nineteenth century to legitimate and accountable democracy took
decades. But I now think that far from being on a steady progression
from political violence to accountable and legitimate democracy, the
bottom billion have headed into a cul-de-sac: competitive elections
without restraints will frustrate internal cooperation, and presiden-
tial sovereignty will frustrate external cooperation.
This book has proposed a way to break this impasse. With min-
imal international action it should be possible to harness the potent
force of domestic political violence for good instead of harm, thereby
supplying the missing public goods. Some of the public goods will
directly meet material needs: goods such as the electricity and inter-
national transport routes that have been so chronically undersup-
plied because of the prolonged failures of collective action. This is
the role of aid as conventionally envisaged. But the key missing pub-
232
WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
lic goods require new instruments. International peacekeeping and
over-the-horizon guarantees are politically difficult, but they work.
Although expensive, they are cost-effective. International rules and
standards, some voluntary, others enforced by incentives, are nei-
ther politically very difficult nor expensive. They have no signifi-
cant downside, and so we should explore their potential.
The last time a secure zone of prosperity really got serious
about the insecurity of a region that could not rely upon its own
efforts was in the late 1940s. The zone of prosperity was America
and the region of insecurity was Europe. America was motivated by
both charitable concern and enlightened self-interest. Whatever the
motivation, it knew it had to get serious.
What did America do? First and foremost, it transformed its
security policy. The prewar strategy of isolationism was torn up:
America created NATO, the system of mutual security guarantees,
and placed more than one hundred thousand troops in Europe for
more than forty years. America also transformed its policy toward
international rules and standards. Whereas after the First World
War it had treated national sovereignty as if it were an eleventh
commandment, refusing even to participate in the League of Na-
tions, after the Second it established the United Nations, the Inter-
national Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Co-
operation and Development, and encouraged the formation of the
European Community. And, yes, America found the money to help
post-conflict reconstruction. It launched the Marshall Plan, and it
founded the International Bank for Reconstruction, the afterthought
for which—“and Development”—now gives the rebranded World
Bank its important role. For good measure, America even tore up
its protectionist trade policy, but that is another story. You get the
picture: faced with a security danger America got serious; no viable
strategy was neglected. It worked: the threat from the Soviet Union
is over, but even with this massive response it took more than forty
years of sustained effort.
On Changing Reality
233
Is the challenge facing our generation greater or less than that?
The zone of prosperity has expanded enormously: the burden can
now be widely shared. The region of insecurity has not shrunk, it
has moved: in 1945 the societies of the bottom billion were secure
because they were part of empires, now they are insecure because
they are on their own. The danger is also less stark: the Democratic
Republic of the Congo is not pointing missiles at Washington. In
fact, we are back to 1919: it is because the dangers are amorphous
that we have not got around to facing them. The failure to get seri-
ous at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 took twenty years before
the catastrophic consequences became unmistakable.
The failure to get serious since the end of the Cold War is man-
ifested in wild swings in strategy. Sometimes we try total neglect:
we left Somalia without a government for more than a decade in the
hopes that it would sort itself out without us. Al Qaida eventually
occupied the resulting vacuum. Iraq 2 is at the opposite end of the
spectrum: preemptive total intervention. I doubt whether there is
now much appetite to make that a normal part of our strategy, we’re
more likely to swing back to total neglect. Yet the lesson of how
America overcame the threat from the Soviet Union is that faced
with challenges of this scale, we will need to apply a consistent set of
policies for a long time. Of course, the rationale for doing something
extends beyond our own security. A billion people are living piti-
fully while the rest of us have credible hope of the good life. That is
not just a looming security nightmare, it is a present scandal.
But self-interest and compassion are not rivals: they can coalesce
into a sense of common purpose. The political right needs to recog-
nize that its well-founded security fears should empower a more ef-
fective strategy than Iraq 2. The political left needs to recognize that
guilt-ridden inaction in the face of political violence is an evasion of
responsibility. The powerful emotions of fear and guilt have fogged
our thinking. In the alliance of compassion and self-interest, compas-
sion will provide the energy to get started, and self-interest will ensure
234
WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
that we stay the course. President Bush was right that prevention is
often going to be the right response to these security problems, but
he was wrong to think that the best preemptive policy was military
invasion. We have a whole armory of policies at our disposal. Some
of them take time to work: think decades rather than weeks. But the
good news is that we are facing this problem only because we have
been so incompetent at dealing with it. Had we woken up to the new
problem at the time we were freed from the burden of the Cold War,
we would be well on the way to fixing it. Instead we were naïve and
we were selfish. It is time to put it right.
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
The ideas in this book are all founded on statistical re-
search. That does not make them right, but it does make it
possible to know approximately how much confidence can
be placed in them. In part, that comes with the statistics, but it also
comes because my work is produced within the modern academic
community. The modern academic community is to an idealized
community what The Simpsons is to an idealized family. Essentially,
academics fight a zero-sum game over reputation in which the fast
route to success is to demolish some prominent piece of work. You
can rest assured that droves of academics on the make are hacking
away at the propositions in this book. And, of course, being scared to
death of them, I have done my best to protect myself by eliminating
the errors. This, incidentally, is why you should be wary of all those
seductive idea
s peddled by heterodox thinkers. Because they are not
taken seriously by the academic community, there are no kudos in
demolishing them.
I greatly admire the lone academic geniuses, but I find that I
work much better in a team. I depend upon a bunch of young re-
searchers with skills far beyond my own. Most of the research on
which this book is based has been done with them. With Anke Ho-
effler I worked on the causes of civil war, on arms races, and on
236
Acknowledgments
what makes a country prone to coups d’état—potentially the most
sellable work I have ever done, since it is the key fear of presidents
in the countries I visit. Our work on coups ended up as a different
kind of race: we managed to finish it in the days before Anke gave
birth to her first child. I promptly found myself in the same race
with Lisa Chauvet, with whom I have worked on elections, on the
costs of failing states, and on why reform is so slow. With my fe-
male workforce on maternity leave, much of the work on which this
book is based has been done with young men. Both Dominic Roh-
ner and Benedikt Goderis left Cambridge to come and work with
me. With Dominic I did the disturbing work on political violence in
low-income democracies that underpins chapter 1. The work with
Benedikt proved so astonishing that it will form my next book: that
is why neither the commodity booms nor the impact of China fea-
ture here. Along the way I worked with Mans Söderbom on how to
reduce the risk of going back to violence in post-conflict conditions
and with Chris Adam and Victor Davies on the role of aid in post-
conflict stabilization.
Surely the most extraordinary research in this book is that with
Pedro Vicente. Randomized experiments are currently all the rage
in economics, but I think we are the first to have done one on how
to curtail the violent intimidation of voters by corrupt politicians.
Evidently, if that is what you are going to study, it’s not much use
choosing a parish council election in Switzerland. The setting for
our research was the presidential election in Nigeria. A presidential
election in Nigeria is not a tea party, as someone nearly said.
With Havard Hegre I estimated the costs and benefits of strate-
gies to curtail violence in post-conflict situations. Cost-benefit anal-
ysis is completely standard as a tool in policymaking: a road planner
would use it in deciding whether to build an overpass. But apply-
ing the technique to whether United Nations peacekeeping is good
value is a stretch. At least, however, with such a cost-benefit analysis
all the steps are transparent: other researchers can challenge, im-
Acknowledgments
237
prove, or mock. While policymakers cannot be expected to base their
peacekeeping decisions exclusively on such analysis, it does serve as
a counterbalance to the other ingredients into the decision process,
wise, shrewd, and politically neutral as they doubtless are.
All our papers can be downloaded from my Web site: most are
also published in academic journals. Together with the articles by
other scholars on which I have drawn, they are the foundations for
this book. I am afraid that some are not an easy read. They carry
the turgid baggage of modern scholarship. In this book I have set all
that aside and tried to write something that you can enjoy. But you
can read this book with both the confidence that it is well founded
(though not necessarily right), and the excitement of new discovery:
racing through it will take you to the frontiers of my knowledge as
surely as if you were plodding through one of the underlying ar-
ticles.
I have enormously benefited from discussions with three intel-
lectual heavyweights: Robert Bates, Tim Besley, and Tony Venables.
Quite possibly after reading this book they will wish that I had ben-
efited even more: discussion does not imply agreement. Finally, I
acknowledge my greatest debt, to my wife, Pauline. Not only has
she been my life support system, her own experience of the societies
I analyze is at least as deep as my own. Her gentle but severe com-
ments on the first draft of my previous book, The Bottom Billion,
spurred me into a desperate attempt to salvage something from the
impending ruin of my reputation. It seemed to work, and I hope she
has done it again.
A P P E N D I X : T H E B O T T O M
B I L L I O N
The countries of the bottom billion are defined as
low-income countries that were caught in one or other of
four development traps. The traps are explained in The
Bottom Billion. This list was measured on data for around the mil-
lennium. I was reluctant to publish it for fear of typecasting: the
traps are not iron laws, and a few of these countries may already
have broken free. However, a list helps to focus international ef-
fort.
Afghanistan
Chad
Angola
Comoros
Azerbaijan
Congo, Dem. Rep.
Benin
Congo, Rep.
Bhutan
Cote d’Ivoire
Bolivia
Djibouti
Burkina Faso
Equatorial Guinea
Burundi
Eritrea
Cambodia
Ethiopia
Cameroon
Gambia
Central African Republic
Ghana
240
Appendix
Guinea
Myanmar
Guinea-Bissau
Nepal
Guyana
Niger
Haiti
Nigeria
Kazakhstan
Rwanda
Kenya
Senegal
Korea, Dem. Rep.
Sierra Leone
Kyrgyz Republic
Somalia
Lao PDR
Sudan
Lesotho
Tajikistan
Liberia
Tanzania
Madagascar
Togo
Malawi
Turkmenistan
Mali
Uganda
Mauritania
Uzbekistan
Moldova
Yemen
Mongolia
Zambia
Mozambique
Zimbabwe
R E S E A R C H O N W H I C H
T H I S B O O K I S B A S E D
This book is based partly on my own research and
partly on that of other scholars. My research is posted on
my Web site, which can be reached by typing my name
into Google. The main published research underlying the book is:
By the author
“Post-Conflict Reconstruction: What Policies Are Distinctive.” Journal
of African Economies (forthcoming).
“International Political Economy: Some African Applications.” Journal
of African Economies 17 (2008): 110–139.
“Implications of Ethnic Diversity.” Economic Policy 16, no. 32 (2001): 127–166.
With Anke Hoeffler
“Unintended Consequences: Does Aid Promote Arms Races?” Oxford
Bulletin of E
conomics and Statistics 69, no. 1 (2007): 1–27.
“Civil War.” In Handbook of Defense Economics, vol. 2, edited by Keith Hartley and Todd Sandler, 711–739. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007.
“Military Expenditure in Post-Conflict Societies.” Economics of
Governance 7 (2006): 89–107.
242
Research on Which This Book Is Based
“Greed and Grievance in Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4
(2004): 563–595.
With Anke Hoeffler and Dominic Rohner
“Beyond Greed and Grievance: Feasibility and Civil War.” Oxford
Economic Papers (forthcoming).
With Anke Hoeffler and Mans Söderbom
“Post-Conflict Risks.” Journal of Peace Research (2008).
With Robert Bates, Anke Hoeffler, and Steve O’Connell
“Endogenizing Syndromes.” In The Political Economy of Economic
Growth in Africa, 1960–2000, edited by Benno Ndulu, Steve
O’Connell, Robert Bates, Paul Collier, and Chukwuma Soludo,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 391–418.
With Dominic Rohner
“Democracy, Development and Conflict.” Journal of the European
Economic Association 6, nos. 2–3 (2008): 531–540.
With Christopher Adam and Victor Davies
“Post-Conflict Monetary Reconstruction.” World Bank Economic
Review 22 (2008): 87–112.
With Lisa Chauvet
“What Are the Preconditions for Policy Turnarounds in Failing
States?” Conflict Management and Peace Science (2008).
With Lisa Chauvet and Havard Hegre
“The Security Challenge in Conflict-Prone Countries.” In Copenhagen
Consensus, 2nd edition, edited by B. Lomberg. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Research on Which This Book Is Based
243
By other scholars
Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara. “Ethnic Diversity and
Economic Performance.” Journal of Economic Literature 43, no. 3
(2005): 762–800.
Abigail Barr. “Trust and Expected Trustworthiness: Experimental
Evidence from Zimbabwean Villages.” Economic Journal 113
(2003): 614–630.
Tim Besley. Principled Agents? The Political Economy of Good
Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Tim Besley and Masayuki Kudamatsu. “Making Autocracy Work.”
CEPR Discussion Papers, no. 6371 (2007).
Stefano DellaVigna and Eliana La Ferrara. “Detecting Illegal Arms
Trade.” NBER Working Papers no. 13355 (2007).
Avinash Dixit. Lawlessness and Economics: Alternative Modes of
Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes Page 29