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I’m all about wars. I mean, not the waging and cheering for same but the study of why they happen according to the participants and, more to my interest, why they happen where and when they do even when everybody in the room is competing for face time to declare how much they want peace.
For some reason, stated and demonstrated intentions don’t always line up. I’ve had more instances of this in my life than I can stomach remembering. Lately, because apparently I just can’t get enough of such things in my actual life, I’ve taken to watching old seasons of a show that never before interested me: Survivor. Yes, that one.
This past summer, I stumbled across something called the Fragile States Index. Now, these guys at the Fund For Peace have it going on: They bridge the gap between macroeconomic and demographic data (my old hunting grounds for research) and incorporate indices for measuring impairments to social development including structural poverty and inequality, police terror and human rights abuses, external military intervention and more.
Naturally, I couldn’t resist figuring out a way to correlate data I’d been collecting for the 1930-now period and finding ways to their admittedly more orthodox indices of States Behaving Badly. (Or well; some countries rock the governance.)
This little exercise took the better part of a month. I find this is par for big data projects. (My last winter Holocene Mass Extinction project took about seven weeks but it WAS a rather BIG topic. Updating my solar system random generator with recent exoplanet findings wasn’t quite that long…but I digress.)
Anyhoo, did I mention I was watching Survivor lately? My good fortune was starting with Survivor: Tocantins (that’s in Brazil) because for reasons of my current book project I will drop everything to watch movies or serials set in either Brazil or Africa. Tocantins, if anyone is curious, is the youngest state in the Federative Republic (that’s what Brazil is officially called), the northernmost, least populated part of the state of Goias that in the late 1980s decided, you know, thanks but see ya. It’s a big rafting/ecotourism spot though cattle, pineapples and (wait for it) selling electricity to more developed states like Minas Gerais is all the rage lately. Here’s how unpopulated Tocantins is: It’s basically the size of Nevada with less than half the population. (Nevada without Vegas.)
Now me, I take some satisfaction that the provision of one really basic thing – sufficient fresh water supply –can sort out a lot a lot of sociological and security dilemmas very efficiently.
The thing is (see: Survivor) people metaphysically suck and thanks to the good people at the Fund for Peace with their Fragile States Index, this principle of suckiness can be extended to the macro level.
For, it seems that in the real world as well as in contrived games that accidentally produce useful microcosmic observations on the human condition, human beings really like to sort one another into groups that deserve respect, regard and reward…and those that just need a quick kick off the island.
No actual real-life society would last much longer than the typical 39-day cannibalization-fest that is the Survivor backstabbing, er, social intelligence tournament. The bad news is that human beings are capable of KNOWING this truth to be self-evident, that they are endowed with lots of common sense and reason and an ability to a la Agent Coulson’s scolding of the ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D’ team in the second episode that surely three people, one of whom can speak six languages, another has two PhDs in unpronounceable degrees and the third actually is a rocket scientist, can work stuff out.
And yet, no, not consistently. It’s kind of like perennial Survivor contestant “Coach”, who has this Quixotic quest to change the game for the better/arguably narcissistic compulsion to remake the Survivor brand in his own image even if it hurts him…and it has repeatedly. (I’ll leave the obvious comparison to calls for noble minded change being treated as flighty, ridiculous, threatening and even offensive for others.)
My point in bringing up this one character is his quite sensible declaration at the onset of the Survivor: South Pacific season that early (first day) alliances are the strongest IF they stay on the same page. If they stay trustworthy. If the selected members are trustworthy. If they don’t turn out to be crazy people…something that for some reason that South Pacific season had to an extent I truly hadn’t seen in the other seasons I perused.
To that extent, Survivor provides a useful insight and the tie to the mashup topic du jour: People are fragile. Even the seemingly strong are fragile, especially of will. Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” is a lengthy study of the incongruity of human reason and human instinct. We simply do not have the physiological foundation – specifically the psychiatric one – to sustain a utopic life or even an honest one .
Peter Ospensky, cribbing rather heavily on George Gurdjieff, had some interesting views on that, perhaps TOO interesting, that people not just live in a state of self-deception but defend it aggressively. This is what I mean by the incompetence of the human being to live an honest life: We are wired to respond to a host of conflicting impulses. We aren’t complex creatures because we are brilliant: We are complex because we are so unpredictable we cannot even predict ourselves.
(I had no idea I would find myself writing about ‘the Fourth Way’ just then when I started this draft diary. Who knew! I didn’t!)
It just goes to show how cerebral shows like Survivor are. (Pause.) Does that mean Professional Damn Right It’s Real Wrasslin’ is intellectual fare as well? (Another pause.) No, definitely not. But maybe I will change my mind tomorrow.
Soooo….back to Survivor. Even when it’s clear that an alliance of five can run the tables on the field, a principle that was proven and yea mightily in the “Survivor: One World” series, people usually eff it up. It’s like not even the immediate, massively rewarding outcome, complete with lulz, is enough to merit replication.
Worse, it’s self-evident what the standard of conduct should be but people just can’t get past how much impulse controls them. In the Survivor microcosm, it’s the inexplicable need of some with momentary power (Colton from ‘One World’ comes to mind right away) to afflict those he deems undeserving of regard and incapable of punishing in return. That’s not being strategic that’s being an ass.
Out in the real world, persons with moments of power and a will to afflict can do vastly worst harm. They’ve no reason to do so but it’s part of the motivation to sort the deserving from the undeserving, the emotional mindset that makes it okay to deprive an often fabricated-on-impulse set of persons of their property, their homes, their dignity and sometimes even their lives.
And wherever this impulse takes on a life of its own…or has never known an alternative…not just people are fragile but their societies are as well.
For me, the chief litmus test of a society to fragility is its vulnerability to violence, both self-inflicted as received either as a consequences of its aggression or the weakness caused by violent afflictions. This topic is of great interest to the Fund for Peace, too.
Using their indices for the 2000s-mid 2010s, I scaled my larger 1930-2010 dataset to create proxy values for the components that FFP uses to generate itself fragile states index.
OK, definition time. What does a fragile state look like, per the original report? Think: South Sudan, Somalia, Central African Republic, the D.R. Congo (I have to call it Zaire privately to keep it sorted) and Sudan. Chad, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and (oh yeah) Syria aren’t too hot to trot, either.
And un-fragile? Same scale? FINLAND. Woo. (But the rest of Scandinavia, Switzerland, Australia and Canada and some others are nice too.)
Countries are scored by FFP on the following criteria ( a high score is worse, a low score better, as these are risk metrics). The remarks are mine based on the last year’s (2013) list:
1. Demographic Pressures – roughly, a proxy for rate of population growth
2. Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons – may reflect results of legacy wars not current ones
3. Group Grievances – religious, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and partisan clashes
4. Human Flight – level of migration, or desire to depart. (Predominance of island countries at top of list, starting with Haiti.)
5. Uneven Development – A very good proxy for corruption as well as wealth disparity. While many states far worse, USA tied with Albania, the UAE and Qatar on this list.
6. Poverty and Economic Decline – Haiti, North Korea and Afghanistan only Worst 20 countries outside of Africa on 2013 list
7. Legitimacy of the State – Use of state terror on subjects widespread and probably not commented upon publicly, never mind critically, by subjects. Worst offender is North Korea.
8. Public Services – Extent to which state plays a positive role in lives of people. Chad, South Sudan and Somalia tied for worst. Luxembourg, Switzerland and the Nordic states rock the good end.
9. Human Rights – Pretty much the usual suspects.
10. Security Apparatus - Extent to which state is a compliance/extractive/self-preservative entity through use of coercion and violence. D.R. Congo and liberated (cough) Iraq tied for worst in ‘13
11. Factionalized Elites – Most wars in history weren’t started by groups of poor folks who were strangers to each other, rather quarrels among elites who knew each other all too well. The phenomenon of unified elite consensus is a phenomenon nearly exclusive to modern nation-states. Where that consensus breaks down, bad BAD things can happen.
12. External Intervention – Really bad situations hurt international interests…and pique new ones, too. Do they help or hurt? Who is helped/hurt?
Because we did commit to a Survivor Mashup, we’ll redo the list based on the seasons I know about:
1. Demographic Pressures – There can be only one (cue the Queen “Princes of the Universe”)
2. Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons – Entire goal of show is to create displaced persons
3. Group Grievances – Alliance clashes and resets and personal grief a go-go
4. Human Flight – Chief pastime is going off looking for immunity idols
5. Uneven Development – Collusion, not only to put down the weak while they are down but short-circuit the most promising, is rampant
6. Poverty and Economic Decline – Seriously, the Gabon series was a bit too close to famine conditions for my comfort but made the point. Snarkily, the later seasons’ rehash use of brand name personalities (Rob, Russell, Coach, Ozzie) invites the comparisons to pro wrasslin’ and that is ‘decline’.
7. Legitimacy of the State – ‘regimes’ alter quickly on Survivor. To extent there is a meta regime (Jeff) the contestants generally take it very, very seriously. For example, I’m amazed no one’s ever thrown a punch despite the consequence of immediate removal.
8. Public Services – in-game: yeah, right. Show-wise: The peeps are never far from the best of medical care or really isolated
9. Human Rights – frequent psychological bullying in ‘it’s just playing the game’ drag
10. Security Apparatus - Repeat contestant Rob policed his alliance like a commissar boss and loved every minute of it. Kept tabs on members, had them buddied up to keep tabs on each other
11. Factionalized Elites – Nemeses a go-go; first the large set of imaginary enmities, then the big showdowns. But in real world as in Survivor, imaginary differences (like eating Skittles while black) can lead to very hurtful outcomes
12. External Intervention – I’ve touched on medical intervention; if someone is every really in trouble the producers swoop in promptly. I didn’t care much for Colton but when he came down with appendicitis I was glad he had the option to be evacuated.
So, let’s mash this all up together one more time.
My big interest in all of the above is human conflict resolution. So is that of the Fund for Peace. Presumably, both the producers and contestants on Survivor want to resolve strife nonviolently and profitably (to themselves).
And that’s the catch…sorting out what people WANT, sticking to meritorious wants, pursuing them consistently and ethically and hopefully managing the surprises to at least an incrementally positive experience even if jackpot results aren’t in the cards.
And that’s really, really hard, because human beings have trouble managing their own variances between what they say they want to do and what they do instead, never mind their responses to other people’s similar variances. The differential reactions are often excuses for self, condemnations for others. Drama then ensues, which makes great television but for societies and interstate peace, not so much. Yeah, we know to be big people in such circumstances but...yeah.
So, how do these twelve variables play out in the interstate arena. If you accept the postulate that another world war would be really bad (so let’s not have one, OK?), what does the WORLD need to survive?
Empirically, I can start a chat on that.
The answer is: It’s complicated by something we’ve hinted at in the Survivor discussion above: The level of analysis matters.
What’s good for a given country might not be great for the world at large, at least as the interstate system is constituted and has generally been set up for the past going on 90 years.
What follows is based on a big, honkin’ pooled time series analysis but this is a Top Comments diary so we’ll keep to the summary format
1. Demographic Pressures – At the country level, high population growth strains resources because borrowing Malthus, supply increases arithmetically while demand grows geometrically. These sorts of pressure are more acute at the local/local country level. The thing is, SO FAR, at the global level population growth has been full of win. LOTS of money being made, resources extracted, considerable community of interest among government and those who have sway over what governments want and do. Regardless, overpopulation is quite bad. The good news is we may have reached Peak Babies and are already en route to the shift of the developing world’s age-distribution pyramid to the columnar distribution of developed states. That still means LOTS of people (9-10 billion) but we’re on the last growth wave now, and that’s in Africa.
2. Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons – the world system at large does not have a problem with refugees, unless they become asylum seekers and immigrants, at which point they become and explosive problem. At the state level, refugees don’t greatly raise the war risk – they’re the weakest peeps around, that’s why they’re being kicked around. The ugly but true story is bullies on the world stage same as in the real world, same as in Survivor, get to do their thing because it’s merely annoying to people with the people to intervene…and they don’t wish to be bothered until they must get involved, usually for reasons we will touch on momentarily.
3. Group Grievances – A huge war risk at the country/regional level. At the world level, Divide And Conquer is great. Who wants one world government, if it means uniform regulation and scrutiny? The entire point of leveraging differential regulatory regimes and business cultures is that things that are perfectly accepted and legal (like this bribe here…take that and put it away) in one country, such as the use of slave labor, would compel arrests elsewhere…and who wants that? Thus, the yammering that a strong UN would be tyrannical, and stuff, because it would interfere with profitable use of uncompensated labor, or blood diamonds or something.
4. Human Flight – Yeah, about dealing with bullies. More than a few repressive or poor regimes have been happy to kick out as many undesirables as possible. Exile has a vintage pedigree. Thing is, the countries that have to take in the refugees aren’t pleased about it. These represent the proxy bully incident that the principal finally has to deal with because some kid’s blood got on the mayor’s daughter’s dress when the fleeing kid ran into her in the cafeteria. Less satirically, displacing people and kicking them around doesn’t bother the big world powers. Generally, large cross-border population movements are considered a no-no and will be remedied.
5. Uneven Development – Exploitation nation! Keeping favors and good things for supporters (spoils system, much) rewards loyalty and …oh, who cares what happens to losers we don’t like anyway? This seems to be in play worldwide and serves to shore up support for any regime. The problem is such partiality makes enemies, the more generic the criterion employed to sort out ‘deserving’ (something that, oh, gender or race would be especially pathetic in this respect) the worse the international consequences, something that the old regime in South Africa learned, albeit not swiftly. The thing is, the world does run better on equity. And good ole boy networks by any other name, just don’t export well.
6. Poverty and Economic Decline – Run-down farms, neighborhoods and nation-states aren’t the safest places for picnics. The good news is that most countries are in a state of increase in longevity, aggregate wealth and development; this is creating local improvements worldwide. The downside is the politics that once prevailed – what Russia and America wanted/did not want, was relatively easy to sort out and the don’t-cross lines easy to spot. These days, things are complicated as we may be approaching a world without superpowers (and almost certainly a future without the United States as one, though that might be a bit longer than many expect.) We are very likely entering an era where the BRICs are just as powerful as Europe and America and the current OPEC bloc. Now add to that a future with a stabilized Nigeria, South Africa…heck, Ethiopia has a large population, good water supply and good eats. And they’ve been around for over 2,000 years nonstop so maybe they have it going on. The point is, it’s becoming a much more complex geopolitical world. Or, invoking Survivor: Imagine a game where you START with one contestant and keep adding them until you have two dozen. It would just get more and more complicated! That’s coming. That’s already happening. It’s already done.
7. Legitimacy of the State – People are expected to behave to a code. Ditto for governments. Regime legitimacy is a concept widely employed in diplomatic communiques precisely because it is one of the few universally accepted concepts in foreign affairs. A government that enjoys the good opinion of its subjects wins both at home and abroad – even more so abroad, which is why regimes even bother with the exercise of SEEMING to have due process, of SEEMING to respect human rights, even/especially even if they have no care of such things at all.
8. Public Services – This goes for being all about ‘development’. States like to brag on their big dig projects with all the others states in the playground before school. Public works and services tend to impress the citizenry more though. Sabotaging such works hurt the popularity of the regime, which is why enemies of any given government block or destroy such things.
9. Human Rights – Regrettably, even purer a case than refugees: Atrocities generate/associate closely with warfare….the world at large is appalled, uses a given local disaster as a cautionary example to justify tightening order elsewhere. The irony being horrors overseas justify a higher comfort level with ‘for your own good’ surveillance and other remedies than would otherwise be accepted. Oh, and disappearances of troublemakers, because freedom.
10. Security Apparatus - The prevalent concept of a nation-state is monopolization of legitimate use of force. The American conflictedness on this matter is virtually absent elsewhere in the developed world. Developing countries’ governments deal with a somewhat more pressing matter: Few possess the only armies inside their own borders. See: Boko Haram in Nigeria. Thus, to the extent they are strong (independent of the bad conduct that comes with them, which we’ve covered just now) their regimes are more stable. A concerning matter is that the international order places more pressure on local regimes to ‘get tough’ and ‘maintain order’ than they might otherwise do if there were no outside pressure. This leads to counterproductive excesses…a lesson that might be playing out in local governments within the United States too.
11. Factionalized Elites – Empirically, we proved the Framers of the Constitution correct. Divided elites might have been bad in a generally unfree world but in the generally democratizing world of today (well, the 1930-2010 period) slicing and dicing power bases is full of win, especially at the country and local level. This, too, per the Federalist Papers, is more difficult but we’ll work on that.
12. External Intervention – I have to be brief now, out of time: Locally pretty decent, system wise sending in an expeditionary force can raise regional or even global tensions. Granted much of this finding covers of the Cold War period but only about half of it. I think the message is sound: Send in the Marines if you MUST…never just because you CAN.
So there’s your mashup. Now you go and save the world!
TOP COMMENTS
December 13, 2014
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With my near-Pharaoh like powers as TC diarist du jour, I declare:
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December 12, 2014
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