David Laitin is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

Lief Carter (discussant) is a Professor of Political Science at Colorado College.

Robert Lee (discussant) is a Professor of Political Science at Colorado College.

“September 11 -- One Year Later: Responding to Global Challenges” took place from Thursday, September 12, to Saturday, September 14.

Professor Robert Lee: Welcome to all of you to the third Jovanovich Symposium of this day. I'm Bob Lee of the Political Science Department, and our topic this afternoon is Poverty and the Causes of War, at least what the program proclaims; the reality may be a bit different. Let me try to put that topic in a context that I think has emerged here in the last couple of days. I see a certain symmetry in al Qaida's view of the United States and the view projected by the Bush Administration, and that image is one of a super power in full control of the world.  That is, insofar as I understand the perverted logic of al Qaida, it's this: The regimes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to mention others in the Middle East, are corrupt.

Why is this so? Because of the United States; they depend on the United States. But while the Palestinians are oppressed by Israel, why is this so? Because the United States permits it to happen. Materialism and immorality have swept the world, engulfing Muslims; why is this so? Because the United States has permitted it, enabled it to happen. So if there is immorality, injustice, and conflict in the world, according to al Qaida, the United States must be responsible; hence perhaps – perhaps – the logic, the overall logic of the attack on the United States.

Of course, the attack on Washington and the Twin Towers shows that we are not fully in control. And the administration acknowledges today that we remain vulnerable. But it also asserts that we can and should wipe out all terrorism, wherever it may lie. It suggests that we can overthrow dangerous regimes and regulate the flow of weapons in the world. We're not in full control but we have more control than anyone else in world affairs, and can with effort enhance that control. Such seems to be, at least to me, the message of the Bush Administration.

Now, I'm a little uneasy about both of those versions of American control over world events. If we are to eliminate terrorism, does that imply that we can eliminate the causes of terrorism or only its manifestations? Terrorism is simply a form of warfare. Does this mean we can eliminate all war? That would mean knowing the causes of war and knowing how to combat them. I'm not sure we know either one. It seems to me there are a whole set of forces at work in the modern world over which we have only marginal control. Increasing literacy, urbanization, intensified communication and European influence have unleashed forces of nationalism. Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism are but two of its products. New forms of identity politics, including the politicization of religion about which we heard just a few minutes ago, have emerged in response to these sorts of social change. Poverty has diminished in some quarters, while inequality has dramatically increased in others. Surely if we are to examine the causes of conflict and therefore of terrorism in the modern world, we must examine these problems. And this I think is how we get to the question of poverty and the causes of war.

What are the causes of war? War is a product of human beings, and human beings have thus far been helpless in eliminating this scourge. Why? To what extent can the world be saved from itself? To what extent can we save ourselves? To me these are important questions and I believe our panelists this afternoon will help us at least to think about these questions.

Our first speaker is David Laitin of Stanford University, who has looked very carefully at the role of ethnic identity in the generation of conflict. He's a specialist in linguistic differences in part. He has entitled his presentation "The Causes of Contemporary Civil Wars." He's a specialist in Eastern Europe and the states that emerged from them from what was known as the Soviet Union. You have in your program a short biography and there is more information on the website.

Our second speaker is Robert Kaplan, correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and freelance author who has also spent a good deal of his time in Eastern Europe but has become a reporter whose domain is the globe. His special interest is American security policy and he will speak about security in the coming decade.

I'm delighted to welcome both of them to this gathering. We will have two presentations and then as usual questions from the audience. Professor Laitin.

Professor David Laitin: It's a great pleasure to be at this symposium. I haven't been on an elite small undergraduate campus since I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore and I forgot what beehives of intellectual energy they are. And it's quite exciting to be part of this symposium. I will be reporting today on work that's in collaboration with my colleague, Jim Fearon; thus, the royal we is not royal, it's Jim Fearon and me.

Civil wars merit attention because in the past half-century they have been epidemic. More than half the deaths from mass violence in the second half of the 20th century were registered in civil wars. I don't think you are going to be able to see this … I can't see it. For those of you who have eyes like mine, there have been a hundred and twelve civil wars since 1945 amounting to 12 million deaths, 17 massacres amounting to two and a half million deaths, 86 interstate wars with four and a half million deaths.

While the public is aware that there have been devastating civil wars in Sudan, Somalia, Columbia, Afghanistan, and perhaps a few other cases, there is little recognition of the overall phenomenon that has had more devastating consequences than interstate wars, AIDS, environmental catastrophe or, I might add, 911. And with the consequences of civil war, involving mass refugee flows, lack of control of the trade of elicit drugs, alliances with international terrorists – I suppose that's the link to this conference – an epidemic, the epidemic of civil war, has disastrous implications for us all, even those living in states without civil wars. Civil war is a grievous problem of our age that cries out for solution.

I ask in this presentation four questions in regard to civil wars. First, what distinguishes countries that have experienced civil wars in the post-World War II world from those that have not? Second, what distinguishes minority groups in whose name civil wars have been fought from those groups whose name no civil wars have been fought? And third, from knowledge of the correlates of civil war can we infer anything about its causes? And finally, if we can infer something about the causes, does this knowledge give us a handle on prevention or cauterization of civil wars by an international gendarmerie.

Many analyses of civil wars are all too quick to report on apparently obvious patterns; for example, that combatants are driven by ancient hatreds or that civil wars are the result of maltreatment of minorities or that African societies who are countries with mixed populations ethnically are especially prone to civil war. But these observations, I hope this presentation will show, are often incorrect. Reports of ancient hatred and grievances, for example, typically sample only on countries that are amid civil wars themselves. But there might well be equal or greater levels of ancient hatreds and grievances among peoples who are at peace. War is an excellent environment for combatants to remember the more violent side of past relationships with members of the other side. Combatants evoking images of ancient hatreds, is not evidence that this is what motivated them to war. The relationship between ancient hatreds, grievances and civil war may therefore be spurious.

Through large-end statistical analysis, we can in part overcome many biases of looking only at single cases. In our work we seek to account for civil war outbreaks. By this we mean armed conflicts in which one party is constituted by the army of the state and another party by some group in the state that does not itself have sovereignty over any territory. The armed conflict, to count as a civil war in our data set, must take the lives of at least one thousand people and at least one hundred of them have to come from each side, or else it's a massacre. And that this one thousand must take place within a couple of years of outbreak to distinguish civil wars from sort of low-grade violence such as in Basque country or Ireland, cases that fall far short of war.

We have relied on two large-end data sets. First we have constructed the country-year data set for all countries in the world for every year that they have been independent. Overall, it includes 6,327 observations – there is a country and a year as an observation. We have also worked with the data from the Minorities at Risk data set, developed at University of Maryland, in which the group country is the unit of observation. For example, Kurds in Turkey, or Kurds in Iran, or Kurds in Iraq are three different observations. This data set includes 329 different religious, ethnic and regional groups from 169 countries.

This table 2 reports on the principal results of our statistical work of both data sets, results which are both fascinating and troubling because two of the major explanations for the sources of civil war –that civil wars are basically caused by grievances and that civil wars are basically caused by clashes of civilization – do not receive support from our statistical data analysis. The principal finding of our research on grievances is that knowing whether a country was a democracy where presumably grievances are best accommodated does not help us know, does not help us predict where there will be civil wars. We often think that where there is no democracy there are more grievances, where there are more grievances there are civil wars.

We've talked a good deal in this conference about Israel, which is a democracy and of course facing a terrible civil war. But Costa Rica in 1948, Cypress in 1974, India with several civil wars throughout its independence period, Pakistan was a democracy in 1993 with the Sindi Rebellion, and Turkey in 1984 with the breakout of the Kurdish Rebellion, are all countries independently coded as democracies that face civil war. Therefore, there is no relationship between whether a country is a democracy and the likely outbreak of a civil war.

We also coded countries as to whether they had federal institutions with the assumption that if you give autonomy to the separate regions of the state, that would reduce group grievances. So we added another variable called, degree to which regions had autonomy, or federal autonomy from the state. They, however, were no less likely to experience civil war than countries that were unitary.

We then went to other forms of grievance. One of the two sources of grievance that we looked at with great care are linguistic grievance and religious grievance, the degree to which people could use their language freely or go to a church of their choice. Knowing where there were such grievances, however, does not help us know where there will be civil wars.

Now, we have the case of Ojilan in Turkey who said in his trial to Turkish authorities, I was not allowed to speak Kurdish as a youth; this incited me to rebellion. Prabhakaran in Sri Lanka has said similar things about not being able to use Tamil. But we have the cases of the Catalans, the Quebecois, the Flemish, and the Lansmal speakers in Norway, other groups that face linguistic differences or linguistic grievances that did not express those grievances in terms of civil war. So knowing which countries have had groups with linguistic grievances does not help us understand where there will be civil war.

Finally on grievances, we coded for economic inequality within the country. And again there was no significant relationship between levels of inequality and civil war. In sum, political, cultural and economic grievances are not correlated with civil war outbreak. We all heard when Dr. Ashrawi the other day – or yesterday – claimed the roots of civil is in injustice. There is no evidence, however, to support it. What we have found is that grievances are almost ubiquitous, but civil wars are much rarer. So you can always link grievances to civil wars but you cannot find that grievances or knowledge of the level of the grievances will help you understand whether a country will be at civil war, so Dr. Ashrawi saying all we have to do is look for injustice and we'll be able to know where there is civil war does not hold up to statistical analysis.

What about cultural difference? Knowing the degree of linguistic difference between a minority group in the state and the dominant language group does not help us distinguish states that have experienced civil wars from those that have not. In the group-country data set, we gave every linguistic group developed from data of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which has drawn a gigantic map of all the languages of the world so we would be able to tell at what branch a language broke off from another branch, how far the distance is, the linguistic or cultural difference is, between any groups. And we gave scores to every single minority group in the world to see how far it was from the dominant or official language group of the state.

Even with this address, we saw that there was no relationship whatsoever between cultural distance and the likelihood of violence. This is not so surprising once you think about it, because the greatest amount of distant addresses come from immigrant communities into industrial states, and immigrant communities are very unlikely to incite a civil war against the state of their settlement. In any case, knowing linguistic difference does not help you predict a civil war.

Maybe it's not cultural difference but rather historical hatreds of culturally distinct ethnic groups that are unwillingly living together in the same state that are at the root of civil wars. Our data show however that if we examine levels of historical hatred from periods before there was a civil war, there is no relationship between levels of hatred and likelihood of civil war. Historical hatreds, as I mentioned earlier, constituted discourse that comes in the wake of the killing in a civil war more than it is a cause of it.

This finding goes so strongly against our intuitions and many journalistic reports. And once source of the misperception may be in what we in social science call selection bias. Journalists are sent to the hot spots of the world seeking the big story on civil wars. They listen to local accounts of why these wars occurred and they link those accounts to the country's history, seeking to understand the seeds of that rebellion. The problem with this approach is that it rarely examines whether the same seeds have been planted in countries that do not have civil wars. If similar seeds had been planted, it would be an error to attribute causal property to those seeds.

For example, when I began conducting field research in Narva, in Northeastern Estonia on the border with Russia in the fall of 1993, journalists were hovering over Lenin Square like ravens reporting on a plebiscite organized by the Russian-speaking population living there constituting about 95% of the local population asking for national territorial autonomy. The new Estonian state refused to consider this request. Russian speakers, most without citizenship, had no political recourse. The animosity between Russians and Estonians was heartfelt, if you saw the graffiti, and its sources go back into the early 18th century. Thankfully, no violence broke out. In consequence, there were no stories called Baltic Ghosts, and these stories remain unwritten because there was no war to explain.

Or take another example. It is often held that ancient hatreds of Turk versus Christian drove the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian majority enclave in Azerbaijan. But data on intergroup marriages, language acquisition of each other's language, and tolerance for the other, they were equally high in Azerbaijan between Armenians and Azeries as amongst the two groups in the late Soviet period – between those two groups, as between many other groups; for example, Russians and Estonians in Estonia that remained at peace.

We tend to use post-outbreak data on hatred to explain pre-outbreak motivations. But this is, as I said before, more a justification for war than an explanation of it. If not ancient hatreds, what about the fact of diversity itself feeding civil war? That is, the more different groups there are, the more likely the civil war. However, knowing the levels of ethnic or religious fractionalization of society is not helpful in distinguishing civil war countries from non-civil war countries. What we did is we created a measure of the probability any individual in the country, if meeting some random other individual in the country, was from the same ethnic group. If the probability was one, the ethnic fractionalization index was one; if the probability was zero – you're the only one of your own ethnic group – then it was zero. The United States is about .8 and Nigeria is about .35, that is, much more heterogeneous.

The relationship, however, between heterogeneity and civil war does not hold up to statistical scrutiny. This finding is in direct contradiction to Woodrow Wilson's assumptions in his Fourteen Points and some of the claims made by Dr. Ashrawi about the importance of self-determination in the production of peace. Wilson's analysis assumed that states that house within their boundaries more than one nationality group are more likely to experience breakdown of democracy or engage in warfare. Our data show in marked contrast this widely held belief that the number of distinct ethnic groups in the country or any other algorithm concerning the relative size of group has virtually no impact on the likelihood of an ethnic uprising.

In the country where I did my original field research, everyone considered Somalia a country with ethnic fractionalization being one – if you were going to meet someone randomly in the population it would be another Somali, so it was coded as one and that therefore the prediction would be no civil war. Civil war breaks out and suddenly it's an ethnically fractionalized country, as people have looked at the clan structure – the Hawiyes, the Abgals, the Habar Gidirs, the Isaqs, the Dulbahantes, and others. So we code ex-post because we know that a civil war occurred in 1991.

Okay. What accounts for civil war? How much time do I have? Per capita income – country per capita income – is strongly significant in both a statistical and substantive sense. In our country-year data set, $1,000 less in per capita income is associated with a 45% greater annual odds of a civil war onset. Holding other variables to their median values, a country in the tenth percentile – that is, the bottom ten percent on country wealth – on income has a 17.7% chance of civil war outbreak in a decade as compared to a 10.7% chance for one at the median level of income and a 1% change in the 90th percentile. This relationship is eerily clear on this table, if you've got Superman eyes. The greatest percentage of civil wars in this period was in poor countries; in less than median of all countries that year, the number of civil wars – that's the middle – about 80 civil wars.  The average death for poor countries is 137,000 people killed in a civil war; for the richer countries, only 26 civil wars and the average death is about one-fourth the numbers. The greatest percentage of civil wars was in poor countries, and the magnitude of death per civil war in countries with less than the median per capita GDP is about four times greater than in countries with greater than the median GDP.

I can continue with this. These are the variables that have a significant relationship -- (interruption) – well, if you destroy me in the question period I can always say, well, you didn't see the …

So, GDP per cap is the overwhelmingly strong predictor of civil war and when you add GDP per cap to most statistical expressions, that almost all these other variables that you now cannot see, they wash away, especially democracy. Democracy and ELF have some positive relationship, but once you know about country wealth, these variables show no significant relationship.

We define the term that you've never learned in political science because we made up the term, it's called anocracy, and that by anocracy we mean – is a country that's relatively stable but is neither autocratic or democratic.  In the data set that we used that I needn't explain to you now – basically a plus-ten is a real strong democracy, a minus-ten is a completely strong autocracy. And these countries which are zero are neither here nor there; they're kind of hard to describe. Guatemala in '68, the Philippines in the mid-60s, Indonesia, Pakistan in the early 70s – countries that had some democratic procedures but they jailed their opponents with aplomb. When we ask if a country is an anocracy, we find that these regimes are 81% more likely to have a civil war outbreak than would be if the country were a full autocracy. So there is something about this "inbetweenness" that is capturing a situation which is a breeding ground for civil war.

What about new states? The odds of a civil war onset are 5.4 times greater in the first two years of a state's independent existence than in other years, which is a huge effect. Similarly, any change in regime in the country – that is, a change in the constitutional regime of a country – increases the odds by 70% that the country will have a civil war in three years.

Mountainous terrain; the more mountainous the country, the more likely a civil war. A country that is about half mountainous, with median values of all other variables, has a 12.4% chance of civil war in a decade. A similar country that is not mountainous at all has a 6% risk, which makes me nervous lecturing here next to the Rockies. Lief has been telling me they're ready to come down.

Finally, populations that are concentrated regionally and who populate not only cities but surrounding rural areas are far more likely to be engaged in sustained rebellion against the state than dispersed ethnic groups or urban-based groups. In the Minorities at Risk data set, group concentration of minority populations is the only group level variable, the only variable that concentrates on the characteristics of the group, that holds up as a predictor of civil war once you add Gross National Product. You can know anything about the culture of the group; the language of the group, the religion of the group, whether they're Muslims, whether they're Christians or whether they're Jews, whether they speak Somali or whether they speak English, all wash away and group concentration holds up.

Well, all I've given you are correlations. Standard answers to the causes of civil war focuses on the grievances suffered by minority populations with a straw breaking the camel's back theory of their outbreak. When grievances accumulate, minority groups have no choice but to rebel against oppressive regimes. Our alternative approach privileges the opportunity for successful insurgency. Insurgencies grow, we argue, not because they're needed or because they're wanted, but because they're easy. All the correlates of civil war are consistent with a perspective that portrays the cause of civil war to be the relative ease in getting one going and the high rewards under favorable conditions for doing so.

Low per capita income is linked to civil war onset in two distinct ways: first, you have to remember that it's not poverty itself that's doing that. We know that because countries which are highly unequal, which have impoverished zones in the country, are not prone to civil war if the country's GDP is high. So it's not poverty itself which is driving it, but poverty of the country.

First, it's a proxy for weak states unable to police their populations, thus allowing tiny insurgencies to prosper and grow. Since World War II, 98 new countries have emerged, mostly due to decolonization or imperial collapse. These now comprise 61% of the 161 countries that were in our data set. The probability that a civil war broke out in a given year in a given country was nearly twice as high for these new states compared to the older states. New countries tended to be institutionally weak with poorly trained armies and police forces. Their abilities to quell a rebellion are therefore limited. When facing a rebellion, their tendency has been to bomb insurgent areas indiscriminately and thereby to exacerbate rather than to ameliorate the violence, more likely to push violence past the 1,000 death threshold.

And let me make a comparison, a case that we've been speaking about a good deal, one with the greatest amount of grievances one can possibly imagine; that is, of Israel and the Palestinians, that it wasn't until 2001 that the Israeli-Palestinian civil war reached our data set to get 1,000 deaths. However, Congo in the last year and a half produced 2.5 million deaths. Weak countries, weak institutional environments, impoverished countries are countries which cause massive amounts of deaths. And even with high grievances in the case of Israel, the number of deaths, though each one precious, is significantly lower.

So, first, good institutions, even good army institutions – especially good army institutions – reduce the magnitude of death; second, poor countries provide little hope for economic success in the legitimate economy. Given the opportunity structure for young men entering the labor force, rebellion is far more attractive in poor countries than in rich ones. Inequality, as I earlier mentioned, is not relevant here, largely because in countries with high inequality young men from poor regions migrate to areas of rich regions. In contrast, in poor countries rebellion as a way of life becomes a more attractive economic plan for life than does the so-called legitimate economy. Young men who join rebellions get guns and ammunition, the opportunity to loot, and the honor of being part of an enterprise that is respected amongst one's peers and is held in awe throughout the world. The recruitment base for rebels far richer in poor countries, helps explain why poor countries are more susceptible to rebellion.

The other correlates of civil war also support this insurgency perspective. A mountainous country makes insurgency easier because mountains afford an opportunity for rebels to hide from the armies of the state. Recent independence, anocracy and regime change are all signals of state weakness which should, if our theory is right, provide advantage to insurgents in countering or hiding from state armies. Group concentration provides insurgents opportunities for hiding from state armies and what we call their regional base. Insurgents have an information advantage over the state in distinguishing informers from supporters, thus allowing them more efficiently to punish enemies and reward supporters – a key to successful insurgency. In sum, the conditions that make insurgency productive for insurgents rather than ancient hatreds, grievances, or cultural diversity have causal properties.

Let me say something about implications for policy. Because the breeding grounds for successful insurgencies are poor countries situated in bad terrain and beset with weak government, there is no quick fix to erase the conditions that make civil wars more likely. Furthermore, simple answers run into the hard reality of the world. In the short term, we can have no or little impact on per capita income and the fact of numerous poor and unstable states will remain with us for some time.

I don't know if you can interpret this, see this, but I'll try to explain it in English. Civil wars are indeed resistant to solution. Since 1945, there has been an average outbreak of 2.3 new civil wars each year, but only 1.7 ends each year. The average length of a civil war is about twelve or thirteen years; the average length of an interstate war about two or three. Because new wars erupt at faster rates than they get resolved, there has been a steady accumulation of unresolved and deadly conflicts throughout the world.

Civil wars erupt at regular intervals but they last a long time. Over the half-century we have been examining, the duration of civil wars has been increasing, and despite an increasingly active United Nations whose Secretary General Kofi Annan has for excellent reason won the Nobel Peace Prize largely for his efforts in resolving civil wars, successful solutions have been elusive.

I'd go through a section on attempts at successful solutions, but I'm going to just go to the final attempt.

The only handle on reducing the deaths caused by civil wars available to the international community is in peacemaking, peacekeeping and what is today called euphemistically transitional administration – it could be called trusteeship, or if you're more jaundiced, it could be called neo-imperialism. These tasks for the past decade have been increasingly assigned to the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Its record has been spotty at best, but there are hardly any alternatives, so the international community, through the acts of the Security Council, has been assigning important yet delicate tasks to the DPKO, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations.

Because of failures of DPKO missions in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Sierra Leone in which the DPKO stood helpless amid massive killings, the Secretary General seconded Lakhdar Brahimi, an internationally respected diplomat who is now a special representative to the Secretary General in Afghanistan, to recommend reforms. In September 2000, the Brahimi Commission Report was issued. This report, and most thinking inside the UN, has held to a grievance approach to civil wars, believing that the good officers of the UN can ultimately soften the hearts of government leaders to address the concerns that motivated the rebels.

Our analysis shows – by the way, I think the Brahimi Report is one of the finest documents ever to appear out of the United Nations and I urge you to go onto the net and to download it. It's a remarkable document to address one of the toughest problems of our age. Our analysis shows, however, that the rebels are motivated more by the rewards of insurgency than by the reforms of policy. In light of this interpretation, we argue that the UN's role as an honest broker is not sufficient to resolve civil wars. Peacekeeping requires a strong dose of counterinsurgency along with diplomacy. And despite recommendations in the Brahimi Report that the UN forces be prepared for what they call robust action, a euphemism for counterinsurgency, the UN is not well equipped to carry out such missions, nor is it capable of administering foreign governments that have collapsed due to counterinsurgency. In light of this analysis, the DPKO cannot and should not serve as the agent of the Security Council, running counterinsurgency operations and protogovernments.

Rather – and here's the direction of our thinking – the Security Council and the DPKO should jointly serve as, what we say, principals who contract out to leading states and regional organizations the dirty work of peacekeeping and transitional administration, the two principal tools of counterinsurgency. Like principals and contracts, the UN has an obligation to investigate how well its agents are performing their contracts and to publicize agency failures. Moreover, the principal, the UN – I think it should be the General Assembly, by the way – the principal will need to develop mechanisms to induce qualified agents to do the dirty work that counterinsurgency and transitional administration entail. Thus, the problem with the ICC, the stronger the ICC gets, the less the Security Council will be able to get troops to support these efforts. Nonetheless, the UN will need to monitor its agents so that they do not violate the human rights of the populations in whose names the insurgents are fighting. The implications of how to do this need to be drawn out and the crucial question over time, and one that the US and NATO are facing in spades in Kosovo, in Bosnia, Afghanistan, in East Timor, these are questions on how to administer transitional administration and counterinsurgency under the context of UN oversight.

But our concluding point here is that the cauterization of civil wars ought to be oriented towards making insurgencies harder rather than making insurgents happier.

(applause)

Mr. Robert Kaplan: Well, as a journalist, to me the true test of a good academic is when I hear things that reflect back what I've actually seen on the ground. And I think David's analysis was just extraordinary in certain parts, when he talked about democracy doesn't necessarily mean there won't be civil conflict, I remembered back to 1974 and 5 in a democratic Pakistan when the democratically elected leader Zulficar Ali Bhutto unleashed a war on the Belush tribesmen and killed thousands of people because it got him a short-term political benefit because of all the problems with the political party.

And I also think in the 1980s when the Atlantic Monthly ran excerpts from my articles that would later appear as Balkan Ghosts, I wrote that while there was all this, as I saw it, ethnic hatred in the former Yugoslavia which I reported not at a time of civil war but before the war in the 1980s when it was a time of peace, the real issue was what I called the problems of Communism, meaning the collapse of a Communist state that was lowering per capita income dramatically and relentlessly. In Yugoslavia every year I went – '81, '82, '83, right up to '89 – so you've got like kind of increasing poverty and that was it. It was like Communism was like the great preserver, as I put it. And, you know, these things do not track perfectly with what David said, they certainly complexify it and I think don't totally contradict it.

Anyway, as far as my take goes, keep in mind that the only serious futurology is the study of history. That doesn't mean that the past is repeated, it doesn't mean that you can predict the future from studying the past; all it means is that if you study the past you will be somewhat less surprised by what happens next. And that is the best that we can do, because this is not a science. We're dealing with human beings who are very unpredictable. And when I look at the past, based on what I see around the world today, the stark realization that comes up to me is that it is not poverty per se that causes violence and upheaval and disasters like September 11th; simply put, it is the very process of development itself. And probably the starkest example of that is Iran in the 1970s, where development was a fast, dramatic, influx of people into the cities. And what did it do? It provoked a toppling of a regime and a fundamentalist regime that replaced it.

Why is this so? And, by the way, let me say this is not an argument against foreign aid, it's not an argument that we shouldn't try to alleviate poverty. You know, increased foreign aid, alleviating poverty are all to the good, all help us with our relations with states bilaterally, helps us with our relationship with our allies, et cetera. It's just that we have to have this tragic realization that alleviating poverty may have absolutely no relation of any kind with stopping terrorism, or something like that. 

What does development mean? Why do I say development causes upheaval? Well, if you look at all the change of dynasties in China – the Ming, the King Dynasty, the tensions against the Ottoman Empire, the decade in Mexico before the civil war there, the decades in France before the French Revolution – what do you see? You see a pattern of economic development, of populations moving into the cities, classes emerging, groups coalescing, interest groups, professional groups that put all this pressure on this creaky old system that here and there collapse. What does development mean in our terms?

Well, let me use India as an example. Going back and forth to India for years, one thing that I realize and that other commentators have also written about is that one of the secrets for the success of Indian democracy is that it's had two things for a long time that you don't necessarily find; it had a back-breakingly poor peasant population for a long time that did not have that many – it was fairly easy to satisfy -- it didn't have all that many demands, relatively. But you could say, well, isn't that the same true of many poor countries in Sub-Sahara and Africa? The poor countries in Sub-Sahara and Africa, unlike India, did not have this vast and highly developed aristocratic and professional class that was able to man civil institutions left behind by the British. So you had two things – you had a big class, professional class, that could man bureaucratic institutions, and you also had a population that more or less – and I'm generalizing and all of that – didn't have all that many demands.

But what happened to India? India became an economic success story like Indonesia, like Nigeria, like Brazil, like so many other places I can name. And what does that mean, a success story? It means that people leave the age-old fatalistic existence of the village and they migrate into the city where on an economist's chart they may be wealthier but they're low-paid wage earners, they're living in shanty towns on the outskirts of cities and they suddenly have demands and ambitions and yearnings that never really existed before in their families' collective histories.

And that doesn't necessarily lead to civil war, it leads to conflict and often pressures. Here's the thing; it leads to pressures on creaky centralized bureaucracies that are the least dynamic force in their own country. Because the society itself, because of the process of development, is far more dynamic than the government that it's got to maintain. So that here and there, governments really get into trouble and you have these upheavals and insurrections and just the tumultuousness of our time. And it is precisely because of the great economic expansion of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s that have created middle classes and other classes in societies that never really had them to this extent, from South Africa to Nigeria to Mexico, to Indonesia, to Cote d'Ivoire, to Nigeria, that we can expect the next ten or twenty years to be very tumultuous. Whether they'll lead to civil wars or not, I don’t know. But there will be rebellions and there will be change, and a lot of this change will not come easily.

The best book that describes this, I think, is Sam Huntington's classic, Political Order in Changing Societies, 1968, Yale University Press, where he describes that as societies develop, as there is more education, there are more demands on government, governments change – sometimes they're overthrown – and that leads to more complex systems and more demands and more change and more tumult. So that if the process of development were easy and peaceful, history would not be so tragic.

Now, in the 1990s, we saw the collapse of a few marginal states here and there that frankly were not even regional powers or pivot states – Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Haiti, Rwanda, other places. This was like the fraying at the margins of the old European colonial system. And these states posed a real challenge to the international community. But as I said before, with all due respect, none of these places were big, they weren't major regional powers, they weren't very well-developed societies in terms of big professional middle classes. It's my worry that in the next ten or fifteen years, we're going to see weakenings – that's the word I want to use, weakenings – in bigger, more complex societies like Pakistan, Nigeria, and other places. And why is that? Why do I automatically assume that because there were problems in smaller states that we're suddenly going to see that in bigger states? I mean, how does that follow?

Five reasons I'd like to go into. And a lot of this is what I've seen on the ground as a journalist and also have read as a consequence of my curiosity. Demography; now, when people talk about demography, I find their statistics are way to general. I mean, frankly, whether the world population goes from six billion to nine billion or ten billion or eight billion doesn't really tell me much about what's going to happen in Cote d'Ivoire in two or three years; it doesn't even give me any insight whatsoever. So, I'm interested in more specific statistics, and in fact I'm interested in something very specific – youth bulges, what is commonly referred to as youth bulges. The FBI can get some sort of vague impressionistic sense of where crime rates are going in individual states and localities based on the percentage of the male youth population in that particular place relative to the rest of the population. When it goes up, there is more of a tendency for crime. As I said, none of this is absolutely correlative, but it provides a sense.

Likewise, in countries, if you look at TV, what one thing ignites so much political violence around the world, whether it's Indonesia, the Gaza Strip, riots in Karachi that I covered in the 1980s; most of this violence is perpetrated by males between the ages of 15 and 30, young males. So, if a society is going to have a larger and larger population of young males over the next ten or twenty years, it's a place to watch out for, it's a place to concentrate on. The top ten youth bulge countries in the world over the next ten years, according to the CIA, are all in Sub-Saharan Africa – Zambia, Kenya, Cote d'Ivoire, Zimbabwe, and a bunch of others that I can name. In other words, places that are already on the brink, already quite fragile.

But what are the next five, the 11 through 15? The Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria. So the Middle East is right behind in terms of the number of young males between the ages of 15 and 30 that any ruler, democratic or nondemocratic, is going to have to cope with, is going to have to provide some kind of jobs, educational opportunity, or something. And this sector of the population, though it's leveling off around the world because the rate at which the population is increasing around the world is descending, not going up, is still going to increase in a number of problematic countries around the world. And guess what? These are the countries that are already causing problems, and these are the countries that are going to be under the most demographic pressure in terms of youth bulges.

But, again, a journalist what you learn is to see a lot of things operating together. One thing in isolation doesn't really help you; it could be very distorting. And the other thing is urbanization. When people ask me, what is the cause of fundamentalism or militant Islam, one of the answers I give, it's a consequence of urbanization over the last few decades in the Middle East. Fifty years ago – the Middle East was not a very urban place fifty years ago. Karachi had a population of 400,000 in 1947; now it's 9 million. Tunis, Casa Blanca, Damascus – these were places of a few hundred thousand people; now Cairo is 12, 14 million, Tunis is 2 million. These places have all become big urban societies. And what has happened? People have migrated from the villages into these cities. And in the villages – and this is something I saw in Afghanistan in the 1980s – in the hill villages of Afghanistan women didn't have to wear veils often because everybody they saw was a relative of some kind.

But when they had to migrate into the urban refugee camps of Pakistan, suddenly they were among the anonymity of strangers and the veil came on. This is one little way in which religion was reinvented. What happened was that religion was reinvented in more starker, ideological terms in order to cope with the stresses of urban life in pseudo-Western environments with bad sewage, plumbing, karate movies, and all the worse refuse of Western culture that got to these places. And think about it, you know, Israel – Israel had a real crime problem with its Oriental immigrants in the '50s and '60s who came into development towns and many of them fell into juvenile delinquency. Why did that happen? Because they left behind their own culture but didn't really have a new one in this modernizing secular society.

But that didn't happen in the Arab world in the Middle East. The amazing thing about the Middle East is you can walk through the poorest quarters of Cairo, Tunis, Damascus, Karachi, and there may be political violence or the odd pickpocket in a tourist zone, but mainly these are some of the safest places in the world that I've encountered. So what happened? What happened was religion lived up to the challenge. It was able to change and reinvent itself in a way that kept the family structure together unlike in development towns in Israel.

But it had an ironic side effect; it provided a kind of fertile petri dish for the emergence of disease germs like terrorists. If you look at not just the September 11th terrorists but a lot of the other terrorists around the Middle East, you'll see that most of them come from poorly urbanizing environments, they're not poor kids from rustic, beautiful looking villages or anything. In other words, it's the problem of modernization, the stresses of modernization that's causing this.

So, more youth, more male youth, more bad urbanization and then you get resource scarcity. And again I want to be specific, not general. The resource scarcity that interests me most is potable water, the use of water. And even as 40%, or some such figure as that, of Arabs from Morocco to Iraq are 14 years old or younger. The amount of potable per capita water in many Middle Eastern societies is going to go down by almost half over the next 20, 25 years. And that is going to lead to more urbanization because there is going to be less water for irrigation.

So, all these things kind of feed together. And what do they feed together towards? Stop thinking of places like Jordan, Syria, Lebanon as states; see them as like grand, vast metroplexes, like great city states, almost like in Phoenician times. When I first went to Lebanon, Beirut was Beirut; now greater Beirut starts in the south near the Israeli border and continues up near the Syrian border. When I first went to Syria in the 1970s, you would drive for hours from Aleppo in the north to Damascus in the south, it was rural areas, beautiful scenery; now it's all closing in with urban development. It used to be that when you crossed the Syrian border into Jordan you drove a long way to Amman, and as soon as you saw Amman, very soon afterwards you were in downtown Amman. Well, now Amman starts an hour outside of Amman and the urban corridor goes right up near the Syrian border, it's expanding eastward and southward.

So that future leaders in all of these countries are going to have more and more the same problems as big city mayors. They're going to be involved in messy municipal thankless urban politics which actually is much more of a stress, much more of a challenge than the grand strategy of statesmen in more rural societies. Think of a New York City mayor governing like not five boroughs but ten or fifteen under much poorer conditions, with weaker infrastructure and you'll get the idea of some of the challenges people like a Nelson Mandela or Thabo Mbeki are under and are increasingly under.

Now, what I've noted so far are just background noises, just some – you know, a vague backdrop of events, things that give you some context of how to look at this stuff. But then there will be what's called sideswipes, just accidents, or seeming to be accidents, things we couldn't predict that came out of nowhere – AIDS in the 1980s and the devastating effect it's had on African societies in the late 1990s and now was a sideswipe; nobody in the 1970s could have predicted it.

When I look at sideswipes, I'm very interested in environmentally driven events that can cause a regime change. And I use the example of the 1992 Egyptian earthquake, where in the first 48 hours after the earthquake, the Al-Ikhwan Al-Moslemoon, the Muslim Brotherhood, responded fast and quick with first aid supplies and blankets. It wasn't much but it was more than the government of Egypt was doing because the president happened to be out of the country, and without the president nothing happened. Now, the president rushed back, got control of the situation, didn't do a bad job, but just think of a scenario where maybe if the government could not get things in order, maybe if the earthquake was worse, maybe if the alternative – you know, the opposition was even better, then you can kind of see – and when you think that all you need is a small drop in sea level to inundate the Nile Delta where most of the Egyptian population lives, you can just see what I mean when I say an unpredictable sideswipe. It's just an example; I'm sure you can come up with a lot of others.

And then, of course, there's the most destabilizing thing itself that's very hard for Americans to discuss, and that's democracy; that's democracy itself which can be a very, very destabilizing element. Now, let me be clear; I think a lot of our debates are unnecessary because we become the product, we become kind of the victims of two narrow definitions. The goal – if I had to define the central foreign policy goal of any American administration, Democrat or Republican, I would say it would be to expand the borders of historic liberalism. I don't mean liberal conservative, what I mean is what is historically considered a liberal society – protection of minority rights, individual expression, rule of law, in other words, what George Soros calls a civil society. And in many cases that means holding democratic elections, most cases even. But there are a fair number of exceptions around the world – and it's a big world, 193 countries, so thirty or so exceptions is a fair amount – where forcing elections in a specific place now would not lead to a more liberal society, it might even have the opposite effect. And that is where a democracy, elections can be very destabilizing.

The best example of this is Pakistan. There are two books coming out this month, one by a New Yorker writer, one by a BBC correspondent, both of which argue that whatever the problems with General Musharraf, he presents the only possible alternative to the expansion of the historic borders of liberalism in Pakistan. And the reason is that while past democratic regimes have just been – well, I'll give you an example. The regime that Mubarak overthrew, that of Nawaz Sherif, was a situation where Nawaz Sherif and his brother Shabaz were in the process of creating a theocratic dictatorship by buying off members of parliament in huge amounts, intimidating and beating up journalists and judges, smuggling billions of dollars out of the country, and meanwhile Karachi, through much of the 1990s, was in the midst of low-level ethnic violence between Mohajers, Pushtuns and others. Musharraf came in in a coup in October 1999 that most Pakistani civil society intellectuals supported. And it was because things were so bad they saw no alternative. Now, Musharraf has not been able to solve these problems, but at least he has spoken out on human rights, women's rights, and many other things that previous democratic governments did not even attempt to do to the same extent.

So, that's one example of this exception. Remember that Hitler came to power in a democratic process, so did Mussolini. Yes, they were both very messy democratic processes, but we should assume that democratic processes in developing countries are going to be just as messy with just as many back room dealings and minority parties as that that existed in Germany in the '30s and in Italy in the 1920s. And in many places where central power is eroding and breaking apart and you're getting more freer, open societies is occurring in places that have inflation rates and unemployment rates every bit as bad as Germany when Hitler came to power and Italy when Mussolini came to power. And the real issue is not always whether a country holds an election now or in six months; it's the size of the middle class, as I've seen it. Show me a place with a big middle class – and of course there are exceptions – and more or less I'll show you a place that's predictable, that's a decent investment for a foreign investor. But show me a place, even if it's had two or three elections, that almost doesn't have a middle class, and I'll show you a place that can erode or collapse in any moment.

Also, when we talk about dictatorships, be very, very careful; there are dictatorships and there are dictatorships. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the leader of Tunisia, is by definition a dictator. He's kind of a Putin, he's a security service heavy who took power in 1987 in Tunisia. And in that country – well, in the last thirteen years he increased the middle class from five to 60%. There are cyber cafes growing up all over Tunisia, and the so-called democratic opposition to him are composed of leftist Nazarites and Muslim fundamentalists.

That's just one little example how this is a difficult issue. And so I think what we're going to see in the next ten years – because military regimes also don't work, as we saw in the '50s and the '60s in Latin America and elsewhere – we're going to see many places that will be called democracies and we will go along with the lie for diplomatic reasons, but in fact they'll be various kinds of mixed hybrid regimes. And in the Middle East, I think we're going to see a lot of messy Mexico-style scenarios, from Morocco all the way to Iraq.

And what do I mean by that? I mean, mass societies with media where there's no longer a one- man "thugocracy" in control. But where the elite is breaking apart at the top you have various constituencies, and instead of the United States having to deal with one man, one telephone number, one fax machine, the way we dealt with problems in Jordan, in China and other places over the decade or two or three, we're going to have 40 or 50 political actors we're going to have to convince in each of those countries. Precisely because we're going to get more and more open societies because of the urbanization and change, the next generation of Arab and Middle Eastern autocrats are not going to have the luxury to govern as autocratically as the passing generation. But neither is it the case that these places are going to have well-developed institutions. We're going to get messy in-between scenarios.

And let me just close up with this: This may sound like a kind of, you know, just overwhelming difficult kind of scenario, but it's the way things have always been. And in all eras, there are eras of difficult, unwieldy transitions. And the way you deal with them I think is the way that the founding fathers dealt with them in the Federalist Papers. You deliberately cultivate a sense of tragedy in order to avoid tragedy in the first place. In the Federalist Papers, if you read all the sections on the Interstate Commerce Commission, and this and that, these guys are just sourpuss pessimistic aristocrats to an extent who are just going over every possible problem that could possibly arise and mulling over it; and as a result, many of those problems never did arise because they dealt with it through the system that they created. And so that the American Republic went on to become a people of great optimism precisely because we've all had the luxury of having our systems of government founded by people who thought tragically. And I think if we apply this to foreign policy and mix that with expanding the borders of historic liberalism, we're likely to make less mistakes than we normally would; and that's about the best that we can do.

And thank you so much, it's a pleasure to be here.

Professor Lee: Lief Carter is the McHugh Distinguished Professor of Leadership and American Institutions, and he is the organizer of this symposium. I believe he deserves a right to speak in his own symposium, don't you think? He will have some comments and then we'll go to questions.

Professor Lief Carter: Well, I would love to talk for ten or fifteen minutes, but I would love even more hearing your questions which have been so good for so long. I do want to make a brief statement which will turn into a question I think more for David, but maybe for Bob too.

There is a conventional widespread model we lay people have about the causes of horrors and it goes something like this; let me read a list to you first. The Inquisitions, the Holocaust, the slaughter of the Huguenots, the genocide of the Armenians, the killing of more than a million by the Khmer Rouge, Northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine, the Balkans, Rwanda, East Timor, the rape of Nanking, the Sepoy Rebellion, Waco and Oklahoma City, Chechnya, 911, Northern Nigeria, the slaughter of the Muslims and Hindus over the temple site in Ayodhya, India, suicide bombings in Palestine – the horrible list of the deliberate killing of men, women and children in almost every human culture is very long.

Second, the quote that I have quoted more often than any other in many years is from George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, where Caesar says, "and so to the end of history, murder shall breed murder always in the name of right and honor and peace until the gods are tired of the blood and create a race that can understand." Now, the popular model, I think the common model implicit in the list and the Shaw quote is there is something in human nature that causes us to be so brutal and violent. In fact, human violence often resembles the violence that chimpanzees do on one another that Jane Goodall describes, and Frans de Waal does too.

Now, what seems to be a common denominator, if there is one, in that list I just read is something like righteousness and humiliation; it's not religion, but it's religious fundamentalism. It's not a political philosophy, but it's a rigid – Communism, Stalinism are good examples of a political ideology in which there is only one right and therefore one righteous way to do things. And when people are righteous, their chances for being humiliated go way up. I've read a lot of material lately suggesting that humiliation is a major factor in reaction and anger and massacre and rebellion.

Now, the question for David I think primarily is, is humiliation – the righteousness/humiliation cycle – in any way measurable? If so, is it causal or might this humiliation factor – righteousness/humiliation factor – simply be a psychological fact of life that leaders, sinister and cynical political leaders use to exploit the masses for their own self-interested ends?

Professor Laitin: Let me take a couple of steps back before I address more directly this important question. I did some research based on a view that life in Africa in the post-colonial era was one of tribal warfare, continuous breakdown and a Hobbesian world which was impossible to traverse without danger. And what I did is I counted every single ethnic group in Africa and then asked the question, what is the probability it was at significant violence with its neighboring group in the past year? The probability of such a violent outbreak was .00000 – the zeros went far longer than the 1. And the overwhelming situation for people living in Africa is to be at peace with their neighbors. And we tend to focus upon the disasters, forgetting about how large the denominator is – the numerator is the number of disasters and the denominator is the number of groups that could be at war with each other. And so we tend to pick on these fifteen, eighteen, nineteen ugly situations and generalize about humanity from them. And I think this gives us an improper and statistically incorrect view of the human condition.

Now, the more direct answer to your question is that humiliation and hatred have been universals, and I would agree with Bob Kaplan here that in the past 400 years sets of institutions have been created – you can call them liberal institutions – which have made it much more difficult for people to just massacre populations at will the way settlers, for example, in the United States did in regard to Native Americans 100 years ago. It's much more difficult to do that with liberal institutions and this helps explain why the probability of dying a violent death in the 20th century is significantly lower than the probability in the 19th century, and significantly lower still than the 18th century, because of a growth of liberal institutions which have in a sense reined in many of these feelings that people have and make them express them, for example, at Denver Bronco games, rather than in massacres.

So, I would say that the view you gave of the world is filled with this, is this something universal? The answer is, the world isn't filled with it; and second, that institutions have been built to modulate it.

Mr. Kaplan: Let me just quickly add on to David that yes, most places in Africa or elsewhere are at peace, but that's not what foreign policy problems are about. Foreign policy usually engages a place when there is a problem and the journalists follow suit. The business class flights to the southern cone of Latin America up until the Argentinean crisis were just packed, there was so much business going on there between the US and the southern half of South America. But it wasn't a foreign policy problem so you never read about it, you never read about this great success story up until that point, up until the Argentinean crisis. So, what overwhelms government – you don 't need 51% of states in a given area to be having insurrections or this or that; all you need is enough international problems that cause policy makers to be inundated or overwhelmed.

Quoting again from Sam Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies, he said the task is not to hold elections but to build institutions. There is a difference. And the United States, ironically, we inherited our institutions to a great degree from Britain. And the big American debate in 200 years has always been, we've been suspicious of government and how to limit the power of government. But in many parts of the world the problem is the opposite; how to build legitimate institutions from scratch out of the ruins of institutions that were legitimate for one reason or another. And this is really the great challenge, that often wily rulers, whether it's an Ataturk or a ben Ali in Tunisia or hopefully a Musharraf in Pakistan – that is their ultimate challenge. And some of them will be liberal-minded without being democratic; some will be democratic without being liberal-minded, and there'll be other mixes of the two.

Professor Lee: We'll take a question from the floor.

Speaker: I have a comment for Mr. Kaplan and a question for Dr. Laitin. My comment is that some of the early factors that you observed, patterns that you wanted to keep track of – you talked about male youth between the ages of 15 to 30 and then talked about the youth bulge repeatedly, and I would just observe that your use of language is a little bit obscuring, that maybe really you're talking about the male bulge in those countries. So, it's an interesting pattern, the way in which gender becomes obscured if there are differences in terms of gender participation in social structures, economic structures and political structures. So that's an observation.

My question then for Dr. Laitin is, did you in your research do any gender-specific differentiation of participation in civil wars? It seems like my hunch that women's social construction tends to mitigate against participation because of the lack of access of political and economic power to the means of war. But I wonder if you've seen any changing patterns among gender participation, in particular of women, in the last 20 years as liberal political changes in their social participation have changed. So, I'm curious if you've noticed any patterns that are specifically related to gender.

Mr. Kaplan: Well, I just want to say that I'm uncomfortable using the term "male bulge" in front of audiences.

Professor Laitin: Let me take this opportunity to say that I too have been immensely influenced by Sam Huntington's work and that if I had known that Bob Kaplan was going to give those remarks I would have mentioned that we did our best to add percentage of the male population between the ages of 18 to 25 into our equations in every way we possibly could. And once controlling for GDP, it had no predictive value for civil war.

And also this view that development causes – and this comes out brilliantly in Sam Huntington's 1968 book, development and rapid development causes modernization breakdowns and breakdown of civil order. And his belief was you needed something like the Leninist Party to contain the excesses of rapid economic development. But fortunately for those of us who like wealth rather than poverty that rapid economic development is associated with lower probability of civil war at any stage. For any continent, every single continent, the more rapid the economic development, the less the number of deaths.

Gender. The only observation we have is some recent research which isn't directly in my research project – and this comes mostly from Africa – is that women tend in all societies which are exogamous – that is where you marry outside your own group – women tend to move to the home areas of their husbands in almost all – although not all – almost all African societies. And so when you do studies of prejudice – ethnic prejudice or ethnic hatred and these kinds of matters, openness to outsiders – the women are much more open to their neighbors because they're likely to be – their parents are likely to be there than are men, so men tend to be more inclusive about tribal loyalty than are women and are more willing to participate in violent conflicts that cross villages. But that's the only data I've seen that speaks exactly to the issue you raised.

Speaker: Since Richard Nixon's decided I guess that we were going to not fight the wars that we're engaged in by ourselves but we're going to use the countries in which they were fought and announced his doctrine in Guam, I think it was, the amount of arms sales that has taken place in the United States, Israel, Germany, France seems to have increased astronomically. And recently the Soviet Union has overtaken us, I guess, as the number one arms seller in the world. What role do arms and arms sales play in relation to poverty in places like the Congo, and what kind of role do they have in affecting foreign policy in democracies? And I think the question goes to both gentlemen, if it's clear what kind of thing I'm trying to get at.

Mr. Kaplan: No. I think it's an excellent question. First of all, keep in mind that all of these factors, what's interesting is how they relate with each other, not what they do or don't do in isolation. And in many places where I've covered there hasn't been a civil war but there's been a lot of instability that puts pressure on rulers to do this and that, and makes it harder for them to govern.

In many places around the world I've noticed a few things that are visually obvious; a lot of poverty, a lot of guns, a lot of unemployed youths with no prospects, cities that are overwhelmed with immigrants from the countryside, often from people coming in from other countries, Burkinabe in Abidjan, in Cote d'Ivoire. And in some places, this will have an effect in causing insurrection, but what it does in all the cases – think of it this way – it makes the margin of error – it increases the margin of error for any leader in any developing country and it narrows the margin of success. So it just makes it harder; it's becoming harder and harder to govern in many, many countries around the world.

And what this gets to is, it's very interesting; I covered Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, backpacking all through there during the war against the Soviets. And even in the heyday of Afghan central government, when Zahir Shah ruled the place – malaria was on the point of being eradicated – what that meant was that the central government controlled the main cities, a handful of towns and the ring road connecting them, but there was still very little government in many of the villages.

So because there is so much pressure on governments more and more, we shouldn't see democracy in terms of elections but also in terms of decentralization. The word warlord can be very misleading. I've spent days with many so-called warlords on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier and much of their time is spent adjudicating divorce issues and family custody issues, trying to raise money for schools, this and that. Because pressures on government, because the issues you raised are getting worse and worse, one of the solutions will be more and more decentralization.

Professor Laitin: Let me make two points to add to this perceptive question, which is absolutely right; and I say perceptive because it fits in precisely with this insurgency perspective that I'm trying to develop. In the end of civil wars, if soldiers are allowed to come back with their arms, they sell them or use them and the probability of insurgency goes way up. After the Afghanistan war, Soviet soldiers were allowed to bring their guns back, sold them to buy gold to Georgians, to Tajiks, and to Chechnyans with egregiously awful consequences. So, on the one hand – and after the United States' Civil War, by the way, Grant allowed the Southern Army to go back with its arms and they in Louisiana and Mississippi joined in militias to overthrow reconstruction governments as terrorists bands; something that you didn't learn in high school, I bet.

On the one hand, the arms that are sold by soldiers after civil wars do propagate future civil wars. There's a second story which takes a little bit longer, but only to put it in a thumbnail sketch is that the kinds of arms the United States, China, Czech Republic and others want to sell to third world countries are appropriate arms for interstate war. When used for civil war, however, they cause more insurgence than they actually put down insurgencies. And for reasons that will take me too long to get into, basically having to do with kickbacks to governments -- governments and militaries want to use these weapons and buy these weapons which governments like the United States are happy to sell, and their inappropriate use of those weapons for civil wars creates larger insurgencies rather than puts them down. So the inappropriate sales of interstate weapons to tin pot dictators exacerbates civil wars and adds to the magnitude of deaths.

Speaker: My question is, Dr. Laitin said that the UN should contract out its agents because the organization, the UN, that's currently running like the peacekeeping operations isn't working, but who are those agents going to be? I mean, it's obvious that the United States really doesn't want to take – at least currently, under the current Bush Administration – undertake the role of international peacekeeper. I mean, with the exclusion of Afghanistan now – they're sort of doing it on the fringe unofficially – who would do this, which countries, which states would be willing to do it that would be acceptable to the international community?

Professor Laitin: I've wrestled with this question for a long time and the answer I give is that we're going to have what might be called post-modern imperialism, that there will be a lead nation or a lead regional organization like a UK, a US, or Russian Federation, that will in a sense be the principal agent. But the troop contributing countries, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Jordan, and many other countries that now supply 75% of the troops to peacekeeping operations, will be under the command of the lead nation, but not acting autonomously from it. And then there will be a congeries of international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, which now run in these places like East Timor or Somalia or Haiti without any central command whatsoever – and this includes organizations like OSCE but also Save the Children Foundation. All these foundations will have to be put under the aegis of the lead nation. So the lead nation would take the responsible role of coordination but would not take the role of supplying most of the troops or most of the agency support. And it's the coordination of this effort, under a single agent reporting to the principal – that is, the United Nations General Assembly – that we call post-modern imperialism.

Mr. Kaplan: Can I take a stab at that? Keep one thing in mind, that the world peacekeeping can be a bit deceptive to people because it sounds like they're not real soldiers. But peacekeepers have to do the same thing as war makers – they have to monopolize the use of force in a given geographical area, which means they have to be willing to kill if necessary, which means they need an esprit de corps in the same way that the best armies do. And this is why towards the end of his tenure former ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrook really kind of scolded the UN and said, you'd better get your act together as peacekeepers, you know, completely reinvestigate why UN peacekeeping operations haven't worked. And the reason is obvious; it's because the US is a country of only 280 million people in a world that's six billion going on nine billion. We cannot run the world, but we can have greater influence in a positive way by projecting our power through international organizations. So a UN that has peacekeepers, that can monopolize the use of force in the same efficient ruthless way as other countries' armies is going to be a benefit to us.

Specific example – Sierra Leone. If you look at Sierra Leone's history over the last seven or eight years, what you see is there were times of peace where institutions were being built, but who was providing the peace for mercenaries? A group of South African mercenaries for two or three years, then a group of British mercenaries. And each time the mercenaries were pulled out, guerilla forces came into Freetown and they killed a lot of innocent men, women and children because the mercenaries monopolized the use of force. And because only they could use the force, it allowed people, individuals, to get on with their daily lives in a place where there were no usable institutions.

So we've learned from the lesson. Now, after we've saved Sierra Leone yet again, this time the monopolizing use of force – those people were not pulled out – you know, British commandos, Nepalese Gurkas, etc., are there providing that kind of element, that kind of Hobbesian Leviathan element to provide a breathing space of years for institutions to emerge upward. And this is a kind of variant of the kind of neocolonialism or whatever that David mentioned.

Speaker: I have a question, and this may be something that you didn't put into your presentation but wrote in your paper. Do you think that – I mean, based on the data that you've presented today, it seems like an equally convincing explanation that – I mean, the variables that you found significant were state weakness variables. And it seems likely that state weakness is an effective, another lurking variable – for example, grievance, or something like that, and that the state becomes weakened and that constitutions are overthrown and that you have this halfway transition from autocracy to democracy; and that that's part of the road to civil war, rather than a cause of civil war. And you called it a correlate and then you called it a cause. And I was wondering if perhaps the reason that all the other factors aren't robust against that factor is that it's some sort of an index of the other factors, that democracy and first worldness in general are very important, and that instability is an index of grievances.

Professor Laitin: That's an extraordinarily subtle question, and it's entirely possible you can never rule this out. You do your best to see in the examination of the particular data points and the narratives you tell about particular cases, whether the grievances could have been the cause of the instability which was then the cause of the instability which was the cause of the civil war. And so after you do the statistical analysis, there is virtually no way that you can rule out what we call endogeneity, the effect being the cause, but by examination of particular cases. And what we tend to find is that the weakness of government or the low GDP in countries that are newly independent, where they haven't had enough time even to create grievances of the minority populations, are the ones most vulnerable. And that many times the grievances that we see have been low-level grievances for a long time where you've had strong governments and weak governments. And then when there is a particularly opportune time for insurgents to move – let's say, with the death of Franco – they'll come in and organize and then bring up the ancient grievances that they've had against Spanish centralization and help recruit new ETAs with this kind of justification. But the grievances have been for a long time; the opportunity was the key factor which allowed them to exploit it.

So I think it's possible to tell a story with the grievances being the cause, but once you do that and you just run the grievances independently of the weakness, you find that you can't get any statistical significance at all. Please come back on this.

Professor Lee: I think I want to accommodate these three questions over here, and then we probably need to end this session; I would really like to do that. I'm sorry to interrupt this obviously interesting conversation.

Speaker: This series makes me sorry I took engineering.

Professor Laitin: I wish I had. 

(laughter)

Speaker: There are so many variables in all this and the one that came up so strongly to me was poverty. I travel a lot in a lot of countries, I happen to teach. But the big thing that seems to be missing, or I should say – I'm sure you have it in the back of your head or somebody is doing it – that is a study on the effect of television on all these things, television, cell phones, email, all these things – the internet. Notice how the Taliban, in order to control the people, pulled away the television. When you go to a South American little village there, it used to be poor people never really saw rich people very much; they knew they were there – like when I was a kid we were in poverty, but we never really saw the rich people. Today, they see it on television all the time, they see a program on a kitchen wax or a faucet or soap, but they're seeing how the other people live. And therefore, you can't keep people ignorant anymore. This lack of ignorance – I'm not saying stop television, but it's changed everything; it's changed our view of religion, it's changed our view of everything about us.

Mr. Kaplan: That's an excellent observation; let me just add some of my own. One of the things I always noticed about Israel and the West Bank is that Palestinian Arabs speak Hebrew, they read Mareeb, Yediot, Ha' aretz, and they watch Israeli television. And Palestinian Arabs do not compare themselves to the amount of freedom they have with Yeminis or Saudis or Iraqis; they watch Israeli television and they see this extraordinary free upper middle class life and they compare themselves with that. So, to a degree what I notice, it's like, you know, the inti-fada, especially the first one, was to some degree a kind of a revolt of rising expectations because that was the method of comparison, which would have been impossible without television.

Another issue about television is, without television you don't really have mass society, in one sense. You may have had many big cities in the Arab world that were urban, sophisticated, with a kind of developed class structure, but until you had like a common television channel, like Al Jazeera, you didn't really have a mass society. So that with television now you have the possibility of instant anger kind of erupting, you know, an instant feeling of grievance depending upon how a story is covered; rumors can circulate more freely, the truth can circulate more freely, dependent upon the professionalism of the reporting, how it's slanted. So television now kind of is another destabilizing element, another destabilizing element of development.

Professor Laitin: You know, George Soros, who should get a Nobel Peace Prize, I think, in the 1980s distributed email to everyone in Eastern Europe who could possibly use it. And many people think that with access to email it made it much more difficult for the state to massacre populations because the whole world would know in ten minutes. So, in a sense, it holds states back from rapaciously murdering their populations if the whole world can find out by running to an internet café. So maybe if you put television on the right side of the equation, its both bad and good effects, and it would sort of wash out. So it's something that has to be carefully examined, thread by thread.

Speaker: There has been much discussion today, particularly at this part of the symposium on – okay, well, just this part is what the question is really about – on the role of the United Nations and what to do after an insurgency has developed, to bring in peacekeeping forces or whatever. But my question is about what to do to alleviate the – what are seen as causes of civil war, things that make it more likely for something like that to happen, particularly what can the United States do? Can it do anything to help by changing its policies in some fashion?

Mr. Kaplan: All right, quickly. Look, the United States is not going to be able to micromanage peace and development in 190 countries of the world, or even the 30 or so that are in trouble. To expect that is just to expect too much from any nation's foreign policy, no matter how enlightened it may be; it will simply exhaust itself. However, the United States, or any great power, I think can intervene best and most wisely when it intervenes in places where a strategic self-interest crosshatches with a moral or humanitarian motive. In other words, so where we get a bigger bang for the buck, where if you intervene here you kind of extend your power in the region, you set an example.

Let me give you an example. In the 1990s, there were mass human rights violations, you could call it ethnic cleansing, in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and in Bosnia. The United States intervened in only one of those cases. And though the reasons given were moral, there were issues of power behind the scenes. Because by intervening – because Bosnia was directly related to the further existence of NATO, to the credibility of NATO, to the security of Central Europe, and it simply was more important in a Western power calculation than those other issues I told you. So although we cannot intervene everywhere and fix things everywhere, here and there we can make a difference, but we're going to have to choose; that's the hard part. And while development assistance, foreign aid programs, et cetera, can gradually alleviate and make things better generally, it's not going to help us in the short run.

Professor Laitin: It's a very astute observation to see that I talked about cauterization but not prevention without any justification whatsoever. When the Brahimi Report mentioned prevention, their idea was to use statistical stuff like I've been playing with and figure out the countries most susceptible to civil war and do conflict prevention exercises there. And then what they realized was third world countries started going crazy saying, nothing doing. Can you imagine our country being named as one that's susceptible? There would be immediate capital flight as everyone would take their money out of the country as quickly as possible. We've been consecrated by the United Nations as a country likely to have a civil war, and therefore it might cause the very conditions it predicted.

So the kind of thing we like to do in medicine – that is, to have everybody check to see whether it's more susceptible to civil war and work on prevention. Brahimi got stuff thrown in his face for even suggesting that this should happen from the countries of the group of 77, the third world countries in the United Nations.

Professor Lee: The final question.

Speaker: Well, this is a sobering topic to bring up, I didn't quite realize I was going to be batting clean-up for this discussion, but my question is concerning you guys' thoughts on the possibility of a World War III. Knowing the history – since we are discussing the causes of war – knowing the history of how the first two got going, and then also knowing our current backing of Taiwan, Russia's backing of Iraq, you know, things that are going on these days are sort of US against the world policy of us wanting to go take out Saddam – I'm just kind of curious. What do you guys think? Do you see this happening again in this sort of new world order? Can another world war happen, or have things changed enough that it is just sort of civil, as we have been talking about, or small interstate wars?

Mr. Kaplan: All right, very quickly. I think barring a great war between the US and China or something like that, many small wars will not necessarily impede global cooperation because the very fact of the emergencies themselves will put pressure on international institutions to enlarge and deal with them. Historically, though, I would say that you tend to prevent great conflicts by arguing in terms of an enlightened self-interest rather than in moral absolutes because when you argue in terms of moral absolutes, you're basically saying anyone that disagrees with you is immoral and therefore illegitimate and you have a greater chance of conflict. That's why I get very nervous when I hear neoconservatives bash China about not being democratic; of course it's not democratic.

But China is developing little by little through investment and this and that. You know, the elites in control in China are simply not – they're like a bunch of guys on a magic carpet with a volcano going up beneath them. Precisely because they were so successful in raising the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people in China over the past 20 years since Dung Shao Ping's new economic policy, they've risen expectations to a point that they cannot control. China will not be able to remain as autocratic, and we should conduct the policy more in the nature of self-interest with China – their self-interest, our self-interest – where we can compromise to kind of ease upward the historic liberalism in China rather than engage in moral absolutes about holding elections and things.

Professor Laitin: In our data, interstate wars are becoming defunct. I haven’t a clue as to why or whether this is going to hold for a longer time, so I claim I have no way to answer this. But you've been an incredibly sophisticated audience, and thank you so much.

Mr. Kaplan: Thank you very much.

Professor Lee: Thanks to both of our panelists and to Lief. Tomorrow morning we're here, Lief, is that right, at 9:30, for the final panel of the symposium. I thank you all for staying so long after a very long day and I welcome you all back tomorrow. Thank you.

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