WARS,
GUNS,
and
VOTES
D emocracy in D angerous P laces
P A U L C O L L I E R
For John Githongo: his struggle
C O N T E N T S
Introduction: Democracy in Dangerous Places
1
P a r t I : D e n y i n g R e a l i t y : D e m o c r a z y
Chapter 1: Votes and Violence
15
Chapter 2: Ethnic Politics
51
Chapter 3: Inside the Cauldron: Post-Conflict
75
Settlements
P a r t I I : F a c i n g R e a l i t y : N a s t y, B r u t i s h , a n d L o n g Chapter 4: Guns: Fueling the Fire
103
Chapter 5: Wars: The Political Economy
121
of Destruction
Chapter 6: Coups: The Unguided Missile
141
Chapter 7: Meltdown in Cote d’Ivoire
155
iv
Contents
P a r t I I I : C h a n g i n g R e a l i t y : A c c o u n t a b i l i t y a n d S e c u r i t y
Chapter 8: State Building and Nation Building
169
Chapter 9: Better Dead Than Fed?
189
Chapter 10: On Changing Reality
229
Acknowledgments
235
Appendix: The Bottom Billion
239
Research on Which This Book Is Based
241
Index
245
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
I n t r o d u c t i o n :
D E M O C R A C Y I N
D A N G E R O U S P L A C E S
My son Daniel, now age seven, may live to see the
eradication of war. Or he might die in one. Why each
of these is a realistic prospect for today’s children is the
subject of this book. War, like disease, has been endemic since the
dawn of man. Diseases are now being conquered: in 1977 scientific
advance and public action in combination eradicated smallpox. For
the first time in history, the world economy looks capable of deliv-
ering the material conditions necessary for global peace. But global
prosperity also increases the risks: an interconnected world is more
vulnerable to any remaining pockets of chaotic violence. Just as the
eradication of smallpox depended upon harnessing science through
public action, so rising prosperity must be harnessed to secure the
prize of global peace.
Wars, Guns, and Votes is about power. Why focus on power? Be-
cause in the impoverished little countries at the bottom of the world
economy that are home to a billion people, the predominant route
to power has been violence. Political violence is both a curse in itself
and an obstacle to accountable and legitimate government. It is a
curse because the process of violent struggle is hugely destructive.
It is an obstacle because where power rests on violence, it invites an
2
WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
arrogant assumption that government is there to rule rather than
to serve. You only have to look at the official photographs of politi-
cal leaders to get the point. In the mature democracies our political
leaders smile: they are desperate to ingratiate themselves with their masters, the voters. In the societies of the bottom billion the leaders
do not smile: their official portraits stare down from every public
building, every schoolroom, with a menacing grimace. They are the
masters now that thankfully the colonialists have gone. Wars, Guns,
and Votes investigates why political violence is endemic in the bot-
tom billion and what can be done to curtail it.
Since the end of the Cold War two extraordinary changes have
occurred, each of which may be opportunities for a decisive shift
away from political violence. Both were consequences of the fall of
the Soviet Union.
Elections spread across the bottom billion. The image of the
popular uprisings in Eastern Europe inspired pressure for political
change around the developing world. In the early 1990s national
conventions sprang up around West Africa. By 1998 Nigeria, Afri-
ca’s largest society, sprang out of military dictatorship. Just as around
the first millennium the leaders of Europe’s petty states had sud-
denly all converted to Christianity to get in step with the times, so
around the second millennium the leaders of the petty states of the
bottom billion all converted to elections. Prior to the end of the Cold
War most leaders of the bottom billion had come to power through
violence: success in armed struggle or a coup d’état. Now most are
in power through winning elections. Elections are the institutional
technology of democracy. They have the potential to make govern-
ments both more accountable and more legitimate. Elections should
sound the death knell to political violence.
The other encouraging change is an outbreak of peace. For the
thirty years prior to the end of the Cold War, violent conflicts were
breaking out more rapidly than they were ending, so that there was
a gradual proliferation of civil wars. Once started, civil war proved
Introduction
3
highly persistent: a civil war typically lasted more than ten times
as long as an international war. But then, one after another of the
ghastly and persistent civil wars came to an end. The war in South-
ern Sudan was closed by a peace settlement. The war in Burundi
was similarly coaxed into a negotiated peace. The war in Sierra Le-
one was ended by international peacekeepers. The end of the Cold
War unblocked the international community to exert itself against
the continued struggle for power by means of violence.
The wave of peace settlements reinforced the wave of elections
and promised a brave new world: an end to the pursuit of power
through violence. How can we tell how these changes will play out?
Can we do more than speculate? I think we can. Although the co-
incidence of these shocks is unprecedented, each can be analyzed
based on how they have played out in the past. There have been
previous experiences of electoral competition in the bottom billion.
There have been many post-conflict situations. This book uses those
experiences to analyze history in the making. As you read Wars,
Guns, and Votes you may be struck by how fast the research frontier
is moving. I get that sense morning by morning as I walk to work
wondering whether, during the previous evening, Pedro, or Anke,
or Dominic, or Lisa, or Benedikt, or Marguerite has cracked what-
ever problem we had crashed into by the time I left for home. I hope
you get a sense of it too.
Political violence is one variant of the struggle for power. We
now see
it as illegitimate: might does not make right. In the high-
income societies over the past century we have internalized the prin-
ciples of democracy, and gradually we have come to regard them
as universal. Ballots, not bullets, should pave the route to power.
Since the end of the Cold War the high-income democracies have
taken a further step: from merely regarding these standards as uni-
versal to actively promoting them. Despite the tensions over Iraq
about whether active promotion should go all the way to enforced
regime change or stop short at nonviolent encouragement and in-
4
WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
ducements, the international community is agreed on the goal. And
it has largely succeeded: in the brief period of less than two decades
democracy has spread across the low-income world. So what have
been the consequences for peace?
The good news is that the world has been getting safer. In fact,
despite the catastrophic period of the world wars, it has unsteadily
but gradually been getting safer ever since humanity started. Con-
trary to all those images of the noble savage, early societies were
murderous. There never was a peaceful Eden from which we have
fallen: peace is something that has gradually been built, millennium
by millennium, century by century, and decade by decade. The need
for security from political violence has always been fundamental to
human society. The great archaeological legacies of antiquity, such as
the Great Wall of China and the massive barrier constructed across
Jutland by the ancient Jutes against the Germanic tribes, stand as an
enduring testimony to the overwhelming priority afforded to col-
lective defense. This priority continued until very recently: for forty
years the richest society on earth, America, devoted up to 9 percent
of its national income to defense spending to meet the security threat
from the Soviet Union.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union an era is over. Despite
appearances, the last decade has been rather peaceful. The measure
used in this grim academic niche is battle-related deaths. The Armed Conflict Data Set keeps a running tally both of the really large conflicts, those that cause at least a thousand such deaths during a year,
and of the smaller ones that nevertheless caused more than twenty-
five deaths. Here is what happened according to these measures.
Back during the time of late colonialism—1946 to 1959—the
number of wars was running at around four a year and the minor
conflicts at around eleven. From decolonization to the end of the
Cold War in 1991 there was a pretty remorseless escalation. By 1991
there were an astonishing seventeen wars and thirty-five minor con-
flicts in various parts of the world running at the same time. If vio-
Introduction
5
lence had continued to spread at that rate, by now we would be fac-
ing a nightmare. Instead, 1991 turned out to be a peak. The world
is not as peaceful as during late colonialism but we are down to five
ongoing wars and twenty-seven minor conflicts. So this break in
trend looks to be consistent with the triumph of democracy: where
people have recourse to the ballot they do not resort to the gun.
I have come to regard this comforting belief as an illusion. Our
approach to political violence has been based on the denial of real-
ity. In consequence there is a brave new world of electoral competi-
tion in ethnically divided societies, some of which have just emerged
from years of civil war. From 1991 onward the visible trappings of
democracy became increasingly fashionable. A president who had
not been elected began to look and presumably to feel like the odd
one out. It went beyond fashion: many donors began to skew their
aid away from unelected governments. And so incumbent presi-
dents braced themselves and decided to face the voters, sometimes
emboldened by the knowledge that their people loved them. Some-
times the voters did not do the decent thing.
In the face of voter ingratitude presidents gradually learned how
to adapt to the new circumstances. One or two got caught out before
they could win. The first was the decent autocrat Kenneth Kaunda
of Zambia, who staged an election and lost resoundingly in 1991. At
the time of writing, the most recent elections in a society of the bot-
tom billion were those in Kenya, in December 2007. Shortly there
will be an election in Zimbabwe. In the years following the defeat
of Kaunda, incumbent presidents learned how to win. The Kenyan
elections were won by the incumbent, President Kibaki. But within
Kenya this was not hailed as a triumph of democracy. Koki Muli, the
head of Kenya’s Institute for Education in Democracy, had offered
the following description: “It is a coup d’état.”* As for the elections
in Zimbabwe, you have the advantage over me since you know the
* “Kabaki Win Spurs Kenya Turmoil,” Financial Times, December 31, 2007, p. 6.
6
WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
result. I had no idea who would win the American election of 2008,
but I had a pretty clear idea about the outcome of the Zimbabwean
elections: I confidently expected that President Mugabe would be
reelected. Presidents have discovered a whole armory of technology
that enables them to retain power despite the need to hold elections.
These elections play out in the context of weak checks and balances,
ethnic divisions, and post-conflict tensions.
The triumph of the post–Cold War international community,
settlements of the accumulated civil wars of the post-colonial era, is
at the same time an alarming point of fragility. Post-conflict situ-
ations are dangerous. Historically, many of them have reverted to
violence within the first decade. Increasingly since the 1990s, the
healing balm for post-conflict tensions and hatreds upon which the
international community has relied, and indeed insisted, has been
an election. After all, an election should confer legitimacy upon the
victor, and the need to secure votes should ensure that the victor has
reached out to be inclusive. That comforting strategy has been based
upon the denial of an increasingly evident reality.
If the problem of political violence is going to be addressed, we
have to understand why small and impoverished countries are so
dangerous. To face the reality of political violence we need to un-
derstand its technologies: guns, wars, and coups. I know that guns
don’t kill people: people kill people. A government can conduct
a very effective pogrom without any guns at all. The slaughter in
Rwanda was done with machetes. But in a violent struggle between
organized groups, the one with more guns will tend to win: guns do
make violence a whole lot easier. And so I start with guns: both their
supply and their demand turn out to be bizarre stories. There is an
illicit trade in Kalashnikovs that furnishes supplies, and arms races
in Lilliput that drive demand.
War has not yet passed into history, but it now happens “else-
where.” Rich countries no longer fight each other, and they no lon-
ger fight themselves. Among the middle-income countries war has
Introduction
7
virtually disappeared. Even the big poor countries are now pretty
safe: China and India have massive armies, but they haven’t used
them against each other for more than forty years. The world may
not hold the line on nuclear proliferation: from time to time more
middle-size powers may wish to posture on the world stage by ac-
quiring nuclear capabilities. But over the past sixty years the first use of nuclear weapons has built up into a formidable taboo that I cannot see any state breaking.
With the arrival of peace among the more powerful countries,
the scale of warfare has diminished: we now have small wars in
small countries. Usually the violence is internal: the country tears
itself apart while the rest of the world watches. Sometimes the vio-
lence draws others in, mostly the neighbors, and sometimes the lo-
cal regional power. Occasionally the international powers intervene:
to prevent internal mayhem, as in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo; to expel an invader, as in Iraq 1; or to force regime change,
as in Iraq 2. The uncomfortable fact is that a large group of im-
poverished little countries remain structurally dangerous. Wars in
the bottom billion are nasty, brutish, and long. They are civil wars;
their victims are mostly civilians and they last more than ten times
as long as international wars. Although the incidence of civil war
has dropped, this is because of a wave of peace settlements: there is
still the same momentum for new conflicts to start. Quite aside from
the conflicts that were not settled, in 2004 four new wars started up.
The following year looked a little better, just one new war. But this
was not a peaceful year: there were eight new minor conflicts. Wars
were back in business in 2006 with three new ones.
Political violence does not have to take the form of warfare
with its attendant “battle-related deaths” to achieve its goal of at-
taining power. Indeed, the most common and effective form of
political violence often succeeds without any deaths at all: it is the
surgical strike in the form of a coup d’état. The military, whose pur-
pose is to defend citizens from organized violence, is sometimes in
8
WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
a splendid position to perpetrate it. Globally since 1945 there have
Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes Page 1
