Cuts and a ring fence

OK, the MoD and DFID are talking to each other in ‘a working group of officials and military personnel’ but insiders have apparently described the two sides as miles apart, which is the language used for negotiations between adversaries.

With the MoD under enormous budget pressure and overseas aid ring fenced against cuts, and with the commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid set to be fulfilled this year while the military continue to downsize, it’s hardly surprising that a spat is unfolding within Whitehall. And in politics, this is also a divisive issue within the coalition, with many Conservatives opposing the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for 0.7, as I’ve previously noted. And, of course, the NGOs are circling their wagons, insisting that every penny of ODA is spent on helping the world’s poor.

the rules

Before the heat gets the way in the light, we could try for a little clarity. There are guidelines, agreed by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, by which the government is bound, as it has repeatedly stated. They’re called guidelines but regard them as rules.

The most relevant bits say as follows:

• Military aid: No military equipment or services are reportable as ODA.  Anti-terrorism activities are also excluded.  However, the cost of using donors’ armed forces to deliver humanitarian aid is eligible.
• Peacekeeping: Most peacekeeping expenditures are excluded in line with the exclusion of military costs.  However, some closely-defined developmentally relevant activities within peacekeeping operations are included.

Are we clear? Collapsing the text a bit: “No military services” may be paid for by ODA except “using donors’ armed forces to deliver humanitarian aid.”

So if one part of the UK government wants to charge another part for flying in aid in the wake of an earthquake or in the midst of a war, it may do, and it may count that internal transfer as part of ODA.  Further, some “Closely defined developmentally relevant activities” are legitimately part of ODA, such as the role military personnel take in security sector reform or in disarming and demobilising former combatants after civil war.

However, broader peacekeeping and conflict prevention tasks employing the armed forces are not chargeable as ODA.

Trying it on

The truth is that the military are not going to find many of their activities – and none of the really big ticket items – that can be covered by ODA while sticking to the rules. The charge that rather desperately, under heavy financial pressure, and used to more lavish treatment under the previous Labour government, the MoD is casting around for ways of blunting the next cuts and, in that mood, is trying it on with the aid budget, as senior Lib Dem Sir Menzies Campbell MP has said, sounds just about on the mark

Getting the aid through, yes. Some other very specific activities, yes. For the rest, no.

There is a proposal that DFID should pre-pay for flights on military aircraft. That probably won’t wash either – or would only stand a chance of washing if the MoD would give back unused cash far enough before the end of the financial year for it to be recycled through the aid budget. To make this manoeuvre possible, the extra accounting measures will probably cost so much to get straight that you might as well not bother with the side-step in the first place. Far easier, I would have thought, just to pay when you go. And if the MoD response is that then they might not have the aircraft and aircrew available, DFID or the aid NGOs would have to charter flights from somewhere else.

Call it off

The MoD and a number of Conservative politicians have eyed the DFID budget (which at about £11 billion is about a quarter of the MoD’s £46 billion this year and £44 billion next year) and have raised expectations among aid sceptics that the money could fund activities they find more congenial.

Frankly, they have raised the stakes over a prize that – unless rules are actually broken – will turn out to be really rather small. However much the MoD manages to charge for flights, it’s not going to solve their budget problems.

Development Secretary Justine Greening and her officials can make sympathetic and cooperative noises but, again on condition rules are respected, they neither need nor can do much to help. So the engine of debate will roar on but the gears of policy won’t be engaged.

In the course of it, as generals fall into long-outdated stereotypical mode and harrumph and snort about humanitarian aid, the MoD risks making itself look somewhere between ridiculous and callous, chasing hard after not very much at the expense of doing good. My advice: call it off. Now.

____________________________________

NB: This article was edited after being first posted, to correct some typos and to source and make more accurate the information on the relative size of DFID and MoD budgets. DS

I was in Washington last week and was queuing for my frappucino when my eye was caught by the following headline half way down the front page and over in the right hand column in last Friday’s New York Times:

“Wall St. Redux: Arcane Names Hiding Big Risk”

No, I didn’t know what it meant either but some instinct linked “Wall St” and “Risk” and told me that, somewhat nervily, I wanted to read it. My jittery instinct was handsomely repaid by the first sentence:

“The alchemists of Wall Street are at it again.”

In a way that’s all you need to know. After those nine words that spell another looming disaster, stop reading and phone your MP, Congressman, deputy, representative. And if you are one of those, convene a debate or a committee, or pass law or get someone fired but for God’s sake do your job.

For that very small handful of readers who are still with me, let’s read on:

“The banks that created risky amalgams of mortgages and loans during the boom – the kind that went so wrong during the bust – are busily reviving the same types of investments that many thought were gone for good. Once more, arcane-sounding financial products like collateralized debt obligations are being minted on Wall Street.”

Same people who did it before and with the same instruments – other things being equal, I see no reason to expect the outcome to be much different. And lying behind it, says the NY Times, is the same sense of opportunity and optimism that drove the credit bubble in the first place. As the article also points out, the resurgent popularity of bundling debt and sharing out the risk among many investors shows how these “structured financial products () have largely escaped new regulations that were supposed to prevent a repeat of the last financial crisis.”

Their re-emergence suggests that banking reform has barely got started and banking regulation remains as chronically weak as ever.

Three thoughts occur. The first is that I am not quite sure whether the time I have spent over the past four or five years getting my head round the arguments of luminaries such as Robert Peston, Martin Wolf and Philip Coggan is now well rewarded or just a damn waste. At least I have a sense (thanks to Peston) of how the idea of these credit instruments of spreading risk was fulfilled all too wonderfully, so that the risk was actually carried by hundreds of millions of people beyond the investors. What was not borne out was the idea, probably no more than wishful thinking, that spreading risk meant the price if the loans went bad would be thinned out. Far from it, it has been heavy and widespread. And I understand (thanks to Wolf) how this is part of generating an enormous financial imbalance in the world economy, so that our European and North American propensity to spend is wholly dependent on China’s propensity to save. Sadly, if they stop saving and start spending it will screw them (by destroying their markets) as badly as it will screw us (by leaving us with nothing to spend). And beyond Wolf I now know (thanks to Coggan) that the financial imbalance reflects some much deeper economic imbalances, with deeper roots, that will take more far-reaching reforms to fix than politicians think they can get the public to support.

So I’m wiser than I was. But I have to say that “redux” headline took me by surprise.

The second thought is about language. Why are bankers allowed to get away with calling credit arrangements that have wrought and in all probability will wreak widespread destruction on economies, livelihoods and lives by the name of “structured financial products”? Why can they label things that have removed job security from untold millions of people and are denying a secure future to young people in so many countries “securitization”? Orwell took us into this in 1984 but that great socialist erred by thinking it was the state that would destroy the language; he never thought bankers would be to blame.

Of course, back in the 1940s when he wrote 1984, a banker was a very different being.

And the third thought was about what happened in the USA last week, for while I was there the front pages and the airwaves were dominated by the Boston Marathon bombing, the manhunt, the shoot-out and the wider ramifications. It was a strange time to be there, yet also not only moving but even in some way rewarding, as a nation spent a considerable amount of time, thought and energy to address how it could be that two young Chechen men, lost in the wild seas of America, could do such a thing.

I make no argument that there is any connection between the background conditions, let alone the motives and thinking, that led to the crime in Boston and the re-emergence of destructive loan activity by the big banks in the USA. I just wonder where on a comparative moral scale you put the two young men and the multiple confusions that led to their crime, compared with the mostly young-ish members of the USA’s social and economic elite (and ours won’t be far behind, I’m sure) who are setting out on a very different yet also profoundly destructive path.

References:

• Nathaniel Popper, “Wall St. Redux: Arcane names Hiding Big Risk,” New York Times, April 19, 2013
• Robert Peston and Laurence Knight, How Do We Fix This Mess? (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2012)
• Martin Wolf, Fixing Global Finance (New Haven & London, Yale UP, 2009)
• Philip Coggan, Paper Promises (London, Allen Lane, 2011)

The fable of the palace in Kathmandu

There is a story, probably apocryphal, about a moment some eight or so years ago when international aid donors began to realise that they needed to be more responsive and effective in conflict countries. Adopting the terminology that these countries were fragile states, they decided to pilot a new approach. To do this, since aid is a government-to-government affair, they needed some fragile states to agree to do the aid recipient side of the piloting. One choice was Nepal, which seemed appropriate since there was a decade-long civil war still raging, corruption was rampant, development was stuck in neutral and the king had just declared absolute personal rule.

And thus, so the story goes, an aid official took the invitation to the palace door asking the absolutist monarchy to take part in the programme as a fragile state. Whereupon the palace door was slammed shut on him.

Regard it as a fable of the dilemmas international aid donors face. They know it’s hard to support development in conflict-affected and unstable states. But how do you get the government that is part of the problem to become instead part of the solution?

The fable suggests you don’t do it by telling the government of a fragile state what condition it’s in and what it ought to do.

Dialogue and deal

A much better approach is to listen to the voices in those countries and find out where and with whom there is enough of a shared agenda to move forward together. That means a dialogue to start and an agreed course of action moving forward. And for the donors, it means agreeing not to take the lead.

That’s the path that has been taken with the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. It brings the g7+ group of governments of conflict-affected countries to the table

along with donor governments, inter-governmental agencies and civil society organisations. Its major product so far is the New Deal arrived at in November 2011. Progress is being assessed at a global meeting of the New Deal partners in Washington on 19 April. It’s potentially a decisive moment.

For, nearly a year and half on from signature, the New Deal is approaching the point where it either delivers or fades, to be replaced in a few years’ time by another attempt.

Inspiration and aspiration

The New Deal sets out ways of working for both donors and recipients of development aid and indicators for judging progress. It is currently being piloted in seven countries – five in Africa and two in Asia. Initial work in the pilot phase focuses on what are known as fragility assessments.

These assessments are done by the conflict-affected aid recipient.  They offer an analysis of each of the conflict-affected countries to see how they do on five Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals: political inclusivity, the economic foundations, citizens’ access to justice, security, and the ability of government to raise tax revenues and provide public services.

In principle, there is something here that is not just positive but positively inspirational. Government of conflict affected countries analysing themselves with civil society participation to report on how they are doing and where they need to direct their efforts next: a few years ago, this was the stuff of dreams.

On the other side of the deal, the donor governments buy into the strategy for addressing these issues that is identified by the recipient and support it rather than backing their own pet projects and approaches. And together the two sides undertake to act with greater transparency and accountability, as evidenced by having civil society involved throughout.

Following through – or not

The intentions have been set out, very many (though not yet all) of the details are in place, and yet there is a growing feeling that it is time for the New Deal to produce. Progress in the pilot countries is zero-to-stalled at worst, slow at best. Slow progress is all very well if it’s because of a great deal of careful consultation. It is not at all well if it results from simply not doing anything about it for months at a time.

Of course, nobody should think it’s easy to follow through on the New Deal commitments. The lesser problems are on the donors’ side. The question there is whether what’s been agreed at headquarters level and in international meetings has traction in the country offices.

Shifting out of default mode is a big problem for all institutions and their career professionals – but this challenge has been taken on reasonably well in many different contexts before. In part the issue is whether the political leadership is engaged; in part it’s a question of institutional detail and seeing through the necessary changes in such things as staff development and incentive structures.

In the conflict countries, change is tougher. Governments have signed up to the proposition that how they do governance is part of the problem they want to solve. This is a big step forward from Kathmandu in 2005. But it is an even bigger step actually to change how governance is done, when almost by definition the government is not united in this commitment, when capacity is limited and energy needed for long-term thorough-going reform is persistently absorbed by short-term crises.

Continuing the dialogue

Here perhaps is the role for the continuing International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. It has set out the reasons why reform is necessary for both conflict-affected countries and donors. It has set out the goals that this change must encompass. Now, perhaps, it should focus on the reasons why not – on both sides, openly and with some humility – so the obstacles that lie within can be confronted. Only then will the logjams be unblocked.

Positive news

There is in fact a publication – both online and hard copy (quarterly) – called Positive News. The label says what’s in the can. There are some other sources of good and positive news as well, including a section of The Huffington Post, a US-based Positive News, which I am not sure whether it’s related to the UK organ of the same name, and also some more ephemeral stuff such as The Daily Good.

In some ways these are the inheritors of a tradition that kicked off some 20 years ago with a high profile complaint by BBC newsreader Martyn Lewis that news values were distorted to give disproportionately more time and attention to bad than good news. Hard bitten hacks rained down a hailstorm’s worth of cynicism and scepticism on his head about his motives and professionalism but the BBC’s postbag on the issue was overwhelmingly in his favour. The public view was that, of course we want to know the bad news, but we’d like to know the rest of it too.

A quiet but noteworthy source of support for Lewis came from war reporter Martin Bell – the BBC’s man in the white suit – who commented in private to the under-fire newsreader that he agreed with the argument because he, Bell, had received every resource from the BBC to cover the war in El Salvador for a decade but received a rejection when he proposed returning to El Salvador to cover the outbreak of peace.*

Good news matters

Getting a balance between the good news and the bad news is one of the not-so-hidden themes of my State of the World Atlas. I have drawn on it for an article for the April number of the print edition of Positive News.

It may seem too easy, trite even, to think in terms of this good news / bad news dichotomy. But I do think it’s important. Lashings of bad news are disabling and disempowering. If everything is rubbish, why would anyone think they could help change anything for the better? But if some things are not so bad and even improving, then maybe others things can change too if enough hands grab hold of enough levers and pull.

This is not just a case of whether the glass is half full or empty. It’s about balancing our sense of what is bad and getting worse with knowing why it is nonetheless possible to work for betterment of the human condition.

the bad news

The world is marked by large inequalities of wealth. The per capita national income of the richest country is 200 times that of the poorest. And inequalities within countries are mind-numbing; in England, homelessness reduces average life expectancy by 30 years, to about the same level as in Afghanistan.

We might hope that once current economic problems are somehow put behind us we’ll grow our way to a better deal for those at the bottom of the global pile. The problem with that thought is the deep global, environmental predicament we are in. We neither know nor understand all the details but we can see that the economic and industrial path we have been on for the last two centuries, along which we are not only still moving today but actually accelerating, is unsustainable.

Scientific knowledge may be imprecise on some of the key details but on the big issues there is no doubt. We are more people than ever before, using disproportionately more water and energy than ever before. Basic arithmetic shows that on current trends the majority of the world’s population will face water scarcity before 2030. As our economic output has soared, we have pumped large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the past 200 years and the laws of physics say the effect of that is to increase the global average temperature, which is happening. And at the same time, we have generated waste and thrown it away as garbage with abandon and if we go to the right places we can see the consequences of that with our own eyes.

These issues might make you despair. The indices of inequality keep worsening and while there are many excellent initiatives on curbing waste, meaningful reductions in carbon output still seem out of political reach.

But a look at other major issues shows that it need not be thus.

Not such bad news

This is not a peaceful world and yet it is more peaceful today than at any time since before the First World War and, some argue, ever. Military spending remains high and armed conflict remains a major cause of death, yet by comparison with earlier times, there are markedly fewer wars and they are less lethal. There has been an avalanche of peace agreements in the two decades since the end of the Cold war and a major, sustained effort to lay the foundations for long-term peace.

It’s not a case of job done but these are real achievements. They are not locked in irreversibly but they have improved people’s prospects of living in peace and dignity. There are multiple risks of conflict escalation, and grounds for concern that governments that funded peace efforts may be less willing to do so in future – but if the United Nations and the peace-funding governments can stay focused, there is every reason to expect a reasonably successful record of building peace to continue.

Ours is not yet a democratic world but this is an age of growing democracy. Today, 48 per cent of the world’s populations live in established democracies, up from 43 per cent in 2008. Like peace, this is a trend that needs safeguarding. Similarly, human rights are advancing slowly; it is a measure of how much more they are respected than hitherto that the indignation and anger at continuing abuses are so sharp. And more women than ever participate in politics as leaders in politics; it’s nothing like parity: only 20 per cent of parliamentary deputies are women – but that’s up from 3 per cent in 1945. Gay rights are also respected more widely; there are more countries where same sex relationships are legal than where they are illegal. On all these issues, much, much more remains to be done yet real advances have been registered.

actually, some surprisingly good news

The same is true with health. There is still too much suffering from curable and preventable conditions and the way mental and psychological disorders are handled primarily by silence and taboo in many countries is as big a health scandal as any. But medical science is advancing, the genetics of cancer have been unlocked, the sequencing of the human genome has been worked out, and new treatments are being and will be developed.

Global health statistics reveal two contradictory trends. On the one hand, there’s the impact of today’s grotesque degrees of inequality. The prospects of a child in a high income country surviving a major cancer are about five times as good as for a child in a poor country. A woman with breast cancer in the US is six times more likely to survive than she is in Gambia. Per capita spending on drugs to treat mental and behavioural disorders is over 1,500 times greater in high income compared to low income countries.

The HIV/AIDS statistics tell a different story. Global inequality would lead you to expect that HIV/AIDS deaths would be disproportionately high in poorer countries because, you would think, treatments are less widely available; you’d therefore expect to find that poor countries’ share of the world total of people dying from HIV/AIDS would be much higher than their share of people living with HIV/AIDS, reflecting longer terms of survival in rich countries, reflecting in turn better living conditions and more access to more expensive drugs. But it’s not so. Within a global picture in which the AIDS pandemic is being slowed, the proportions for “living with” and “dying from” are about the same for rich and for poor countries. In this area, that means, inequality has not got in the way so much.

so pay attention to it

The good news is there for anybody to see who is not blinded by the bad. Improvements in health, like advances in democracy and peace are real and, though by no means irreversible, are signs of what can be done. Of five major world issues, the surprise (perhaps) is that three currently look manageable. With them, why not the other two?

* I know of no printed source describing this encounter but both participants in the conversation have confirmed it to me on separate occasions.

from Cameritsar…

There are three components to the context. Taken together, they do something to illustrate pressures on the coalition government – and, come to that, any future government that tries to be relatively generous on development aid.

The first part of the context grows out of remarks  David Cameron in Amritsar during his trip to India in February. Bloomberg and the Guardian both interpreted him  as saying the development aid cash could be diverted to the Ministry of Defence. In Bloomberg’s version it sounds like it can be spent on national defence but that’s not what Cameron said, which was, as clarified by Downing Street, that ODA could be used to fund three areas of military activity – security, demobilisation and peacekeeping.

…To the Conservative Home

But that is not where the influential Conservative pollster and former deputy chairman of the party, Michael Ashcroft, took the argument in a post on the Conservative Home website. He depicted this as a first step towards dismantling the ringfence around overseas aid and slowing the planned increase in ODA, which he has previously characterised as consisting of ’golden taps’ that should be turned off.

It’s interesting that, on the same Conservative Home website, the influential blogger Tim Montgomerie describes the achievement of the 0.7 per cent target for ODA as one of three great moral achievements of the Cameron government, the other two being gay marriage and 2.7 million people not paying income tax. What makes this particularly interesting is that aid critic Michael Ashcroft owns Conservative Home and aid advocate Tim Montgomerie is one of its editors.

As Montgomerie notes, most of his readers object to ODA when domestic budgets are so tight. Indeed, he references a survey showing 86 per cent of Conservative members want the aid budget cut. There is no doubt that the Ashcroft view is much more representative of Conservative opinion than Montgomerie’s. This is the second part of the context to Justine Greening’s remarks in the House of Commons – Conservative distaste for one the coalition’s flagship policies. But, take note, the general public shares this view (though not by a majority of six to one); it is part of the political reality in Britain today.

Against this background it is not surprising that the general interpretation of Cameron’s aim in his Amritsar remarks was to win some acquiescence from the aid sceptics by appearing (and only appearing) to concede some ground to them.

What the Minister said

And so to Justine Greening. She was handling Parliamentary Questions, one of the House of Commons’ moments for institutionalised jousting. She made two comments on the theme of ODA and security issues. First, in a prepared answer (i.e., it was written and she read it out) to a question from a Labour MP, she said,

“The Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence are working together within existing international rules on official development assistance spending to consider how we can better use Government resources in dealing with the humanitarian and development aspects of conflict and instability around the world.”

Then, in a separate answer to a follow-up question by a Conservative MP, answering off the cuff but undoubtedly well briefed, she said,

“The existing ODA guidelines clearly set out what spend can be counted as ODA and what cannot be, but things such as peacekeeping fall within the ODA definition and we should look at how we can work more closely with the Ministry of Defence.”

The wording of the impromptu answer is unsurprisingly looser than the written answer. Interestingly, the first version in which I saw this, reported by Andrew Sparrow’s political affairs blog in the Guardian, was a little different. In that version she said it slightly more forcefully: ‘Things like peacekeeping absolutely do fall within the ODA  definition.’

Do they? – that’s the exam question.

The ODA guidelines

The third part of the context is formed by the ODA guidelines. These were agreed  in and are safe-guarded by the OECD Development Aid Committee (OECD-DAC), the donor governments’ forum. Donors are self-bound by the guidelines, which define what development aid is and what it covers. And here’s what they say about two areas in which, ‘The boundary of ODA has been carefully delineated’:

• Military aid: No military equipment or services are reportable as ODA.  Anti-terrorism activities are also excluded.  However, the cost of using donors’ armed forces to deliver humanitarian aid is eligible.
• Peacekeeping: Most peacekeeping expenditures are excluded in line with the exclusion of military costs.  However, some closely-defined developmentally relevant activities within peacekeeping operations are included.

What this means is that, as worded, Justine Greening’s answers in Parliament do not disrespect the ODA guidelines that the UK government like others chooses to be bound by. The prepared answer in particular is comfortably within the ‘boundary’ of ODA as defined by the guidelines. The second and impromptu answer is a bit less comfortable because only a small part of peacekeeping is eligible – but some is eligible and that will do.

Peace and Development – Links and intricacies

However, it is worth entering a caveat. As readers of this blog and those who follow International Alert‘s work will know very well, I believe it is pretty close to unintelligent and certainly counter-productive to try to isolate peace and security on the hand from development on the other. Put briefly, there’s no development without peace and only the peace of the graveyard without development. They go together or they just don’t go.

But that’s not the same as saying that all, most or any of the issues covered by the label of security are rightly funded by the budget for ODA.

It is all very well to say, as I do, that peace and development go together but the relationship between them is more complex and subtle than that quick summary of the case implies. In the same way, good development and peacebuilding both imply building the state – but again there are subtleties that the headline doesn’t capture.

The building of a state can trigger conflict or generate peace depending on how it is done. Strengthening the security forces of the state can be a viable development goal if it is a developmental state and ‘strengthening’ means, inter alia, enhancing the rights of citizens and increasing the openings they have for ensuring their needs for security are met, especially in places where hitherto the forces of the state have been part of citizens’ insecurity.

And further the UK is a major player in development assistance and the government would do well not to muddy its own waters by hinting – or by saying things that some people interpret as hinting – that ODA can be raided to fund military requirements.

It’s not as if the UK is facing growing pressure for funds on the peacekeeping front. It is doing less peacekeeping than for decades past because of commitments in first Iraq and then Afghanistan and peacekeeping operations have in any case declined in number somewhat in the last few years.

UN Peackeeping Operations 1950-2010, from The State of the World Atlas.

Contamination risk

In other words and in brief, there are intricacies of policy in the links between security and development and the needs of people in developing countries are ill-served by allowing UK political considerations to invade the issue.

I suppose that politicians may be a little less likely to realise this than the rest of us, but there is a serious risk of political issues being contaminated by politics.

Let me parse that out a bit. Development aid is a political issue both at home and in the way it is provided in developing countries, as well as how it enters into relations between states in the UN and other international forums. How development aid is provided is also a detailed policy issue. Neither those different political aspects nor the policy details are well served if the question starts to be taken over and shaped according to domestic UK political interests and considerations.

But to state the obvious, government is a political operation. So for a government committed to spending relatively generously on aid – only Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Scandinavia have previously reached the 0.7 per cent target, so the UK is joining some pretty rarefied company – what’s the best way to respond to criticism and pressure from some of the government’s own supporters?

Rather than trying to protect ODA by seeming to concede some points to Conservative critics, the government and other supporters of ODA would do better to get into a proper debate about it and try to win the arguments.

Yes – don’t manoeuvre round the sceptics but bring along evidence and arguments and persuade them. from that point of view, take another look at the blog post by Tim Montgomerie, already mentioned, and perhaps at the plea by Bill Gates in the notoriously anti-ODA Mail newspaper that Britain continue its proud record of generosity.

The Peace and Security Cooperation Framework for the DRC and the Region is pithily summed up by South African President Jacob Zuma, one of the signatories, as a guide out of the morass.

The UN Special Representative in DR Congo, Roger Meece, has already asked the UN Security Council for additional military support for the UN operation. But as International Alert‘s statement about the agreement points out, what is needed is a two track approach targeting both the drivers of violence within DRC and in the region.

There have been previous regional agreements; if this one is to work, it has to generate the space for the protagonists to discuss and work on the issues that divide them in as open and frank a way as possible. As our report Ending the Deadlock explores in detail, DRC has a multiplicity of needs and an extra UN battalion is at best only a partial contribution to a short-term solution. At worst it could become part of the problem. More important is a raft of reforms of governance, the security sector and land management, driven for once by the needs of the ordinary citizens of DRC.

The agreement is a good step forward but there is still a need for an enormous amount of work and international support for the efforts of the people of DRC and the region in order to build a real peace.

Prolific statehood

Largely we think and talk as if the state system is long established. It’s not. Let’s start with the numbers. By 1900 there were just 48 states in our modern sense of the term. In the years either side of World War I, with the break-up of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, there was considerable state-making. Even so, the UN was founded by just 51 states (and NB, although that number was kept low by excluding countries on the losing side in World War II, it was boosted by including some that were republics of the USSR and thus not proper states at all). Today, 193 states make up the UN, the newest being South Sudan in July 2011.

From 48 to 193 (recognised states, that is) – from The State of the World atlas

The big waves of state-making occurred with decolonisation from the second half of the 1940s through the 1970s and, on a smaller scale, with the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the USSR and then Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s. While state-making has slowed down there is no reason to think it is yet at a full stop. Even one of the world’s oldest states may in the not very distant future shed some territory and citizens and allow an independent Scotland to be born.

If nothing else, these figures show that in our era sovereignty and statehood have been extremely desirable items in the global market of power and politics. Seen in historical perspective, the growing strength of international organisations, laws and linkages of all kinds is undeniable and remarkable. But that has been balanced by the growth in the number of actors within those institutions. If the idea still persists that the world is heading towards ever larger and more encompassing sovereign units – a widespread surrender of sovereignty upwards, so to speak – the figures lead to a different conclusion.

Yet the fact that the shape of the state system today is so very recent offers a second conclusion, going in almost the opposite direction. For sure, the numbers lead us to think a trend towards supra-states is unreal but they could also suggest that the system is not in any sense fixed and is liable to change.

To put this in some perspective, when my grandparents were born around 120-125 years ago, there were fewer than 50 states in the world. The number has quadrupled in four generations. And for the next three to four generations? Four times as many or four times as fewer or where in between?

The freshness and potential changeability of the state system construct a further conclusion, arising like the first two straight out of looking at the simple numbers: the system is full of diversity. There are different kinds, and differences within each kind, responding to differences in culture, history and development.

Diversity of states’ political systems and the potential for change - from The State of the World atlas

These are simple questions to ask and simple conclusions to draw – even simple-minded, I’ll agree, but nonetheless important for all that. Forgetting them can lead you badly astray.

The purpose of states

So, another simple question: why the state? Discuss.

In value-free terms, the purpose of states is to organise power. The modern state organises power with a greater degree of predictability and durability, normally based on law, than preceding varieties. No more today does territory change hands (or even whole states come and go) because of a marriage here or an alliance there. Even the old habit of carving up territories through war has fallen into disuse and it’s been some time since a major international conference parcelled out chunks of land to be ruled by the winners in a recent war and their allies. States today may be weak or strong by a variety of measures, their borders may be tight or porous, their finances robust or rocky – and their government come and go – but they endure and provide the organising framework of power in that territory.

That seems to me to be a fact. What’s left to argue about is how individual states organise power, to what ends and whose benefit.

the failure of purpose

In this post I want to explore this by going to the extreme cases; in a future one, I’ll look at more standard cases.

Because the state system is taken for granted and left unexamined, odd and paradoxical ideas about politics enter our discourse. One such is the idea of “ungoverned spaces”, which has emerged from narrow circles of strategic experts  to enter mainstream political vocabulary. It is being used quite often to justify the French intervention in Mali and, likely enough, we will hear more of it in relation to Afghanistan after the pull-out of foreign forces in 2014 and probably Syria too.

It is a term that creates at least as many problems as it resolves. It points to a real issue but mis-describes it. An article by Yvan Guichaoua usefully unpicks it in the context of the Mali intervention, showing how its core assumption that “terrorists have established their stronghold in a political vacuum” implicitly exonerates from blame those who had authority and responsibility. The logic that follows from this assumption is that the way to resolve the crisis is by building up “the legitimate administration”, which, Guichaoua argues, will mean relying on the power-brokers and authorities in Bamako who bear significant responsibility for the country’s plight.

Like the closely related concept of “failed states” back in the 1990s, that later evolved into the more nuanced but equally unhelpful “failing states”, which has since been replaced by the yet more nuanced and rather helpful term “fragile states”, the concept of “ungoverned spaces” carries unexamined notions of what governing is and what a state is. These notions forget the actual diversity of states and conjure up a narrow range – France, Britain, America or Sweden. Finding nothing that those notions of statehood can recognise in a particular territory – normally a whole country for a “failed” or “failing” state but these days just a part of it can earn the “ungoverned spaces” label – the temptation is to recognise only a void.

I find the term “fragile states” more useful because the metaphor of fragility has a sharp truth in it that outside powers would do well to respect more than they normally do. But mis-used, it too comes to imply void, no authority, no power – a blank sheet of paper.

Operating on that basis is bound to lead you astray both in understanding the problems that ordinary people who live in those insecure circumstances face and in figuring out what might be done to bring about a general improvement. It means not facing up to the realities of power in that place. The truth is not that there is no power or authority but that the way that power and authority are organised and used places ordinary people in a situation of terrifying insecurity.

It has been shown time and again in countries torn apart by war and rampant instability - for example, Lebanon in the 1980s, Somalia in the 1990s, eastern Congo for much of the past 15 years, swathes of Afghanistan and Pakistan today – that there are other kinds of effective power than that which resides in the modern state. This is also true in urban settings – in the big cities, parts of which are no-go areas for the representatives of the state, or in which there are effectively parallel systems of power.

Ignoring that reality means getting the analysis wrong. As International Alert‘s report on eastern Congo has demonstrated, that results in the international community promoting solutions that won’t work and add up over time to a waste of effort and resources.

What are often called “ungoverned spaces” are really “spaces governed in ways and by people that other people think are the wrong ways and the wrong people.”

And what used to be called “failed or failing states” are states in which power is organised in a way that, generally speaking, you and I find offensive.

But it is power and they are states - and if any of us want to help do something about the abuses, we need to pay attention to that.

The numbers

After an upsurge in the number of armed conflicts in the early-to-mid 1990s, there was a marked decline that continued to about 2008 when it bottomed out. Using consistent definitions, the Uppsala Department of Peace and Conflict Research reports that there were 50 open armed conflicts in 1990 and 30 in 2010.

For most concerned citizens, the opposite feels true. Opinion surveys tend to find gloomy views about armed conflict and about the prospects for the future because what makes the news are the wars and disasters.

The investment in peace

A huge if often quiet effort has been invested in peace. There have been more peace agreements than at any time in history – Christine Bell’s authoritative study On the Law of Peace found 646 from 1990 until the end of 2007. There have been more peacekeeping operations – on the part of the UN, there were 6 active in 1980, 10 in 1990 and 18 in 2000, falling to 15 in 2010 as some no longer needed were wound down in the century’s first decade. There has been significant and sometimes massive international spending on trying to build firm foundations for peace in war-torn countries. And as the Human Security Report has found, wars are on average less lethal today than in the 20th century.

Grounds for concern

That’s the good news but there’s inevitably a cloud to the silver lining.

The fall in frequency of armed conflicts has stopped. Compared to 30 in 2010, the Uppsala team identified 36 in 2011. Whether that is the start of a new rising trend, it is too soon to say, but the previous trend of fewer wars appears to have stopped.

They also noted that from 2008 to 2011 the number of new peace agreements has fallen. This may in part be a trick of the data, for there were fewer wars to make peace about, but in part it likely also reflects something more substantial – that the wars that persist are much harder to bring to a negotiated conclusion.

And there’s grounds for concern about whether the governments that have funded the making, keeping and building of peace will be able to continue the effort at the same scale, given the economic downturn of the past five years and the next however many.  What makes that particularly worrying is that in many countries recovering from armed conflict, violence has been suppressed but peace has not really been built.

All this suggests that the gains made during two decades of growing peace, while real, are not stable or fully consolidated.

Elsewhere on the spectrum of violence

But there is a further reason why, with or without the increase in armed conflicts in 2011, the good news on peace should be regarded with caution. So far this article has discussed armed conflicts in the terms in which it is normal to. The conflicts referred to above consist of open armed conflict between two or more parties, at least one of which is a government, with conflicting aims for control of government or territory, and with continuity between clashes.

And that definition means that while inter-state and civil wars are counted, other kinds of armed violence are not. A whole category of the problem of violent conflict is left to one side. It has only come into view in the lst ten years or so.

The conflict counters at Uppsala do now count non-state armed conflicts – take the definition two paragraphs above and remove the words “at least one of which is a government.” And like other observers of security and insecurity today, they try to record the numbers in non-state armed forces and how many people are killed.

As international organisations and aid-giving governments find better solutions for inter-state wars civil wars, the rest of the spectrum of violent conflict takes on clearer shape (image from The State of the World Atlas, pp 60-61).

Most of these armed conflicts look just like conventional armed conflicts except that the government isn’t a combatant. But it is not a crisp category. On the spectrum of violent conflict, these conflicts shade into other kinds of violent conflict that the Uppsala team does not count, especially large scale criminality, whether in the form of gangs’ control of deprived urban areas ,or the heavily profitable trafficking in illegal narcotics, other contraband and people, especially for the sex trade.

The World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 did a lot to surface this problem with its estimate of 1.5 billion people living under the threat of large scale violence and instability. What the authors had in mind was not only the non-state conflicts with explicit political orientation, and not only political violence erupting around election time in some countries, but also organised crime.

The institutuional lack

The point that the WDR authors especially wanted to ram home is that our international institutions for making, keeping and building peace have got quite good at dealing with inter-state and civil wars. But we do not have institutions that were designed for the full spectrum of violent conflict including criminality, criminal politics and the like.

The UN can mediate between parties involved in armed conflict and the Red Cross / Red Crescent can find humanitarian space between them. But the UN has no role mediating between governments and criminals, let alone between two criminal gangs, nor can the Red Cross / Red Crescent find that humanitarian space.

Casting the net of peacebuilding wider

It is a priori likely that mediation of some kind among criminal groups and between them and government is possible; one example that has been described to me happened quite recently in El Salvador. The possibility is there – but the international institutions are not.

International Alert is exploring these issues – there’s a roundtable meeting in London on 28 January with a public meeting that evening on the topic. The question for us is whether it could be possible to spread the net of peacebuilding over a wider range of the spectrum of violent conflict than hitherto. And what would be the key vocabulary, underlying concepts and lead policies if it is possible?

On the one hand, each of the five big issues I have been highlighting in my recent blogs (wealth and poverty, war and peace, human rights and democracy, health of people and health of the planet) and in the The State of the World Atlas is complex, prospects for progress on them are not the same for each, and the interactions between them add further layers of uncertain outcome. On the other hand, people and their circumstances are highly diverse and a world system that gives a perfectly satisfactory state of affairs to one group of people is torturing another.

So I thought that in the next few weeks I would highlight a few of the facts and sometimes paradoxes about our condition today, that struck me as I prepard the atlas.

Readers of the atlas will know I am a qualified optimist. On three of the five big issues (peace, democracy and people’s health) progress has been made but there remains much to do. On the other two – wealth and poverty and the health of the planet – we are currently heading in the wrong direction. And among the biggest obstacles to making further progress is inequality.

Some inequality is all right, necessary, arguably even positive. It provides incentives for personal improvement. But when 0.000016% of the world’s population holds 16% of its economic output, something grotesque has happened. The relationship between those two figures is 1 million to one. So if you thought (as I do not) that everybody should own exactly the same amount, that 0.000016% of the world’s population owns a million times more than they ought to.

Increasing life expectancy is a good indicator of social progress and because it’s an average, it’s a reasonable indicator about the spread of the benefits of progress. But averages also mask a great deal. The average life expectancy in the UK these days is over 80. But for the homeless in England (and probably the rest of the UK but the England statistics are all I saw), the average life expectancy is reduced by 30 years to a level that’s about the same as in war-torn, impoverished Afghanistan and Central African Republic.

Billionaires by the way were hard hit by the financial crash of 2008 (as you would expect since so much of their wealth is paper assets). Before the crash, a world total of 1,125 dollar billionaires owned $4.4 trillion worth of everything. In 2008-9 the numbers sank: there were only 793 billionaires in the whole world and they owned by $2.4 trillion. But just 2011, billionaires were on the up once more, their numbers growing to 1,210 individuals owning $4.5 trillion.

This does, by the way, imply that there is a little more equality between billionaires these days than there was before the crash, which may or may not mean something.

The recovery of the billionaires is doubtless cheering news to the 400,000 residents of Athens who were receiving free food daily during 2012.

Many of the ways in which we have understood our divided world over the past 40 or 50 years have been becoming steadily less cogent in the last decade or so. In particular, a division of the world into poor countries and rich countries, in which we imagine that poor countries are where poor people live, is becoming actively misleading. There are more poor people in India than in any other country, India with a space programme, an overseas aid programme and 450% economic growth over the last 20 years (compared to the EU’s 130%, the USA’s 155% and China’s 1000%).

This looks likely to be a pattern for the coming period, with most poor people living in middle-income countries, not the poorest ones.

However, don’t run away with the notion that the distinctions between rich and poor countries have wholly collapsed. GNI per head is 200 times higher in the richest countries than the poorest.

The lead Millennium Development Goal was to reduce extreme poverty by a half by 2015, and the world is on track for that mainly due to what has happened in China. So that seems like – if not reducing inequality because the ri chest few might be rising faster than the multitudinous poor – nonetheless like progress. And indeed it is. But this the extreme poverty of living on less than 1 dollar a day (or 1.20 these days – inflation?). Meanwhile, the number of people living on less than 2 dollars a day is 2.6 billion – more than one-third of the world’s population.