Chris Blattman

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War and the state in the other stateless Great Lakes region

I have been reading The Middle Ground, a history of the French encounter with the Algonquins about the Great Lakes of North America. Many interesting insights into state building.

The French equated leadership with political power, and power with coercion. Leaders commanded; followers obeyed. But what distinguished most Algonquian politics from European politics was the absence of coercion. Only among the Miamis did the French recognize leaders who seemed to possess power in the French sense.

…The normal influence of an Algonquian okama was far different. As Chigabe, a Saulteur chief, and probably a lineage head of one of the proto-Ojibwa bands of Lake Superior told Governor Frontenac: “Father: It is not the same with us as with you. When you command, all the French obey and go to war. But I shall not be heeded and obeyed by my nation in a like manner. Therefore, I cannot answer except for myself and for those immediately allied or related to me.” Except for war leaders during a war expedition, chiefs could command no other men. There were people of power and influence among the Algonquians, but their power was, as Pierre Clastres has argued, non-coercive; it was a type of power that Europeans failed to recognize.

In Algonquian village societies, people conceived of power as arising from outside. Power came from manitous [spirit beings], who gave it to individuals or to ancestors of the group. The power of clans usually derived from an ancestral vision, and that power was actualized in a ritual bundle consisting of objects that symbolized the original vision. Each bundle had its attendant ceremonies. A clan chief was the person responsible for these ceremonies.

Coercive, stable structures that look a little like a state emerge as the French and Algonquins ally and push back aggressive Iroquois invasions.

It’s a reminder that it’s difficult to see the order and logic of places that look different from us.

Also a reminder that the central states we equate with peace exist (in most places) because someone was were conquered by coercive neighbors. Or (in their own defense) grew their own military tyrants.

Today, unstable places like South Sudan or CAR didn’t face these pressures to the same degree, and so their tumult and transition is happening now. The violence is tragic and terrible. The alternative, though, was tragic and terrible violence generations ago, as they came under the yoke of some tyrant. The difference is it’s happening beneath the gaze of the global media rather than the frumpy historian.

The other difference, I’d like to think, is that there are better paths to stability today than tyrant’s yokes. That the global gaze restrains the tyrants, and make it possible to reach a stable political balance with less violence than in the past. Of course, today we also have helicopter gunships and AK 47s, so I’m not so sure.

And that, folks, is your optimistic thought of the day.

5 Responses

  1. Also on the positive front,
    a) the work at the Human Security Reports that shows much improved humanitarian outcomes in war zones. Gunships and AKs may kill a lot of people, but vaccinations and food aid in the camps are saving more.
    b) people seeking to change institutions are increasing using non-violent methods (Chenoweth)
    c) much more history to look at today for peaceful statebuilding than back in the day.

  2. If war was that significant in state formation, wouldn’t Somalia have the state to end all states by now? And in the history books I’ve seen, everybody is always slaughtering everybody almost all the time. Was CAR really an oasis of relative calm that missed out on as much war as, say, Egypt?

    It seems more like states arise in spite of war, not because of it. Just because both of them are about power doesn’t make them part of the same continuum. Avalanches don’t create mills and millstones, even though they’re both about big rocks grinding things into smaller pieces.

    Or, more likely, I’ve thoroughly misunderstood what you were saying.

  3. Currently reading the Art of Not Being Governed (I read about Scott’s work from this blog) and this is the perfect post to come across.

  4. Great piece, but what actual models for state creation (leading to a functional bureaucracy, etc.) exist beyond coercion? What’s the alternative?

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