Rory Stewart OBE: "Failed States - and How Not to Fix Them"

hello and welcome everybody to the Macmillan Center I'm in Shapiro the director we're delighted to host Minister Rory Stewart as this year's George Herbert Walker jr. lecturer and in uh in International Studies the Honorable George Herbert Walker the third Yale College class of 1953 established this lecture series in 1986 to commemorate his father a distinguished graduate of the Yale class of 1927 the war collection has featured eminent practitioners and scholars including Madeleine Albright John Major Richard Holbrooke and un secretary-general ban ki-moon Minister Stewart was currently the Minister for prisons in the UK is a member of parliament for Penrith and the border the largest geographical constituency in England he's an accomplished author senior diplomat philanthropist and a documentary filmmaker in January 2018 he was appointed Minister of State for the Ministry of Justice having previously been the Minister of State for Africa at both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the department for international development as I said he's now moved on to take responsibility for you said 180 prisons he said yes so we were commenting that perhaps this is the beginning of a like Tocqueville before him coming to America to study the present system which will lead to a new book on democracy in America his previous career was in foreign affairs particularly focused on military intervention and international development while on leave from the foreign service he worked for 21 months crossing Iran Afghanistan Pakistan India and Nepal in state in 500 village houses during his journey from 2005 to 2008 Stewart was chair and chief executive of the turquoise mountain foundation based in Kabul where he grew up which he grew from a hundred to three hundred employees the so restored a section of the old city established a clinic primary school and Arts Institute and he bought Afghan crafts to the international market Stewart has written four books the places in between a New York Times best seller that describes his walk across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001 and 2002 occupational hazards or the prince of the marshes his account of his time as an administrator in southern Iraq the marshes which describes a walk through Cumbria and the borders with his father and kin intervention work an essay on military intervention which is close to the subject that he's going to speak about today as a filmmaker Stewart has presented three BBC television documentaries in search of Lawrence of Arabia Afghanistan the great game and border country the story of Britain's lost middle land suit has been we've been awarded the Order of the British Empire for his work in Iraq the gold medal of the Royal Scottish geographical society for his work in Afghanistan the spirit of Scotland awarded the Radio France award the prize del Camino del CID for his books a Scottish BAFTA for his documentary making and honorary doctorates from Sterling University and the American University of Paris the title he's chosen for today's lecture is failed States and how not to fix them I'm pleased to introduce Minister Rory Stewart welcome well thank you all very very much indeed first thing can you hear me clearly great um so thank you for coming and I'm going to try to speak relatively briefly and then turn this into more of a conversation rather than the formal lecture given given the size of the room and I wanted to begin by trying to draw out some of my own personal experience some of my own personal experience as somebody who went from being a practitioner on the ground so I began my career working in Indonesia in Bosnia and Kosovo I then worked in Iraq and then in Afghanistan and moved from that to being a minister and I try to reflect a little bit on what it means to be a minister and I wanted to begin by sharing with you my experience just over a year ago a year and a half ago when I became the minister for international development responsible initially from Elysee in Asia and then Africa I had a budget for which I was responsible of about seven and a half billion u.s. dollars a year and I had to spend that money every year because the British government had signed up to spending 0.7% of GDP on international aid so every day crossing my desk came these business cases for different spending decisions so any spending decision over ten million pounds I had to sign off and as you can imagine when you're trying to spend a six and a half billion dollars there's a lot of those spending decisions so I sit there every day and every day on my desk is would you like to spend 220 million dollars on an education program in Ethiopia would you like to spend 42 million dollars on training political parties in Bangladesh would you like to spend 15 million dollars on a health care projects in Upper Tanzania right and this whole environment this whole context is of course something that comes out of a very very exciting very inspirational vision post-war vision about the role that wealthy countries can play in the developing world this sum of money in fact this 0.7% of GDP spent over on international aid reflects a huge international commitment that began to emerge in the 1970s when economists calculated it of all the wealthy countries spent 0.7 percent of their GDP on international aid they would be able to end poverty by the year 2000 right this didn't quite happen but the the the commitment remains so that Scandinavian countries Britain are now Germany have now met this 0.7% target and the focus of our work of course over this period has narrowed so whereas in the 1970s we were very concerned with countries like China India Indonesia Bangladesh now increasingly we are preoccupied with fragile states and particularly failed states so let's just start with that as an example and in order to do this I need I need my chalk I have my shirt and I have a box of chalk the professor at firebot school and I've got very spoilt recently because though we have whiteboards in Britain which allow me to write in red and blue and green but you're just gonna have to get me scratching and white so just going to start by putting up on the board here as a way of getting the conversation going a list of countries right so that's the Central African Republic that's the Democratic Republic of the Congo it's Burundi Liberia Mischa anyone like to try to guess what those five countries are what what those five minutes be generally what are they supposed to be those five countries if you're a minister dealing with this kind of stuff I do what well there's five countries are okay there's sub-saharan African countries but in addition to that they are in terms of normal GDP per capita they are supposed to be the five poorest countries in the world at the moment right and I over here I'm just going to put another list of countries South Sudan Somalia Yemen Chad basin any thoughts on those for what do we got going on there yeah this this is these are the major humanitarian emergencies the moment this is where the large UN appeals are taking place appeals four to three billion dollars this is UNICEF World Food Program these are the big famines which people have been leaning into over the last couple of years right now would anyone like to begin to generate so imagine you are now my position you are now the minister responsible for International Development you may not be spending your six-and-a-half billion a year and you're supposed to be addressing the issues of these countries the poorest countries countries where people are on the case to the Central African Republic where terms of GDP per capita people are supposed to be on about two dollars a day but it's a very unequal society so very few people are actually making $2 a day and you men to be dealing with these countries in which take Somalia 2011 and nearly a hundred and fifty thousand people starved to death in a two-month period including a number of children when I was in northern Somalia last year I went to emergency nutrition centers where I could see children getting tubes put in their noses by UNICEF in order to try to keep him alive children hadn't eaten for two it's okay so what are the problems for these countries what's involved in trying to deal with these countries what are we supposed to be doing about these countries how are you going to spend your money can I have an idea from the audience doesn't need to be a very serious idea I'm just trying to get the conversation going some thought or infrastructure okay let's put some infrastructure okay now infrastructure of course is something that we were building a great deal in all these countries in the 1960s and early 1970s in fact if you travel as I did recently through the Democratic Republic of the Congo you are perpetually coming across roads which were funded at various times by the US government by the Soviet Union by the Belgians and those roads have largely collapsed so does anyone want to just speculate a little bit about what the fundamental problem has been with us constructing infrastructure in these countries and why building infrastructure has already turned those countries around please corruption okay let's think of another problem in DRC or indeed there another fundamental problem yep dictators okay let's put put a put yeah okay let's put government here yep civil war I'm going to put security up here all right generate please so many more health education food jobs yeah clean water water yep water yeah that's a big problem if you get too new share yeah women so what did somebody say that tribalism okay that's a different kind of problem I'm gonna put that out here all right now what would be the basic analysis for why despite the fact that we've spent many many billions of dollars over the last 4050 years in those countries we haven't actually managed to solve the problem so any number of people from the 1960s onwards ranging from dedicated missionaries to USAID workers to people working for Save the Children or the United Nations have gone into those countries and spent an enormous amount of money and not a great deal has been achieved take the next country that would have been on the less so the sixth wealth poorest country in the world is Malawi Malawi is a country where the British government for example has spent something in the region of four and a half billion pounds over the last 50 years and Malawi is a fairer thing poorer than it was when we started 50 years ago what are we doing wrong what is the problem with this whole model yeah okay so we've had corruption and trying to build governments in our own image so I'm going to put up here and this of course is what I'm trying to move towards the problems basically here we normally analyze in terms of failed states right so the analysis is basically that it doesn't matter how many roads you build if the government isn't actually going to sustain maintain and manage those roads they will collapse pretty quickly it doesn't matter how much you spend on health care or education if the education system in the country doesn't work the health care system country doesn't work it's not sustainable right your money is effectively wasted unless you can begin to address some of these issues tribalism corruption civil wars security government you're not going to be able to sort these problems out right now let me then move on to the next stage so we have an analysis of a problem we have some very poor countries and at the heart of the problem is that these countries are basically failed States we can come later in the conversation to defining exactly what a failed state is but there's absolutely no doubt that these states have a real problem with what we might call capacity or what we might call the JIT a'mma C or what we might call security they don't seem at least from their capital cities to control their territory in the way that we might anticipate or expect right let's then come to the next question right why does this matter to us why do we care about any of this why is any of this important to us so I want to suggest okay exactly so our insecurities and moral issues so let's break that down let's take Africa for example why do we get upset about Africa well we get upset about Africa firstly because people there are very very poor right so that you have those 150,000 people dying in Somalia or in a six week period but also because at the moment in Africa we are in a situation in which by 2050 one in ten of the children born in the world will be Nigerian right by the end of this century half the world's population will be from sub-saharan Africa at the moment 18 million sub-saharan Africans are joining the job market every year and they are not getting any jobs right if you go to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania at the moment the unemployment rates amongst youth well over 90 percent so if you were trying to guess where the Syria of the future is likely to be where the failed fragile States future like me they're likely to come from Africa if you're thinking about whether migration threats to Europe likely to be well what's gonna happen to all these young unemployed people who have no livelihoods or future in Africa they're gonna start crossing the Mediterranean if you're worrying about where epidemics are likely to come from because of course epidemics is not just right a question of a particular natural environment it's a question of the state structures ability to deal with it what was the problem in Liberia Sierra Leone with Ebola the problem for not fundamentally was the problem of the health system in addressing that right now they didn't have proper clinics they don't have proper detection systems it was very very difficult for them to process people when they became up so whether you're worried about security and the form of terrorism whether you're very about security in terms of migration if you're worried about security in terms of epidemics you may be worried about Africa and on the positive side if you're looking for the markets of the future it's almost certainly to Africa that you would turn and if there's a labor shortage in Europe and if there's an excess capital in Europe then the labor is in Africa if you're interested in more materials right nearly ten percent of the contents of this come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo is has the world's largest reserves of coltan of cobalt has enormous reserves of rare earth and all of this is going to be increasingly important Brett so we have a situation where we have a problem we have a problem that has significance for us in terms of security and our humanitarian obligations and a potential opportunity for us so for all those reasons we would feel I guess that we would want to be able to fix these failed States which brings me to my next point okay now imagine that you have been given the job of trying to fix one of these failed states let's take it down from the nine states that I've put up there and let's take it down just to Somalia and imagine yourself sent out as an advisor to the governor of a province somewhere in central Somalia and I'm going to paint a little picture for it and then I'm going to give you an opportunity to try to work out what you're going to do about this situation so Somalia has been through a civil war you end up in an office it's got smashed windows there's very little furniture there's a fancy new laptop computer that somehow the governor is acquired from some USAID grant that's arrived before you and you are being given the job of trying to re-establish the basic conditions of a state in order to generate prosperity employment security and a sustainable future for Somalia right and you are you right you are some form you are employed by USAID well you're employed by the World Bank all you're employed by UNICEF well you're employed by Save the Children are employed by Oxfam and you've been dumped here and you're trying to fix this failed state okay and you turn up in the governor's office day one just smart clothes on right and you're gonna have a conversation with the governor and you're going to try to fix his failed state because you know that there's no point you just spending money on infrastructure because it won't be sustained there's gonna be no point to spending on health education which then unless you address the fundamental problems so what are you gonna start by doing somebody give me an idea right day one I've stood up I know in Somalia very good who's that very good and bring it okay all right so I'm gonna set up a horrible thing here called us in there right okay so this is interesting so ask his opinion okay all right let's go on from that what other things might you be doing yet okay very good okay very good okay we got a government governor who might the other stakeholders beat let's have some stakeholders yep okay it's kind of Maire Church is very good very good yep yep let's put a church a mosque yeah women okay let's just pause on this for sickness they're very interesting how are you facilitating that how are you setting about working out how are you meeting these people how are you getting them in the room okay we need the census okay census data alright got an infantry okay so we got our data we've got our infantry I'm going to come back to some of the problems around this but it's it's a good model right data of a tree we've got our stakeholders who's we've consulting so I don't know we've got a let's let's say that we've got it but let's let's put this into pompous language here and then I'm going to put it up right so we're we're mapping internal and external stakeholders right we're defining critical tasks we're mobilizing resources and finally to finish with my jargon we are measuring through iterative monitoring well we're also threatening people that's interesting with threatening people are getting threatened feel good okay let's come back to that but that's very good okay I like that power all right okay No let me just start on this because this is actually a very interesting what's going on on the right hand the left hand side of this board of men right the traditional model of international development which has been driven basically for the last 40 years is not doing what this room and Yale is doing right you're an unusual audience the traditional way in which international development thinks about this is not like that the traditional way that international development thinks about this is in terms of three things right it thinks about problems in terms of best practice capacity building and political will these are the three things right so the normal idea is that you turn up in Somalia you bring your best practice from Vietnam or wherever it happens to be right you then do your capacity building of the governor right and then you wait for his political will to implement your wonderful best practice that you've done the festival know contained within that of course this is true of almost all International Development is an insult all you have to do is turn those phrases around to see the insult so basically what you're saying if you say somebody needs best practice capacity-building and political will is you're basically saying that they are ignorant unskilled and idle right and that your job is to provide the knowledge the training and a bit of bit of both now here on the other hand this audience in Yale has generated a different kind of model where you have focused much more on existing power relationships that are already there on the ground right and this is absolutely central to the problem in international development so if you look at zambia for example where we have just wasted a prodigious 55 million on trying to do reform of agricultural subsidies right and we've been trying to do this for over 20 years trying to reform the agricultural subsidy system so it's a classic international development situation some economist turns up they say one of the reasons why the economy in Zambia is not going well is because they are subsidizing agricultural inputs too much they're wasting an enormous amount of money on this we can reallocate it to much more efficient uses so we're going to bring in a brilliant economist who's gonna sit down with the Ministry of Finance he's going to explain how agricultural subsidies were removed in Egypt and by doing so we're going to unlock economic growth in Tanzania and everything will be fine so we need the best practice from Egypt we do the capacity-building in the Ministry of Finance and then nothing happens right and why does nothing happen we'd say it's a lack of political will right but in fact we're wrong right what's gone wrong is exactly all the stuff that you've just identified here what's gone wrong is that we haven't understood power relationships in the case of Zambia and agricultural subsidies we haven't understood the fact that the entire government owns land and therefore most of the major Minister's involved in decision-making are themselves receiving these agricultural subsidies and therefore may be quite reluctant to have them removed let me give you another question right to try to get back into this stuff I went to see two projects first one was in Ethiopia and second one was in another sub-saharan African country and they were identical projects right they were both projects which were about 27 million pounds for rural health clinics I turn up in Ethiopia at my rural health clinic it's busy there are doctors there there are nurses there there are young volunteers working on sex education seeing about 27,000 patients a year there are fantastic patient records there are great medicines on the shelves I then turn up in the second country an absolutely identical program same amount of money same implementing partners same model and I turn up in the clinic and there's human excrement on the floor there's no medicines on the shelves there are no patient records there's a fan but there's no electricity to power it and of course there are no patients and sane enough to go anywhere near that clinic right okay so what is the difference between the successful example in Ethiopia and the unsuccessful example in the other country does anyone want to generate some thoughts warning so what's what's going wrong so I've given 27 minutes here at the Capitol and here's the question what's gone wrong between that 27 million and the clinic some corruption okay so how does the corruption work this so we got it we got corruption but give me an example of where the corruptions going where the money's going okay so we lose some here central governments so the Ministry of Health scoops off about 5% of this money they need some money in order to do what with it what would the Minister of Health want to be doing with this money it is sorry very good very good I like this audience okay right this is very important to understand which is that the corruption is not always as one could imagine buying the jacuzzi right often the way that we misunderstand corruption is we imagine in these countries that actually what's happening is the person stealing the money trouser ring it and buying themselves a nice property in London or a Rolls Royce now that does happen of course right but that is not the major form of corruption that you're having to deal with right so we had a very good example there siphoned off for urban hospitals why is it been siphoned off for urban hospitals please know budgets why is he got a low budget for urban hospitals correct because some some guy like me has decided I want to put my 27 million into the raw hospitals and none of the other donors had decided to put any money into urban hospitals because they've done a needs assessment where they've concluded that it's the rural population their needs the money even more than that we may have even decided on erroneous theological basis that primary health care is more important than hospitals so we're not giving any money to hospitals right but he may want to continue to run the urban hospitals so he's stealing some of my money to put it in an urban hospitals what what other things right yep he's not visiting the rural areas why is that okay maybe he's an educated person who went studied at Yale comes from an elite family like many of the people that would have been in his government he probably doesn't spend much time in the rural areas and it's not a huge priority to him because these people are not likely to vote for him right okay so that's another thing that he might be putting the money in pick so he needs to or so possibly can make a contribution towards his own political party he needs to get some money together in order to get some votes get some people out delivering some leaflets make sure people are in certifies to come in and vote okay so there's some money that's gone missing at the center right next bit of money is going to go missing at the district level anyone like to suggest where the money's gone at the district Wow beautiful salaries why has he got to steal the money to pay the salaries he is not collecting taxes he's not collecting taxes which means that he has to get the money from the international donor and what does the international donor not want to give them money for salaries right we hate the idea of giving money for salaries because it doesn't feel like it's sustainable we worry that if we start supporting people's salaries there's going to be no end of it so we want to start investing in some innovative small clinic but we don't want to be paying the salary bill because we don't really feel that's our job right meanwhile the medicines okay I'm trying to get my head around why are the drugs not on the shelves in this place right why are the no rather no drugs on the shelves and the drugs have been imported into the country we believe right some nice American company has got the contract for pharmaceuticals there are contracts or invoices the receipts the pharmaceuticals have arrived right why have they not made it onto the shelves here sorry so yet some has been stolen yes lack of refrigeration very good beautiful remember why I've got that fan up there which we spent a lot of money installing but there's no electricity within 10 miles of this place so you can't refrigerate anything Reds who is supposed to be getting the pharmaceuticals into that place I mean his that she's job is it to get it from the capital city from the airport to the clinic hospital administrator or possibly a contract has been issued to somebody right maybe somebody's want a contract in order to deliver it but they don't deliver on the contract what do you do when they don't deliver on the contract are they your cousin are they from your political party what kind of sanctions have you got or does it turn out that the person who's in charge of actually running the dispensary in the clinic has their own private dispensary in the same village into which the medicines have no pity okay not promised you were coming towards an end here right okay now let's get back to our fixing our state so we've just been here in health I want to keep generating other things that you want to do in order to fix this state right what are the other things that you feel the state needs in order to operate so we've got security so we got legitimate monopoly on the use of violence I'm going to turn this into jargon right we've got an effective civil service got a decent financial administration somebody mentioned tax we've got health and investor education so we're investing in human capital to get the jargon together beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful so judiciary I'm gonna put it here as the rule of law rule and maybe citizen's rights how are we gonna get the economy going what do we need to get the economy going huh Michael let's Michael let's discuss in my credits maybe we need a pragmatically regulated free market maybe we need some bias but so you need a market of some sort yeah somebody who understands the culture there that's more about yeah okay no the next problem is who are you right so you've arrived in this place you're advising the governor you're trying to do all this stuff who actually are you right and what are your problems right you as UNICEF you as the World Food Program you as the World Bank you as USAID you as a Yale University professor off on a four months right okay what are the problems that you face stealing with this government give me one problem you don't speak the language correct this is not a trivial problem this is not a trivial problem there is a conceit in the international community that you don't need to speak the local language there's some idea that the people that matter speak English the fact is in almost every developing country that simply is not true and certainly outside the capital city it definitely is not true and yet the statistics on this absolutely horrifying so in 2011 the height of the surge in Afghanistan when there were a hundred and twenty thousand international soldiers and 100,000 I could you not 100 thousand international civilian consultants right so nearly 220,000 foreigners on the ground there were approximately 100 of those people who could speak in Afghan language fluently it approximately 100 the the scale of this problem is inconceivable right and that lack of linguistic understanding of course is also a deep deep lack of cultural understanding I mean absolutely no idea whatsoever about the context so we are now including myself Ernest turning up in this country we are experts on governance in the abstract we are experts on gender in the abstract we are experts on education in the abstract on economics in the abstract what we are not experts on is gender in Afghanistan education in Afghanistan the economics of Afghanistan because we don't know anything about Afghanistan we don't know any matter of Kansas and we don't speak the language why else don't we know anything about Afghanistan correct we don't have any relationships to get us into doors and what is the reason why we don't have any relationships or one fundamental structural logistical problem transient so short-term relationships there so short-term very very serious problem right so the average tour length of an American soldier in Afghanistan was 12 months the average length of a British soldier was 6 months the average tour length of an Italian soldier was 4 months the average diplomatic posting was 12 months extendable to 2 years right and then the next problem is what what's the next problem when you want to go out and visit your governor and spend time in that place security right there's an insurgency going on people are trying to kill you people are trying to blow you up you can only move around in an armored vehicle you want to go and see the Department of Education to have a discussion of the direction of Education you go along in two armored vehicles with four bodyguards who tell you that you can be in that office for an hour and a half before they have to extract you because they're worried that somebody's gonna come and kill you how easy is it right you turn up with your translator because you don't speak the language you're there for a very short term period you're actually if you're a civilian almost certainly getting leave for two weeks every six weeks where you're removed from the country decide to stop you go crazy so there's absolutely no continuity of anyone dealing with it and you can only spend an hour and a half from the person's office and you're a fantastic okay so then there are these whole issues around bureaucracies right the issues around the stovepipe the issues around the incentives of bureaucracies right then what happens when you are the person on the ground so you're out there on the ground and you pretty rapidly determine that nothing very useful is getting done here you're not really achieving very much right but you're sending your reports back to your boss right and there are one of two problems with saying that you're not achieving very much on the ground right a one problem is that you're I don't know you're a middle-aged South African consultant trying to get away from your wife and you're slightly worried that you might be sent back to South Africa if you keep sending in reports saying things about getting very far or the second problem is somebody said there is an existential threat to global security here if Afghanistan Falls Pakistan will fall mad mullahs will get their hands on nuclear weapons right at which point failures not an option so visit which brings us to the politics so back home somebody's got an idea of what they're trying to do with this place I try to simplify it initially by suggesting that back home you could provide a humanitarian explanation for what you're doing in sub-saharan Africa and a national security explanation for what you're doing in sub-saharan Africa but the reality is that the political justifications in Washington or in London or in Paris alerting around them changing very very rapidly I mean almost more rapidly than you can keep up with them I remember feeling this very strongly when I was challenging the surge in Afghanistan right I remember in 2011 we had the British Embassy in Kabul as the largest British Embassy in the world and I said what on earth do you think you're doing why on earth have you got the largest embassy in the world in Afghanistan I mean if if you're worried about terrorism Pakistan it's more important if you're worried about regional security the Middle East is more important if you're worried about poverty sub-saharan Africa is more important what on earth are you doing with the largest embassy in the world and Afghanistan and the answer was low key of F garrison Falls Pakistan will for Mad mullahs will get their hands on nuclear weapons this next era global security right 2013 and I go to a meeting and they tell me that they're reducing the size the Embassy in Kabul so it's going to become the second smallest embassy that we have in that part of Asia I said what are you doing why you were juicing it's so small it's gonna be smaller than the pool where are we going with this and then they say to me ah Rory if you're worried about terrorism Pakistan matters more than Afghanistan run on it right the whole thing moves like this so who knows whether at one time or another what you're really concerned about here is human rights democracy and a full rich thick sense or whether you're only concerned about holding elections who knows whether what you're really concerned about is defeating the Taliban or whether what you all really care about is killing Osama bin Laden who knows whether your government actually buys into that whole theory that I hope just sketched on Africa about migration about epidemics about Labor potential about raw materials or whether the government is just committed to spending 0.7 percent of its GDP on international aid and is trying to find somewhere to park that money and this presupposes of course that the politicians themselves have any clear answers to these questions the answer of course the politicians not being a highly distinguished room in Yale may be quite busy people with many other things to think about it may not have a fully analyzed and worked out logical theory on exactly what their position is on the Central African Republic or exactly what they believe about the RO hinga and Myanmar and the question of whether they're going to be focusing this week on Yemen or this week on South Sudan may have nothing to do with the objective conditions on the ground in Yemen or South Sudan or may have a great deal more to do with what happens to be in the newspapers right now let me try to wrap this up and then then move on to questions so I began by saying that I came in as a new minister into international development and I touched the edge of this wonderful idealistic vision which we carry with us of the transformation of other people's countries so the transformation of very poor countries transformation of countries that are going through humanitarian catastrophes I talked about the failures of development since the 1970s and talked about some of the reasons why we feel development has failed we then began together as a joint exercise to sketch out conceptually what is involved in trying to describe the business of fixing a failed state a little bit of an attempt to describe what an ideal state might look like and what the methodology might be in achieving it which is where we generated this mapping of internal and external stakeholders the definition of critical tasks the mobilization of sufficient resource and the measuring through iterative monitoring we created ten functions with state right ranging from the legitimate monopoly on the use of violence through a good civil service a good financial administration investment citizens rights and responsibilities investment in human capital infrastructure good management that's international regulations pragmatically regulated free-market and the rule of law right and then we talks about the problems and trying to flesh those things out so we took the example of Health and corruption and health and the problems of getting those those drugs through to the clinic then we touched on who we are it took a little bit about us in there and if we can come back to us in them in a second but who we are who we are as individuals right what languages do we speak where are we based how long we there what kind of security constraints do we face talked a little bit about of bureaucratic structures what is it in the culture of bureaucracies that makes it difficult to mesh or interact and then we reflected on the political the strange political lurches within the brains the politicians which brings us back to the fundamental problem the fundamental problem is that in many many many cases we are dedicating ourselves to impossible projects and projects which we cannot acknowledge as impossible because we find it very difficult to take on board leaving aside the ethical issues leaving aside the deep moral problems for the intervention we cannot take on board the sheer practical the sheer practical implications of putting yourself in that governor's office in a remote part of Somalia trying to turn around a society when a civil war is going on when there's no electricity on the ground and where you don't begin to understand the local structures where all these things that you've mentioned if I can get the importance of data the importance of an inventory the importance of trying to map who these stakeholders are the census all these things are close to impossible for you to achieve there is no data in that part of Somalia the records have been blown up or destroyed you have no way of getting your researchers out into the field you're not there for long enough you simply cannot gather that information the stakeholders that you unfortunately end up seeing end up unless you're very very careful being a very very arbitrary group of people dominated by tribal chiefs who turn up and say I am the chief of this tribe this tribe follows me in the next day somebody else turns up and says my cousin's bluffing he's not the chief of the tribe I'm the chief of the tribe and the women that you are trying to deal with right your women that you're trying to interact with in my case what trying to do this kind of consultation in Amara in Iraq we set up a Provincial Council in which all the women sat at one end of the room in total silence where their head scarves on didn't contribute to the political conversation at all and then when one of them spoke up she was dragged out of her car and executed the next day right so the extremity of the problems you're dealing with the problems again of me my self dealing with Haider and Iraq who was a young human rights activist who I helped finance his children's magazine and who I employed as a translator who was himself dragged from his car and executed by the Sarris militia because he was working with me ranks problems which I haven't begun to touch on here which go beyond this which are problems of legitimacy problems and what happens when an insurgency is going on problems when a country perceives you as a foreign occupying force put all that together and then take on board the fact that sometimes these interventions work and I'm going to finish for this because I want to finish on a slightly more optimistic note before we get on to questions in Bosnia when I arrived there first 1994 that country had faced a war in which over a hundred thousand people have been killed in which nearly a million people have been displaced from their homes as refugees in which there were a hundred and fifty thousand people under arms in which there were about 85 checkpoints between Sarajevo and a town 100 miles north of Sarajevo in which war criminals like melodic were on the loose carriage which was on the LEAs we intervened United States playing this very major part of it Richard Holbrooke playing as a former lecturer Atlas in this lecture series played a very major part and within five years five years a very short period of time against all the ants a million houses had been returned to their original owners the killing had stopped the checkpoints had disappeared the hundred and fifty thousand people under arms had been reduced to 16,000 under arms the war criminals had almost all been arrested and have since been prosecuted in The Hague and the crime rate in Bosnia is today lower than Sweden right that is a success which is why the challenge for all of us moving forward is to try to work out how to combine the deep pessimism that might emerge from this kind of analysis with the strong understanding that it can be done that it was done in Bosnia to a lesser extent in Kosovo in Sierra Leone in Cambodia and that if we can often do much less than we pretend we can do much more than we fear thank you very much indeed good thank you all very much questions okay so China in relation to Africa is very very difficult for the West the presence so we don't know exactly how much China has spent in Africa over the last twenty years maybe seventy five billion maybe a hundred billion dollars maybe more because you're having to count the money that is spent directly by the Chinese government money sent by state-owned enterprises money spent by Chinese private businesses the Chinese involvement in Africa is very deep so many African countries now you'll turn up there may be as many as 150,000 Chinese citizens settled in the country performing basic agricultural tasks running shops getting involved in construction go to someone like Zimbabwe the airport has been paid for by China the National Training College for the military has been paid for by China go to Ethiopia most of the major road network has been installed and paid for by China and so you will find African leaders saying that they are very keen that the United States or Britain behaved more like China right there are African leaders who say to me that we don't want you coming in and talking about human rights we don't want you to a civil society we don't want you talking about democratization what we would like you to do is build us some roads build our Parliament building for us build our Airport for us and above all invest we'd like some money coming into the country to get some jobs no at the same time there are other African leaders who are beginning to get very frustrated with China and are beginning to feel that China has exploited and abuse that the Chinese model has been very one-sided and there are people in China who are beginning to feel that they've lost a lot of money in Africa but most of the loans they've made in Africa a lot of the investment they've planted where Africa isn't going to come good these projects are never going to return the kind of investment they've put in and where they are discovering as we all discover the limits of the kind of power I mean it's not quite clear what China is doing here and one of the answers this may be that China doesn't necessarily need to answer that question because their economy is growing so fast they've got so much money they don't need to really worry about it I mean when people in Britain challenged me and say what's China doing spending all this money why are you not out competing China the answer is the Chinese economy it's currently growing every year and a half about the size of the entire British economy so they've got a certain amount of surplus money to be putting into these kinds of projects but are they doing it in order to try to gain strategic advantage over war materials possibly so current estimates suggest I was waving my iPhone around that China currently owns about 75% of the world's coltan about 78 percent of the world's cobalt and about 85 percent of the world rare earths so one way of interpreting this is this is a smart bet that these are the things that are going to matter for those objects of the future and China needs to put a marker down on those things and then the question funny even if you wanted to be China what would American or British populations make of their governments trying to behave like China so as a working politician of course my experience every day in Parliament is turning up and being challenged why are you not intervening in the Civil War in Burundi and I have to stand up and say in a slightly pompous way we call on Burundi to respect UN resolution whatever we call on them to respect the Arusha Accords we call on them to work with the EX Tanzanian Prime Minister who's currently gone out my sit down and then somebody else stands up and says what are you doing to resolve the situation in western Cameroon and then I have to stand up and say we call on the Anglophone community of west Cameroon to resolve their political differences with the francophone community and in the end the only solution to the conflict is through a political solution but we call on everyone to respect the Constitution return glance and I sit down again and thanks guys 6000 says what are you doing about the situation and Togo right the point that I'm trying to make here is that my political culture doesn't enable me to say what a Chinese diplomat would say to me which is frankly I don't really have a dog in the fight of who's winning in Bern D I don't really have any control about what's happening in West Cameroon and I'm not going to pretend to my public that these things are either things I can do much about all things that we have a particular national interest in pursuing so I think those were some questions in response to China rotten answers on China but it was a good question okay so Botswana is a really really interesting example and Botswana you know went from being down there with Malawi one of the poorest countries in the world in the 1960s to now being a middle-income country in Africa a middle-income country with very little corruption which was not destroyed by a resource curse the normal idea is that if you are cursed with oil or diamonds you get a Dutch disease and you're in a terrible trouble but in fact what's what I was able to manage its diamonds it's been able to get very very good figures not just some things like education but on things like fertility rates so where it's in Nazaire the average family size is about 7.2 and Botswana they've managed to get it down to about 3.4 a month now these are very very impressive achievements that have happened in Botswana and it's not immediately obvious what it is about Botswana that's allowing to do it let's move on to another couple of cases Rwanda Ethiopia right these are these are even more controversial Botswana it's one that we feel quite comfortable with because it's a democratic country where there have been nice democratic transitions every eight years but Rwanda Ethiopia very interesting so Rwandan Ethiopia of course if I had been doing this talk in in the late 1980s would have been right up there on the West amongst the five poorest countries in the world and Ethiopia coast went through a famine and of course in 1994 Rwanda went through this horrifying genocide since that time those countries through very authoritarian governments have managed to double the GDP per capita of their countries and Rwanda is genuinely remarkable Ethiopia is genuinely remarkable I mean there are huge questions around the style of government but my goodness you walk into the clinics they're working you look at the roads they were repaired it's clean its progressive a lot of the investments bearing fruit even these strange governments state-owned enterprises that we don't really understand we want to sort of suggest that everybody should be following a Botswana model one on private enterprise in fact ruonan Ethiopia a lot of the money is spent by the army and yet seems to be effectively spent by the army and been getting actual returns for people in those countries but do we have any real way of explaining why that's working in Rwanda and it's not working in Burundi and Burundi is basically a perfect comparison to Rwanda their histories are almost identical their geology is their geographies the ethnic divisions between Tutsi and Hutu are almost identical between the two countries and yet one of them is taken off and the other one is mine and miserable poverty and is sitting there is number three on my list so the answer on Rwandan Ethiopia is supposed to be the inheritance of medieval state structures so the theoretical answer that's proposed at the moment is that somehow they're drawing off a deep legacy of state control under an old Rwandan Kingdom and under the Ethiopian King none of that of course applies to Botswana at all right that had none of those structures in place which is where you end up in this horrible question around leadership and of course this question saying this is about leadership or saying this is about um avoiding corruption is simply a tautology and it's completely empty statement because it poses the prior question of well what style of leadership what is it that allowed it to involve corruption in fact a lot of what we proposed as explanations and not really explanations at all they're just other ways of stating the obvious I mean the classic example on corruption let's say we say how did Botswana avoid corruption right and the traditional answer to that is through transparent predictable and accountable financial processes right there doesn't tell you anything right right to say that a to say that a country has transparent predictable furnished press is just another way of saying it's not corrupt it doesn't help you get anywhere closer to the core explanation so the answer is I'm sorry confused and if you have an idea or an explanation I'd like forth but the the basic story is that in in almost every developing country to provide us a sort of slick answer that is that it's much much easier to provide a convincing explanation of success than it is of failure Renault buddy can ever explain failure and you saw that most variable in the comparison between the search in Iraq and the search in Afghanistan when the search in iraq worked General Petraeus provided a very clear explanation for why it worked when his certain Afghanistan failed there was no explanation at all and that are working as much as possible [Applause] okay so this is a really really central point okay mobile telephones are a very good example of something that seems to work almost everyone right the first big success not just in Somalia but in Afghanistan was the mobile telephone system the second thing that the international community whatever the hell that means seems to be able to do in these countries is stabilize the currents in set up a central bank right first thing they did in Bosnia their best thing about central banks stable currency cabal's stable currency central bank Baghdad stable currency central banker what do these things have in common right the mobile telephone system the stable currency the central bank generally what they have in common is they're quite techie engineering issues they're generally things that foreigners sitting in a capital bringing best practice from somewhere else in the world are able to deliver right they're not deeply rooted in complex issues of culture tribalism governance the rule of law civil society in fact it's one of the reasons why the Gates Foundation I believe is increasingly focused on health rather than education because certain kinds of health interventions in particular immunization appears to be relatively standard across many of these different kind and it's relatively straightforward for the Gates Foundation to send out people you know how to do immunization turn up in a country and really achieve some very dramatic improvements in health indicators when it comes to education ah highly politicized the teachers union the curriculum the low status of teachers the way a rural school operates girls boys all this kind of thing they are scary so what do we do with this fact what do we do with the fact that there are certain kinds of things that we seem to be able to do well mobile phones Bank some aspects of health care and other things which seem to us more fundamental more important but which we really struggle to deal with rule of law governance corruption my instinct is focus on that right because I don't think you can do this stuff generally it can be done right people within those countries can themselves sort out those problems in different ways Botswana Rwanda sorted out those problems Bangladesh is an extraordinary example of a country which if I'd been talking to you in 1976 was the definitional basket case you know a country where 150,000 people could be killed in the single incidence of flooding today their flood emergency response is so good that she would probably only lose 500 people in a similar scale flood and they're on the verge of becoming a middle-income country and the employment rates have rocketed and education rates and rocketed and the microcredit schemes of work etc so countries can begin to sort out some of these things Bangladesh perhaps not a great example sorting out those particular things I read on the on the right wall but other things they have sorted out but I do not think these are things that farmers are going to be very good at sorting out and the is because of all these kinds of things it's because of who foreigners are I mean the people that are likely to be able to deal with these root problems of rule of law governance corruption are going to be people from within that culture in particular local political leaders we talked about us and them and the fundamental problem for us in them if I can find it again which I can't is that generally in the way in which we have thought about other people's countries we have over emphasized us and we've under emphasized them we've tended to assume that we are heroic brilliant intervenors with all this best practice that's going to come and do the capacity-building and that they are a little bit foolish right generally the places that have worked Bosnia's are a good example of this they worked for exactly the reasons that we thought they wouldn't work right so we thought the problem in Bosnia was that the foreign military was not more active in fact in Bosnia the secret was that the forum actually wasn't more active because it gave more space to the local political actors we thought the problem in Bosnia was that too many deals were cut with extremist political parties almost certainly giving the responsibility to local political actors and forcing them to cut deals with extremist political parties is actually what led to the political solution in Bosnia right so it's there that's going to be able to sort that stuff out and it's us that should try to focus on the things that we can do right which is why I am quite a believer just to annoy everybody in this room even more in humanitarian relief work right obviously humanitarian relief work sounds done humanitarian relief work sounds absurd right what on earth are you doing providing cash transfers or shelter or food to starving people surely what you should be doing is addressing the deep underlying root structural issues that caused the famine in the first place and you should be creating the sustainable economic development so that you don't have to do that so that the country concerned can do it now of course logically that's true of course if a country is able to do what China did I'd get itself into the state of wealth that China's in now it doesn't need any humanitarian relief or anybody to look after itself in fact in get around providing humanitarian leave to other people's countries but I don't think that we can do that we in this room right and insofar as we can't do that then I think it's just such a very good idea to go around providing humanitarian assistance to people and not worrying too much about the fact that we haven't addressed the root causes that led to it so yeah I'll provide shorter answers I'm sorry yeah yeah so this I think is what the German was probably getting onto and that's exactly right so of course the point is to then think deeply about the way in which you might be able to use something like the setting up of a good mobile telephony system in Somalia to achieve many other things and that could be in the case of Kenya of course the impasto system on banking it could be a very good project I saw in Northeast Nigeria which was using weather data in order to create good simple insurance models for farmers with their crops it could be in the case of Somalia actually beginning to get information out about the famine and the drought through the use of those mobile telephones so you're absolutely right I mean the secret is focus on what we can do and then making the most of what we can do but that still will fall short of being able to address some of the issues that will continue to fill a phone about to the lady at the backyard try to work to solve them because okay yeah nominated but the point is a very very fundamental one and it's a fundamental problem with my position right it's a fundamental problem with my position so essentially what's being said there is look if these countries genuinely pose a serious threat to global security then what I'm proposing here isn't going to cut it because essentially what I'm saying is that these countries here those five countries on the left and most those countries on the right are probably likely in 25 50 years time most of them still to be quite poor quite fragile quite traumatized still have quite a lot of um government space still have quite a lot of areas that are likely to either generate regional conflicts and Wars or perhaps in the worst case generate on government space where terrorists could stifle push large amounts of migrants through into Europe if the population if 40 percent of the children born in the world by 2050 are going to be in sub-saharan Africa and if they're going to be no jobs in sub-saharan Africa then it seems perfectly plausible that by 2050 you you could of course have 150 200 300 million Africans trying to move into Europe so of course what I'm saying in that sense is quite pessimistic I'm saying that we can't I'm afraid create jobs for those people we don't know how to do it if we knew how to create jobs for 18 million Africans a year we wouldn't have the problems we have in Greece and Spain at the Monde yeah we should be we should be planning for the worst-case scenario we should be assuming that we do not have it within us to achieve the kind of radical transformations we're not going to be able to create full employment in Africa we're not going to be able to turn Malawi in the next 50 years into South Korea I mean I don't think right and therefore we need a plan for the worst at the same time we also need to be aware of the fact that maybe the threat posed is not as Extreme as we sometimes suggest that often things that we say our existential threats to global security may not be existential threats to global security we may present them as such because and I feel this as a politician because we're trying to justify our aid budget or explain to the public why we're spending all this money on international aid so we tend to overemphasize the threats that could be posed and I good point right I'll stop oh well I'll take two and I'll send together thank you thank you yeah sir back hey Charlene question something law for the right path I said as I said that was so this beautiful beautifully beautifully instead it I I think I'm gonna dodge that one I think it's slightly off the subject to think but maybe we could talk about it afterwards they were a drink I'm happy to do that um okay let me let me finish on the on the question that's been post around East Timor Kosovo Bosnia um I suppose I'm company I suppose my gut instinct is that number one we were wrong or people were wrong who concluded in Iraq for example that cumbersome UN coalition operations are inferior to us led coalition's with a much more aggressive military posture in many ways the things that seemed so frustrating in those countries which are that troops in Bosnia were very reluctant to deploy from their bases as was true in Kosovo too there were more injuries to American soldiers on the baseball court in Sarajevo than were suffered in any form of contact with the enemy right in retrospect were virtues because they actually compelled local political actors to play the role and and and rebuild their own societies the useful role played by the military is often in these situations in Kosovo for example were moving behind cost of our civil society organizations that were moving to do refugee return with the troops coming along behind them and then drawing back and they're moving forward in the costs case of Kosovo and Bosnia two very very important to understand that we the international community are one factor alongside other perhaps more important factors I've mentioned local leadership but also regional power politics what the neighbors are doing what the European Union was able to offer as a carrot to draw people in on East Timor on Cambodia is beginning to push outside my area expertise but I would say that my gut instinct is that the light footprint approach is the correct one that the surge is almost always a mistake because the surge is generally an attempt by the foreigner through massive deployment of resources and troops to impose their will on a recalcitrant situation the only hope of success I think has to be the light footprint that necessarily forces local political actors to take the lead in other words to conclude in relation to all of this probably as indeed with the much of the rest of the world the wisdom is the wisdom of humility humility is endless thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 287,883

Rating: 4.7109828 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, Rory Stewart, The MacMillan Center, Yale University, Walker Lecture, failed states

Id: zMXXJqvMdk4

Length: 80min 37sec (4837 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/_Un_Known__]

should've been Rory 😩

never forget 2019 ✊😔

[u/Porn1025]

I know most are clicking on this for the title or for Rory Stewart but the guy who gives the introduction, Ian Shapiro, is one of, if not my favorite, political economists. His lecture series "power and politics in today's world" is probably the best run down on the issues of the modern world and how we got where we are. It's an amazing jumping off point if nothing else, and it's filled with stuff this sub loves to talk about.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyViG2ar68jkgEi4y6doNZy

[u/Titswari]

If you guys haven’t read his book “The Places in Between” I suggest giving it a look. It’s an easy read with short chapters and he’s got a very cool writing style. He walked from Herat to Kabul a few weeks before the US invasion of Afghanistan, and he talks about the different kinds of people he met and the different ethnic groups that live the country. Really gave me a sense of how poor these people were. At times it felt like, what he saw when he was describing the people and the cultures that he met had been the same people that the British fought. Or the same people that Babur met. How little the outside world had affected them and how besides for a few modern conveniences, they were living their lives the way that their ancestors had been living for 1000s of years.

[u/dukeofkelvinsi]

Rory Stewart looks like the most stereotypical Brit. But I look forward to seeing what insights he can offer

[u/canadianchris57]

Rory Stewart is brilliant, he has some great insights and I would have loved to see him as mayor of London.

[u/csp256]

Can you please provide a summary?

I don't actually have time to devote 80 minutes to this.

[u/thisispoopoopeepee]

That guy needs to get more sleep. But i think he missed a point on cell phones, another reason they work is because everyone wants them to work, is willing to pay for them to work and to make sure they continue to work. Tribal leaders, priests, literally everyone in power wants their cell phone to work and wants to be able to browse social media..