Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes

by Democracy in Dangerous Places (pdf)

  need for them. So it is not surprising that the post-conflict election

  should be used as the milestone, in the surreal technical jargon of

  peacekeeping, for troop withdrawal. Or, in the more familiar sound

  bite, elections are the exit strategy. How this strategy played out in

  the Democratic Republic of the Congo I will return to shortly.

  If you think about it, our results suggest that a post-conflict elec-

  tion is inappropriate as a milestone: it is more like a tombstone. Of

  course, it depends whether peacekeeping works: if it doesn’t work

  then the boys might as well be brought home and any sort of stone

  will do. So it is time to turn from elections to peacekeeping.

  We asked the United Nations for data on its peacekeeping op-

  erations. The good news was that they had pretty complete records.

  Unfortunately, the records were not organized for quantitative

  analysis: it took our research assistants seven months to put them

  into shape. But eventually we had information, country by country

  and year by year, on the numbers of troops and their cost. It was time

  to see whether peacekeepers helped to keep the peace. Somewhat to

  our surprise we got clear results: peacekeeping seems to work. Ex-

  penditure on peacekeeping strongly and significantly reduces the

  risk that a post-conflict situation will revert to civil war.

  By now you will realize that the standard concern is whether

  such results are spurious because of reverse causality. For example,

  if the troops are systematically sent only to the safer post-conflict

  countries, they will appear to be successful in keeping the peace but

  the result will not be causal. And so we tried to find something that

  would explain the allocation of peacekeeping troops but that was

  otherwise unrelated to the risk of conflict reversion. Whatever we

  tried, we were unable to get a good explanation for the allocation of

  troops, and so we turned to the academic literature. Nicolas Sam-

  banis, a young Greek political scientist whom I had once worked

  with, had just coauthored a book on post-conflict peacekeeping with

  Michael Doyle, who used to be head of research at the United Na-

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  tions and is a world authority on peacekeeping. They had concluded

  that the political decision process that assigned troops to post-con-

  flict situations was so complex as to defy being modeled. The vari-

  ous members of the Security Council who took the decision were

  involved in such byzantine horse-trading that any particular deci-

  sion was close to being random. This explained why we were unable

  to find good predictors and also suggested that we were not facing a

  severe problem of reverse causality.

  Nevertheless, we were able to make one helpful check. The de-

  cision as to how many troops to send into a post-conflict situation

  can conceptually be split into two stages: first, should troops be sent

  at all, and, then, if it is decided to send troops, how many should be

  sent? We realized that we could learn something about the motiva-

  tions for sending troops by looking at that first decision: should they

  be sent at all? We found that the decision to send troops at all was

  associated with a significantly higher risk of reversion to violence.

  The most plausible way of interpreting this is that troops tend to

  be sent to places that are more at risk. We cannot tell whether the

  same is true of the decision as to how many troops to send. We just

  know that given the decision to commit troops, the more that were

  sent, the safer was the society. If, in fact, the number of troops sent is

  motivated by the same concerns as seem to motivate the prior deci-

  sion of whether to send any, then they are being sent in the greatest

  numbers to the most dangerous places. How would this affect our

  results, which implicitly assume that they are assigned randomly?

  Its effect would be that our results would understate the true effectiveness of peacekeepers. The truth would be that places with many

  peacekeepers have a lower rate of reversion to conflict despite intrinsically being more at risk. So our assumption that their numbers are

  unrelated to intrinsic risk may well be conservative.

  I had the results on post-conflict elections and on the efficacy

  of peacekeeping by the summer of 2006 and shared them with the

  appropriate parts of the international community. I was particularly

  Inside the Cauldron

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  concerned that the proposed strategy in the Democratic Republic of

  the Congo of troop withdrawals the day after the election, which was

  due to be implemented within a couple of months, looked unwise. I

  was promptly invited to address the new Peace-Building Commission

  of the United Nations, and also shared the results with the French

  government, who were supplying the largest component of the peace-

  keeping troops. I learned that the military commanders were them-

  selves highly skeptical of the plan for troop withdrawal. In the event,

  the aftermath of the election became so violently unstable so rapidly

  that instead of troops being flown out, they had to be flown in. Within

  a few months there was a shoot-out between the private army of Be-

  mba, who lost the election, and the government army of Kabila II, the

  incumbent winner. Bemba’s forces lost the shoot-out, and he himself

  sought protection in an embassy before fleeing to Europe, where he is

  now in exile. His exit has not restored order: the Democratic Republic

  of the Congo continues to be dangerous.

  Even if international peacekeeping is effective it faces problems.

  It is expensive and unpopular. Some of the post-conflict govern-

  ments get indignant about the intrusion: the Department of Peace-

  keeping Operations of the United Nations (DPKO) has become the

  new International Monetary Fund, a challenge to the unrestrained

  sovereignty of governments keen on asserting their power. It is also

  understandably unpopular with the electorates of the countries that

  supply the troops: no one wants his son or daughter to be exposed to

  the risks of peacekeeping.

  Is there an alternative? I could think of two other possibili-

  ties. The first is what is known as over-the-horizon guarantees. It is

  what the British government is doing in Sierra Leone. For the past

  few years there have been only eighty British troops stationed in the

  country, but the government has been given a ten-year undertaking

  that if there is trouble, the troops will be flown in overnight. Perhaps

  this has helped stabilize the society. Sierra Leone is, at least in terms

  of reversion to violence, a major success. It has even weathered post-

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  conflict elections and a change of government. The problem with

  the Sierra Leone example is that it is just that: one example. You

  cannot perform a statistical analysis on one observation, and so there

  is no way of knowing whether in general such guarantees would be

  effective. Or is there?

  I started to think whether there was anything analogous in

>   the past to what the British are now doing in Sierra Leone. Sure

  enough, the French had provided security guarantees to their cli-

  ent countries in Africa for years. In fact, with the typical logic of

  international coordination, they had abandoned it only just before

  the British started to do it. The French security guarantees were

  informal, but they were most surely for real. They were backed by

  a series of French military bases across Francophone West Africa.

  They had started with independence and rolled on until the French

  government got caught up trying to implement its informal guaran-

  tee defending the Hutu regime in Rwanda in 1994. If you remem-

  ber, there were French troops stationed in Rwanda as the Tutsi rebel

  forces invaded from Uganda and as the Hutu regime set about its

  genocide. The French came disturbingly close to finding themselves

  propping up a regime implementing genocide and only just pulled

  back in time. After that President Chirac ordered a rethink and an-

  nounced a new policy toward Africa: military intervention began

  to look anachronistic. The first test of this new policy was the coup

  d’état in Cote d’Ivoire in 1999. The French old guard wanted to

  intervene to put it down, but President Chirac vetoed intervention.

  So we can date the credible prospect of French intervention from

  independence until the mid-1990s. After their military catastrophe

  of the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam the French were in no po-

  sition to extend their military guarantee across the whole of the Fran-

  cophone world; it was basically credible only in West and Central

  Africa, and it had lasted for around thirty years. This was, however,

  a large enough group of countries, for a sufficiently long period, to

  be amenable to statistical analysis.

  Inside the Cauldron

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  The key question was whether this guarantee had actually re-

  duced the incidence of civil war. This question needs a model of the

  risk of civil war. Such a model can be used to address a range of im-

  portant questions, but here I will just give you this particular answer.

  Did the French informal security guarantee reduce the incidence of

  civil war? We found that it was highly effective. Francophone Af-

  rica had characteristics that would otherwise have made it prone to

  warfare: the actual incidence was much lower than would have been

  expected. Statistically, the guarantee significantly and substantially

  reduced the risk of conflict by nearly three-quarters.

  But was the military guarantee the reason for this remarkable

  reduction in conflict? Could it have been something else associated

  with the French presence? For example, in response to French op-

  position to the invasion of Iraq, some Americans accused the French

  of an excessive aversion to force: what was that ill-judged phrase,

  “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”? Perhaps French culture had

  inculcated pacific values? While this might seem implausible to

  anyone aware of French military history, we decided that no stone

  should be left unturned. If the reduction in the risk of conflict was

  due to culture rather than the security guarantee, it would reach the

  parts of La Francophonie that the guarantee did not cover. It didn’t:

  the enhanced security was unique to West and Central Africa, the

  region covered by the French military bases. To my mind this is rea-

  sonably convincing. Over-the-horizon guarantees look as though

  they work. As I was finishing this book Chad exploded into civil

  war: rebels reached the gates of the presidential palace. As the crisis

  unfolded the French position rapidly shifted. Initially the French

  announced that they had no intention of intervening militarily.

  Within a week they had thought better of it and issued a security

  guarantee: the rebels would be repelled by French force unless they

  withdrew. The French had a large military base right there in Chad:

  the rebels withdrew.

  It is time to move on from the politics and the military. What

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  else drives post-conflict risks? Surely the economy enters some-

  where? In fact it enters twice over. The lower the income, the higher

  the risk of conflict reversion; and the slower the economic recovery,

  the higher the risk. Both of these have implications. If low-income

  countries face higher risks of conflict reversion, other things equal,

  the international community should be allocating peacekeeping

  troops disproportionately to those post-conflict situations with the

  lowest income. This would indeed provide a useful rule-of-thumb

  to cut through all the horse-trading that Doyle and Sambanis found

  to be dominating the decision on the Security Council. A further im-

  plication is that, again other things equal, strategies that enhance the

  economic recovery are going to be peace-enhancing: raising growth

  and cumulatively augmenting the level of income.

  So how to rebuild a shattered post-conflict economy? The

  problem with economic interventions is that they are not exactly the

  cavalry. It is possible to destroy an economy quite rapidly, as Presi-

  dent Mugabe has convincingly demonstrated, but putting Humpty

  together again takes time. If average income can grow at 7 percent

  a year, which is entirely possible in post-conflict situations, then the

  level of income doubles in a decade, and so by the end of the decade

  risks are substantially lower. But this is the time frame for economic

  recovery, not two or three years.

  The story so far is that the post-conflict decade is dangerous

  and that there seems to be no clear political quick fix. In particular,

  elections and democracy, at least in the form found in the typical

  post-conflict situation, do not bring risks down. Economic recovery

  works but it takes a long time. The one thing that seems to work

  quickly is international peacekeeping, but it is politically difficult to

  sustain peacekeeping for the length of time needed for the economy

  to recover. Is prolonged peacekeeping necessary, even if only in the

  form of over-the-horizon guarantees? There is one remaining pos-

  sibility. Perhaps the key risks occur early in the decade and are fol-

  lowed by a safe period. In that case peacekeeping could be brief.

  Inside the Cauldron

  89

  That would make it politically much easier. Since an option that is

  politically easy is far more likely to be adopted, it was worth inves-

  tigating. The risk of going back to conflict does seem gradually to

  decline with time, but don’t hold your breath. Time heals, but its ef-

  fects seem to be decade by decade rather than year by year. The first

  four years after the end of a conflict are perhaps somewhat more

  dangerous than the next six, but the effect is not statistically signifi-

  cant. Within the post-conflict decade there is no safe period.

  So where does this leave us? Economic recovery is to my mind

  the only genuine exit strategy for peacekeeping. I think we need to

  dismiss the illusion that elections are the milest
one and face the long

  haul of building the economy. It may well not be necessary to keep

  many peacekeeping troops on the ground throughout the decade:

  an initial military presence may well be able to evolve successfully

  into an over-the-horizon guarantee. But any such guarantee must

  be credible: the French guarantee was made credible by its military

  bases, and the British guarantee was credible because during the

  conflict they indeed flew in overnight to check the Revolutionary

  United Front (RUF) forces that were set on occupying the capital,

  Freetown. The British forces held off the RUF on the outskirts of

  the capital at little place called Waterloo. But they only arrived just

  in the nick of time: as Lord Wellington said of the former, some-

  what grander battle, it was “a damned close thing.”

  S o , i f e c o n o m i c r e c ov e ry i s the exit strategy, how can it be facilitated? What policies work, and can donors help? Anke and I

  had already done a little work on the payoff to post-conflict aid: we

  found that it was significantly more effective than aid at other times.

  This is not surprising: post-conflict recovery was the initial rationale

  for the international aid agencies. But I decided it would be worth

  looking more closely at what could be done to revive the economy.

  For this work I teamed up with Victor Davies, a doctoral student

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  from the classic post-conflict country of Sierra Leone, and Chris

  Adam, a close colleague at Oxford. I also worked with Marguerite

  Duponchel, a doctoral student at the Sorbonne, where I teach as a

  visitor. Although I will try to make what you are about to encounter

  come across as a seamless web of research, it was not like that at the

  time.

  Some important uses of aid for post-conflict are blindingly ob-

  vious: it pays for the reconstruction of infrastructure. But here is

  one that is much less obvious: countering inflation. High inflation

  is a pretty disastrous macroeconomic strategy: essentially a policy of

  desperation. Normally governments keep inflation moderate. This

  is despite the fact that in the short run they could fleece the econ-

  omy by printing money. Inflation is a tax that most people do not

  recognize as a tax. Governments restrain themselves because of the

  alarming dynamics that lead to hyperinflation. The only govern-