Continuing on yesterday’s theme, Jeff Vail’s article on the potential for an Open Source War (OSW) in Cabinda describes some decidedly traditional motivations for the potentially budding global guerillas.

The situation with regards to the Cabinda exclave would be far less problematic if the people of Cabinda were happy participants in the “Angolan Oil Miracle.” The huge royalties derived from Cabinda’s oil production, however, flow directly to the Angolan capital of Luanda, with very little flowing back in the form of development funds. This is especially significant considering that Cabinda has a population of only 300,000 people—that’s nearly two barrels of crude produced per person, per day, with this number expected to increase significantly over the next few years. The people of Cabinda understand that they should be among the wealthiest in Africa. Instead, only 10% of the oil revenues produced in Cabinda stay there–in theory. Because Angola hasn’t held elections in 14 years, and because provincial governments are appointed top-down from Luanda, the theoretical 10% that “stays” in fact enriches the pockets of Angolan officials hand-picked for these luctrative positions (see Ghazvinian, “Untapped,” pg. 154-65)

Complicating the situation further, there is a long history of armed struggle for independence in Cabinda. The FLEC (Frente para a Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda, or Cabinda Liberation Front) and FAC (Fuerzas Armadas de Cabinda, or Armed Forces of Cabinda) have been longtime participants in Angola’s past conflicts, and were the lone holdouts to the 2002 cease fire.

As with Stratfor’s analysis of MEND’s motives, we find another example of the evolving operational and tactical methods of OSW being used for traditional strategic ends. This challenges both the historical narrative of 4GW and the strategic forecasts of 4GW strategists, since Vail’s analysis implies that the Cabindan insurgents are motivated by a desire for fairer government (so that they can benefit more from their region’s oil wealth) and/or self-government (i.e. creation of their own state). These motivations do not challenge the legitimacy of the state system itself, but rather look more like the strategic motives for anti-colonial insurgencies, updated with some modern operational and tactical methods.

As with yesterday’s post, I am not precluding the possibility that these system disruptions could potentially produce feedback dynamics that could lead to unintended and uncontrollable consequences. In the extreme case, such consequences could include state failure so severe that insurgents cannot establish an alternative state structure and the region instead returns to tribal, localized loyalty structures. But that is a separate argument that I haven’t seen 4GW thinkers explicitly make.

This also brings up a related point I’ve been thinking about for a while. To what extend did the European state system ever truly proliferate to Gap regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, Southwest Aisa or Central America? If the state system never really existed in these regions, then current challenges to the facades of states created by the end of colonialism doesn’t necessarily reflect a crissi in the legitimacy of the state system itself. I’m slowly working my way through Bobbitt’s marvelous The Shield of Achilles and one of the themes that I am closely following is how Bobbitt’s detailed historical narrative of the past five hundred years agrees or disagrees with the four hundred year narrative of 4GW theory. Of particular interest is how Bobbitt weaves in the role of economics and law while 4GW focuses more narrowly on military power, with passing references to the state system.