As the EU has signalled the lifting of sanctions on Libya, quite a lot of that $110 billion of Libyan assets will presumably get unfrozen in the very near future. As part of that, expect much backslapping over the removal of Gaddafi (when it has actually been confirmed).
At this point, it is worth noting Laura Seay’s interview with Zachariah Cherian Mampilly about his book Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War. Based on his own experiences, Mampilly notes that the exisitng literatures
didn’t conform to the reality of what I was witnessing on the ground but were more a fantasy of how the West perceives post-colonial countries, i.e. weak and corrupt governments overtaken by violent criminal warlords.
Similarly, and presciently, back in February, Charles Hugh Smith gave an ascerbic dissection of the crisis that currently grips much of Arab world in particular in what he described as post-colonial karma:
Most of the “developing” world is still working through the consequences of 19th century Imperial/colonial domination–the “karma” of post-colonialism. Even the rare exceptions which avoided direct Imperial control such as Thailand were still shaped by the carving up of the globe by European Empires in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
I’d suggest that the problem in some of these postcolonial states is that local power structures and social modes have continued to be resistant to the actual territorial framework and insistence on western style governance models that was imposed at the moment of colonial eclipse (and subsequently maintained by various western agencies like the UN and World Bank). And it isn’t just the ‘developing’ world, unless you want to include Palestine/Israel and Ireland in that…
Both articles are worth a read.
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