I have moved my blog - please check it out at:
http://resourcecurse.wordpress.com/
http://resourcecurse.wordpress.com/
Monday, May 23, 2011
Monday, June 7, 2010
Connecting the Dots: Marijuana, the Cartels, and Economic Integration with Mexico
Co-Authored with Ami Carpenter, originally published as:“Marijuana Cartels and the Mafia” in the San Diego Union Tribune, 03 June 201
Speaking at the Kroc School of Peace Studies last September, Alan Bersin, President Barack Obama’s Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, commended Mexican President Felipe Calderón on his “courageous” 4-year war against organized crime in his country and drew a parallel to the United States’ own struggle against the Mafia in the mid-20th century. He contended that recognizing organized crime as a significant challenge to the rule of law and taking bold action against it was what ultimately brought the Mafia under control – and would prove equally useful with Mexico’s drug cartels.
The parallels between Mexico’s cartels and the U.S. Mafia during the early 20th century are indeed striking – but not for the reason Bersin mentioned. The Mafia coalesced during a period of massive immigration to the U.S. In the late 19th century, Italians took the place of the Irish at the bottom of the immigrant socioeconomic ladder. Then, from 1920 to 1933, the prohibition of alcohol gave the Mafia an unprecedented opportunity to grow, reaping monopoly profits thanks to supply-side suppression. Far from a challenge to rule of law, the Mafia depended upon it to keep competition low.
A similar dynamic now operates with Mexican drug cartels: strong U.S. demand and restricted supply due to rigorous law enforcement make for massive profits. High-risk, high-reward opportunities attract ruthless types and incentivize brutality. As the price of marijuana has climbed, so has cartel violence. Civilian deaths in Mexico – doctors, journalists, students, embassy workers, police officers, children – total 22,700 since January 2007, according to the Kroc School’s Trans-border Institute. Add to the human toll the economic hit from precipitous declines in Mexican tourism. Costs to the U.S. include higher spending on border security and the drug war, lost sales tax revenue and increased gang violence in cities serving as trafficking hubs across the U.S.
Successful regulatory countermeasures would work with, not against, the market. International examples abound, with other violent conflicts fueled by “lootable” resources: diamonds in Sierra Leone, coltan in Congo, tin in Uganda , opium in Afghanistan. The Kimberly Process, an international regulatory scheme to prevent “blood diamonds” from entering global markets, raised awareness of, and thus demand for, “clean” diamonds. Congress’ recent Conflict Minerals Act (HR 4128), tightening international controls on coltan and tin extracted from conflict zones, may work because the commodities it seeks to regulate are legal in the first place. In Afghanistan, a recent proposal from Canada’s Senlis Council to promote local morphine production would turn poppy cultivation from a vehicle to fund warlords into a legal economic and truly democratic boon: the production process and revenue distribution is controlled by local villages and estimated to produce morphine at 45 percent of the average market price.
In November, Californians will vote on a ballot measure to legalize marijuana. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates voters evenly split on this issue. For both selfish and humanitarian reasons, they should vote yes. Legalizing marijuana will strip cartels of their oligopoly on marijuana production and distribution. True, Mexican cartels also traffic in cocaine, but though cocaine fetches a higher price on the street, the cartels do not control its production and are relegated to playing middleman between Colombian cartels and American consumers in that trade. The business the Mexican cartels do in marijuana is their workhorse revenue generator. Upon legalization, they will face a decision similar to the one the Mafia faced after prohibition’s repeal: get more heavily into narcotics, or transform into legitimate market actors.
Regulations must adapt to political realities of contemporary conflict. We have a successful national precedent. Given a combination of sticks and carrots, much of the U.S. Mafia went “legit,” getting into the legal industries like gambling. In the postwar boom years, Italian-Americans better integrated into the American economy; reasons for joining Mafia organizations dried up. Of course, the question of integrating Mexican and Mexican-American labor forces into the American and Mexican economies goes beyond marijuana legalization (and raises the specter of state enforcement of federal immigration law). So does the potential for Mexico’s continued economic development to curtail cartel recruitment. But the prospect of economic integration appears scarier when violence in Mexico has mushroomed to the point that our state universities are barred from taking fieldstrips across the border. Marijuana legalization is a good first step in dismantling the structural conditions for violence.
Speaking at the Kroc School of Peace Studies last September, Alan Bersin, President Barack Obama’s Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, commended Mexican President Felipe Calderón on his “courageous” 4-year war against organized crime in his country and drew a parallel to the United States’ own struggle against the Mafia in the mid-20th century. He contended that recognizing organized crime as a significant challenge to the rule of law and taking bold action against it was what ultimately brought the Mafia under control – and would prove equally useful with Mexico’s drug cartels.
The parallels between Mexico’s cartels and the U.S. Mafia during the early 20th century are indeed striking – but not for the reason Bersin mentioned. The Mafia coalesced during a period of massive immigration to the U.S. In the late 19th century, Italians took the place of the Irish at the bottom of the immigrant socioeconomic ladder. Then, from 1920 to 1933, the prohibition of alcohol gave the Mafia an unprecedented opportunity to grow, reaping monopoly profits thanks to supply-side suppression. Far from a challenge to rule of law, the Mafia depended upon it to keep competition low.
A similar dynamic now operates with Mexican drug cartels: strong U.S. demand and restricted supply due to rigorous law enforcement make for massive profits. High-risk, high-reward opportunities attract ruthless types and incentivize brutality. As the price of marijuana has climbed, so has cartel violence. Civilian deaths in Mexico – doctors, journalists, students, embassy workers, police officers, children – total 22,700 since January 2007, according to the Kroc School’s Trans-border Institute. Add to the human toll the economic hit from precipitous declines in Mexican tourism. Costs to the U.S. include higher spending on border security and the drug war, lost sales tax revenue and increased gang violence in cities serving as trafficking hubs across the U.S.
Successful regulatory countermeasures would work with, not against, the market. International examples abound, with other violent conflicts fueled by “lootable” resources: diamonds in Sierra Leone, coltan in Congo, tin in Uganda , opium in Afghanistan. The Kimberly Process, an international regulatory scheme to prevent “blood diamonds” from entering global markets, raised awareness of, and thus demand for, “clean” diamonds. Congress’ recent Conflict Minerals Act (HR 4128), tightening international controls on coltan and tin extracted from conflict zones, may work because the commodities it seeks to regulate are legal in the first place. In Afghanistan, a recent proposal from Canada’s Senlis Council to promote local morphine production would turn poppy cultivation from a vehicle to fund warlords into a legal economic and truly democratic boon: the production process and revenue distribution is controlled by local villages and estimated to produce morphine at 45 percent of the average market price.
In November, Californians will vote on a ballot measure to legalize marijuana. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates voters evenly split on this issue. For both selfish and humanitarian reasons, they should vote yes. Legalizing marijuana will strip cartels of their oligopoly on marijuana production and distribution. True, Mexican cartels also traffic in cocaine, but though cocaine fetches a higher price on the street, the cartels do not control its production and are relegated to playing middleman between Colombian cartels and American consumers in that trade. The business the Mexican cartels do in marijuana is their workhorse revenue generator. Upon legalization, they will face a decision similar to the one the Mafia faced after prohibition’s repeal: get more heavily into narcotics, or transform into legitimate market actors.
Regulations must adapt to political realities of contemporary conflict. We have a successful national precedent. Given a combination of sticks and carrots, much of the U.S. Mafia went “legit,” getting into the legal industries like gambling. In the postwar boom years, Italian-Americans better integrated into the American economy; reasons for joining Mafia organizations dried up. Of course, the question of integrating Mexican and Mexican-American labor forces into the American and Mexican economies goes beyond marijuana legalization (and raises the specter of state enforcement of federal immigration law). So does the potential for Mexico’s continued economic development to curtail cartel recruitment. But the prospect of economic integration appears scarier when violence in Mexico has mushroomed to the point that our state universities are barred from taking fieldstrips across the border. Marijuana legalization is a good first step in dismantling the structural conditions for violence.
Friday, May 21, 2010
How are regional resource trafficking plans like dental bridges?
Often, the international community finds itself at an impasse attempting to stymie the trade flows of illicit goods or “conflict resources” onto world markets, which may fuel rebel groups and perpetuate conflict. Military interventions may freeze the conflict dynamic in a static state, but do not get at the root of the problem, which is thought often to stem from developed world demand for precious metals, gems, timber, oil, coltan, illegal drugs… But regulating these flows internally is often next to impossible, since the local government is already struggling to remain a legitimate player, and lacks the capacity and geographical reach necessary to staunch production and trafficking at the source. Even worse, as the supply decreases at the source, the price only rises, giving renewed incentive for risk-taking entrepreneurial outfits to meet market demand. Success itself hinders further success, and there are diminishing returns to scale in supply-suppression.
Given the lack of local capacity, the United States and the “international community” often turn to one or more neighboring countries to provide a buffering layer of strong governance institutions between the sources of these commodities and their final destinations. It is thought that such measures will, in the short term at least, reduce the “felt demand” of the resource, since fewer exported shipments actually get paid for, making production and internal trafficking riskier. Such was the case with Sierra Leone’s diamonds, in which monitoring neighboring countries’ (and especially Liberia’s) exports of the gems became a top priority, eventually triggering the Kimberley Process. Such was the case during the Second Congo War (and up to the present) in which gold and gems out of the northeast were monitored from the surrounding countries of Rwanda and Uganda. Such is the case still in Afghanistan, where the flow of opium was hoped to be quashed in Pakistan – a country with a capable and highly professional military – before it could be transferred to Iran. The same is true of countries surrounding Colombia and its exports of cocaine. The same is true of Kenya, which has long been relied upon to take care of the nasty spillovers from the Somali state collapse, essentially “containing” the problem.
The problem with such regional border plans is that, like dental bridges, they rely on – and compromise – the strength of neighbors in order to fill a local void. And just as dental bridges tend to pull on the anchor teeth, hurrying their own demise, so too do such regional trafficking plans exacerbate governance problems in neighboring states. It is no secret that Liberia under Charles Taylor was buoyed in its excesses by diamond trafficking wealth from its neighbor to the northwest. The Rwandan military was arguably rotted out by the corruption bred of gemstone trafficking in areas where they chose to “keep the peace” – and likewise to greater or lesser extents with the other six countries that intervened in the DRC’s conflict. The government of Pakistan is now straining under the stress of attempting to crack down on Taliban activity, the opium/poppy trade included, in the Pushtun and Baluch regions of the country. The US understandably considers the prevention of the collapse of the Pakistani government one of the most important items in its foreign policy agenda. It is increasingly clear that the cocaine trade has significantly contributed to the corruption of Venezuela’s government at the highest levels, as the estimated metric tonnage trafficked through that country have more than quadrupled in the past 5 years. Kenya’s government, it now appears, may be increasingly corrupted by monies secreted away by Somali pirates wishing to keep their profits in a relatively stable place in case things back home go even further south than they already have.
So what is the answer? According to one friend who recently lost a tooth, it’s much better to pay an exorbitant sum to get an implant tooth drilled into your jaw bone, than to hang a dental bridge from the neighboring teeth for less. “If you go the cheap route, the gap just grows and grows, and pretty soon you’re left with no more anchor teeth at all!” You see where I’m going with this… Much better to focus on local-level governance solutions than relying on the aid of – and in turn undermining – those countries that are unlucky enough to border a failed or failing state. And that local level governance may be truly local – community resilience to extremism appears like an increasingly worthy area of study.
Given the lack of local capacity, the United States and the “international community” often turn to one or more neighboring countries to provide a buffering layer of strong governance institutions between the sources of these commodities and their final destinations. It is thought that such measures will, in the short term at least, reduce the “felt demand” of the resource, since fewer exported shipments actually get paid for, making production and internal trafficking riskier. Such was the case with Sierra Leone’s diamonds, in which monitoring neighboring countries’ (and especially Liberia’s) exports of the gems became a top priority, eventually triggering the Kimberley Process. Such was the case during the Second Congo War (and up to the present) in which gold and gems out of the northeast were monitored from the surrounding countries of Rwanda and Uganda. Such is the case still in Afghanistan, where the flow of opium was hoped to be quashed in Pakistan – a country with a capable and highly professional military – before it could be transferred to Iran. The same is true of countries surrounding Colombia and its exports of cocaine. The same is true of Kenya, which has long been relied upon to take care of the nasty spillovers from the Somali state collapse, essentially “containing” the problem.
The problem with such regional border plans is that, like dental bridges, they rely on – and compromise – the strength of neighbors in order to fill a local void. And just as dental bridges tend to pull on the anchor teeth, hurrying their own demise, so too do such regional trafficking plans exacerbate governance problems in neighboring states. It is no secret that Liberia under Charles Taylor was buoyed in its excesses by diamond trafficking wealth from its neighbor to the northwest. The Rwandan military was arguably rotted out by the corruption bred of gemstone trafficking in areas where they chose to “keep the peace” – and likewise to greater or lesser extents with the other six countries that intervened in the DRC’s conflict. The government of Pakistan is now straining under the stress of attempting to crack down on Taliban activity, the opium/poppy trade included, in the Pushtun and Baluch regions of the country. The US understandably considers the prevention of the collapse of the Pakistani government one of the most important items in its foreign policy agenda. It is increasingly clear that the cocaine trade has significantly contributed to the corruption of Venezuela’s government at the highest levels, as the estimated metric tonnage trafficked through that country have more than quadrupled in the past 5 years. Kenya’s government, it now appears, may be increasingly corrupted by monies secreted away by Somali pirates wishing to keep their profits in a relatively stable place in case things back home go even further south than they already have.
So what is the answer? According to one friend who recently lost a tooth, it’s much better to pay an exorbitant sum to get an implant tooth drilled into your jaw bone, than to hang a dental bridge from the neighboring teeth for less. “If you go the cheap route, the gap just grows and grows, and pretty soon you’re left with no more anchor teeth at all!” You see where I’m going with this… Much better to focus on local-level governance solutions than relying on the aid of – and in turn undermining – those countries that are unlucky enough to border a failed or failing state. And that local level governance may be truly local – community resilience to extremism appears like an increasingly worthy area of study.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Thoughts on, or around, campaign finance
On 21 January, I was still too absorbed by the Haitian earthquake to really pay too much attention to the Supreme Court decision rejecting corporate campaign finance contribution limits. While I am by no means a specialist in domestic law or politics, I have to say that the implications of the decision really worry me.
Some observers have claimed that the case marks the beginning of an unprecedented embedding of corporate America within the apparatus of the state. Certainly, it looks that way. But just as certainly, the fiction of the American political system – or really any strong state at all – as ever having functioned independently of the industrial complex it tames, nurtures, and protects, is just that: a fiction. As Alice Amsden has noted elsewhere, America cultivates a certain founding myth, stemming from the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of smallholders and diffuse economic power, that is totally at odds with the Hamiltonian strategy of government-infused big-business development that became our reality. This topic resonates with me, as someone concerned with the ways in which industry may condition the strength and legitimacy of the state – and, in the cases that I study in conflict-affected areas of the world, determine the realtionship between the state and its challengers.
The power and legitimacy of the modern state on the one hand, and the breadth and depth of economic industrialization on the other, can be said to develop in tandem. This often occurs in the crucible of war, which in puts strain on public finances and generates a state-industry mutualism. And it isn’t new. Even in what W.W. Rostow termed the “pre-conditions for takeoff” in Western Europe, there existed a growing philosophical alliance between the increasingly powerful and centralized absolutist monarchies on the one hand, and the nascent propensity to leverage scientific knowledge for technological applications. Francis Bacon asserted that, “…the true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.” His contemporary and countryman, James I of England declared that, “[t]he state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth: for kings are not only God's Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods.” Nor were these two notions merely concomitant, but found their union in the writing of Thomas Hobbes, that devotee of causal materialism who sought to harness scientific knowledge of the social realm to better govern it – and thus avoid the much trumpeted “war, as of every man, against every man” that our natures would surely bring upon us otherwise. In developing this ideology, Hobbes paved the way for future social engineers like Saint-Simon.
Some observers have claimed that the case marks the beginning of an unprecedented embedding of corporate America within the apparatus of the state. Certainly, it looks that way. But just as certainly, the fiction of the American political system – or really any strong state at all – as ever having functioned independently of the industrial complex it tames, nurtures, and protects, is just that: a fiction. As Alice Amsden has noted elsewhere, America cultivates a certain founding myth, stemming from the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of smallholders and diffuse economic power, that is totally at odds with the Hamiltonian strategy of government-infused big-business development that became our reality. This topic resonates with me, as someone concerned with the ways in which industry may condition the strength and legitimacy of the state – and, in the cases that I study in conflict-affected areas of the world, determine the realtionship between the state and its challengers.
The power and legitimacy of the modern state on the one hand, and the breadth and depth of economic industrialization on the other, can be said to develop in tandem. This often occurs in the crucible of war, which in puts strain on public finances and generates a state-industry mutualism. And it isn’t new. Even in what W.W. Rostow termed the “pre-conditions for takeoff” in Western Europe, there existed a growing philosophical alliance between the increasingly powerful and centralized absolutist monarchies on the one hand, and the nascent propensity to leverage scientific knowledge for technological applications. Francis Bacon asserted that, “…the true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.” His contemporary and countryman, James I of England declared that, “[t]he state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth: for kings are not only God's Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods.” Nor were these two notions merely concomitant, but found their union in the writing of Thomas Hobbes, that devotee of causal materialism who sought to harness scientific knowledge of the social realm to better govern it – and thus avoid the much trumpeted “war, as of every man, against every man” that our natures would surely bring upon us otherwise. In developing this ideology, Hobbes paved the way for future social engineers like Saint-Simon.
The campaign finance decision is particularly troubling because it seems to have the potential to accelerate an already run-away social process of wealth accumulation. Capital has a tendency to concentrate – “cumulative causation” Gunnar Myrdal called it. It is the reason we have cities. It is the reason we have regional competitive advantage. It is the reason we have disparities between rich and poor, North and South, the developed and developing worlds. To a certain extent, and for all the reasons that Alfred Marshall enumerated, it is a good thing. But as we all know, labor is not as fleet of foot as capital, nor as maleable. Labor must be cultivated and it can be susceptible to emotional and social crisis. And labor is, lest we forget, real people who desire real, dignified work. At the risk of sounding downright Marxian, labor, not capital, is the end of economics. And government, elected by majority vote, has always served as a mechanism for bringing the two back into line with one another, educating the workforce, regulating capital markets, preventing exploitation, and redistributing wealth.
That last function is increasing important in a society in with the richest 20% of the population hold over 85% of the private wealth – a statistic that most Americans do not approve of (if they even know). Moreover, economists have realized for over half a century (since Kuznets) that societies in which wealth is more unequally distributed tend to have slower long-run growth trajectories. So there is a balance to be struck: on the one hand, we want to incentivize entrepreneurs and the private sector more generally to go forth and productify (and presumably accumulate wealth). On the other hand, we don’t want to deprive future entrepreneurs the educational and business opportunities that past generations have enjoyed. That balance is best struck by our political institutions, because they are designed to have longer time horizons than the private sector, even if they are informed by it.
As I’ve mentioned, I harbor no illusions as to the absolute separation of the private and government sectors in American political life – nor do I believe we should aspire to that vision. But that joint venture should ultimately be accountable in its performance to the voters. I worry that the rescinding of corporate campaign finance contribution limits, a mainstay of the American legislative environment for over 100 years, threatens to undermine our government accountability. That is for two reasons.
First, like it or not, humans are gullible, sometimes ill-informed, often herd-like, and easily swayed by well-funded, emotionally evocative, and aesthetically appealing advertising blitzes. For instance, many elections in the developing world occur relatively freely and fairly, but in places where the dominant party is the only one wealthy enough to afford publicity, the outcomes are still just foregone conclusions. What good is fair when most people only know of one choice? Yes, individual voters can, and sometimes do, do due diligence in researching their ballot options. But as a rule and from a structural point of view, most do not. Why not make it easy to do so?
Second, while some braindead Tea Party pundits have claimed that this is a victory for the middle class (since a middle class upstart politician with a bold new message of reform can now find the resources to fight in the big leagues, or so goes the argument), I think we all realize what an ungodly load of crap that is. There are far fewer middle class upstart politicians with bold new messages of reform than there are money-grubbing, snake-oil-selling, middle class aspiring politicians who will say or do just about anything to get into the hallowed Halls of Power. If you were the CEO of a company, liable for lawsuits by your investors if you failed to maximize their profits at any given point, would you really choose to sponsor some unpredictable, stubbornly idealistic do-gooder? No way, I’d take the palavering snake-oil dude any day, and have him peddling my agenda.
In the end, I wonder if we are doomed to the fate of all democratic societies as predicted by Mancur Olson: that they should all succumb, slowly but surely, to the increasingly ineluctible influence of specialized interest groups – those able to lobby for concentrating benefits on them while dispersing the costs across the voiceless masses.
I close with another quote from Sir Francis Bacon – a bit of cold comfort:
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
- Francis Bacon
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The battle for the Asian state
An Indian development economist recently asked me my opinion on "emerging trends" in India-Pakistan-China relations. This person then proceeded to talk about de facto Chinese administrative expansion into small parts of northeast India, and Pakistan's relentless push in Kashmir. What? Emerging? These "trends" have been going on for a number of decades, and to talk of a joint Chinese-Pakistani assault on Indian territory not only starts to sound a bit Indo-centro-paranoid, but also, I think, misses a key trend that really should catch our eye in the 21st century - namely, the struggle of the state to survive and adapt to new internal challenges.
All three of these great Asian powers are finding it increasingly difficult not to jockey for international clout or territory, but just to keep a firm grip on the territory that is nominally theirs already. This reorientation takes the interesting form of armies that have typically been outward-looking being tasked with increasingly inward-looking security work - and begging a whole host of questions from the state's legitimacy to govern without the classic Weberian monopoly on the use of violence, to basic questions of how the state defines who "the Enemy" is when it is its own citizenry.
Pakistan is the most notorious case now, of course, as the legendarily professional and historically India-focused national army turns on its own territory to fight the spread of the Taleban in the Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan. Now ethnic Baloch are being disappeared by the Frontier Corps in a clandestine campaign. Less well known in the western world is India's increasingly intense struggle to wrest control of the so-called Maoist "Red Corridor" from the Naxalites, so named for a peasant uprising in the West Bengal town of Naxabari in 1967. The Naxal movement first gathered steam in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was largely stamped out by the Indian government in the following decades. The opening of the Indian economy, however, and the resulting effects of globalization – everything from large-scale development projects like dams and special economic zones that displace marginalized groups to the rapid development of farmland and forests on which tribal and poor people depend – have seen it roar back to life. While historically consisting of an urban intelligencia and a rural peasant base of support, the Naxals and their front organizations today are increasingly finding themselves struggling to remain hidden in urban areas – a trend attested to by the recent arrest of Kobad Ghandy, the South Western Regional Bureau (SWRB) coordinator for the premiere Naxal group, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), or CPI-M, formed in 2004 through the merger of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India. Ghandy had organized Naxal activity in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra, and was caught living in Delhi on 20 September, 2009.
Nonetheless, today Naxals are present in 16 of India’s 28 states (or 170 of 602 districts), primarily finding purchase in the remote and less developed forested belts running generally from the Nepali border in the north to the inland mountains of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south. They draw largely on marginalized tribal people for their recruits and logistical support, where they are often seen as the only force standing up for the rights of the underclass. While the various Naxal groups disagree on the overarching strategy for eventual capture of the Indian state, most groups have relied upon recruits from the forest areas, with the intention of then spreading to rural agricultural areas, small towns, and, in the final stage, large cities. As such, it is often seen as a classic case of a rural insurgency, even if its primary recruits are often forest-dwellers rather than agricultural peasants.
There has been a great debate in India over just how to deal with the Naxals. Do you (as the progressives suggest) push a strategy of rural development so that Naxals lose their peasant support base? Or do you adopt a sort of Guilliani-type "mano dura" with heavy police repression and possibly the domestic use of the military against the country's own citizenry? Some have even suggested a bombing campaign of the forest areas by the Indian Air Force, to the outrage of most people of conscience (or just those who remember how well air strikes have traditionally fared against entrenched insurgencies in places like Vietnam or the Afghanistan/Pakistan border).
Add to this trend the handful of secessionist movements in Northeast India; the festering anger of Muslims, Christians and other minority communities marginalized in an increasingly Hindu-nationalist political atmosphere; and a crescendo of terrorist activity that is often - though not often enough for the Indian government's liking - linked to foreign interlopers, and you have a true national identity crisis.
While China's army has been outwardly-oriented to a limited extent since the establishment of the PRC (pushing into Tibet, fighting border wars with Burma, India, Vietnam), China has never pretended to embrace democracy like India, nor even flirted with it sporadically and schizophrenically like Pakistan. It has therefore never pretended to make any social contract with its citizens (even if it claims to represent them), and has often used its army to repress domestically at will, solidifying its "legitimacy" and image of national harmony. But there too, signs of strain have been appearing, whether in the Uighur unrest, the rural farmers revolts, continuing American arms sales to Taiwan (still part of China, in the eyes of the establishment), or even the siding of urban internet users with Google and against the official Chinese position in the recent political sparring around human rights campaigners' email privacy and web censorship.
Across the board, then, transnationally-flavored movements - whether religious, ideological, or economic - continue to challenge the Asian state. Far from being inherently invidious, many of these challenges could push these states in the direction of increasing accountability, more broad-based development initiatives, and greater respect for human rights. How the political establishments will choose to respond will make all the difference in the years to come.
All three of these great Asian powers are finding it increasingly difficult not to jockey for international clout or territory, but just to keep a firm grip on the territory that is nominally theirs already. This reorientation takes the interesting form of armies that have typically been outward-looking being tasked with increasingly inward-looking security work - and begging a whole host of questions from the state's legitimacy to govern without the classic Weberian monopoly on the use of violence, to basic questions of how the state defines who "the Enemy" is when it is its own citizenry.
Pakistan is the most notorious case now, of course, as the legendarily professional and historically India-focused national army turns on its own territory to fight the spread of the Taleban in the Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan. Now ethnic Baloch are being disappeared by the Frontier Corps in a clandestine campaign. Less well known in the western world is India's increasingly intense struggle to wrest control of the so-called Maoist "Red Corridor" from the Naxalites, so named for a peasant uprising in the West Bengal town of Naxabari in 1967. The Naxal movement first gathered steam in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was largely stamped out by the Indian government in the following decades. The opening of the Indian economy, however, and the resulting effects of globalization – everything from large-scale development projects like dams and special economic zones that displace marginalized groups to the rapid development of farmland and forests on which tribal and poor people depend – have seen it roar back to life. While historically consisting of an urban intelligencia and a rural peasant base of support, the Naxals and their front organizations today are increasingly finding themselves struggling to remain hidden in urban areas – a trend attested to by the recent arrest of Kobad Ghandy, the South Western Regional Bureau (SWRB) coordinator for the premiere Naxal group, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), or CPI-M, formed in 2004 through the merger of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India. Ghandy had organized Naxal activity in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra, and was caught living in Delhi on 20 September, 2009.
Nonetheless, today Naxals are present in 16 of India’s 28 states (or 170 of 602 districts), primarily finding purchase in the remote and less developed forested belts running generally from the Nepali border in the north to the inland mountains of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south. They draw largely on marginalized tribal people for their recruits and logistical support, where they are often seen as the only force standing up for the rights of the underclass. While the various Naxal groups disagree on the overarching strategy for eventual capture of the Indian state, most groups have relied upon recruits from the forest areas, with the intention of then spreading to rural agricultural areas, small towns, and, in the final stage, large cities. As such, it is often seen as a classic case of a rural insurgency, even if its primary recruits are often forest-dwellers rather than agricultural peasants.
There has been a great debate in India over just how to deal with the Naxals. Do you (as the progressives suggest) push a strategy of rural development so that Naxals lose their peasant support base? Or do you adopt a sort of Guilliani-type "mano dura" with heavy police repression and possibly the domestic use of the military against the country's own citizenry? Some have even suggested a bombing campaign of the forest areas by the Indian Air Force, to the outrage of most people of conscience (or just those who remember how well air strikes have traditionally fared against entrenched insurgencies in places like Vietnam or the Afghanistan/Pakistan border).
Add to this trend the handful of secessionist movements in Northeast India; the festering anger of Muslims, Christians and other minority communities marginalized in an increasingly Hindu-nationalist political atmosphere; and a crescendo of terrorist activity that is often - though not often enough for the Indian government's liking - linked to foreign interlopers, and you have a true national identity crisis.
While China's army has been outwardly-oriented to a limited extent since the establishment of the PRC (pushing into Tibet, fighting border wars with Burma, India, Vietnam), China has never pretended to embrace democracy like India, nor even flirted with it sporadically and schizophrenically like Pakistan. It has therefore never pretended to make any social contract with its citizens (even if it claims to represent them), and has often used its army to repress domestically at will, solidifying its "legitimacy" and image of national harmony. But there too, signs of strain have been appearing, whether in the Uighur unrest, the rural farmers revolts, continuing American arms sales to Taiwan (still part of China, in the eyes of the establishment), or even the siding of urban internet users with Google and against the official Chinese position in the recent political sparring around human rights campaigners' email privacy and web censorship.
Across the board, then, transnationally-flavored movements - whether religious, ideological, or economic - continue to challenge the Asian state. Far from being inherently invidious, many of these challenges could push these states in the direction of increasing accountability, more broad-based development initiatives, and greater respect for human rights. How the political establishments will choose to respond will make all the difference in the years to come.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Haiti, in retrospect
I lived in Haiti for some months after college. And now, years later, this earthquake strikes, and I see all the familiar places again in the news, but now devastated, strewn with bodies and swarming with the grieving and newly homeless. So I thought I would write down a few random thoughts in an attempt to give those of you who haven’t been to Haiti a kind of feel for it, or at least a feel for my own memories as they intersect with current events. I figure if you feel connected, even imperfectly, you’ll be more inclined to donate to the relief effort – which is why I’ve pasted links of good ways to give. (If you decide to give, please also consider making a long-term commitment to the organization, as it is difficult for organizations to operate effectively in crisis-based feast-and-famine funding cycles.
I went to Haiti knowing almost nothing about the place. I had been a philosophy major and a francophone literature minor. I was interested in foundational ideas, epistemology, thought histories, concepts of societal progress - topics, in short, that would cause Lotus to claw her own eyeballs out in aggravation and boredom. I had read Aimé Césaire, Jean Anouilh, Joseph Zobel, Franz Fanon, Jacques Roumain. I was fascinated with the forging of post-colonial identity, but had a distaste for – or perhaps was willfully ignorant of – politics and had an aversion to economics (a field I would come, tentatively, to embrace). I had no appreciable skills aside from French – a language that wasn’t really spoken there. Like I said, I knew nothing.
From the plane, my eyes wandered over the crumbled landscape below: up steep, terraced mountainsides; across trickling green washes; down the muddy Artibonite River pumping like an artery; and along the red estuarine branches reaching, dendritic, into the shallows of the Caribbean. Red and blue. Like the colors of the flag. A line of lush forest clearly demarcated the Dominican frontier. The Haitian side was stripped bare as a skinned animal, and bony outcroppings of rock protruded from the soil like exposed ribs. I thought: it is bled only slowly, to be kept barely alive, a semi-coagulated slurry of hemoglobin-red silt dribbling from a thousand shallow wounds.
Haiti was rough. It challenged me in ways I could not have predicted. For one, the daily realities there – and especially in Port-au-Prince – seemed to make philosophy an effete and useless pastime. Haiti seemed not to tolerate theory with no immediately practical and material applications. When a gunfight erupts out of nowhere, you either save yourself instinctively or you don’t; no time for meditation on ethical dilemmas. When you see an angry mob brutally kill a would-be robber, you either watch or choose not to – but you certainly don’t intervene in some foolhardy attempt to impose morality.
The landscape was stunning and the people were unbelievably friendly and welcoming toward me. But the place was also dangerous. Random gunfights, bombings, riots, political assassinations, urban warfare between drug gangs and UN peacekeepers… In retrospect, I think that I felt less personally secure in Haiti on a daily basis than I have in almost any other place. And that’s coming from someone who has since – and not coincidentally – gone on to study economic development in conflict-affected and post-war countries.
A friend told me there that “Life is cheap in Haiti,” and I knew what he meant. It’s not that people don’t value their lives or those of their family or other people – quite the contrary. It’s that there is an inescapable stochasticity to it all: there’s some unknown probability that you’ll find yourself killed one day. Of course, that’s life everywhere, but in Haiti, that probability is higher, and the circumstances under which the probability is highest are themselves somewhat unpredictable. That gets to be stressful and takes a toll on you. Take the 16-year-old Lebanese kid, Tony, who lived upstairs from me in the same apartment building. He came to Haiti to be near his big brother a little while before I arrived, and got a job at his brother’s grocery store as a checkout cashier. It was a place with security guards, catering to rich, mostly foreign customers, in the richest enclave in the country. A few months later, a gang came in, took all the money in the tills, and took Tony hostage in case the police caught up with them – which they did. In the ensuing gunfight, all the gang members managed to escape, but Tony was somehow shot and killed. His father arrived from Lebanon to get justice for his boy, since the police story was obviously fishy, but after three months of frustration and official obfuscation, he devolved into a chronically depressed, whoring, alcoholic and disheveled wreck.
And then there is the geographical proximity. You can be in Haiti in 90 minutes from Miami. No 22-hour, multi-leg trip via some European hub to a war-torn West African nation. It’s right there. I could, I think, legitimately bring up this point in an attempt to dispel the myth of the “Third World” as being unrelated to the existence of a developed “First World”. Or perhaps as some sort of moral goad, questioning such plenty persisting alongside deprivation. But that’s not the point. The point is much more personal than that. It’s about the emotional capacity of any one person to hold those extremes in their consciousness at one time. The point is that when I finally left Haiti, 20 pounds lighter than when I arrived, I still had the smell of burning trash in my nose, the sounds of musical Creole popping in my ears, the crackling edge of street awareness in my nerves. I stepped off the plane in Miami to the sight of a sleek, muzak-infused modern terminal populated by just a few, calm people sipping coffee and flipping through magazines. I sat down and just breathed for a while, staring at the row of croissant sandwiches in an Au Bon Pain across the corridor. I won’t say I cried exactly, but for a few minutes, my eyes watered. Then I got up, and made my way to my connection.
Haitians have a particular and stoic attitude in the face of mortal stochasticity. It was a common belief among African slaves being transported to the New World that those who died – and whose bodies were thrown overboard – would ride an ocean current back to Africa and there be reunited with their ancestors. I heard more than once in Haiti the description of the island as one giant slave ship that never quite reached the New World, anchoring just off shore in the Caribbean – and those who die onboard still go back to Africa, home of the original, paternal Vaudoun gods, the Rada, and so leave behind the angry, unpredictable New World gods, the Petwo. The following is an embellished version of one of those stories I heard from a Haitian, which I wrote down years afterward.
My grandmother was a mambo; she had powerful vaudoun. When her ti-bon-ange, her little angel, ceded its post to another, her eyeballs smoldered and flashed in her skull like charcoal in strong wind. Red-eyed (jé-wouj) Erzulie whipped flesh, as one might whip egg whites, into frothy magma, mixed blood with lust, bile with remorse, saliva with acquisitiveness. At these moments, the human heart cannot be contained in the chest and spills its contents upon the ground, where drums pump it coursing through dusty delirium. She lived 175 years and then one night waded into the sea. There, Agwe welcomed her as a loa, wrapped her in his streaming mantle, doused her coal-fire eyes with brine, and cleansed her of her Petwo anger. Her hair flowed about her like sea grasses.`
In a great irony, my own island-dwelling people can no more swim than breathe underwater. In death, however, my grandmother faced the open ocean alone after long generations of estrangement from it. Just as we must all pass alone through the crossroads of death, whose gatekeeper is Legba, keeper of the Po-Mitan, after lives shared in community. It is well-known that on the surface of the ocean, a current runs like a perennial river from the coasts of slaves, gold, ivory, grain to the New World. It regurgitates its silty sediment of lives and ships and religions in the alluvial fan of the Caribbean. What is less well known—but equally true—is that this river sinks as it nears our archipelago, plummeting slow, dark fathoms before, almost imperceptibly at first, it begins to gather momentum eastward. By the time this corollary deep-water river reaches open ocean, it’s swelled to a roiling, undeniable force, carrying bones and souls back to the continent. In this river, my grandmother drifted—piecemeal or head-over-heals, who knows? The darkness there is nearly absolute, with just a few shards of shattered moonlight tinkling as they filter down. I imagine, though, that after a shapeless while, the daylight grew steadily to a diffuse, palm-wine-hued effervescence, and she felt, through a sense known only to those who have crossed the doorways Legba guards, the soothing rush and vastness of the land of the eternal Rada.
The beneficent Rada are the elders; they have already seen it all. They have no use for the raging power of the revolutionary Petwo gods that can wrack a man possessed, literally break his bones, lacerate his body, pulverize his flesh. Theirs is an incontestable force, a rumbling of the earth, an elephant stampede, the thundering of Congo Savanne.
In the wake of the earthquake, Senegal’s president offered land to Haitians who want to come “home” to West Africa – an act that takes on ironic overtones in light of the repatriation myth. As though the whole country were already dead and will now be brought back on ocean currents to the land of the ancestors. Needless to say, I have some serious mixed feelings about this proposition.
I’ve been to a lot of poor countries since my stint in Haiti, many of which were considered worse-off. I’ve never yet been back to Haiti, though I think of it often and would not be the person I am today, personally or professionally, without it. Nor would any of us, by the way. Haiti’s revolution ushered in the modern age in some ways. It was the first and only successful slave rebellion – a strong statement in fact and not just in theory of the equality of all. Again, Haiti’s intolerance for insubstantial, unconnected theory shines through, putting the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen into practice.
I still have the feeling that I’ll return to Haiti someday. In the meantime, here are some links to *good* relief efforts there.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
What is Urban Resilience? Pt. 2
It has been pointed out to me that my last blog post, 'What is Urban Resilience?', spent a great deal of time on the phenomenon of resilience, and little time on what is peculiar to resilience in the urban context, beyond a brief discussion toward the end on taxation of urban industries. This criticism is entirely 'fair and balanced.'
However bad a communicator I may have been, though, I believe that at the least my 'Problem 1' is indeed an issue that has particular pertinence in the urban arena. This is because urban areas exist in the first place at least partly because of the concentration of intermediate goods and services. This concentration is one of the three families of agglomeration economies described by Alfred Marshall, and the only one that the New Economic Geography seeks to model. (The other two are 'thick' labor markets and knowledge spillovers.) A large number of intermediate industries by definition imply that any exogenous demand will have greater local knock-on effects -- a higher value of a in the Keynesian model. Moreover, it is only with high values of a that the break points and sustain points even (1) emerge as discontinuities (i.e., exhibit radical jumps up or down in output), or (2) separate from each other. Rural economies -- at least in the model -- are much more likely to exhibit outputs that linearly reflect the exogenous demand; whether that demand is recovering from a low point or coming down from a high point makes no difference.
Regarding 'Problem 2' from the past post, there too I would argue that the discussion was more germane to urban economies than rural ones. The third and least easily modeled Marshallian agglomeration economy -- that of knowledge spillovers -- goes to work in areas of dense social interactions. It might be argued that it is just this sort of networked flow of information, ideas, and experience that allows urban societies to anticipate future market developments and technological innovations, and make adjustments for them. In this view then, it is no accident that urban areas tend to be politically 'progressive' while rural ones tend to be 'conservative.' Urban economies rely more heavily on public goods (e.g., public spaces in which to share knowledge, IT and transportation infrastructure to convey it, public schools and universities to generate and disseminate it, etc.), which require the ongoing commitments of economic and political institutions with long time horizons -- i.e., forward-looking institutions.
So maybe we have an irony: urban economies may be best equipped to anticipate future crises and handle ongoing ones upto an undefined break point. But thereafter, rural economies tend to be less affected, and show greater short-term resilience as the exogenous factors that precipitated crisis creep back above the level that originally triggered collapse in urban areas. At this point, when urban agglomeration economies essentially cease to function and dispersal, not concentration, is the order of the day, rural areas may find themselves relied upon to a far greater extent relative to good times. Rural-urban linkages may become critical to urban industry survival.
However bad a communicator I may have been, though, I believe that at the least my 'Problem 1' is indeed an issue that has particular pertinence in the urban arena. This is because urban areas exist in the first place at least partly because of the concentration of intermediate goods and services. This concentration is one of the three families of agglomeration economies described by Alfred Marshall, and the only one that the New Economic Geography seeks to model. (The other two are 'thick' labor markets and knowledge spillovers.) A large number of intermediate industries by definition imply that any exogenous demand will have greater local knock-on effects -- a higher value of a in the Keynesian model. Moreover, it is only with high values of a that the break points and sustain points even (1) emerge as discontinuities (i.e., exhibit radical jumps up or down in output), or (2) separate from each other. Rural economies -- at least in the model -- are much more likely to exhibit outputs that linearly reflect the exogenous demand; whether that demand is recovering from a low point or coming down from a high point makes no difference.
Regarding 'Problem 2' from the past post, there too I would argue that the discussion was more germane to urban economies than rural ones. The third and least easily modeled Marshallian agglomeration economy -- that of knowledge spillovers -- goes to work in areas of dense social interactions. It might be argued that it is just this sort of networked flow of information, ideas, and experience that allows urban societies to anticipate future market developments and technological innovations, and make adjustments for them. In this view then, it is no accident that urban areas tend to be politically 'progressive' while rural ones tend to be 'conservative.' Urban economies rely more heavily on public goods (e.g., public spaces in which to share knowledge, IT and transportation infrastructure to convey it, public schools and universities to generate and disseminate it, etc.), which require the ongoing commitments of economic and political institutions with long time horizons -- i.e., forward-looking institutions.
So maybe we have an irony: urban economies may be best equipped to anticipate future crises and handle ongoing ones upto an undefined break point. But thereafter, rural economies tend to be less affected, and show greater short-term resilience as the exogenous factors that precipitated crisis creep back above the level that originally triggered collapse in urban areas. At this point, when urban agglomeration economies essentially cease to function and dispersal, not concentration, is the order of the day, rural areas may find themselves relied upon to a far greater extent relative to good times. Rural-urban linkages may become critical to urban industry survival.
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