Mike McGovern

Popular Development Economics—An Anthropologist among the Mandarins

I n 1997, I found myself newly arrived at Oxford University. I was taking a detour from my path to do research in West Africa thanks to a fellowship that funded a year of ancillary training before my fieldwork. Though studying anthropology, I was at St. Antony’s College, where Paul Collier’s Center for the Study of African Economies is located, and was in the same entering cohort as Collier’s now-famous student Dambisa Moyo (assuming I would not be able to remember her first name, she offered, “it sounds kind of like ‘pizza’”). During my first week there, I was talking with three graduate students in development economics and asked them whether the 1997 Asian economic crisis had caused development economists to question any of their models. Yes, they assured me, the crisis had left them and the field more generally rather shaken and ready to entertain all kinds of new ideas about how economies work. I found that interesting and, telling them that I worked in Africa, asked whether the failure of African economies to conform to most economic models caused them similar consternation. All three replied simultaneously with a derisive snort and chuckles, followed by assurances that no, Africa’s failure to develop was not challenging economic theory then or any time soon. I assume these were not students of Paul Collier, an economist who has dedicated his career to understanding how African economies do work. But the vignette is perhaps instructive inasmuch as it gives a sense of how economists, even development economists, tend to view Africa. Where Africa and economic theory fail to coincide, the fault lies squarely with Africa, not with economic theory. In his books The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It and Wars, Guns, andVotes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (cited henceforth as BB and WGV, respectively), Collier attempts to bring African and other poor countries with problems of “stuck” development back into the conversation of economists, policymakers, and an educated nonspecialist readership. Book cover testimonials from The Economist, Larry Summers, Larry Diamond, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof give a sense of the readership Collier has targeted. Using analysis based on econometric studies he has conducted with his research colleagues at Oxford and the World Bank, he first tries to make sense of the world’s “basket cases,” and then to propose policy interventions that may help them to set themselves right. Collier’s argument starts from the finding that the bottom billion have stagnated over the past forty to fifty years while the other four billion people living in the “developing world” have not only achieved economic development but, in most cases, a greater degree of political stability. He identifies four “traps” that reinforce economic stasis, political instability, and each other. They are conflict, reliance on natural resources, being landlocked with bad neighbors, and bad governance. Having laid out these structural challenges, Collier uses the second half of The Bottom Billion to outline some possible solutions, including judicious use of development aid, postconflict international peacekeeping missions, revised international laws that would diminish the complicity of richer governments and their businesses in bad governance and conflict, and revising trade policy in a way that actively favors the poorest countries. In Wars, Guns, and Votes, Collier goes further, elaborating his theory of how electoral democracy feeds instability, especially in a context where countries are “too diverse for cooperation to produce public goods” (BB: p. 9), guns are easily available, looting easy, and a past history of coups has weakened democratic culture and emboldened the military. In this book, his proposed solution is more activist: Mike McGovern is assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University. | | !

Rebuilding a failed state: Liberia

This article argues for a combination of long-term engagement in providing security, culminating in training and mentoring of new security forces; a comprehensive approach to reintegrating ex-combatants that also benefits civilian host communities and helps to ensure that agricultural livelihoods are made viable; and the opening of a space for discussion of governance issues and revenue distribution that is supported by a revenue-collection trusteeship that takes some of the key areas of economic pillage out of the purview of the state and deposits state revenues transparently into the states coffers, leaving it to a new breed of Liberian politicians to emerge.

History is stubborn: Talk about truth, justice, and national reconciliation in the Republic of Guinea

This article uses an analysis of discussions of the November 1970 Portuguese attack on Guinea as a window into issues that continue to be raised concerning the countrys first post-independence regime (1958–1984). We analyze ongoing debates among Guineans regarding the legacy of the former president, Sekou Toure, and whether or not there is a need for truth-telling and/or justice for abuses committed under his rule. One strand of this discussion focuses on legitimate political tactics and another on the politics of ethnicity in contemporary Guinea. The frequent assertion by Guinean interlocutors that “history is stubborn” points to both the perceived power of truth-telling and the ethno-political stakes with which these debates have become imbued. Debates among Guineans often focus on the uses and abuses of “truth and reconciliation” testimony, which for some Guineans is essential to breaking past cycles of violent state repression and for others is a kind of Pandoras box that could fuel not reconciliation but retribution. We show that Guineans are also engaged in a third order of analysis, of the status of “imported” notions of justice, agency, and culpability in an African setting.

WRITING ABOUT CONFLICT IN AFRICA: STAKES AND STRATEGIES

Writing about conflict in Africa is a tricky thing. Publications from non-governmental organizations and human rights campaigners often read as if they were calibrated to maximize public distress, and thus the political or financial support that would keep human rights institutions in business. Many journalistic accounts are stitched together from the rhetorical and analytical remnants of a colonial and sometimes racist common sense. Against this backdrop, fine-grained empirical studies like those typically produced by anthropologists, historians and geographers take on a particular salience. They stake out a privileged space for explaining other logics, other incentives, and different causal relations that could make sense out of wars, insurgencies and other forms of violence that appear irrational to Europeans and North Americans.