AFRICAN WEAK STATES AND COMMERCIAL ALLIANCES

Conventional analyses of Africa's 'failed states' conclude that patron age networks fragment as stare resources decline. As payoffs from rule rs decline, once-loyal strongmen become warlords, attacking centralize d authority. This article examines how rulers of weak states actually manage increasingly threatening patronage networks. The cases of Angol a and Sierra Leone show how rulers use more reliable foreign mining fi rms and foreign private (mercenary) armies to marginalize threatening strongmen. At home, militarizing commerce denies its benefits to enter prising strongmen. Rulers then receive creditor financial support for their offensives against elements of their old patronage network and i nsurgencies, seeming to battle corruption and inefficiency. Rulers dis cover that they can use foreign firms to collect revenue, defend terri tory and conduct diplomacy with other states and multilateral agencies more reliably then domestic bureaucrats or strongmen whose political authority may threaten their own. This new political alliance increase s the economic viability of some weak states. Paradoxically, the destr uction of conventional state institutions eases the hard pressed ruler 's efforts to recruit aid from global society and manage the demands o f competition in global markets.