UA News

The desperate situation in Liberia helps illustrate how a criminal autocracy uses its legitimacy as a government to essentially drain the resources of a country before it collapses into anarchy. Such anarchy provides fertile territory for terrorists, drug smugglers and arms merchants, says a public policy expert at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Brinton H. Milward says the implosion of Liberia also shows how the phenomena called "dark networks" function to support such governments' immoral or illegal purposes, and how legitimate governments often are frustrated attempting to stop them.

Milward, the McClelland Professor of Public Management at Arizona's Eller College of Business and Public Administration, and his colleague Jorg Raab at the University of Konstanz in Germany, have summarized their research on this in a paper, "Dark Networks as Problems," which Milward will present at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association later this month in Philadelphia.

"Dark Networks" also will be published in October issue of "Journal of Public Administration, Research and Theory."

Networks themselves have been a prime field of social science analysis for at least three decades. Most of the research on collaborative networks has focused on how groups have organized in a collective fashion to solve complex social or political problems such as homelessness, labor disputes and enfranchising citizens.

Only since Sept. 11, 2001, though, have scientists have become increasingly interested in so-called "dark networks," groups whose interests center most often on destruction or on enriching themselves at the expense of social and political stability.

Milward and Raab's paper deals specifically with three such networks: heroin, al Qaeda and arms trafficking in West Africa. The latter two are both present and function in Liberia.

Milward, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia between 1969 and 1970, says the country is essentially "a criminal gang that has become a state." It presently exists, Milward says, for the enrichment of its now-embattled president Charles Taylor.

"There is increasing evidence of a close connection between al Qaeda and the failed states of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso in West Africa," Milward says. "The connection appears based on al Qaeda's need to exchange cash for diamonds ... fueled by the pressure from the U.S. and Western Europe to clamp down on al Qaeda's use of legitimate banks for international monetary transactions," he says.

Taylor and his cronies who controlled the Sierra Leone diamond fields, helped al Qaeda operatives exchange their bulky and traceable cash for diamonds, which are easily smuggled and highly liquid as currency. Taylor's Liberia also offers a vast outlet for weapons dealers and buyers. Much of the arms come from stocks controlled by former Soviet military officers in Russia and its federated republics. One of these shadowy figures even owns his own fleet of rickety, Soviet-era air transport planes to move arms about.

Milward says there are weak states, like Liberia, that can be destabilized with only a planeload or two of small arms. The cost of such an operation is not high, and for many poor people, war on this scale amounts to entry into a lucrative, albeit risky, career.

A fugitive from a bank robbery in the U.S. and wanted for crimes in other countries, Charles Taylor, Milward notes, actually won the presidential election in Liberia by campaigning on the threat of continued conflict unless voters chose him as their leader. Taylor has since become a lynch pin in a group that once included another head of state and the leader of a rebel movement in West Africa. "These men used power based on terror for their own purposes," he says.

Milward says Liberia and other failed states flourish amid the apathy of other countries. Pressured by non-governmental agencies such as Global Witness, the United Nations is leveling and threatening sanctions and boycotts against such regimes, which has helped reduce some of the violence in the region.

"Another lesson is that failed states can be extremely useful to covert networks," says Milward. "Not only are there commodities to extract for arms or supplies, but members of these networks can be provided with diplomatic passports and ... Liberian ship and air registries give covert networks the ability to give their transport arms some degree of legitimacy."

Milward and Raab will speak at the American Political Science Association meeting, on Thursday, Aug. 28, at 10 a.m. Contact Milward at the UA at 520-621-7476, or at bmilward@eller.arizona.edu