Perspectives on Fragile States

I would like to take a step back from linking fragile states to our [the western world] security. Searching for lists of fragile states I realized that a good number of these failed states would also show up on historical lists of being recipients of western intervention and aid. This is right back to this blog's namesake, Easterly's "White Man's Burden", since this is exactly the analysis that he performs on a number of countries.

So we have the situation where governments and/or other international bodies, such as the IMF, exerted external pressures on a government in order to get it to "shape up" and become just like the rest of the, fairly homogenous, western world. Then a few years down the road, when those pressures and expectations simply do not mesh well with the traditions and cultures of the country, we distance ourselves from the situation, wag our finger and say, "Woah, stay away from them, they are a fragile state. They're insecure, relating with them could be unsafe." (Who else sees the analogies to current socio-economic stratification between individual people here in North America?)

Encouraging internationally a generic form of government, which the US is so keen to do in the form of democracy, is exactly like imposing outside technology when doing development work. (On a side note, I just got news that my work from the past three years has unraveled even faster than I thought possible, which was already pretty fast.) So as aid agencies "discover" that local problems have local solutions, when are we going to make the jump to political institutions?

Please watch this four minute BBC interview with Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a former British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Israel. The last 30 seconds of this clip say it all... (apologies to those with slow internet.) In summary, Cowper-Coles says the key to a stable Middle East is to provide the youth with education and jobs as well as a representative government, not necessarily a Western liberal democracy.

Without promoting a no-government influence Tea-Party type perspective, I think we have to come to the realization that when trying to unnaturally influence and cajole extremely complex systems to move in a direction we feel at the time is the right direction, then the end result is often very undesirable, even in the rare instances when the system did move where we wanted. Science has begun to see this in ecological systems (an introduction of foreign species has unintended consequences), development studies are beginning to understand this (the real development or progress rarely results from the planned activities), and I think one could even find historical examples in the Roman empire or the Catholic church.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, this could even be the case for economic and political systems. We have yet to understand the full effects of all the bail-outs going on around the world whether it's GM in North America or Greece in Europe. Similarly, we simply have not learned from our history of trying to influence politics in Afghanistan and yet we still are sticking our noses in there. Just like unnaturally preventing forest fires annually resulted in massive, unpreventable fires every few years, falsely supporting or even toppling governments will continue to have some unintended consequences, including possibly making this world more insecure for the rest of us.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

ps. This is a fairly laissez-faire perspective. Ie, hands off, things will sort themselves out, which I tend NOT to agree with, I think there are a number of strong anti-laissez-faire examples from complex systems which I have not mentioned at all. Please, comment away!