Economies of Violence: Reflections on the World Development Report 2011

The apparent motive, the principal motive was, of course, single. But the crime was the effect of a whole list of motives which had blown on it in a whirlwind (like the 16 winds in the list of winds when they twist together in a tornado, in a cyclonic depression) and had ended by pressing into the vortex of the crime the enfeebled “reason of the world.”

—Carlo Emilio Gadda¹

The World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security and Development (WDR 2011) arrived on my desk as the Arab Spring was in full bloom and the United States continued to struggle with the intractable politics of simultaneous troop withdrawal and insurgent escalation in Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write, London and other provincial British cities are recovering from the extraordinary explosion of street violence in July, which has triggered a debate over David Cameron’s austerity measures and the politics of “Thatcher’s children.” In Somalia, facing the worst food crisis in over half a century, the Transitional Federal Government and al-Shabaab are fighting over famine relief, while to the north ecstatic Libyan rebels pour into Green Square in Tripoli. Violence, democracy, and development seem inextricably linked, everywhere. One might conclude that, like poverty, violent conflict is and will always be with us.

WDR 2011 suggests there is more to be said.² Violence, the report says, may not just be a cause of poverty but perhaps the central cause for the “bottom billion of the population” (to invoke Paul Collier’s handy turn of phrase).³ One and a half billion people currently reside in areas affected by what WDR 2011 calls “fragility, conflict or large-scale organized criminal violence” (1). Central to the condition of the poor is, in short, a violence trap. Peace confers conditions in which economies can grow; conversely, poverty is concentrated in states riven by civil war, ethnic conflicts, and organized crime. New forms of violence supplant conventional war. In Guatemala, more people are currently murdered—mostly via gangland violence—than during the height of the civil war in the 1980s. Over 40,000 people have died in Mexico since 2006 in drug-related violence.⁴

WDR 2011 asks what spurs the risks of violence, why conflict prevention and recovery have proven so chimerical, and what can be done by national leaderships and international development organizations alike to restore stable development in conflict-torn and fragile states, or what the Clinton administration in the 1990s famously called “failed states.” The central message of the report is that “strengthening legitimate institutions and governance to provide citizen security, justice, and jobs is crucial to prevent cycles of violence,” a key point being that violence is recursive and high rates of recidivism plague war-torn countries (2). There is a dialectics of violence: conflict can cause poverty (death, injury, and displacement reduce life chances) as much as poverty can cause violence. If you are poor, it pays to rebel. As a result, not a single low-income conflict-affected or fragile state (the Bank’s language and categorization) has achieved a single Millennium Development Goal.⁵ Yet when security is restored, coupled with a restoration of confidence, trust, and institutional accountability, the effects can be transformative, even within a generation.

Normatively, the report’s conclusions are wide-ranging and in many respects amount to a profound critique not only of the peacekeeping and humanitarian model traditionally embraced by the international system but also, and less explicitly, of the World Bank’s own position and ideology—something to which I will return. Violence prevention, says WDR 2011, must be given priority. Admirably, the report draws upon experiences from places like Los Angeles and Northern Ireland as much as East Timor and South Africa. Such diverse experiences of violence reduction offer a wealth of evidence to suggest that confidence and trust in state apparatuses is crucial; that the field of violence has been refigured in such a way that the standard roles for diplomats...