Measuring how countries perform is all the rage. Everyone from the World Bank to Bertelsmann to Africa’s most famous entrepreneur does it, producing indices on things like how competitive economies are, how hungry populations are, how free the press is, how risky investments are, and how corrupt public sectors are.

Many of these indices are directly relevant for people working in development. They help countries determine how they compare with other states and where they ought to improve their performance. And they help aid agencies decide where and how to invest their resources.

Indicators tracking everything from GDP per capita to poverty to governance are ubiquitous across the field, especially among international professionals. Such numbers are used to determine need, priorities, and strategies (such as whether a government ought to be funded directly).

But do the indicators that have the greatest influence measure the right things? Are they focused on the issues that are most important to development? Can they predict how governments work or how countries will evolve in the future?

Too often, developing countries are assessed on a very narrow set of indicators, leading to an overemphasis on certain programs and “results” that have little to do with their prospects. Reducing poverty and hunger are worthwhile goals but may not reflect how well a country is doing (aid can reduce both without helping a state function better). “Good governance” may indicate good prospects, but bad governance certainly does not point to the reverse, as a long string of countries can attest to (including China, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam). GDP per capita is widely used to assess how well countries are doing (not least by the World Bank and many leading poverty analysts), but may actually be saying very little about the subject (such as when only elites benefit from natural resource wealth, as in Nigeria, Libya, and Angola).

Indicators on state fragility can easily miss the mark. The Failed States Index, for instance, completely failed to pick up the fault lines that threaten many Middle Eastern countries before the Arab Spring brought them into the open. The 2011 FSI ranked Syria as the 48th most fragile state in the world, but its complex ethnic and religious landscape has always made it far more fragile than it appeared. In 2012, Syria plummeted down to 23rd in the FSI. Next year, it will inevitably be much worse. Bahrain and Libya did not even make the ranking before 2011.

Many of the most important development issues are not included in major indices because they are not easily measured or are simply not considered as important as they ought to be.

In Fixing Fragile States, I wrote:

Development describes a complex process that transforms both the way people think and behave and the system of how they work together. Although economics drives development, politics plays a far greater role in the key take-off stages, with social, business, and government modernization inextricably linked as the process advances.

Do we ever measure how well a people work together? How institutionalized politics is (something quite different than democracy and “good governance”)? How cohesive a population is?

Assessing a country’s political dynamics may not be easy—especially if the goal is to measure it numerically—but is arguably more important than the majority of the indicators we currently use. The right kind of assessment ought to better gauge how resilient a country is, how prone to conflict it is, how stable its current political system is, how likely its elites are to work together to promote progress. All these things help us understand a country’s overall prospects in a way that few existing indicators can.

Measuring politics and political development requires creating a set of indices that reflect—or at least depend upon—the nature of sociopolitical dynamics, the degree of social / political / economic inclusiveness, the institutionalization of the state, the robustness of the rule of law, the level of social capital, the capacity of societies to create wealth (separate from natural resources), and the ability of government to get things done (which may not reflect existing governance scores).

What would these indicators look like? The new assessment criteria would seek to answer questions such as:

1) How great are group-based (ethnic, religious, caste, clan, etc.) economic, political, and cultural horizontal inequities?

2) How equitable is public spending?

3) How equitable are markets?

4) How equitable is the rule of law? Do elites or particular groups have systemic advantages over others?

5) How effective is public authority and the rule of law (taking into account a variety of mechanisms to achieve these)?

6) How inclusive is the concept of citizenship?

7) How equitable is the system of property rights?

8 ) How inclusive and poverty reducing is growth?

9) How diversified is the economy and exports (which depends on the robustness of institutions)?

10) Is political succession institutionalized and predictable?

11) How much does politics revolve around political parties and policies (rather than ethnicity and patronage)?

12) How much do political leaders depend on group identities to gain, hold onto, or compete for power?

13) How well do formal institutions (such as laws) reflect informal institutions? How widely accepted are these? How well do they penetrate society (as opposed to existing above it)?

14) How much investment is going into large factories (which are more risky than other investments)?

15) What is the level of political risk to invest in labor-intensive businesses (which require more effort and are more beneficial to a population)?

16) Is the economy producing an adequate number of jobs for young people?

17) How well can the government implement the policies it puts into place (if a road is supposed to be built, does it? How good is it?)?

18) How well can the government project authority across distance (is it as effective in outlying districts as it is in the capital)?

19) Are the government’s capacity and the country’s economic prospects keeping up with increases in education, urbanization, and the expectations of the population?

20) Are levels of dissatisfaction/frustration rising among powerful out of power actors (elites, identity group leaders, youth leaders, religious leaders, etc.)?

Some of these questions could be turned into indicators very easily (the data is available). Others could be turned into indicators by substituting another data source (for instance, tracking how well a government delivers public services at various distances from the capital will give a decent account of how well it projects authority). Many may be hard to assess, and require a more a concerted effort involving more spending on research and analysis.

If politics and political development mattered as much as they should, more effort would be made to create and use such indicators. Without these, we are flying blind, trying to understand the terrain using the wrong instruments.

Great post from Nils Gilman on Small Precautions:

In 2006 RAND staged a wargame to think through the implications of a nuclear terorr incident. They created a specific scenario – a tactical nuclear device being detonated by a terrorist organization in the Long Beach harbor – and then staged a role-play to determine how key stakeholders would react and work together. The experience must have been incredible, because even the write-up is riveting. When I revisited this text today, however, what struck me with particular force was RAND’s assessment (this is in 2006, remember) of what the longer-term economic implications of such an event would be:

“The attack is likely to have dramatic economic consequences well beyond the Los Angeles area:  

• Many loans and mortgages in Southern California might default. 
• Some of the nation’s largest insurance companies might go bankrupt. 
• Investors in some of the largest financial markets might be unable to meet contract obligations for futures and derivatives. 

“While exact outcomes are difficult to predict, these hypothetical consequences suggest alarming vulnerabilities. Restoring normalcy to economic relations would be daunting, as would meeting the sweeping demands to compensate all of the losses.”

As some of you will no doubt observe, all of these consequences in fact did come to pass just two years after this report was issued - as a result of the Lehman Brothers default, the consequent collapse of AIG, and the cascade effects which are still creating malign reverberations throughout the global economy, above all in the Eurozone.

Usually when people say that something would be “like a nuclear bomb going off” they are exaggerating; but in the case of the Lehman default, it is accurate.

Two car bombs exploded in Karbala, a centre of Shia worship south of Baghdad, killing 13 people and injuring 50 in a shopping area … A similar double bombing took place in Kirkuk, a city in the north of the country at the centre of several sectarian and ethnic divides, also killing 13 people …

The double car bomb is a standard tactic of al-Qaeda and linked to Sunni militant groups in Iraq, with an initial explosion attracting the attention of police and other emergency services and a second bomb exploding when they arrive.

- From the Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2012

There is now significant evidence that the US has repeatedly engaged in a practice sometimes referred to as “double tap,” in which a targeted strike site is hit multiple times in relatively quick succession. Evidence also indicates that such secondary strikes have killed and maimed first responders coming to the rescue of those injured in the first strike …

Those interviewed for this report were acutely aware of reports of the practice of followup strikes, and explained that the secondary strikes have discouraged average civilians from coming to one another’s rescue, and even inhibited the provision of emergency medical assistance from humanitarian workers.

The lone survivor of the Obama administration’s first strike in North Waziristan, Faheem Qureshi, stated that  “[u]sually, when a drone strikes and people die, nobody comes near the bodies for half an hour because they fear another missile will strike.” …

One interviewee told us that a strike at the home of his in-laws hit first responders: “Other people came to check what had happened; they were looking for the children in the beds and then a second drone strike hit those people.”

- From Living Under Drones, a report from New York University Law School, 2012

“Whoever fights monsters”, warned philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

Over and over we have failed to recognise this truth. In its resistance to Hitler, the United States became a militarised society. In its opposition to communism, the US was as willing to incinerate the world as its opponents. To keep communism from spreading in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, the US felt it had to move in with its troops, or manipulate elections, or unseat legitimately elected regimes, or assassinate leftist leaders. To fend off revolution in client states, the US beefed up and trained local police and soldiers, only to watch the military itself becomes the gravest threat to democracy in one country after another. To counter Soviet espionage, the US created a spy network; to make sure that no one cooperated with the enemy, it spied on its own citizens.

“You always become the thing you fight the most,” wrote Carl Jung, and the United States has done everything in its power to prove him right.

- From The Powers That Be by Walter Wink (credited by Neal Stephenson with developing an “epidemiology of power disorders”)

Economists dominate the development field, but politics is more important to promoting it. This contradiction explains why the policies often recommended by international institutions (such as the World Bank) do not sufficiently take into account the local political, social, and institutional context.

The problem is echoed in other fields, with some blaming the inability of economists to understand institutions and politics as a contributing factor to the 2008 financial crisis. (more…)

Donald Rumsfeld a few moments ago…

The attacks on our embassies & diplomats are a result of perceived American weakness. Mitt Romney is right to point that out.

— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) September 12, 2012

From 2001-2006 when Rumsfeld did his second, disastrous, stint as Secretary of Defense, Wikipedia lists attacks on US diplomatic facilities in Calcutta, Karachi (twice), Denpasar, Islamabad, Tashkent, Jeddah, and Damascus.

A timeline from CBC adds Lima and Monrovia. The embassies in Afghanistan and Iraq were, of course, under more or less permanent attack.

And then, of course, there’s 9/11.

Makes you nostalgic for the days when Rumsfeld did so much to convince the world America was strong, doesn’t it?

News is emerging that an oil tanker has been hijacked off the Nigerian coast. This appears to be part of a growing trend, and one that was predicted in these pages four years ago (even a blind pig sometimes finds a truffle). Back in December 2008 I wrote of the attractions of West Africa as a venue for piracy, suggesting that its coast ‘has many of the elements that make Somalia a good spot for a bit of buccaneering – rank poverty, lots of underemployed young men, unstable governments, endemic corruption and favourable geography.’ If ships start going the long way round the Horn of Africa to avoid the East African coast, I added, ‘they might be in for a nasty surprise when they reach the opposite side of the continent.’

A few months later I posted this map published by the International Maritime Bureau, showing the global distribution of pirate attacks in the first part of 2009:

You need only compare this with the IMB’s latest 2012 map to see how rapidly the industry has expanded in West Africa:

There has been much hilarity this week over comments by Tom Head, a Texan judge who predicts that President Obama is going to authorize a United Nations invasion of Texas in his second term.

Head vowed to personally stand “in front of [the UN's]  personnel carriers and say, ‘You’re not coming in here.’ And I’ve asked the sheriff. I said, ‘Are you going to back me on this?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to back you.’ Well, I don’t want a bunch of rookies back there who have no training and little equipment. I want seasoned veteran people who are trained that have got equipment. And even then, you know we may have two or three hundred deputies facing maybe a thousand UN troops. We may have to call out the militia.”

The UN says that this is “ridiculous”.  But I think there is a bigger question here: if the UN invaded Texas, could it win? To answer that, I turned to past editions of the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations to compare statistics on current UN missions with data on the forces that might rally to the defense of Texas.

Here are some working assumptions.  Texas is pretty big (nearly 270,000 square miles) so if the UN wanted to send in a force, it would probably be comparable to its current large-scale mission in Darfur, which involves over 20,000 soldiers and police officers.

So, going on data from Darfur from late 2012, I think that Judge Head and his fellow Texans are likely to face an invasion force consisting of about 17 infantry battalions with just over 600 combat vehicles and 5,000 support vehicles.  Note that “combat vehicles” typically means armored cars, not actual battle tanks.

Looking at Darfur and a couple of other recent UN ops, I estimate that the force would have an air component of just over 30-40 helicopters and 10-20 fixed-wing aircraft.  But again, note that fewer than 10 of the helicopters would be attack rather than transport aircraft, and the force would have no fighters, bombers or ground-attack aircraft.

Let’s compare that to what’s available in Texas.  The backbone of the defense would be the Texas Army National Guard and Texas Air National Guard – presumably supported by the volunteers of the Texas State Guard plus police, etc., across the state.  There are lots of regular US military forces in Texas too, but let’s assume that President Obama could compel them not to resist the UN.

So what have the Texans got?  Here is data culled from from various bits of Wikipedia:

• “The Texas Army National Guard is composed of approximately 19,000 soldiers, and maintains 117 armories in 102 communities.”
• The Army National Guard also fields a battalion of attack/recon helicopters – this can add up to 24 Apaches – and a separate support battalion.
• The Texas Air National Guard includes one airlift wing plus a fighter wing flying F-16s.

So, in terms of numbers the UN and Texan National Guard would be fairly evenly matched, although this would be off-set by the large number of law enforcement officials and well-armed citizens who would fight for the Lone Star state.

But this numerical issue is quite irrelevant.  What matters is that the Texans would have immediate air superiority.  The F-16s could deal with the UN’s puny attack helicopter component on day one of the campaign.  The National Guard Apaches could then go after the UN ground forces at their leisure.

The UN invasion would almost certainly be hampered by the UN’s generally weak command and control systems – designed for day-to-day peacekeeping rather than war-fighting – patchy communications technology and very limited night-fighting capabilities.  If the Apaches and Texan ground forces could mount a counter-offensive under the cover of darkness, the UN would soon be in disarray.

My guess is that a UN invasion of Texas would collapse in 24-48 hours.  This doesn’t really tell us much about President Obama’s plans for the UN or Texas.  But it is worth asking why the Security Council thinks that forces with very limited military capabilities – and especially negligible air assets – can take on cases like Darfur.

The Security Council decided today to close down the UN observer mission in Syria, which I once predicted would be a “heroic failure”.  But this isn’t quite the end of the UN political presence on the ground, as the BBC reports:

Although the 101 remaining military observers will leave Damascus over the next eight days, a civilian liaison office is due to remain and a new special envoy is expected to be appointed.

What can such a political mission achieve?  Here’s a few historical analogies from a paper I wrote for USIP last year:

What happens if preventive diplomacy fails and decision makers choose to cross the Rubicon and unleash full-scale war? Counterintuitively, political missions may still have a role to play in this scenario, urging the parties to at least limit the level of violence and maintain some channels of communication during the fighting. As noted earlier in this report, UN missions currently play a role in trying to mitigate a number of ongoing conflicts, including those in Somalia and Afghanistan. The United Nations also has a long-standing presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which has continued to operate during crises such as Israel’s 2008–09 incursion into Gaza (“Operation Cast Lead”). During that crisis, the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO) engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomacy with all sides—once Israel pulled back, UNSCO turned to facilitating the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. It is a conduit for communications with Hamas that other actors cannot undertake directly.

Political missions can thus play a useful functional role during active conflicts, although they are typically constrained by both security issues and a lack of political leverage.  . . .  A mission deployed during the early phase of a war can identify ways to mitigate the damage, but this ultimately depends on the combatants’ cooperation.

Syria’s combatants are unlikely to prove very cooperative.

There’s mounting confusion at the UN about who will replace Kofi Annan as the envoy to Syria.  Everyone knows that it’s meant to be veteran UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi.  But it’s widely rumored that Brahimi is holding up the announcement because he wants a clear vote of support from the Security Council, which is not so easy these days.

That’s all a bit sensitive.  Ban Ki-moon gave a press conference in Timor-Leste today, and some impertinent journalist brought the issue up (as well as raising concerns about Timor’s future).  Check out the subtle way that the UN transcript deals with the complex Brahimi issue:

Q: Are you confident the country will remain peaceful once the peacekeeepers [sic] leave? And the second question: Mr. [inaudible] …. is a strong candidate to replace Kofi Annan, are you going to announce officially here in East Timor?

SG: I didn’t clearly understand your first question, but for the second question: I am not in a position to inform on anything about the successor issue of Kofi Annan as Joint Special Envoy for Syria. I am in the process of actively searching for a successor and when I am ready I will certainly announce this as soon as possible.

Now we don’t know if the questioner said “Brahimi”.  But it’s not a bad guess, and it wouldn’t be too hard to check.  But maybe there’s another mediator in the frame: Mr. Inaudible, a master of quiet diplomacy?

Global concern is currently mounting all over again about the impacts of a more resource-scarce world, with particular attention focused at present on the risks of a renewed global food price spike following a spate of extreme weather in the US and around the world. Two weeks ago, corn and soyabean prices broke the record they had set during the 2008 food spike, while wheat prices have increased by 50% over the last five weeks.

These global trends have the potential to cause massive problems for a country like Ethiopia - where wheat is by far the country’s biggest import by value. And that’s before you take into account low agricultural yields and farm sizes, major exposure to drought, limited access to energy, and how these challenges will be magnified by high rates of population and economic growth, which will increase demand for resources – as well as intensifying climate change impacts

Against this backdrop, the NYU Center on International Cooperation has just published a new report of mine entitled Resources, Risks and Resilience: Scarcity and climate change in Ethiopia.  This is the first in a series of CIC case studies on the risks that resource scarcity and climate change pose to poor countries – and on how those countries and their international partners can build resilience to them. (A second case study, on resource scarcity in Pakistan, is currently being prepared by David Steven; plans are also in train to undertake a third study on Nigeria.)

While the report sets out a daunting set of scarcity-driven challenges for Ethiopia, it also notes that Ethiopia’s government is well aware of the challenges it faces, and has put in place a battery of policies to address them – including, notably, the breathtaking aim of becoming a middle income country by 2025 with zero net growth in greenhouse gas emissions, as well as an extremely ambitious (and controversial) program of dam-building and large scale agricultural projects.

As well as assessing these policies, the report also identifies a range of vulnerabilities, policy gaps and exogenous risks that will need to be taken account of in future planning by the government and its international partners. It concludes by setting out a ten point agenda on how Ethiopia’s government and partners can improve their performance in managing scarcity issues. (more…)

The term “fragile states” is much abused.

Policymakers, development researchers, politicians, and the media seem to think that every country experiencing a period of instability or bothered by certain governance problems is “fragile.” As a result, they group a wide range of countries experiencing vastly different types of problems together—creating a mass of confusion in the process.

Such thinking means that the term as currently used has very little value as an analytical tool. Instead it has become a catchall phrase to explain any situation that seems “fragile” even if the fragility is likely to be ephemeral. It also means that states that are structurally fragile but that have none of the most obvious symptoms of fragility (such as Syria before 2011) do not get considered as one. (more…)

The EU rule of law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) is adopting an unusual PR strategy:

“EULEX is doing nothing in the fight against high level corruption” is the slogan of a new campaign that has just been launched on TV stations in Kosovo. The campaign spot is being broadcast on all major TV stations, more than 35,000 flyers with the same message are being distributed around Kosovo and T-shirts and car air fresheners in support of Kosovo’s Anti-Corruption Agency are also being distributed.

The EU isn’t really doing nothing: EULEX’s campaign explains that it is tackling corruption.  But it’s just conceivable that this cunning wheeze could backfire.

A report by David Steven, Andrew Hart and Bruce Jones which addresses the Arctic’s growing strategic relevance and conflict dynamic; offers background on, and assessment of, the existing institutions, and examines ongoing risks. Ultimately, the report concludes that the prospects for cooperation outstrip the potential for conflict, and that the Arctic offers lessons for tackling evolving challenges in other regions.

Download Report

Photo: BBC

Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who was last week sentenced to fifty years imprisonment for crimes committed in Sierra Leone’s civil war, was a man with many enemies. As a warlord, he would have expected nothing less – only the most insane of his ilk expect to be universally popular, and whatever else he may be accused of, Taylor’s sanity has never been called into question.

He dispatched his first important foe, his predecessor as Liberian leader Samuel Doe, within a year of beginning the rebellion that would lead him to the presidency. As his army rampaged towards the capital, they gained notoriety for the brutality of their methods – cutting off limbs, enslaving women and boys, torturing children and eating the flesh of their enemies were all on the menu, all endorsed by Taylor. With Doe out of the way, his swansong a home-video recording featuring Taylor’s men slicing off his ears as he begged for mercy, the young warlord then turned on enemies within his own group, precipitating a further six years of civil war. His efforts led to the deaths of over 200,000 people and the physical and psychological maiming of many more, but he has been tried for none of his actions in his homeland.

Taylor did not delay long in internationalising his list of enemies. Sierra Leone’s government had played host to a West African intervention force that was set up to end the bloodshed in next door Liberia. Taylor retaliated, pledging that the people of Sierra Leone would “taste the bitterness of war”. As his trial found, he lived up to his promise by providing financial and operational support to Sierra Leone’s rebel army as it murdered, raped and pillaged its way around the country, as well as planning the horrific 1999 assault on Freetown that was the war’s nadir. Among the atrocities committed in the latter attack were the mass rape of students at the college of nursing, the torture of patients in their hospital beds, the use as human shields of those the rebels had enslaved in the hinterland, and the throwing of live children into burning houses. Taylor’s conviction was celebrated on the streets of Freetown – the words of Musa, an informal medicine seller, who told me in 2010 that ‘Charles Taylor was a wicked man,’ encapsulating the views of many of his compatriots.

But it has not all been isolation and ostracism for Taylor. Throughout his life, he has been able to count on a significant network of friends. Not all of these are the type of friends you would expect to find in the circles of a warlord. (more…)