Threat Inflation

Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen have a smart piece in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs in which they argue that threats to American security are overblown. They write:

Within the foreign policy elite, there exists a pervasive belief that the post–Cold War world is a treacherous place, full of great uncertainty and grave risks…There is just one problem. It is simply wrong. The world that the United States inhabits today is a remarkably safe and secure place. It is a world with fewer violent conflicts and greater political freedom than at virtually any other point in human history. All over the world, people enjoy longer life expectancy and greater economic opportunity than ever before. The United States faces no plausible existential threats, no great-power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon. The U.S. military is the world’s most powerful, and even in the middle of a sustained downturn, the U.S. economy remains among one of the world’s most vibrant and adaptive. Although the United States faces a host of international challenges, they pose little risk to the overwhelming majority of American citizens and can be managed with existing diplomatic, economic, and, to a much lesser extent, military tools.

Zenko and Cohen blame “threat-mongering” for the sense of insecurity that pervades in spite of these positive trends, and they see a few reasons for it (emphasis added):

The disparity between foreign threats and domestic threat-mongering results from a confluence of factors. The most obvious and important is electoral politics. Hyping dangers serves the interests of both political parties…

Warnings about a dangerous world also benefit powerful bureaucratic interests. The specter of looming dangers sustains and justifies the massive budgets of the military and the intelligence agencies, along with the national security infrastructure that exists outside government — defense contractors, lobbying groups, think tanks, and academic departments.

There is also a pernicious feedback loop at work. Because of the chronic exaggeration of the threats facing the United States, Washington overemphasizes military approaches to problems (including many that could best be solved by nonmilitary means). The militarization of foreign policy leads, in turn, to further dark warnings about the potentially harmful effects of any effort to rebalance U.S. national security spending or trim the massive military budget–warnings that are inevitably bolstered by more threat exaggeration.

That’s a good list, but I think Zenko and Cohen’s focus on active “threat-mongering” overlooks the crucial role of innate flaws in how we (humans) think about risk. In fact, cognitive psychologists have shown that we’re pretty lousy at it, and our perceptions of risk are routinely led astray by a subconscious process of substitution. When contemplating rare but scary threats, our minds substitute readily available answers to questions of emotion (How scary is the idea of a terrorist attack?) for hard-to-find answers to questions of fact (How likely is a terrorist attack? How much damage would it actually inflict?). As a result, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.” (That’s psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as quoted by Daniel Kahneman in Chapter 13 of Thinking, Fast and Slow, my source on this cognitive bias.)

This problem is amplified by incentives inherent in the media marketplace we inhabit. Kahneman (p. 138) makes this point in talking about our misperceptions of the risks of various causes of death:

Estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy. The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but also are shaped by it. Editors cannot ignore the public’s demands that certain topics and viewpoints receive extensive coverage. Unusual events (such as botulism) attract disproportionate attention and are consequently perceived as less unusual than they really are. The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

It’s easy to see how stories of things like terrorist sleeper cells, “dirty bomb” attacks, global pandemics, and nuclear strikes from Iran would appeal to editors and consumers seeking novelty and poignancy, and it’s easy to see how those stories would, via substitution, distort our perceptions of the threat those things pose.

Whatever its precise causes, the threat inflation described by Zenko and Cohen has serious consequences for our actual security. Here again the authors:

The most lamentable cost of unceasing threat exaggeration and a focus on military force is that the main global challenges facing the United States today are poorly resourced and given far less attention than “sexier” problems, such as war and terrorism. These include climate change, pandemic diseases, global economic instability, and transnational criminal networks — all of which could serve as catalysts to severe and direct challenges to U.S. security interests. But these concerns are less visceral than alleged threats from terrorism and rogue nuclear states. They require long-term planning and occasionally painful solutions, and they are not constantly hyped by well-financed interest groups. As a result, they are given short shrift in national security discourse and policymaking.

Here’s hoping the publication of their article will help move the needle ever so slightly in a more positive direction.

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by dartthrowingchimp on February 23, 2012  •  Permalink
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In Defense of Particularism in American Foreign Policy

I’ve just finished reading John Lewis Gaddis’s terrific biography of George Frost Kennan, a towering figure in American foreign policy after World War II whom Henry Kissinger described as “one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants.” Apart from recommending the book, which I do without hesitation to anyone with an interest in world affairs, I wanted to talk about how Gaddis’ distillation of Kennan’s ideas helped me clarify some of my own thinking on the conduct of foreign policy.

Nowadays, discussions of grand strategy in U.S. foreign policy are usually framed as a battle between realism, which emphasizes power and encourages statesmen to focus shrewdly on their national self-interest, and liberal institutionalism, which emphasizes cooperation and encourages statesmen to build institutions that facilitate it. Kennan–who was not trained as an academic and apparently didn’t care much for formal theories of international relations–saw the same terrain from a different perspective, and I think his map may be the more useful one.

For Kennan, the crucial divide lay between universalists and particularists. Gaddis spells out this theme most clearly in his discussion of Kennan’s thinking about how the United States ought to respond to the successes of Communist revolutionaries in China in 1947. Mao’s gains posed an early test of the recently pronounced Truman doctrine, which had seemed to pledge the United States to do all it could to prevent Communist advances anywhere in the world. While Kennan was dismayed by that doctrine’s absolutist language, it overlapped with the containment strategy he had begun to advocate as a response to the global ambitions and aggressive nature he saw in the Soviet Union.

Even so, and despite loud calls in the U.S. to do whatever was necessary to defend Chiang’s regime, Kennan convinced Truman to provide only a bare minimum of support to the Nationalists. According to Gaddis (p. 299), Kennan had thought that

Americans had clung too long to the idea of remaking China, an end far beyond their means. The [State Department's] Policy Planning Staff [which Kennan headed] should determine what parts of East Asia are ‘absolutely vital to our security,’ and the United States should then ensure that these remain ‘in hands which we can control or rely on.’

Kennan framed this recommendation within the need to choose between universal and particularist approaches in foreign policy. Universalism sought to apply the same principles everywhere. It favored procedures embodied in the United Nations and in other international organizations. It smoothed over the national peculiarities and conflicting ideologies that confused and irritated so many Americans. Its appeal lay in its promise to ‘relieve us of the necessity of dealing with the world as it is.’ Particularism, in contrast, questioned ‘legalistic concepts.’ It assumed appetites for power that only ‘counter-force’ could control. It valued alliances, but only if based on communities of interest, not on the ‘abstract formalism’ of obligations that might preclude pursuing national defense and global stability. Universalism entangled interests in cumbersome parliamentarism. Particularism encouraged purposefulness, coordination, and economy of effort–qualities the nation would need ‘if we are to be sure of accomplishing our purposes.’

Kennan’s recommendation on China seemed to contradict his own grand strategy, but this contradiction reflected his deeper beliefs about the importance of particularism. He understood that a Communist victory in China would be a setback for the U.S., but he didn’t think it would be a disaster, and he believed that even massive American assistance was unlikely to stop the Communists from winning.

In this history, I hear echoes of contemporary debates over the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine and whether or not the U.S. should intervene militarily in Syria to stop the mass atrocities occurring there. As in the arguments over China policy in the 1940s, universalists often make the case for intervention in Syria on both moral and strategic grounds. Mass atrocities are morally abhorrent, of course, but acting to stop or prevent them is also an essential function of America’s role as the producer and defender of a liberal global order, a universalist might argue, just as stopping Communism in its tracks was during the Cold War. In a recent call for more forceful U.S. action against Syria, Anne Marie Slaughter, a successor of Kennan’s as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, made just such a case. She wrote:

If you believe, as I do, that R2P is a foundation for increased peace and respect for human rights over the long term, that each time it is invoked successfully to authorize the prevention of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave and systematic war crimes, and ethnic cleansing as much as the protection of civilians from such atrocities once they are occurring, it becomes a stronger deterrent against the commission of those acts in the first place…If the U.S. says it stands behind R2P but then does nothing in a case where it applies, not only will dictators around the world draw their own conclusions, but belief in the U.S. commitment to other international norms and obligations also weakens, just at a time when the U.S. grand strategy is to expand and strengthen an effective international order. The credibility of the U.S. commitment to its own proclaimed values will also take yet another critical hit with every young person in the Middle East fighting for liberty, democracy, and justice.

After reading about his approach to China, it’s easy to imagine Kennan responding to this universalist argument by asking: “Yes, but how likely are we to succeed, and at what cost?”

To universalists, that kind of equivocation may seem immoral. Kennan, whom Gaddis portrays as a religious person and a philosopher, was not insensitive to these concerns. His rejection of universalism was not meant as a rejection of moral thinking. Instead, Kennan’s commitment to particularism was informed by his judgment that stark views about right and wrong were poor guides to foreign policy-making.

Could governments behave as individuals should? His preliminary conclusion, sketched out in his diary, was that politics, whether within or among nations, would always be a struggle for power. It could never in itself be a moral act…Foreign policy was not, therefore, a contest of good versus evil. To condemn negotiations as appeasement, Kennan told a Princeton University audience early in October [1953], was to end a Hollywood movie with the villain shot. To entrust diplomacy to lawyers was to relegate power, ‘like sex, to a realm in which we see it only occasionally, and then in highly sublimated and presentable form.’ Both approaches ignored the fact that most international conflicts were ‘jams that people have gotten themselves into.’ Trying to resolve them through rigid standards risked making things worse.” (p. 492)

As a frequent critic of the U.S. government’s attempts to provoke and promote democratic revolutions elsewhere–here and here are some blogged examples–I was particularly interested in how Kennan’s commitment to particularism was evidenced in his frustration with policies aimed at supporting the “liberation” Communist-ruled countries during the Cold War. In Kennan’s view,

“[A policy seeking 'liberation' in Communist-ruled countries] is not consistent with our international obligations. It is not consistent with a common membership with other countries in the United Nations. It is not consistent with the maintenance of formal diplomatic relations with another country. It is replete with possibilities for misunderstanding and bitterness. To the extent that it might be successful, it would involve us in heavy responsibilities. Finally the prospects for success would be very small indeed; since the problem of civil disobedience is not a great problem to the modern police dictatorship.” (p. 479)

Those concerns may sound cold, but Kennan was not indifferent to the liberationists’ cause. In fact, his views on the subject were also informed by a conviction that democracy would prevail in the end without active American support. According to Gaddis (p. 495), Kennan believed that

Democracy had the advantage over Communism in this respect, because it did not rely on violence to reshape society. Its outlook was ‘more closely attuned to the real nature of man…[so] we can afford to be patient and even occasionally to suffer reverses, placing our confidence in the longer and deeper workings of history.’

Like Churchill, who famously remarked that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried,” Kennan saw many faults in Western society in the 20th century, but he saw the available alternatives as even worse. Nevertheless, he firmly believed that any gains realized by pushing for liberation were not worth the entanglements, lost opportunities, and even wars that might result, especially when war could be nuclear.

Kennan saw himself as more of a “prophet” (his word) than a theorist or practitioner, and his views on “liberation” illustrate how he often thought about international relations on time scales that most people either don’t consider or consider a luxury. His containment policy was founded on the prescient expectation that the Soviet Union’s internal flaws would eventually lead to its own disintegration, but he did not expect to live long enough to see that happen.

When contemplating the plight of actual people suffering under actual dictatorships, the idea that democracy will eventually prevail can seem a little too convenient, like it’s just a way to absolve us of any responsibility for the injustices of the here and now. Is it really more convenient, though, than the belief that righteousness is always right? Where Kennan’s view is materially convenient, implying that we can achieve the desired result through inaction, the liberationist’s view is morally convenient, presuming that well-intentioned actions will always bring good results.

And there’s the matter of the historical record. Long-term trends clearly support Kennan’s expectation that democracy would keep expanding, albeit fitfully and with many reversals. More important, these advances have usually come either without direct U.S. support, or in places where U.S. involvement was incidental to the eventual outcome. The events that precipitated the collapse of the USSR and the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe mostly caught the U.S. by surprise, and the U.S. response to them was generally modest and ambivalent.

Likewise with the Arab Spring. The wave of uprisings that swept the Arab world in 2011 started in Tunisia, where the U.S. had done virtually nothing to promote democracy. It soon spread to Egypt and Bahrain, where U.S. support for military “deep states” vastly outweighed its material and verbal commitments to opposition groups, and to Libya, where the U.S. had actually warmed to the dictator in recent years in response to his decision to give up weapons of mass destruction. In other words, theses revolutions were hardly American-made; if anything, they occurred in spite of American indifference and support for the status quo. In this sense, the Arab Spring supports Kennan’s expectation that American intervention is hardly a prerequisite for democratic revolution, and that democracy will advance on its own through the “longer and deeper workings of history.”

If universal principles aren’t the way to go, how, then, should foreign policy be conducted? For most of his adult life, Kennan owned and worked a small farm in southern Pennsylvania, and he often did the yardwork at his home in Princeton, too. It’s not surprising, then, that he may have best expressed his commitment to particularism and penchant for thinking on long time scales in a horticultural metaphor that envisioned a patient, process-oriented approach as the best way to strike a balance between moral ambitions and animal interests. This metaphor was offered up during a series of four lectures Kennan delivered at Princeton in 1954–lectures that became the book Realities of American Foreign Policy, and I think Gaddis’ summation of those lectures (pp. 494-495) it makes a proper coda to this post.

Americans could no longer afford economic advances that depleted natural resources and devastated natural beauty, Kennan insisted. Nor could they tolerate dependency, for critical raw materials, on unreliable foreign governments. Nor could they tear their democracy apart internally because threats to democracy existed externally. Nor could they entrust defenses against such dangers to the first use of nuclear weapons, for what would be left after a nuclear war had taken place? These were all single policies, pursued without regard to how each related to the others, or to the larger ends the state was supposed to serve. They neglected ‘the essential unity’ of national problems, thus demonstrating the ‘danger implicit in any attempt to compartmentalize our thinking about foreign policy.’

That lack of coordination ill-suited the separate ‘planes of international reality’ upon which the United States had to compete. The first was a ‘sane and rational one, in which we felt comfortable, in which we were surrounded by people to whom we were accustomed and on whose reactions we could at least depend.’ The second was ‘a nightmarish one, where we were like a hunted beast, oblivious of everything but survival; straining every nerve and muscle in the effort to remain alive.’ Within the first arena, traditional conceptions of morality applied; ‘We could still be guided…by the American dream.’ Within the second, ‘there was only the law of the jungle; and we had to do violence to our own traditional principles–or many of us felt we did–to fit ourselves for the relentless struggle.’ The great question, then, was whether the two could ever be brought into a coherent relationship with one another.

They could, Kennan suggested, through a kind of geopolitical horticulture. ‘We must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs.’ International life was an organic process, not a static system. Americans had inherited it, not designed it. Their preferred standards of behavior, therefore, could hardly govern it. But it should be possible ‘to take these forces for what they are and to induce them to work with us and for us by influencing the environmental stimuli to which they are subjected.’ That would have to be done ‘gently and patiently, with understanding and sympathy, not trying to force growth by mechanical means, not tearing the plants up by the roots when they fail to behave as we wish them to. The forces of nature will generally be on the side of him who understands them best and respects them most scrupulously.’

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by dartthrowingchimp on February 18, 2012  •  Permalink
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Why the Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund Won’t Make a Difference

On Monday, the Obama administration released its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2013, which starts on 1 October 2012. Among the many tidbits buried in that document is a proposal to establish a new Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Incentive Fund, to be managed by the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). According to a State Dept. press release, the point of this new $770-million fund would be “to better position the United States to quickly respond to dramatic changes in the region and incentivize reforms.” More specifically, the MENA fund is intended to “incentivize [gack, I hate that word] long-term economic, political and trade reforms—key pillars of stability—by supporting governments that demonstrate a commitment to undergo meaningful change and empower their people.”

On its face, this fund strikes me as smart policy. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government’s efforts to promote democracy abroad have relied heavily on negative incentives–sticks rather than carrots. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have routinely sought to jawbone recalcitrant autocrats into adopting political and economic reforms and funded training for those autocrats’ domestic challengers.

As I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog, I don’t think these hostile approaches are very effective, and they may even be counterproductive. The appearance of an alliance between foreign powers and domestic opposition groups may goad authoritarian rulers into cracking down before that opposition grows powerful enough to pose a serious threat, and it can enhance domestic support for that crackdown by playing on nationalist concerns about foreign meddling. Foreign funding for “civil society” organizations and training  also draws local activists’ energy away from the difficult but crucial work of domestic organizing into the cyclical hunt for overseas grants and attention.

These problems haven’t stopped Western governments from trying, but they also haven’t stopped American policymakers from experimenting with positive incentives, or carrots, too. The single-biggest experiment along these lines is the Millennium Challenge Corporation, created on George W. Bush’s watch, but the proposal of this new MENA fund shows that interest in positive incentives was not unique to that administration.

The more I think about it, though, the more I doubt this MENA fund would have any effect on the odds that regimes in that region will attempt or sustain democracy. I see three major problems.

First, the proposed fund is awfully small. Even if it’s spread across just a handful of the many countries in the region, the proposed budget of $770 million would still represent no more than a few hundred million dollars per country. That’s not a whole lot of incentive to undertake or sustain reforms that will often have powerful domestic enemies in countries as large as Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia. To have much impact on those governments’ behavior, the fund would have to be big enough to make a real dent in the expected costs of democratization–and, equally important, to bear some resemblance to the expected rewards of sustaining or restoring authoritarian rule.

Second and related, the benefits of that assistance aren’t properly targeted. Specifically, the benefits of the foreign assistance the MENA Fund could offer would be public, while the benefits of sustaining or restoring authoritarian rule are often private, or at least spread across a much smaller pool of beneficiaries. Enticements work by motivating someone to do something. When it comes to political and economic reforms, the “someone” isn’t a country or its population; instead, it’s the small group of elite insiders who control–and benefit most from–the current institutional arrangements. Asking them to destroy those arrangements in exchange for new foreign assistance is kind of like offering a reward for tips leading to the capture of a local crime boss but insisting that the informants share the reward with everyone in the neighborhood. Stacked against the material benefits of keeping the old order going and the risks of ratting out the boss, one’s personal share of the public gain starts to look pretty meager.

Third, there are too many alternatives. Conditional rewards don’t work very well when the targets can get the same benefits somewhere else without the hassle of meeting the conditions. If the U.S. and the were the only source of badly needed foreign financing and assistance, conditional assistance might be more effective. In today’s world, though, governments in need of cash can often shop around for a better deal–from China, from Russia, from the Gulf monarchies, from regional development banks, from wealthy private investors, and so on. The availability of unconditional alternatives further dilutes the drawing power of these already-modest enticements.

If it gets established, the Incentive Fund will add some programs to the roster of U.S. activities in MENA countries “in transition,” and some of those transitions might succeed in producing durable democracies. My guess, though, is that the countries receiving this new assistance will be the ones that would have undertaken the relevant reforms anyway. The Incentive Fund will not transform any dictators into democrats, nor will it have a significant effect on the odds that new democracies in the region will survive.

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by dartthrowingchimp on February 16, 2012  •  Permalink
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Why Egyptians Should Care about the Maldives Coup

I knew nothing about the Maldives until it popped into the news this week, but what I’m seeing there now looks very familiar, as it should to anyone who studies how new democratic regimes so often sputter and fail.

The Republic of Maldives is a tiny archipelago state off the southern tip of India with a population of only about 314,000. Fish are its leading export, but its economy depends most heavily on beach tourism. The Maldives gained independence from the British in 1965 and was ruled for most of the ensuing 45 years by one man, Mamoun Abdul Gayoom. Years of pro-democracy activism finally spurred the government to open the door to multiparty politics in 2003, and the state became a democracy in 2008 when its first free and fair elections delivered the presidency to longtime activist leader Mohamed Nasheed.

The 2008 elections terminated a long period of authoritarian rule, but they did not instantly transform the fundamentals of the political economy that developed under al-Gayoom’s government. That transformation would require deeper change, and President Nasheed’s efforts to bring about those reforms seem to be what recently got him into trouble. In 2010, the New York Times reported:

The government of the Maldives wants its money back — $400 million to be precise. That is the amount that it estimates was looted by its former president, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and his associates. Mr. Gayoom dominated politics in the Maldives, a tiny Indian Ocean nation, for 30 years. After winning six successive single-party elections, he finally bowed to popular pressure and allowed open elections in 2008. He lost. He is one of a number of politically connected figures — some alive, others dead — who are the targets of increasingly coordinated efforts to repatriate misappropriated funds. Results to date have been encouraging, but much more can be done, officials and development experts say. A report from the Maldives’ national auditor released in 2009 reads like a guidebook on self-enrichment. The president’s spending was “out of control,” it said, as Mr. Gayoom used his power to live a lavish lifestyle and extend largesse to those around him.

As President Nasheed’s administration struggled “to get its money back,” it found its efforts impeded. When the president tried to overcome one small piece of that resistance by ordering the arrest of an uncooperative criminal court judge, the judge refused to go, and the president’s opponents took to the streets to protest. The Times described the final spiral this way:

Recently, Mr. Nasheed’s popularity has suffered as the economy of the Maldives has struggled. Then, last month, Mr. Nasheed ordered the military to arrest the criminal court judge, Abdulla Mohamed, accusing the judge of acting on behalf of Mr. Gayoom and compromising the fairness of the country’s courts. The arrest, which was widely condemned, prompted the nightly protests in Male that peaked on Monday. “The real catalyst, last night, was that the police decided that they wouldn’t disperse the protesters,” said Mohamed Hussain Shareef, the spokesman for Mr. Gayoom’s party, the Progressive Party of Maldives. Mr. Shareef contended that soldiers had balked as well as the police. “We were told that the army was also asked to disperse the protesters using live rounds,” he said. The Associated Press reported that troops had initially fired rubber bullets. S. Ahmed Shiyam, a police subinspector in Male, said there were clashes between police officers and soldiers on Monday evening and early Tuesday morning, with some of the protesters joining on the police side. Then some soldiers switched sides as well, he said. An official close to Mr. Nasheed denied that the president had ordered soldiers to fire on the protesters. Rather, he said, the president chose to resign specifically to avoid such violence. “He faced the choice of seeing a lot of blood by asking the military to crack down,” said the official, who asked not to be identified, given the political volatility of the moment. “But he wasn’t prepared to do that.”

What seems apparent from the bits of information I’ve been able to find is that political polarization had amped up long before the recent showdown over judge Mohamed. Some of that polarization seems to have resulted from an economic slowdown that hit the Maldives in 2011, some from a disagreement over the proper role of Islam in politics, but surely some also resulted from the new government’s attempts to discover and dismantle the networks of patronage and corruption left over from the ancien regime. Presidential elections were due in 2012, and President Nasheed’s move against judge Mohamed apparently strengthened their belief that he was willing to do whatever it would take to cement his continuation in office and continue his fight against their interests.

These are the familiar and formidable challenges of democratic consolidation. New democracies are not drawn on blank slates. The development of democratic institutions that persist usually requires a transformation of deeper arrangements in which powerful groups are heavily invested. Wealthy individuals and powerful bureaucrats must be convinced to subject their sinecures to the rule of laws adopted by representatives they do not choose. Men with guns must be convinced that they will be better off refraining from picking sides in partisan fights or seizing direct control of government when they don’t like how much money it spends on them or what it tells them to do.

For democracy to survive under these conditions, political and military leaders have to gain confidence that every political confrontation is not a gladiatorial death match, and that their rivals can’t or won’t try to win those confrontations by simply usurping power and demolishing the arena. This trust is impossible to manufacture. It seems instead to rise and decline fitfully, and the confrontations whose successful resolution might deepen that trust more often lead instead to resumptions of authoritarian rule. We can recognize and even vaguely understand all of this and still not know how to make it happen differently.

So what usually happens instead is what happened this week in the Maldives. Motivated by mixtures of ambition and fear, partisan rivals get stuck in a downward spiral of distrust that leads eventually to an undemocratic resolution. These resolutions often take the form of a military coup, where the guys with guns decide to take matters into their own hands or, as in the Maldives, side with the rebellious opposition. In many other cases, the confrontation is resolved by executive coup, where incumbent officials ensure their continuation in power by tightening the screws on their political rivals or just rigging or scrapping elections. Opposition parties sometimes rebel, but those rebellions very rarely succeed; instead, they are usually either quashed or hijacked by a collaboration of opportunistic political insiders and state security forces.

Anyone who cares about the fate of new democracies in Egypt, Tunisia, or really anywhere should care about this pattern, because it foretells the likely futures of those regimes. I don’t mean this to be a declaration of helplessness in the face of these patterns as much as a frank assessment of the depth of the challenges involved. As I’ve said before, I’m a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist. In their brilliant overview of political development throughout recorded history, Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast drly note (p. 27) that “historic transitions [of the sort described here] occurred within relatively brief periods, typically about fifty years.” Replace that last comma with a pause for comic timing, and you get a better sense of what I have in mind.

PS. For detailed reporting on the coup and the spiral of events leading to it, see this story by Bryson Hull for Reuters.

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by dartthrowingchimp on February 10, 2012  •  Permalink
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A Liberal Case Against Military Intervention in Syria

The Syrian state is continuing to murder its own citizens, and the pace of that killing appears to be picking up. In a pensive blog post that made its way onto my screen this morning, scholar and writer Jillain York observed:

From opinionators on Syria, be they Syrian or foreign, there are two dominating views: The first is the viewpoint of the Syrian National Council (SNC), or farther right. This “view area,” so to speak, ranges from the precise position of the SNC in calling for intervention, to the hawkish calls–such as this by Daniel Byman in Foreign Policy–for foreign intervention. The second dominant view comes from the anti-imperialist crowd. By and large, the anti-imperialists have largely failed to denounce the Assad regime, and those who have imply that any alternative is worse.

I don’t see myself fitting into either of those two camps she describes, so I thought I would try to lay out my thoughts on what has to be one of the most difficult and important foreign-policy questions of the moment in hopes of clarifying them for myself and contributing to the wider discussion.

What is happening to scores of civilians in Syria every day is horrifying. States are among the most powerful organizations in the world, but state boundaries are not moral boundaries. I want to live in a world where we–not the United States or NATO, but the larger “we,” humanity–can and do stop these kinds of atrocities, punish their perpetrators, and enable the establishment of the accountable government Syrians are literally dying to create. I want to live in a world where attempts to deliver those just ends only save lives and build peace.

We do not (yet?) live in that world. Instead, in the world I see around me, the actions our governments undertake in pursuit of good intentions around the world are often ineffective at best and more often have unintended consequences that run counter to their stated ends. This disconnect is most obvious in the grand state-building schemes winding down in Iraq and still underway in Afghanistan, but it also afflicts most other militarized efforts to achieve humanitarian ends.

As Ben Valentino convincingly shows in a recent Foreign Affairs article, military intervention for the purpose of civilian protection almost always comes with a much steeper price tag than we realize when we contemplate it. Intervening forces often end up accidentally killing many civilians and empowering groups that perpetrate their own atrocities. Harder to see but at least as important, armed interventions and the peacekeeping or nation-building missions that often ensue carry substantial opportunity costs; the resources they absorb might have been applied elsewhere against problems where we can be more certain that they would have saved lives or improved well-being–for example, to public-health problems like malaria or diarrhea that are preventable but still kill millions every year.

The point of all this for making foreign policy is that good intentions are not sufficient. I consider myself a classical liberal, as, I’m sure, do many of those ardently advocating the use of American military power for civilian protection. The first principle of Millian liberalism, however, is to seek the greatest happiness, not to be seen as having acted in defense of liberalism. The consequences of our actions are what really matter, and those consequences are not burnished by the values our actions were meant to uphold.

In that moral universe, it is right to be more humble about our capabilities and more circumspect in our actions. States are not moral islands, and injustice in other states should concern us as moral beings. But it doesn’t always follow that our government can be, or even ought to be, the agent of ending that injustice and promoting liberalism. In situations where the costs and consequences of forceful action are uncertain and might be steep, liberal principles encourage us to consider capabilities as well as ends, and the two will not always align.

In the case of Syria, the recommendations for military intervention I’ve seen all either assume the best, best-case scenario for how that intervention will unfold or simply declare that the current path is unacceptable and then fail to discuss in depth what kind of intervention we should undertake and the many consequences those actions might carry. Unless and until advocates of forceful intervention can make a convincing case that this time will be different, I will infer from the historical record that it will not be different, that the most likely outcome is a clash of armed forces that will itself kill many civilians, will likely require a substantial long-term commitment of forces and money, and could plausibly spiral into a wider war that would kill and destroy many more soldiers and civilians.

Where does that leave me? In Jillian York’s words, “I am an observer of tragedy.” I am convinced that the proper course of action for the U.S. government is to continue to encourage and engage in diplomacy aimed at stopping the killing of civilians and encouraging political change in Syria that will respond to the just demands of the resisters. I realize that might not work, and that the Assad regime may kill thousands more civilians as diplomacy founders. I realize that, but I do not see a better alternative.

(For clear and brilliant thinking about the larger question of how to end mass atrocities, see this essay from the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, brought to my attention by blogger Daniel Solomon.)

4 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on February 8, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Foreign Policy
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on February 8, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/a-liberal-case-against-military-intervention-in-syria/

Economic Growth and the Survival of New Democracies

Last week, a senior official in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood warned the U.S. against cutting aid to his country at a time when Egypt is, he suggested, on the brink of economic collapse. In an interview with the Washington Post, Khairat Al-Shater said that reductions in Western aid would exacerbate an economic crisis that could “transform a peaceful revolution into a hunger revolution.”

Al-Shater’s warning reflects a widely held view that new democracies can be made or broken by their economic performance. “It is a cardinal principle of empirical democratic theory,” democratization scholar Larry Diamond writes, “that hard economic times are supposed to mean hard times for democracy.” This principle has been confirmed by a few statistical studies on the survival of democratic regimes: other things being equal, the risk of democratic breakdown does seem to be higher when GDP growth rates are slower. (See here, here, here, and here for affirmative findings and here for a negative one.)

After reading Al-Shater’s warning, I decided to revisit this question with an emphasis on the real-world concerns of the moment. Instead of looking at the entire life course of all democracies, as previous studies generally do, I wondered what economic performance around the time of a democratic transition–like we saw in Tunisia in 2011 and like we might be seeing right now in Egypt and Libya–would tell us about the prospects that a democratic regime will survive well beyond its founding elections. Perhaps these earliest years create impressions and encourage strategies that enable or afflict the ensuing regime during this formative period in ways we can’t see when we lump entire episodes of democracy together.

To test this conjecture, I used a global data set to identify all transitions to democracy that occurred during the period 1955-2008. With that case list in hand, I built a logistic regression model of the relationships between the conditions under which those transitions occurred and the odds that the ensuing regimes would survive for at least five years. (As it happens, surviving for just five years is actually a pretty big deal. Of the 103 transitions to democracy that occurred during that period, only 62 produced regimes that lasted longer.)

From prior research, we know that higher levels of economic development, the absence of political polarization, prior democracy, and the end of the Cold War are all associated with improved prospects for democratic consolidation, so all of those factors were included in the model. To capture the marginal effects of economic performance on prospects for democratic survival–the original point of this exercise–I added measures of annual percent change in GDP per capita for the three years bracketing the transition: the one before, the year of the transition, and the year after. (See the end of the post for more details on the modeling.)

As expected, I found that a new democracy’s survival prospects are indeed better when its economy grows faster around the time of its birth. In contrast to al-Shater’s gloomy prognostication, however, the effects I observed were not large. The marginal effects from GDP growth in the year of the transition are illustrated in the line plot below. As the chart shows, a difference of several percentage points in GDP growth–a large swing in most real-world situations–would produce only a very modest difference in the estimated likelihood of surviving past five years, other things being equal. (I don’t think p-values are as informative as estimates of marginal effects, but for those of you wondering, the p-value in this instance is 0.28; the coefficient is 0.046.) The association with growth on either side of the transition are not captured in that chart, in part because they were even weaker (coefficients of 0.027 and 0.018 and p-values of 0.54 and 0.70, respectively).

We can also see the weakness of this effect in the modest contribution of those growth rates to the statistical model’s ability to accurately assess risk in the historical cases. The figure below plots Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves for versions of my model with and without the measures of initial GDP growth. ROC curves summarize a model’s ability to discriminate between cases with and without some feature of interest–in this instance, surviving past five years. The better the model does, the farther the line pushes toward the upper left-hand corner, and the larger the area under the curve (AUC). As you can see, adding measures of GDP growth to the model doesn’t improve the accuracy by a whole lot, producing just about a 2% bump in AUC.

On the whole, I’d say these results run counter to the spirit, if not the letter, of prevailing expectations. The marginal effects of economic performance flow in the anticipated direction, but they don’t have anything close to the kind of “make or break” impact that Al-Shater and Diamond’s statements imply. A new democracy’s level of economic development and the occurrence of acute political polarization tell us the most about its survival prospects, and variations in economic performance around the transition don’t seem to move the needle a whole lot beyond that.

I wonder if the prevailing wisdom about the dire consequences of poor economic performance for democratic consolidation isn’t at least in part a case of the availability heuristic at work. Historical cases of economic crisis followed by democratic collapse easily spring to mind (Weimar Germany, anyone?), and it’s not hard to generate a plausible story linking those two events. What those plausible stories seem to overlook, though, is that many of those attempts at democracy probably would have failed anyway, even in the absence of economic crisis, because that’s the fate of most democracies across a wide range of conditions. Meanwhile, there are plenty of countervailing examples of young democracies that survived sharp economic contractions (say, Greece after military rule, or much of post-Communist Europe), but these null cases seem to be more forgettable.

Even if economic growth had a stronger impact on prospects for democratic survival than my analysis indicates it does, I’m skeptical that this information would be as useful to policy-makers seeking to promote democracy as I suspect they think it is. Assume for a moment that a bump of a few percentage points in GDP growth in the transition year would double the odds in favor of democratic survival. Can anyone tell me what policy interventions will reliably pump growth rates that far, that fast? If foreign aid or economic policy could work that kind of magic, wouldn’t the “developing” world already be a lot richer?

I’ll wrap this post up by going back to where we started, namely, the Middle East after the “Arab awakening.” Even though GDP growth doesn’t contribute much to it, the model’s overall performance isn’t bad. After looking at those ROC curves, I wondered what the model would say about the prospects for the survival of new democracies in three Arab countries on the cusp of new tries at democracy: Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Of the three, only Tunisia would already qualify as democratic by my definition, but Egypt and Libya are both in the midst of transitions from authoritarian rule that could put them over the threshold soon. So I took the IMF’s latest projections of their growth rates and plugged them into the model, along with recent data on their levels of economic development and my best guess as to whether or not they would qualify as acutely polarized according to the data set I used for that indicator. Here’s what came back as estimates of the  probability that each of those new democracies would make it to their sixth birthday, assuming that, of the three, only Tunisia would not qualify as acutely polarized:

  • Tunisia: 82%
  • Egypt: 48%
  • Libya:  89%

The contrast between Tunisia and Egypt’s survival prospects did not surprise me, but the high estimate for Libya did. Interestingly, expected economic growth seems to be contributing to this result. According to the IMF, Libya’s economy contracted by more than 60% in 2011, but it’s expected to recoup some of those losses in 2012 with an astonishing annual growth rate of nearly 70%. That value is so unusually large that it packs a lot of wallop, even though the weight for GDP growth in the equation is small. Whether that anomalous leap translates into a tremendous boost for democratic consolidation in the real world is another matter. Color me dubious.

Details of the Modeling

The sample for the statistical analysis described here comprises 103 democratic transitions that occurred in countries worldwide during the period 1955-2008.  These transitions were identified using the same data set on episodes of democracy that was summarized in my book. To focus on transitions most like the ones occurring in the Middle East today, cases where new countries were “born” with democratic regimes were excluded from the analysis. I did not use the well-known and widely-used Democracy and Dictatorship Data Set because, as elaborated in this working paper, I have serious concerns about its utility for survival analysis. (That said, I would be very interested to see how sensitive the results reported here are to the choice of measures of democratic transitions and breakdowns. I’d do it myself if this were an academic paper, but, hey, it’s just a blog post.)

Once I’d assembled a roster of relevant cases, I used the ‘glm’ command in R to estimate a logistic regression model that included the covariates listed below (with sources in parentheses). The analysis file includes one record per transition. The dependent variable in this model was a binary one indicating whether or not a democratic episode lasted more than five years beyond its transition year. As noted above, 62 of the 103 cases did.

  • Annual percent change in GDP per capita in years t-1, t, and t+1, where t is the year in which the democratic transition occurred (World Development Indicators)
  • Infant mortality rate, relative to annual global median and logged (U.S. Bureau of the Census)
  • Political polarization (a.k.a. “factionalism,” indicated by a score of 3 on Polity’s PARCOMP variable)
  • Any prior episodes of democracy
  • Post-Cold War period

The ROC curves were created using ROCR.

If you’d like to replicate and tinker with this analysis, please email me to ask for the data set and R script. My address is ulfelder <at> gmail <dot> com.

10 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on February 6, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Forecasting, Statistics, Democratic Breakdown, Democratic Consolidation
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on February 6, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/economic-growth-and-the-survival-of-new-democracies/

Assessing Coup Risk in 2012

Which countries around the world are most likely to see coup activity in 2012?

This question popped back into my mind this morning when I read a new post on Daniel Solomon’s Securing Rights blog about widening schisms in Sudan’s armed forces that could lead to a coup attempt. There’s also been a lot of talk in early 2012 about the likelihood of a coup in Syria, where the financial and social costs of repression, sanctions, and now civil war continue to mount. Meanwhile, Pakistan seems to have dodged a coup bullet early this year after a tense showdown between its elected civilian government and military leaders. I even saw one story–unsubstantiated, but from a reputable source–about a possible foiled coup plot in China around New Year’s Day. These are all countries where a coup d’etat would shake up regional politics, and coups in some of those countries could substantially alter the direction of armed conflicts in which government forces are committing mass atrocities, to name just two of the possible repercussions.

To give a statistical answer to the question of coup risk in 2012, I’ve decided to dust off a couple of coup-forecasting algorithms I developed in early 2011 and gin up some numbers. Both of these algorithms…

  1. Take the values of numerous indicators identified by statistical modeling as useful predictors of coup activity (see the end of this post for details);
  2. Apply weights derived from that modeling to those indicators; and then
  3. Sum and transform the results to spit out a score we can interpret as an estimate of the probability that a coup event will occur some time in 2011.

Both algorithms are products of Bayesian model averaging (BMA) applied to logistic regression models of annual coup activity (any vs. none) in countries worldwide over the past few decades. One of the modeling exercises, done for a private-sector client, looked only at successful coups using data compiled by the Center for Systemic Peace. The other modeling exercise was done for a workshop at the Council on Foreign Relations on forecasting political instability; this one looked at all coup attempts, successful or failed, using data compiled by Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne. For the 2012 coup risk assessments, I’ve simply averaged the output from the two.

The dot plot below shows the estimated coup risk in 2012 for the 40 countries with the highest values (i.e., greatest risk). The horizontal axis is scaled for probabilities ranging from zero to 1; if you’re more comfortable thinking in percentages, just multiply the number by 100. As usual with all statistical forecasts of rare events, the estimates are mostly close to zero. (On average, only a handful of coup attempts occur worldwide each year, and they’ve become even rarer since the end of the Cold War; see this earlier post for details). For a variety of reasons, the estimates are also less precise than those dots might make them seem, so small differences should be taken with a grain of salt. Even so, these results of this exercise should offer plausible estimates of the chances that we’ll see coup activity in these countries some time in 2012.

Here are a few of things that stand out for me in those results.

  • My forecast supports Daniel’s analysis that the risk of a coup attempt in Sudan in 2012 is relatively high. It ranks 11th on the global list, making it one of the most likely candidates for coup activity this year.
  • Surprising to me, Pakistan barely cracks into the top 40, landing at 38th in the company of Iraq, Cambodia, and Senegal. Those countries all rank higher than 120 others, but the distance between their estimated risk and the risk in most other countries is within the realm of statistical noise. Off the top of my head, I would have identified Pakistan and Iraq as relatively vulnerable countries, and I would not have thought of Cambodia or Senegal as particularly coup-prone cases.
  • Unsurprising to me, China doesn’t even make the top 40. Perhaps there has been some erosion in civilian control in recent years, as Gordon Chang discusses, but it still doesn’t much resemble the countries that have seen full-blown coup attempts in the past few decades.
  • Interestingly, Syria doesn’t show up in the top 40, either. To make sense of this forecast, it’s important to note that assigning a low probability to the occurrence of a coup attempt in Syria in 2012 isn’t the same thing as a prediction that President Bashar al-Assad or his regime will survive the year. It might seem like semantic hair-splitting, but the definitions of coups used to construct the data on which these forecasts are based do not include cases where national leaders resign under pressure or are toppled by rebel groups. So the Syria forecast suggests only that Assad is unlikely to be overthrown by his own security forces. As it happens, my analysis of countries most likely to see democratic transitions in 2012 put Syria in the top 10 on that list.
  • Two of the countries near the top of that list–Guinea and Democratic Republic of Congo–are the ones where the Center for Systemic Peace’s Monty Marshall tells me he saw coup activity meeting his definition in 2011. Those recent coup attempts are influencing the 2012 forecasts, but both countries were also near the top of the 2011 risk list. This boosts my confidence in the reliability of these assessments.

I hope there’s a lot more on (or off) that list that interests readers, and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the results in the Comments section. For now, though, I’m going to wrap up this post by providing more information on what those forecasts take into account. The algorithm for successful coups uses just four risk factors, one of which is really just an adjustment to the intercept.

  • Infant mortality rate (relative to annual global median, logged): higher risk in countries with higher rates.
  • Degree of democracy (Polity score, quadratic): higher risk for countries in the mid-range of the 21-point scale.
  • Recent coup activity (yes or no): higher risk if any activity in the past five years.
  • Post-Cold War period: lower risk since 1989.

The algorithm for any coup attempts, successful or failed, uses the following ten risk factors, including all four of the ones used to forecast successful coups.

  • Infant mortality rate (relative to annual global median, logged): higher risk in countries with higher rates.
  • Recent coup activity (count of past five years with any, plus one and logged): higher risk with more activity.
  • Post-Cold War period: lower risk since 1989.
  • Popular uprisings in region (count of countries with any, plus one and logged): higher risk with more of them.
  • Insurgencies in region (count of countries with any, plus one and logged): higher risk with more of them.
  • Economic growth (year-to-year change in GDP per capita): higher risk with slower growth.
  • Regime durability (time since last abrupt change in Polity score, plus one and logged): lower risk with longer time.
  • Ongoing insurgency (yes or no): higher risk if yes.
  • Ongoing civil resistance campaign (yes or no): higher risk if yes.
  • Signatory to 1st Optional Protocol of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (yes or no): lower risk if yes.
4 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on January 30, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Forecasting, Statistics
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 30, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/assessing-coup-risk-in-2012/

Can Electoral Systems Cure Democracies and End Civil Wars?

Electoral systems are what we call the rules used to organize voting and then to convert votes into election outcomes. For at least the past few decades, political scientists have been fascinated by the idea that certain electoral systems might help “troubled” societies heal what ails them. One recent contribution to this literature appears in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Democracy, in the form of an article asserting that majoritarian electoral systems should work better than proportional representation (PR) at keeping new democracies alive and ending violent conflicts. The January article is a response to a piece in the previous issue asserting the opposite, that new democracies in the Middle East and North Africa could improve their chances for survival by adopting PR. ( If you don’t know what these labels mean and are curious to learn, Georgetown University’s Charles King offers a simple primer here.)

The literature on electoral-system design as a policy instrument is produced by very smart people, but it still feels like a big “Coke! Pepsi!” fight to me.

For one thing, empirical evidence of the effects of electoral systems on outcomes like democratic consolidation and conflict resolution is, and will probably remain, too ambiguous to resolve the argument. Articles often toss out a couple of supporting examples, but the fact of the matter is that these systems are really complex, and the conditions under which they operate vary widely. Because the systems are so complex, any particular combination of rules has often only been tried one or a few times in the real world. Because the numbers of similar and contrasting cases are inevitably small, it’s impossible to make the kinds of sharp comparisons we’d need to infer causality with any confidence.

Second and more important, this literature consistently ignores the real-world politics of institutional design that would inevitably be involved in making the choices it recommends. Electoral systems aren’t drawn up and plunked down by technocrats hoping to make democracy stick or to end fighting. Instead, they’re usually the products of tough bargaining among loose coalitions of shrewd actors all looking for a selfish edge. Iraq and Afghanistan under foreign occupation in the 2000s are about as close as the real world will ever come to the conditions in which technical experts were in a position to prescribe and impose systems designed to achieve certain ends. Yet, in both cases, the systems that emerged deviated substantially from expert recommendations after local actors (understandably and appropriately) asserted themselves and injected their own ideas and interests into the process. If paper solutions couldn’t get translated into practice under those conditions, it’s hard to see how this literature is going to become much more than an intellectual exercise unless and until it incorporates the politics of institutional choice into its recommendations.

Last but not least, articles in this vein often gloss over the fact that decisions about electoral-system design inevitably involve trade-offs between different values. As Pippa Norris puts it,

There is no single ‘best’ system: these arguments represent irresolvable value conflicts. For societies, which are raven [sic] by deep-rooted ethnic, religious or ethnic divisions, like Mali, Russia, or Israel, the proportional system may prove more inclusive (Lijphart 1977), but it may also reinforce rather than ameliorate these cleavages (Tsebelis 1990). For states, which are already highly centralized, like Britain or New Zealand, majoritarian systems can insulate the government from the need for broader consultation and democratic checks and balances. In constitutional design it appears that despite the appeal of ‘electoral engineering’ there are no easy choices.

Until the literature starts dealing more effectively with these issues–the ambiguity of the empirical evidence, the hard politics of institutional change, and the inevitability of trade-offs between supposed ends–I’m going to keep hearing “Tastes great! Less filling!” whenever I read pieces like the ones in the recent issues of JoD.

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by dartthrowingchimp on January 27, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratic Consolidation
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 27, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/can-electoral-systems-cure-democracies-and-end-civil-wars/

Strong Evidence that Donors Use Development Assistance to (Try to) Influence Elections

Researchers have scrutinized foreign aid’s effects on poverty and growth, but anecdotal evidence suggests that donors often use aid for other ends. We test whether donors use bilateral aid to influence elections in developing countries. We find that recipient country administrations closely aligned with a donor receive more aid during election years, while those less aligned receive less. Consistent with our interpretation, this effect holds only in competitive elections, is absent in U.S. aid flows to non-government entities, and is driven by bilateral alignment rather than incumbent characteristics.

That’s the abstract from an important new paper by UC-San Diego economists Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus, forthcoming in American Economic Review. Technically, official development aid (ODA) is supposed to be about promoting economic development and improving popular welfare. Nevertheless, Faye and Niehaus show a strong link between election cycles and aid flows that fits what we would expect if aid were also being used for political ends. In cases where elections are competitive, donors crank up the aid to friendly governments facing tough elections while reducing aid to hostile ones. In cases where elections aren’t competitive, aid flows don’t vary much around elections (why bother, right?). Meanwhile, assistance to non-governmental organizations and opposition groups from the U.S.’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) follows the same cycles, but the pattern is reversed (albeit not statistically significant): assistance to opposition groups goes down around election time in countries with friendlier governments, and it goes up around election time in countries with more hostile governments.

All in all, it’s a pretty compelling set of results that should put another big dent in the “development aid isn’t political” narrative.

Thanks to NYU’s Cyrus Samii for pointing this paper out on Twitter.

6 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on January 24, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Democracy Promotion, International Relations, Statistics
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 24, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/strong-evidence-that-donors-use-development-assistance-to-try-to-influence-elections/

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Burma

Over the past year or so, Burma’s authoritarian government has implemented significant, albeit limited, political reforms. This partial liberalization has won guarded praise from Aung San Suu Kyi, the nation’s leading dissident who is now set to run for parliament in by-elections this spring, as well as Western governments who support her cause. At the same time, the country’s military has intensified its vicious fight against the autonomy-seeking Kachin people of northern Burma. In its efforts to snuff out that uprising, the Burmese military has “committed serious abuses” against civilians, including killing them, using them as forced labor, and pillaging their homes. And the Kachin conflict is just one of several long-running ethnic insurgencies in Burma, none of which is yet resolved.

These seemingly schizophrenic responses to popular demands for reform–releasing prisoners one minute, literally smashing villages the next–has a lot of people wondering: Which of these approaches shows us the real Burmese government? Is the country being run by budding democrats who haven’t quite figured out how break their atrocious habits in the north, or is it being run by tyrannical genocidaires who are using piecemeal reforms as a tactic to trick the rest of the world into ending painful sanctions? In a post on his always-thoughtful Securing Rights blog, Georgetown University student Daniel Solomon put it this way:

The release of Burma’s political prisoners is a symbolically significant effort, essential to effective political reconciliation between Burma’s civilian government and the pro-democracy opposition. However, the real challenge to Burma’s democratization will stem from the regime’s effort to negotiate a political settlement with Burma’s ethnic minority groups. The Karen conflict is a microcosm of a wider issue–Burma’s central government, interested in consolidating political authority and access to the border regions’ natural resource wealth, prefers a Naypyidaw-based, centralized government, while minority opposition groups prefer a federalized system.

From that passage, I inferred that Dan sees the ethnic wars in northern Burma as more fundamental to the country’s future than its constitutional changes, and therefore the government’s counterinsurgency efforts as somehow more revealing of its true nature. That order of priority was echoed in a recent tweet from former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who linked to the New York Times story on the Kachin war with this commentary: “New military action against the Kachin reminds how far Burma has to go to achieve genuine reform. Not there yet.” Meanwhile, Burmese journalist Zin Linn noted for the Asian Correspondent that President Thein Sein had twice instructed the military commander-in-chief to stop the Kachin offensive, but those instructions have apparently been ignored. From that fact, he concluded that the president’s commands are a “deceitful tactic,” “worthless statements intended to satisfy the international community” so it will lift long-standing sanctions.

I wonder, though, if attempts to view these two streams of behavior through a single lens obscure more than they clarify. Burma’s reform process will inevitably be multidimensional, because governance is multidimensional. Democratization lies on one dimension, centralization lies on another, and ethno-nationalism arguably on yet another. Democratization is about the expansion of a government’s accountability to its citizens. Democratic states vary widely in the extent to which they centralize power, from the genuine federalism of the United States to the highly centralized administration of the French Republic, and one end of that spectrum is not obviously more liberal or democratic than the other. Existing democracies also vary widely in the extent to which they recognize ethnic “communities” as rights-bearing groups and provide legal opportunities to advance demands for national self-determination. These three dimensions are interrelated in their concern for popular sovereignty, but they do not and need not move in lock step.

If that’s right, then I’m not sure it’s helpful to presume that decentralization represents the only just and liberal outcome to Burma’s ethnic wars. Without question, it is deeply illiberal to respond to demands for autonomy or even independence with mass atrocities, where punishment is collective, disproportionate, and indiscriminate. It is not inherently illiberal, however, to reject demands for decentralization or autonomy, and it is arguably more liberal in the classical sense of that word to reject attempts to link citizenship to ethnicity than it is to accept them.

I also agree that it’s reasonable to look to the government’s treatment of the communities entangled in these insurgencies for clues to that government’s direction and intentions. That said, I don’t think it is sensible or even particularly helpful to presume that both streams of behavior flow from a single “character,” or even a common strategy.

What if these seemingly contradictory tracks are the twin results a house divided? It’s quite possible that actions on these different fronts are being led by different factions within the Burmese government. Maybe civilian leaders intent on liberalization are driving reforms at the center while military leaders committed to maintaining the country’s territorial integrity retain control over counterinsurgency. Maybe civilian and military elites have both split into “soft-liner” and “hard-liner” camps, and the two are wrestling for control while we scratch our heads over their seemingly incoherent behavior. I don’t know which of these is true, and I get the sense that very few people do. Based on my knowledge of other reformist episodes in recent history, however, either of these scenarios seems more plausible to me than a narrative in which a ruthless and unified cadre outfoxes the world.

This question isn’t academic. On the one hand, foreign governments and international activists have every right and reason to demand that Burmese forces immediately stop committing atrocities. On the other hand, if the Burmese government is internally divided, then conditioning rewards for political reform on specific responses to the country’s ethnic insurgencies could push liberalizers into a confrontation with their internal rivals before they’re strong enough to win that fight. If soft-liners are competing with hard-liners for the upper hand in this process, they will gain powerful allies over the next several months as political parties and civic groups mobilize in response to reforms at the center and even, hopefully, win seats in parliament. I don’t see any simple answers to this moral dilemma, but I do believe we’ll grope our way toward more effective responses by avoiding policies that tightly link conditions on the two dimensions and the assumptions of organizational and strategic coherence on which those policies would be based.

2 Comments
by dartthrowingchimp on January 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratization, State-building, Transitions to Democracy, Violent Conflict
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Posted by dartthrowingchimp on January 23, 2012

http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-in-burma/

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