I am nearly finished with Paul Collier’s follow up to The Bottom Billion, a book called Wars, Guns and Votes. I haven’t quite finished it yet, but today I read a chapter about methods of effective post conflict peacekeeping, a chapter I found really interesting.  In this day and age, at the beginning in a new century, we are looking back at 100 years defined by international war. Two world wars and the Cold war were nothing new, international wars had been going on indefinitely. But the fact of the matter is, the probability of international war occurring in this century is greatly reduced, such is the strength of dialogue between the majority of the international comunity. Sure there are exceptions (Iraq, Afghanistan) but large scale international war is a thing of the past. Collier points out that this is the case and highlights that most future wars will not be between states, but between factions within a country: civil war. I’m not going to re-write the chapter, but I found Collier’s disection of potential methods by which to minimise the risk of civil war facinating. He suggests that the best method is what he calls “over the horizon” protection, the idea that the international community need not maintain large military presences, but instead maintain an ability for rapid, large scale intervention. No rebel group in their right mind is going to start a civil war if they know that within a day a large modern army can arrive to put them down. And the more time that goes past without a civil war, the less likely there is to be another one.

Here is a piece by Collier and Bjørn Lomborg on post conflict peace, and its in a similar vein to Collier’s chapter from the book. The cost of peacekeeping is huge, its about $2.5 billion to lower the probability of civil war by 1 percentage point. This cost is massive, even if the results are desirable. The oportunity cost is significant, so being able to reduce peacekeeping costs whilst maintain an incentive not to fight sounds like a good deal. We take our developed democracy in the west for granted. Parties run for power, and if they fail then they accept that fate. But where democracy is new, less entrenched and respected, losing the election doesn’t mean the end, its just sends people after their kalishnikovs. So minimising the potential for conflict and thus allowing the roots of democracy to take hold, making civil war less popular in the future.

I’d drone a little more but I am pretty tired, so i’ll leave it there. But Collier’s books are good fun to read, they aren’t that challenging and there’s something about their content that feels very relevant and applicable.

I have work tomorow, so better have a good kip, cold calling requires a lot of energy, and patience!