Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes

by Democracy in Dangerous Places (pdf)

  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-

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  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

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  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