LESSONS IN ANARCHY

The news coming off the continent of Africa has not been good in recent years. Reports of genocidal violence, unchecked disease, political corruption, and the use of rape as a weapon of war have dulled the senses of many in the Western world. But on September 26, 2008, a story hit the wires that touched the imagination of people around the world. A small band of Somali “pirates” using nothing more than AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades had managed to hijack a cargo ship transporting thirty-three Russian made T-72 tanks and other heavy armaments bound for Kenya. The assailants, comprised of a rag-tag gang of uneducated youth, barefoot and dressed in dirty t-shirts, successfully overtook a major ship on high waters transporting sophisticated weaponry worth tens of million of dollars. The incident has become somewhat of a symbol for a new era of criminal anarchy on the continent, and is perhaps a gloomy talisman of things to come.

In 1994, the intrepid writer Robert Kaplan published an essay titled “The Coming Anarchy” in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly in which he predicted that the new international order of the 21st century would not be about trade, oil, or clashing cultures. What he experienced while traveling through parts of Africa and other impoverished regions around the world was a growing tension between the haves and the have-nots. He foresaw a new age where criminal violence and political anarchy would create the new fault lines dividing the world. “Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress,” Kaplan observed, “in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real ‘strategic’ danger.” The sight of criminal pirates operating off the coast of a country already living in political anarchy was a conspicuous image for the future Kaplan foretold.

The trends leading to the “coming anarchy” can be traced to three distinct causes: the lingering effects of colonialism and the weak and ineffective nation-states that emerged from it; environmental degradation and the scarcity of the resources that societies depend upon; and the demographic trends that are causing overpopulation in the world’s poorest regions.

KIND LEOPOLD’S GHOST
Straight lines on a map of political geography are unnatural constructs. Where political domains follow the contours of rivers or mountains, or natural barriers that would have delineated different ethnic or cultural groupings in a pre-Colonial Era, there tends to a greater rationale for a nation’s sovereignty. But any glance at a map of Africa finds an abundance of straight lines. No region on earth continues to linger in the pernicious effects of colonial domination more than Africa. It was only a century ago that the continent remained divided up between the competing commercial interests of the European powers. It was an era when the Congo, today one of the most violent and underdeveloped nations on earth, remained the personal playground and resource stock for a ruthless European monarch. To understand the political problems facing the continent, we need to begin by confronting King Leopold’s ghost.

The West often blames political corruption for the turmoil in Africa. But corrupt leaders may be just a visible symptom of a much deeper root cause. How can any leader, no matter how noble in intention, rule over a political entity that lacks a reason for being? Many of Africa’s nation-states, in Kaplan’s anarchy theory, are illusions. Kaplan takes Sierra Leone in West Africa as an example: “According to the map, it is a nation-state of defined borders, with a government in control of its territory. In truth the Sierra Leonian government controls Freetown by day and by day also controls part of the interior. In the government’s territory the national army is an unruly rabble threatening drivers and passengers at most checkpoints.” In much of the surrounding region the situation is the same. “Even in quite zones none of the governments maintains the schools, bridges, roads, and police forces in a manner necessary for functional sovereignty.”

Here we come once again to the lines on the map—what do they mean, and to whom? In Kaplan’s analysis, borders have become largely meaningless in many places around the globe. He observes that in the world’s poorest regions, “political maps are the product of tired conventional wisdom,” and for governments whose borders lack intrinsic recognition, there is a trend to make an even more aggressive show out of their supposed legitimacy. “The more fictitious the actual sovereignty, the more severe border authorities seem to be in trying to prove otherwise.” These artificial borders are a lingering apparition of King Leopold’s ghost. As Kaplan observes, “The borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at cross purposes with demography and topography.” They are the straight lines on political maps.

The very notion of the nation-state with defined political borders drawn on maps is a Western invention. Prior to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Europe was broken up into a set of kingdoms without defined borders. The nations that emerged from the Peace tended to have a sense of collective identity in the form a shared language, culture, religion, and ancestry. To be French held a deeper meaning beyond a political structure. The same cannot be said for many nations in the developing world, and Africa in particular. The lack of a common, binding national identity makes governing a country through a centralized government—I in which most people feel no real connection—all the more challenging.

In Kaplan’s anarchy, the future may see a steady dissolution of this system of organizing political power in the developing world. There is nothing to say that the world of nations is the final chapter in the history of humankind’s political evolution.

THE LAST TREE STANDING
Until recently, discussions on the role that the environment and natural resources play in international relations was viewed as a peripheral concern, but no longer. In regions around the world, resource scarcity will become the flashpoint of conflict and one of the major sources of political instability. Kaplan makes the point quite clearly, “It is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the defining national-security issue of the early twenty-first century.” In regions such as Africa, competition for water, timber, and arable farmland will become a driving source of violence.

The situation in Darfur, where thousands have been killed and millions others displaced, is instructive to this point. While on the surface the conflict appears to be yet another struggle based on tribal antagonism, but international observers now believe the real issue driving the violence is a contest for the underground aquifers of the region, and the last remnants of productive farmland.

Competition for the resources of survival will increasingly become a defining feature in regions that lack effective political and civic institutions to supply basic services to their growing populations. Kaplan explains, “The environment, I will argue, is a part of a terrifying array of problems that will define a new threat to our security.” Thomas Homer-Dixon, Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto, believes, “Future wars and civil violence will often arise from scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests, and fish.”

Indeed, the scarcity of natural resources will be a key harbinger to the criminal anarchy that Kaplan predicts. When society breaks down to a point where the very survival of a community is placed in question, a form of violent desperation is sure to ensue. In Kaplan’s’ analysis, “Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity.”

THE MALTHUSIAN DILEMMA
A non-scientific method of gauging the stability of a region is to observe the number of men and boys lining the streets with nothing to do. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times calls this population of loiterers “the standing around guys.” A combination of population growth coupled with a corresponding lack of economic development has created in the poorest regions of the world pockets of desperate young men with no real hope for material advancement in the world. This is true across Africa, the Middle East, and in Pakistan: the regions with the greatest potential for political anarchy.

There is a cruel trajectory to the demographics of the early twenty-first century. While much of the developing world is seeing a stabilizing in population growth, and parts of Europe and Russia are actually witnessing a population decline, Africa and the Middle East are growing at an exponential pace. According to the National Academy of Sciences, ninety-five percent of the population growth in the coming decades will be in the world’s poorest regions; areas that also have the least functional political and civic institutions to support this growth.

Young men’s willingness to resort to terrorism and serve as suicidal bombers is an example of the sort of desperation that can arise in circumstances that combine population growth and a lack of economic opportunity. Kaplan explains how “a large number of people on this planet to whom the comfort and stability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find war and a barracks existence a step up rather than a step down… in places where the Western Enlightenment has not penetrated and where there has always been mass poverty, people find liberation in violence.” Violence as an expression of dissent, driven by poverty and desperation, is the final component in the coming of Kaplan’s anarchy.

Burgeoning demographic “youth bulges” will be one of the lingering threats to peace and stability in many under-developed regions around the world. Kaplan sees these disenfranchised people as one of the key catalysts to the violent anarchy he predicts, “I saw similar young men everywhere—hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.”

THE COMING ANARCHY
Thomas Homer-Dixon likes to make an analogy for the situation facing the industrialized world. He asks us to think of a stretch limo driving down a side alley in one of the world’s poorest slums. Inside the limo, with its air conditioning and high fidelity sound, is North America, Western Europe, and the emerging Pacific Rim. Outside the limo is the rest of humankind looking in. This disparity between the haves and the have-nots will create the new fault lines of conflict in the decades ahead.

If the world continues along this trajectory, the problems of Africa or other impoverished regions will not be isolated. They will most likely become grim exports. “Disease, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders…” these could become the leading sources of instability in large parts of the planet. The final message embedded in Kaplan’s theory of the coming anarchy is, “Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.”