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Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes

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by Democracy in Dangerous Places (pdf)


  teric, it can be given a very clear meaning. The ideal scale is reached

  when a further increase in peacekeeping expenditure would gener-

  ate additional benefits that just equal their cost: beyond that, ex-

  pansion would be wasteful. In principle, the analysis that yields the

  ratio of costs to benefits also yields the ideal scale of peacekeeping

  operations. Obviously, peacekeeping has to be tailored to particular

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  circumstances, and so the question is not answerable statistically on

  any realistic array of data.

  Given the primitive nature of my own model it is definitely

  a bridge too far, but let me take it nevertheless to illustrate the ap-

  proach. The point at which additional benefits match additional

  costs is reached when the peacekeeping force is somewhere between

  $100 million and $200 million. At $200 million the risk of conflict

  reversion is reduced by around 25 percentage points and so is worth

  around $5 billion. Its cost over the decade is $2 billion: effective

  peacekeeping is not cheap. While peacekeeping on this scale has a

  much less impressive ratio of benefits to costs, it still leads to a large

  overall gain of around $3 billion. These estimates are conservative

  because they are based on a cost of war that omits many important

  elements, and so the likely overall gain from a peacekeeping opera-

  tion is, I suspect, even larger. The core role of politicians is to mobi-

  lize the collective action that supplies public goods with benefits far

  in excess of their costs. Peacekeeping is such a public good.

  Is this quantification a complete fantasy? I think that in the

  Democratic Republic of the Congo there is a reasonable case that

  the presence of peacekeepers has averted a catastrophe. If so, it has

  surely been good value for money. Quantification forces you to flesh

  out such judgments. Nobody is going to be so foolish as to base pol-

  icy on numbers. But it is surely useful, given that such huge amounts

  of money are being spent and that lives are on the line, to try to

  move beyond gut instinct. Indeed, peacekeeping is quite unpopular

  with aid agencies: they see large amounts of money being channeled

  through their ministries of defense and would like it diverted into

  their own budgets. Such decisions should not be taken on the basis

  of turf wars: in the end, the question of whether peacekeeping gives

  value for money has to be faced.

  While the initial maintenance of peace cannot credibly be done

  without troops on the ground, the British experience to date in Si-

  erra Leone suggests that it may be possible to phase out the bulk

  Inside the Cauldron

  99

  of international troops after, say, five years, replacing them with

  a guarantee made credible by a rapid-reaction force. The French

  security guarantee for Francophone Africa prior to the late 1990s

  reduced the risk of a civil war breaking out in the typical country

  of Francophone Africa from around 10 percent in any five-year pe-

  riod to around 3 percent. The risk reduction achieved by the French

  security guarantee can perhaps give some guidance as to whether

  over-the-horizon guarantees are cost-effective.

  When I started to think about how to do a cost-benefit analysis

  of the French guarantee, I expected to need three components. One

  would be a figure for the reduction in the risk of conflict: I have just

  given you that, from 10 percent to 3 percent. The second would be

  the cost of achieving this reduction in risk. I asked the French Trea-

  sury for an estimate of approximately how much its rapid-reaction

  force had cost, and they gave me a ballpark figure. As a ballpark it

  must be treated with heavy caveats, but they thought that it might

  have been around $1 billion per year. This is equivalent to a super-

  force of peacekeepers in a single country, but this very scale pre-

  sumably added to its credibility. Indeed, the guarantee force must

  evidently be at least as large as that needed in the largest envisaged

  operation. The third component in a cost-benefit estimate would

  normally be the cost of an averted conflict. For peacekeeping I used

  the figure of $20 billion, but for over-the-horizon guarantees, I hit

  on a way of avoiding the need for any figure at all. This was to value

  the over-the-horizon guarantee not relative to the absence of any

  peacekeeping but relative to the continued presence of peacekeepers

  in the country. This way I could pose the question as “How many

  peacekeepers could be brought home if a guarantee was put in place

  while leaving the risk of conflict unaltered?” An advantage was that

  posed in this way, I did not need to value any change in the risk of

  conflict: by design there would be no change.

  The gain from the release of peacekeepers on the ground clearly

  depends upon the size of forces and on the number of situations

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  covered by a single rapid-reaction force. For example, I estimated

  that if the initial forces were costing $500 million, then they could be

  scaled back to around $100 million. This estimate is purely illustra-

  tive. There are simply not enough instances of peacekeepers being

  partially withdrawn and replaced by an over-the-horizon guarantee

  for us to be able to make a defensible estimate. But the illustration is

  a guide to the judgments that will need to underpin actual decisions.

  For example, in my example a soldier based over-the-horizon in a

  rapid-reserve unit is much less effective than one based in the con-

  flict situation, and this seems plausible. However, the rapid-reaction

  force might nevertheless be more cost-effective if the same force can

  cover more than one situation. A rapid-reaction force is analogous

  to a fire brigade, whereas a force in situ is analogous to a sprinkler

  system. In my example, a rapid-reaction force would be cost-effec-

  tive if it could provide cover for three post-conflict situations. And

  this is before counting the benefit that for most of the time soldiers

  would not need to be away from home.

  What should we conclude from all this? Post-conflict situations

  are fragile and there is usually no simple political fix. Peacekeeping,

  phasing into an over-the-horizon guarantee, looks to be the key instru-

  ment for post-conflict peace. The disquiet that it now evokes both in

  the countries that send troops and in the regions that receive them is

  understandable but misplaced. Even peacekeeping is not a quick fix: it

  needs to be sustained for around a decade. Peacekeeping is the hand-

  maiden of economic recovery, not its rival, and so budget wars between

  the aid agencies and defense ministries of the high-income countries

  are misplaced. Building post-conflict peace is expensive, and both will

  need large budgets. The case for a large budget for peacekeeping is

  that it looks to be very good value. We should learn to support it. Post-

  conflict situations also need big aid. The aid-assisted economic recov-

  ery is the true exit strategy for the
peacekeepers.

  Part II

  F A C I N G R E A L I T Y :

  N A S T Y, B R U T I S H ,

  A N D L O N G

  C h a p t e r 4

  G U N S : F U E L I N G T H E F I R E

  As we are told: guns don’t kill people, people kill

  people. The genocide in Rwanda showed that mass kill-

  ing does not need guns: the Hutu government managed

  to generate a slaughter of more than half a million people, largely

  with machetes. But guns become necessary if your opponents have

  them. The Hutu government could slaughter Tutsi civilians with

  machetes because they were unarmed, but rebels face government

  armies and so they need guns. No rebel guns, no rebellion, and so no

  nasty, brutish, and long civil war. And because the government next

  door has guns, our government needs guns: a government without

  guns cannot defend its citizens against a neighbor with guns. That is

  the message that many of our politicians thrive on: national security

  is the ultimate national public good and military spending is the way

  to achieve it.

  Like many issues, whether the ready availability of guns makes

  a society more dangerous or less dangerous is an empirical matter.

  Despite the overheated political positions, there are three perfectly

  sensible possibilities. Cheap and plentiful guns may increase the risk

  of violence. Alternatively, they may make violence so dangerous

  that they deter it. Finally, guns may be plentiful where there is a

  lot of violence, but this may be because in societies that are violent

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  for whatever underlying reason, people make sure they have guns

  around: the guns are a consequence, not a cause. Ideologues seem to

  think that such issues can be settled a priori: turning to the evidence

  challenges superficially plausible belief systems with the possibility

  that they are make-believe.

  P ro b a b ly t h e m o s t i m p o rta n t q u e s t i o n to be asked about guns is whether they work as a deterrent. However, in order

  to answer this question, we first need to know why governments

  buy so many of them. Somehow we have to be able to sort out the

  chicken-and-egg causality problem: the risk of violence affects mili-

  tary spending, and military spending affects the risk of violence. If

  military spending keeps a society safe it is worth every cent. But be-

  fore slipping into such easy thought patterns I decided to investigate

  what has actually been driving it. By this I do not mean answers

  such as “the military-industrial complex” about which the Marxists

  of my youth used to fantasize.

  During the Cold War there used to be an academic industry

  that studied the arms race between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

  But with the end of the Cold War, that collapsed, and nothing

  has replaced it. There were scarcely any recent studies on military

  spending in developing countries, so Anke and I decided to do it

  ourselves. Because we were new to this question it took a long time

  to get it right: we finally published the results in 2007. No sooner

  had we done so than President Arias of Costa Rica, the Nobel Peace

  laureate, asked us to develop their implications as a support for his

  initiative for coordinated reductions in military spending. Costa

  Rica has led the world in virtually eliminating military spending,

  and we were delighted to be able to add our evidence to support his

  efforts.

  Governments are not exactly forthcoming with data on their

  military spending. That is scarcely surprising, but it makes the task

  Guns

  105

  of analyzing their spending rather harder. I almost persuaded the

  American government to provide its own private estimates of the

  spending levels of other countries, but it balked at this. Instead we

  relied upon the estimates made each year by the Stockholm Peace

  Research Institute (SIPRI). We decided to measure spending as a

  proportion of national income: averaged across all the countries of

  the world for which SIPRI has data, and the forty-year period from

  1960 to 1999, the global average was 3.4 percent. Expressed as a per-

  centage it is a small number, but expressed in dollars it is large: by

  2006 it had grown to $1.2 trillion. That is around ten times the global

  aid budget. The countries of the bottom billion alone are spend-

  ing around $9 billion. This compares with their total aid inflows

  of only around $34 billion. Our question was why did some coun-

  tries spend a higher proportion than others, and why was spending

  higher at some times than at others: the highest proportion we found

  was 46 percent of income, and the lowest a mere 0.1 percent.

  We started with the obvious and gradually got more elaborate.

  The most blindingly obvious reason for a government spending a

  lot on the military was if it was fighting a war against some other

  government. I figured that if we did not find that in the data we

  should give up and work on something else. There it was in the

  data: controlling for everything else, if a country is engaged in an

  international war its military spending increases by 1.5 percentage

  points of GDP. However, much as you might be forgiven for think-

  ing otherwise, international wars are now so rare that this reason

  for military spending accounts for only a tiny proportion of global

  spending: most spending occurs during peacetime.

  Just because a country is not currently at war with some other

  country does not mean that it regards itself as being free of external

  threats. We scratched our heads trying to think of a good observable

  proxy for the perception of an external threat. One idea we came up

  with was once bitten, twice shy. Expressed more professionally, if a

  country had once had to fight an external war, maybe it would be

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  more fearful that it would have to do so again. Perhaps the country

  had a particularly dangerous neighbor, maybe it had a particularly

  aggressive leadership, or perhaps it saw itself as an international po-

  liceman, riding to the rescue of distressed regimes. We decided to

  try it, focusing on the history of warfare since the end of the Second

  World War. Sure enough, once a country had been engaged in an

  international war, its military spending was permanently higher by

  around 1.8 percentage points. We tried to see whether this faded

  with time. Presumably at some point it does, but we could not find

  any such tendency: as far as we could see, wars fought years ago

  were still leaving their legacy in the form of higher spending. If this

  is right, a disturbing implication is that much of the costs of an in-

  ternational war accrue after it is over: the society continues to be

  burdened with higher military spending.

  A previous war is one reasonable proxy for a perceived external

  threat, but we decided to try another one that was even more obvi-

  ous and rather neatly complemented it: the Cold War. The Cold

  War was evidently a period of perceived threat, but unlike our pre-
/>
  vious proxy, it was a threat that did not materialize. Further, it had

  a clear ending, namely the collapse of the Soviet Union. The end

  of the Cold War therefore constitutes a revealing natural experi-

  ment for the coordinated removal of a perceived threat. As you will

  see, such an experiment is useful: it simulates the effect of ending

  the cold wars in Lilliput that bedevil the societies of the bottom bil-

  lion. So what happened once the Cold War ended: did it show up

  in global levels of military spending? It most certainly did: with the

  end of the Cold War global military spending fell by an astonishing

  35 percent. The collapse of the Soviet Union delivered a huge global

  peace dividend.

  The nature of the threat during the Cold War was, however,

  unusual: America and the Soviet Union could threaten each other

  despite the fact that they did not have a common border. This was, of

  course, due to nuclear missiles. Pretty well all other external threats

  Guns

  107

  come from neighbors: no border, no genuine threat. Even the sub-

  sequent proliferation of nuclear missiles has barely changed this

  state of affairs: it is because India and Pakistan fear each other as a

  result of their common border that they now point nuclear missiles

  at each other.

  How big a threat is your neighbor? Well, other things equal, it

  depends upon how much they are spending on the military. There

  is a whole body of fancy economic theory that has modeled warfare.

  Economics has a knack for ugly terminology, and these models are

  termed contest success functions. The punch line of this work is that

  if your enemy spends more, then it is wise for you to spend more.

  You might have sensed that that was quite likely, but you will doubt-

  less be relieved to know that economists have done the mathematics

  to prove it. So, armed with the cast-iron certainty that comes from a

  theorem, we decided to investigate whether there really were arms

  races in Lilliput. First we had to get countries organized according

  to who their neighbors were. We found a data set that purported to

  do this, cleaned it up so that China no longer bordered on Uganda,

  and got to work. Incidentally, this tells you why our sort of research

  requires patience: it is necessary to check, check, and check again

 

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