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Contributions from
the Column
InWEnt Forum
Global warming: Andean glaciers are melting away
Fragile states: Priorities …
Peacekeeping: End to illusions
01/2007 |
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End to illusions
Oxford professor Paul Collier claims the international community is often going the wrong way about addressing “fragile states”. Policy has been guided, he says, by illusions, rather than empirical data.
Peace missions, for example, are typically based on the belief that international contingents are needed to help stabilise a country that is emerging from civil war, until the people get a chance to choose a new government in elections. Typically, it is expected that after two to three years, the blue helmets will have done their job and can go home. According to Collier, however, such calculations do not add up. The former World Bank economist backs up his claim with data from many post-conflict countries. What they show is that the prospect of elections does have a stabilising effect, but that afterwards the statistical risk of renewed violence increases again – and even more sharply so.
For Collier, it is not difficult to explain the connection. Elections hold out the prospect of lots of power, still unconstrained by any constitution. Accordingly, all parties involved in a conflict have an incentive to run for office. When the result is announced, however, there are winners and losers; and losers will often be inclined to contest the legitimacy of the winners’ triumph. The supporters of all parties still remember only too well how to settle scores by non-peaceful means – and in most cases they are still armed.
Such tensions are exacerbated, Collier says, by the fact that newly installed governments in crisis-countries normally feel they are sitting on a time bomb. They know there is a threat of fresh violence, and they have learned to think in terms of short-term survival, not successful social engineering. So they start to put the army and police force back on their feet – and in doing so set a self-fulfilling prophecy in motion. At the very least, defeated groups seeing security forces being re-armed question the wisdom of surrendering their own weapons. Therefore, the conventional notion that the government of a country in crisis needs to assert its legitimate monopoly of force with a police and military presence is dangerous: attempting to do so actually has a destabilising effect.
Collier also warns that democracy is all too often reduced to elections. Equally – or perhaps even more – important are constitutions, he says, setting out a clear separation of powers. But the credibility of such institutions cannot be established by an election or two. Legitimacy does take root eventually, but only after a long track record has been built up. “Time heals”, Collier says, “but very, very slowly”.
The professor is not just a prophet of doom, however. He believes there is more scope for action on the economic front than is typically taken into account in post-conflict scenarios. In most cases, he says, not much is done ahead of elections because of fears that reforms might undermine established interests and unleash new violence. But that view is not supported by empirical research. On the contrary, the data show that people expect and accept change at such times.
Collier even speaks of “windows for change”. His statistics show that nothing is as stabilising for a crisis country as rapid economic growth. And the scope for that is distinctly encouraging. A post-conflict economy is an economy at rock bottom, so growth rates up to 10% a year are a realistic possibility. And growth rates of 10% for 15 years, Collier calculates, mean that any given economy quadruples, with increasing affluence reducing the propensity for violence. (dem)
Literature:
Paul Collier, forthcoming: The bottom billion.
Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it. Oxford, University Press
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