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  • Violence, Development, and the Making of the World Development Report 2011: An Interview with Bruce Jones
  • Nils Gilman and Bruce Jones

Editor’s note: Bruce Jones of New York University was the lead author of the latest World Bank World Development Report. On July 27, 2011, Humanity coeditor Nils Gilman interviewed Jones about it. Jones spoke in his capacity as a scholar: the perspectives he voices are his own, not those of the Bank.

Nils Gilman:

As background, please tell us what “World Development Reports” are, and how in general they get put together.

Bruce Jones:

“World Development Reports” (WDRs) are the flagship research products of the World Bank. Every year the Bank chooses a topic on which to concentrate research focus—a topic on which it feels there has been enough policy or research development that it warrants a fresh look. Then usually a pretty big team is put in place, but led by one or two senior scholars who pull together the material. Most WDRs are longer than this one, and most of them have a series of separate chapters written individually by different people. For this one, to make it more accessible for policymakers, we tried to keep it a little shorter, and we had an integrated drafting: we didn’t pass out chapters, but did the drafting ourselves.

NG:

Your official role for the project was “Senior External Advisor.” What did that entail?

BJ:

I was integrally involved from the beginning with the two co-leads, Sarah Cliffe and Nigel Roberts, in designing the architecture of the research. Then I was one of the three principal drafters of text, along with Sarah and Nigel. There was a large cast of characters who contributed ideas in a number of different ways. Finally, I had the additional role of brokering the interrelationship between the Bank team, on the one hand, and the United Nations, on the other, because a lot of the topics were ones on which we had to bring in U.S. expertise or bore on UN issues, so we had to spend a lot of time doing consultations and engagements with the UN, and I helped organize a lot of that.

NG:

How did the Bank decide to take on the topic of conflict and violence as a developmental issue? [End Page 103]

BJ:

There were two things. One, it’s been a topic that [World Bank President Robert] Zoellick himself paid quite a lot of attention to when he got to the Bank in 2007. (In 2008, he gave a major speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, setting out some of the key themes.)1 Then there was a competition of ideas inside the Bank about what the topic should be, and this won out. There are usually three or four proposals, and this one won Zoellick’s attention.

Violence and Development

NG:

Let’s begin with some of the substantive findings. What kind of violence is the Bank concerned with in this Report? As you were designing the Report, did you consider the variety of different ways in which different societies define violence, and variations in the legitimacy of different sorts of violence?

BJ:

We basically excluded both interpersonal violence at a family level and criminal violence of a disorganized type. (We weren’t interested in robberies, or murders of a limited type.) For our purposes, the violence had to be, first of all, organized and, second of all, in some sense, a challenge to the state. That was our threshold: is the violence organized in such a way that it constitutes a challenge to the state, such that it interrupts the developmental pattern of the state? Whether it is organized into a rebel group fighting the government, an organized criminal gang that is challenging the rule of law, a terrorist organization—for us those were more minor questions than the first one: “Is it organized, and of a scale where it constitutes a challenge to the legitimacy of the state?”

What we found when we actually started to do the work—and this is very much an initial finding, and it needs a lot more work (but my hunch is...

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