Despite the dominant role it plays in the Beninese economy, the cotton sector has not succeeded in accelerating the country’s economic growth. Yields have been volatile, and production practically stagnated from the mid-1990s to 2016. This poor performance mainly relates to the sector’s unstable management, which has oscillated between public and private monopolies. In its turn, this unstable management relates to several institutional factors including changes in ideology of the donors supporting the sector and the country’s political leader, elite bargaining, and clientelist contracts motivated by rent-seeking. These factors gave way to institutional instability, with the government abruptly overturning policies and planned actions by the previous government or re-assigning the mandates of management organisations in the cotton sector, which caused uncertainty in the sector and increased the cost of agriculture services in the sector.

This chapter devises a synthetic ordering of the factors identified as impeding long-run development in Benin, namely corruption, weak public management, opacity of public decision-making and policy implementation, and excessive informality. These institutional weaknesses are traced back to proximate and ultimate causes, while in the other direction the economic consequences of these weaknesses are unfolded. We identify the immediate causes as political instability, elite capture of key state functions, weakness of the state, and the possibility of easy but illegal rents. In turn, these causes are linked to five deep factors: (1) neo-patrimonialism with multiple oligarchs; (2) a multiple ethnic groups; (3) a geographical/neighbourhood landscape in which Benin appears as a small country that possesses a long border with its big neighbour (Nigeria); (4) a legacy of centralised management of key economic sectors, dating back to the French colonial period; and (5) the heavy presence of aid agencies. Policy reforms aiming at overcoming or circumventing these institutional problems are then discussed.

This chapter introduces Rwanda to the reader and explains why this small central African nation represented an extraordinary baseline for the forces that would ultimately lead to the genocide to unfold against. It begins by tracing Rwanda’s historical trajectory from the precolonial to the postcolonial era and zooms in on those features that increased the risk that political contestation would follow ethnic rather than non-ethnic fault-lines in Rwanda. It also documents those characteristics of Rwanda’s socio-demography and geography – several of which, such as its remarkable population density, were highly unusual – that served as amplifiers of the mobilization and violence. It is these extraordinary socio-demographic and geographic features that would account for the extraordinary characteristics of Rwanda’s violence: the speed with which Rwandans mobilized; the number of victims; the speed with which they were killed; and the nationwide scale of the killing.