International Interventions and the Human Cost of a Militarized Political Marketplace in Chad

Contribution au blog "Reinventig Peace", World Peace Foundation/Fletcher School at Tufts University.http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2014/07/17/international-interventions-and-the-human-cost-of-a-militarized-political-marketplace-in-chad/My participation in the seminar on “The Political Marketplace: Analyzing Political Entrepreneurs and Political Bargaining with a Business Lens” at the World Peace Foundation has been an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the “political marketplace” framework put forward by Alex de Waal. “Political marketplace” refers to “a contemporary system of governance, characterized by pervasive rent-seeking and monetized patronage, in the form of exchange of political loyalty or cooperation for payment, in the context of pervasive violence or threat of violence” (de Waal 2014). This framework offers a fresh perspective on politics everywhere (since political marketplaces are not specific to any particular country or region in the world). In this contribution, I build upon de Waal’s framework to give insights into structural patterns of politics in Chad, a country where I have conducted research for the past ten years. I argue that the Chadian political marketplace is characterized by five main patterns: externally-derived rents, the gap between politico-military entrepreneurs and the cheap combatant labor force who participate in “rent-seeking” rebellions, a violent mode of governing associated with a decentralized control over the instruments of coercion, the structural weakness of the civilian opposition trapped between repression and cooptation, and the exclusion of women