QuestionsWeb LinksClass OutlineClass notes
Question for Discussion: Do you agree with Kaplan
that the anarchy and environmental collapse in
sub-Saharan Africa is a possible model for the
human future?
Readings: Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy";
Homer-Dixon, "The Rich get Richer, the Poor get Squat";
Bono Wants You ;; Pearlstein, "Paulson's $125 Billion Mistake"

Video: The Baka of Cameroon (1997)


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Africa and the Problem of Failed States

Genocide in the Post-Cold War World

Genocide in the Movies

Environmental Causes of Societal Collapse

AIDS in Africa and the World


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Africa and the Rise of Failed States


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The Third World Future for the
First World?

Kaplan's larger argument is that we must study the Third World present to understand our possible future. Faced with growing populations, increasing environmental destruction and resource scarcity, a huge Debt burden, and collapsing states and civil societies, many West Africa countries are on the verge of being "failed states." Because of these increasing problems, Third World nations cannot easily follow the United States example. They do not have the money, resources, strong government, and social and political stability to easily solve their problems. If we do not recognize the very
real dangers of increasing environmental, political, and societal collapse in these desperate Third World countries, their problems could one day become ours.
If these Third World countries undermine their environments, resources, and societies, could their increasing collapse threatenthe stability of the First World? If these Third World countries can't follow the example of the First World and become developed,
what can and should be their future? Is Sub-Sahara West
Africa the nightmare future that these Third World countries must avoid. (Chris Lewis)

Africa's Debt Crisis

Africa and the Lost Decade of the 1990s

The widening gulf between the global haves and have-nots was starkly revealed last night when the United Nations announced that while the United States was booming in the 1990s more than 50 countries suffered falling living standards. The UN's annual human development report charted increasing poverty for more than a quarter of the world's countries, where a lethal combination of famine, HIV/Aids, conflict, and failed economic policies have turned the clock back.

Highlighting the setbacks endured by sub-Saharan Africa and the nations that emerged from the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of the cold war, the UN called for urgent action to meet its millennium development goals for 2015. These include a halving of the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, a two-thirds drop in mortality for the under fives, universal primary education and a halving of those without access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation. The report said the 1990s had seen a drop from 30% to 23% in the number of people globally living on less than a dollar a day, but the improvement had largely been the result of the progress in China and India, the world's two most populous countries.

Despite some sporadic successes such as Ghana and Senegal, there was little hope of Africa meeting the UN's 2015 development goals; on current trends it would be 2147 before the poorest countries in the poorest continent halved poverty and 2165 before child mortality was cut by two thirds. Thirty of the 34 countries classified by the UN as "low human development" are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Taking issue with those who have argued that the "tough love" policies of the past two decades have spawned the growth of a new global middle class, the report says the world became ever more divided between the super-rich and the desperately poor. The richest 1% of the world's population (around 60 million) now receive as much income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the richest 25 million Americans is the equivalent of that of almost 2 billion of the world's poorest people. In 1820, Western Europe's per capita income was three times that of Africa's; by the 1990s it was more than 13 times as high.

Larry Elliott, 2003

Debt is Killing the Environment

As debts mounted, what poorer countries needed most was foreign currency to pay back their debts. One easy solution was to milk the earth's resources for the hard cash they brought in, and cut back on environmental conservation programmes.

Third World countries have done this by:

1. Heavily overusing soil to grow cash crops, often forcing small farmers off their land.

2. Producing more crops on small areas of land, often using chemical fertilisers, and so degrading the soil.

3. Allowing overfishing of their waters, so that fish
stocks are damaged.

4.Allowing multinational companies logging rights to
their forests, destroying the lifestyle of those who
live there.

5. Chopping down forests to make room for beef cattle grazing or crop farming.

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
by Robert D. Kaplan

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence--as I intend to do in this article--I find I must begin with West Africa. (Kaplan, 7)

 "The coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are entering. (Nine of twenty-one U.S. foreign-aid missions to be closed over the next three years are in Africa--a prologue to a consolidation of U.S. embassies themselves.) Precisely because much of Africa is set to go over the edge at a time when the Cold War has ended, when environmental and demographic stress in other parts of the globe is becoming critical, and when the post-First World War system of nation-states--not just in the Balkans but perhaps also in the Middle East--is about to be toppled, Africa suggests what war, borders, and ethnic politics will be like a few decades hence." (Kaplan, 18)

It is time to understand the Environment for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh--developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts--will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern United States. (Kaplan, 20)

"In Homer-Dixon's view, future wars and civil violence will often arise from scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests, and fish. Just as there will be environmentally driven wars and refugee flows, there will be environmentally induced praetorian regimes--or, as he puts it, "hard regimes.....Candidates include Indonesia, Brazil, and, of course, Nigeria. Though each of these nations has exhibited democratizing tendencies of late, Homer-Dixon argues that such tendencies are likely to be superficial "epiphenomena" having nothing to do with long-term processes that include soaring populations and shrinking raw materials. Democracy is problematic; scarcity is more certain." (Kaplan, 21)

While a minority of the human population will be, as Francis Fukuyama would put it, sufficiently sheltered so as to enter a "post-historical" realm, living in cities and suburbs in which the environment has been mastered and ethnic animosities have been quelled by bourgeois prosperity, an increasingly large number of people will be stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts to rise above poverty, cultural dysfunction, and ethnic strife will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil to till, and space to survive in. In the developing world environmental stress will present people with a choice that is increasingly among totalitarianism (as in Iraq), fascist-tending mini-states (as in Serb-held Bosnia), and road-warrior cultures (as in Somalia). Homer-Dixon concludes that "as environmental degradation proceeds, the size of the potential social disruption will increase."
(Kaplan, 22)

"Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction."
(Kaplan, 24)

"We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel's and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes's First Man, condemned to a life that is "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not." (Kaplan, 24)

Consider that Indian cities, like African and Chinese ones, are ecological time bombs--Delhi and Calcutta, and also Beijing, suffer the worst air quality of any cities in the world--and it is apparent how surging populations, environmental degradation, and ethnic conflict are deeply related.
(Kaplan, 27)

Van Creveld concludes, "Armed conflict will be waged by men on earth, not robots in space. It will have more in common with the struggles of primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war." While another military historian, John Keegan, in his new book A History of Warfare, draws a more benign portrait of primitive man, it is important to point out that what Van Creveld really means is re-primitivized man: warrior societies operating at a time of unprecedented resource scarcity and planetary overcrowding.(Kaplan, 48)

"Although the borders within West Africa are increasingly unreal, those separating West Africa from the outside world are in various ways becoming more impenetrable.

"But Afrocentrists are right in one respect: we ignore this dying region at our own risk. When the Berlin Wall was falling, in November of 1989, I happened to be in Kosovo, covering a riot between Serbs and Albanians. The future was in Kosovo, I told myself that night, not in Berlin. The same day that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat clasped hands on the White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was approaching Bamako, Mali, revealing corrugated-zinc shacks at the edge of an expanding desert. The real news wasn't at the White House, I realized. It was right below." (Kaplan,57)

Bono Wants You

"Bono: Right now there is the biggest pandemic in the history of civilization happpening with AIDS. It ’s bigger than the Black Death, which took a third of Europe in the Middle Ages. Sixty-five hundred Africans are dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease. And it is not a priority for the West. Why? Because we don’ t put the same value on African life as we put on a European or an American life. God will not let us get away with this. History certainly won't let us get away with our excuses.

We say we can’t get these antiretroviral drugs to the farthest reaches of Africa, but we can get them our cold fizzy drinks. The tiniest village, you can find a bottle of Coke. Look, if we really thought that an African life was equal in value to an English, a French or an Irish life, we wouldn’t let two and a half million Africans die every year for the stupidest of reasons: money. We just
would not. And a very prominent head of state said to me: ‘If these people weren ’t Africans, we just couldn ’t let it happen. ’ We don ’t really deep down believe in their equality. "

"Bono: Harry became emotional at the end of this tale: ‘When Bobby Kennedy lay dead on a Los Angeles pavement, there was no greater friend to the civil rights movement. There was no one we owed more of our progress to than that man. ’ (…) Whether he was exaggerating or not, that was a great lesson for me, because what Dr. King was saying was: Don ’t respond to caricature—the Left, the Right, the Progressive, the Reactionary. Don ’t take people on rumor. Find the light in them, because that will further your cause. And I’ve held on to that very tightly, that lesson. And so, don ’ t think that I don ’ t understand. I know what I’m up against. I just sometimes do not appear to."

"Bono: I know, I know. Religion can be the enemy of God. It ’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building. ” [laughs] “ A list of instructions where there was once was conviction; dogma where once people just did it; a congregation led by a man where once they were led by the Holy Spirit. Discipline replacing discipleship. But the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma..... You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the Universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that, ‘As you reap, so will you sow’ stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I ’ve done a lot of stupid stuff. "

As Resources are Wasted:
Mass Violence will Rise

Within the next fifty years, earth's human population will probably pass nine billion, and global economic output may quintuple. Largely as a result, scarcities of renewable resources will increase sharply. Human beings will face a drop in the total area of rich agricultural land, along with the loss of much of the planet's remaining virgin forests. Coming generations will also see the ongoing depletion and degradation of aquifers, rivers, and other water resources, the decline of fisheries, further stratospheric ozone loss, and, perhaps, significant climate change. For several decades, a number of analysts have warned that such scarcities could precipitate violent civil or international conflict. But a full debate has been limited by lack of carefully compiled evidence. We therefore brought together a team of thirty researchers from four continents to study a series of specific case studies.

The evidence they gathered points to a disturbing conclusion: scarcities of renewable resources are already contributing to violent conflicts in many parts of the developing world. Moreover, these conflicts may foreshadow a surge of similar violence in the coming decades, particularly in poor countries where shortages of water, forests, and, especially, fertile land are already producing terrible human hardship.
(Thomas Homer-Dixon)

Thomas Homer-Dixon: Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflicts

"In brief, our research showed that environmental scarcities are already contributing to violent conflicts in many parts of the developing world. These conflicts are probably the early signs of an upsurge of violence in the coming decades that will be induced or aggravated by scarcity. The violence will usually be sub-national, persistent, and diffuse. Poor societies will be particularly affected since they are less able to buffer themselves from environmental scarcities and the social crises they cause. These societies are, in fact, already suffering acute hardship from shortages of water, forests, and especially fertile land." (Thomas Homer-Dixon)

The research was structured as I proposed in my previous article. Six types of environmental change were identified as plausible causes of violent intergroup conflict:

  • greenhouse-induced climate change

  • stratospheric ozone depletion

  • degradation and loss of good agricultural land

  • degradation and removal of forests

  • depletion and pollution of fresh water supplies

  • depletion of fisheries.

We used three hypotheses to link these changes with violent conflict. First, we suggested that decreasing supplies of physically controllable environmental resources, such as clean water and good agricultural land, would provoke interstate "simple-scarcity" conflicts or resource wars. Second, we hypothesized that large population movements caused by environmental stress would induce "group-identity" conflicts, especially ethnic clashes. And third, we suggested that severe environmental scarcity would simultaneously increase economic deprivation and disrupt key social institutions, which in turn would cause "deprivation" conflicts such as civil strife and insurgency. (Thomas Homer-Dixon)

The Rich get Richer, and the Poor get Squat

If people around the world come to perceive that today's globalized capitalism is making the already rich vastly richer, while it's simultaneously leaving a large fraction of the world's population behind, then it will lose much of its moral standing as a set of principles for ordering our social and economic lives. And any social system that loses its moral standing—its legitimacy, in the jargon of social scientists—is a target for rebellion.

The statistics describing the gap between rich and poor people on Earth are truly breathtaking. According to a recent report from the World Bank, in 2001 about 1.1 billion people, or one-fifth of the population of the world's poor countries, lived on less than what one dollar a day would buy in the United States. About 2.7 billion people, or over half the developing world's population, lived on less than two dollars a day. In 2004, says the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, 852 million people faced chronic hunger, up 15 million from the previous year. And in the same year, according to UNICEF, one billion children—or nearly half the children in the world—were severely deprived. Over 600 million children didn't have adequate shelter, and every day four thousand died because of dirty water or poor sanitation.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, in 2004 the world had 587 billionaires with a combined wealth of $1.9 trillion—equivalent to nearly 20 percent of the annual economic output of the United States.

Economists have known for some time that, for the most part, convergence isn't happening. Many of today's poorest countries have GDP growth rates far below those of the richest countries. And, if we look back over a century or more, inequality between incomes in poor countries and those in rich countries has widened.

So upbeat assessments of the world inequality trend, based on population-weighted measures, are wrong. Inequality between the world's rich and poor people has been rising for a very long time and has stayed high in recent decades. To the extent that there has been improvement in the population-weighted inequality statistics, it has been entirely due to China's spectacular growth since the 1970s. But when we look at inequality between individuals, we find that widening inequalities inside China and India have counterbalanced the gains from China's overall growth. We also find, definitively, that we now live in the world without a middle class: over 77 percent of the world's people are poor (with a per capita income below the Brazilian average), while nearly 16 percent are rich (with incomes above the Portuguese average), which leaves less than 7 percent in the middle.

The more we live in a truly global society—intimately connected by fiber-optic cables, air travel, and trade—the more the absence of a world middle class matters. And the more the huge income differences among us matter too, because people care not just about their absolute level of income but also about their relative position in the overall income distribution. “Globalization must, by changing the reference point upward,” Milanovic concludes, “make people in poor countries feel more deprived.”

Thomas Homer-Dixon, 2005

Growing Number of Failed States
in the World

Web Resources on the Coming Anarchy



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America, the Environment, and the Global Economy