulation of global capitalism’s underbelly to one’s own ends, something Charles Taylor demonstrated not long ago, plays a small role in global debates about economic development.

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