Why Nations Fail

I am currently reading the excellent new book, "Why Nations Fail," by Acemoglu and Robinson. First introduced to this trio earlier in the year with their colonial/settler theories on development (extractive colonies vs. inclusive colonies as being the key predeterminant for future economic success), this book has been impressing at every step with its clarity and purpose....

A comment, on their views on failing educational systems:
"The low education level of poor countries is caused by economic institutions that fail to create incentives for parents to educate their children, and by political institutions that fail to induce the government to build, finance, and support schools and the wishes of parents and children." 

While I agree that inclusive economic institutions are vital to a nation's (and individuals) prosperity, schooling incentives can often be decoupled from the reality of the immediate economic climate, or better yet, inverse to the broader economic climate; desperation or struggle  in one's current situation will lead to an increased hope in the power of education as a "savior" for the next generation, a though and wish echoed constantly in the developing world.
The "incentives" for schooling, thus, often fall under the familial desire for the next generation to prosper, and an often misguided hope in the individual economic rewards that can be reaped by sending children to school (see: Poor Economics). Thus, I would argue, the above proposition regarding economic institutions (though I agree with the political institutions necessity) is much too broad and general to render valid, in the area of education, as proposed.

A Moment of Hope, Dashed.

"Robert Mugabe battling for his life in a Singaporean hospital..." The news wires rang out yesterday morning here in London, the second bout of hopeful (for the citizens of Southern Africa) news to come out of the region in a week (the first being the demise of the Malawian Autocrat, President Bingu wa Mutharika). 


I do not celebrate the demise of other human beings, (being a humanist), but when individual's actions have enormously devastating repercussions for other human beings, and when these individuals become entrenched into power through their own subversion of institutions, then often, death is the only release. 
What we witnessed in Malawi this week was political institutions, in the wake of the death of the President, wobbling and shaking, but not crumbling; an ultimate test for political stability and openness in a desperately poor nation. However, in a nation such as Zimbabwe, equally ransacked economically and politically, this ransacking has been so much more complete in nature, that the hopes of a legal transition, a constitutional transition after the death of Mugabe seems extremely unlikely. Just as in Malawi, where the President's brother was set to step in, unconstitutionally, in the power vacuum, it seems predetermined that Mugabe's feared security chief will be the next in line to hold the reins of power in Zimbabwe. Thus, if legitimate political transition is to be seen as almost impossible in the political climate of Zimbabwe, what is the other option? I would argue, in this case, rebellion, awakening, a Zimbabwean Spring, is the only answer, the only hope. 
As Mugabe walked off the gleaming white private jet back into a nation that he has ruled as a vampire for the last 30 years, a breathe of hope vanished. When will it return?

The Failure of Aid...asinine philantropy

"Back in the early 1970s, in an effort to break the cycles of starvation in the Turkana region, Kenyan officials had delegated the Norwegian development agency Norad the task of retraining local herders to fish. The lake swarmed with tilapia and Nile perch. The idea was to wean the people off their boom-and-bust livestock economy, swap animal for fish protein, and make the nomads productive, sedentary citizens. The Scandinavians built a modern freezer plant near the lake. They taught people how to cast nets. And they distributed 20 large, modern fiberglass skiffs. The project was a colossal failure. As it turned out, freezing the catches cost more than the fish were worth. And, astoundingly, the foreigners hadn't bothered to ask whether the milk- and meat-addicted nomads even liked fish. (They didn't.) A decade after donors had sunk millions into the scheme, the Turkana pastoralists were as poor and hungry as ever. Many gave up and returned to the bush. A few of the more enterprising families found a novel use for their upturned fishing vessels as crude shelters. 

Lake Turkana's beached fishing fleet became an icon of asinine philanthropy in Africa."

-Paul Salopek, The Last Famine


We need to analyze what went wrong with this program, what were the structural deficits that created failure, not just for the project, but for the intended beneficiaries, as well as the Kenyan State, whose social contract with these nomadic tribes was thus eroded. A few superficial critiques of the program....

Program Design: participatory in nature? I think not...
Delegation of Program Responsibility: Is the Norweigan government better able to design and implement a program for nomads in Kenya than Kenyans in Nairobi are? Increased geographic distancing=increased chances for failure.
Focus on "Nomadic Productivity:" How can we learn/understanding that certain lifestyles are simply not conducive, in their traditional form, to integration into the wider, globalized economy? How can we understand/learn that pushing this integration will lead to greater failure, domination by power, and, if "successful," only succeeds in bringing people onto the lowest rungs of development while stripping their cultural identity and community bonds?
Modern Freezer Plant: A great symbol/metaphor for the imposition of inappropriate technology upon unwilling recipients; the vestiges of these projects dominate the landscape of so many LDC's....

and so much more....

"The Last Famine"

One of the great journalists of our time, Paul Salopek, recently published an article on the famine in the Horn of Africa this year (Foreign Policy Magazine, March 2012).
Salopek, with his characteristic, ethnographic approach, details the impact of the famine, of the environmental change, on nomadic, pastoralist communities in the north of Kenya, in the region of the mythic Lake Turkana, "...A gargantuan wilderness of hot wind and thorn stubble..."

Salopek's investigation turns him, seemingly unwittingly, as he is also a humanist,  into a critic of humanitarian aid; his words encapsulate the conundrum of long-term humanitarian assistance:

"The savannas were crisscrossed by invisible migration routes, seasonal pasturage rights, proprietary water holes. In a place as destitute as the Turkana Basin, food aid hadn't just swollen human populations, but undermined those antique rules. It had also encouraged the nomads, ruinously, to maintain more animals than the fragile pastures could sustain; living on donations, they saw little need to eat or sell off their herds in times of drought. And so, the rangelands eventually wore away, becoming sterile as concrete."

The fine line of humanitarian assistance, of ecological devastation, of the increasingly heavy human burden on remote, ragged, thin lands, in addition to its thickening presence elsewhere; the human as the occupier of this earth, its burden.
Stopping food aid to these communities would cause mass death, which is not a viable solution, even for the most hardened critics of foreign assistance.

Is it possible to go back? Has the West, has our benevolence, brought about systematic destruction of survival mechanisms, and, if so, what is to be done?

Is it Time for an African Spring?

Can the winds of change, perennially seen as superseding political barriers, truly transcend?
Can authoritarianism, cloaked in the thin veil of democracy, continue to deceive both a willing world, and the unwilling, unlucky participants caught in the crossfire?
Can power and vested interests, when so firmly entrenched, ever yield?
Recent history paints a startlingly contrasting answer to this multifaceted question; but we must ask-why does this work for some, and not for others? Why id Mugabe still firmly in control of Zimbabwe, and country he has devastated, while Mubarak is being wheeled into trial in a nation in which he oversaw at least some measure of progress and human development enhancement?

What are the tools that are used to preserve power?
What is the threshold of ruthlessness that must be crossed in some, but not other nations?
And why is this threshold permitted to be crossed with some populations, while violent upheavals and revolutions result in others?
What is the dividing line of humanity, what is the tipping point of collective action?

The BBC's Jimmy Kainja states that, "...an African Spring in the exact fashion of the Arab Spring would signify a step backwards - not a step forward...I previously argued that "the protagonists of the Arab Spring have more to learn from their sub-Saharan Africa counterparts than the other way round. The majority of sub-Saharan African countries peacefully did away with one-party-rule in the 1990s.""

The majority of countries in the region "did away with one party rule in the 1990's." This statement is both true and completely false; truth, a thin veneer painted on top of a reality of lies. The tide towards authoritarianism is increasing with time; the initial movements away from one party rule were in response to Western demands, back by structural adjustment loans and financing; they were not indigenous revolutions, indigenous movements; and thus, they have never been more than thin lip service. The governmental systems in most nations exist to serve the vested interests of a few; democracy and democratic elections acts as a trough for political patronage, not for the distribution of public goods to the majority of citizens. These vested interests are also the ones reaping the fruits of the newly energized economic growth of the continent, not the ordinary citizens, who continue to the blindly neglected and untouched by the hand of the state. And how? Governments have become adept at limiting the coordination goods, the ability of opposition groups to coordinate and scale dissent through strict media and political controls. What we have in nations such as Rwanda, Uganda, and Ethiopia, is not democracy; development and progress, but surely not democracy. What we have in nations such as the DRC, Zimbabwe, and Angola is kleptocracy, not democracy. What we have in nations such as Mozambique and Kenya is limited progress, with vastly entrenched vested interests reaping the fruits of economic growth; democracy, with very limited development. 

I agree with Kainja that developing strong democratic institutions is the best way forward to establishing true democracy; however, this is simply not happening, has not happened, and is promising not to happen in many nations (there are certainly exceptions, Ghana and Liberia come quickly to mind). What, then, is the answer to a Mugabe, who shows no sign of relenting?

Kapuscinski

"The population of Africa was a gigantic, matted, crisscrossing web, spanning the entire continent and in constant motion, endlessly undulating, bunching up in one place and spreading out in another, a rich fabric, a colorful arras."
-Richard Kapucinski

"The Adventurer has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible."
-Conrad

Insecurity Ruminations

Insecurity is manifest to the human condition, whether this insecurity is found in the external circumstances of ones lives, internally due to psychological stress; this insecurity can be, and is, the combination of these specific factors. When applying a logical, "Western" academic framework to human insecurity in humanitarian/conflict situations, it is important to bear in mind our own psychological conditions, our own mental insecurities, and understand how these translate into our concern and our constructs for others' insecure physical situations. Important parallels can link physical and mental insecurity; these conditions are often thought of as outside our control, as something we must bear witness to, suffer through, however humanely or inhumanely this suffering might be; we, and they, are commonly seen as observants in the grand mechanisms of suffering; however, this is a rather simplistic view, one that takes the impetus away from action, from examination, whether this be self-or-other examination, and change as a result of this critical investigation.

A Long Term Solution

"Hatred will never cease by hatred." 
-Maha Ghosananda

Reading of the continued tribal/ethnic violence that has been wracking the newly independent nation of South Sudan in the last weeks; marauding groups of heavily armed warriors, seeking "retribution" through the barrel of a gun, pillaging, killing, stealing. My immediate intellectual response is to investigate: whose interests are really being served by these actions? Are there greater manipulations occurring at the hands of elites? Who is benefiting and who is losing from these actions? Though this might seem straightforward, there are often hidden and deeply powerful motives being served by violence; I do not believe that this case is an exception.
What these motives are, I am not certain, my only sources of information are Al Jazeera and the BBC; their inherent biases must also be taken into consideration; their lack of contact with villagers, embedding with national army units and UN units who have their own interests in the conflict, whether that be in prolonging it for self-perpetuation, or in ending it in the name of national and international harmonization. Thus, we must analyze the motives, the elite and organizational interests at play in this new struggle, while be careful not to overlook the most obvious explanations, which, in the wise words of the past, are often correct.
What manifests here is multi-faceted; as a result of decades of war and Western/Chinese/Malaysian/Indian involvement (no guns are manufactured, to the best of my knowledge, in South Sudan) there is a proliferation of arms in this nation, where traditional tribal justice and conflict is historically consistent and significant, but has not resulted in the widespread death rates of the modern era due to the modern arms now involved. We have a new nation state, struggling to define its own international borders, facing an increasingly hostile Khartoum. We have widespread poverty, illiteracy, one of the poorest regions on the face of the earth. We have international interest in mineral resources that are found in multitude under the soils of this new nation state. But we also have a deeper ethos that needs to be examined, an ethos of violence, of the acceptance of violence as a legitimate means of conflict resolution, the vicious cycle of this violence, I am sure comprehended, but not heard, not heeded; this circle, this cycle of violence requires a definite end point, a clean break in the wheel, or it will continue to manifest, to perpetuate itself into the future, with devastating results for those who are always affected the most by conflict; the most vulnerable, the citizens caught in the crossfire.
What creates an ethos of violence, of violent, seemingly disproportionate, response? This is cultural, historical, as well as a factor that has been manipulated by outside players for centuries in their own vested interests; where this cycle stops, where visionary, non-violent leadership takes control of a situation and charts a new path into the future, is yet to be determined, obviously complicated by the fact that the national leader was, in fact, the rebel army commander, and that these messages of peace require information infrastructure to be disseminated, which is sorely lacking in this newborn nation.

What lies ahead is unknown.

Levi-Strauss and Mattheissen

"Perhaps, then, this was what traveling was, an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me."

-Claude Levi-Strauss

"Between clinging and letting go, I feel a great struggle."
-Peter Mattheissen, The Snow Leopard

Reflections on Retreat

We sit,
like a mountain,
still,
strong,
closing our eyes,
the thoughts assail.
Pain and pleasure,
gain and loss,
seeking, being, becoming.
We stay seated,
watch the magical display of the mind,
with strength, silence, openness, receptivity,
invite in pain, fear, sit with them, bow to them,
and say, yes, this too.
We watch the fleeting nature,
the transitions that we spend our lives trying to chase,
to hold onto so tightly.
And we stop,
we sit,
like a mountain;
a smile forms on our silent lips,
an opening, a glimpse of silence, freedom, space;
still,
strong.