by Noah Raford
We must be able to rise above this instinctive, neurotic defense. Ian Mitroff’s leading edge work on crisis management in organizations confirms that lesson: “You can and will survive—even prosper—but if, and only if, you are prepared emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually.” Mitroff’s “seven essential lessons for surviving disaster” apply equally to individuals, corporations, maybe even societies. The first is “right heart”—emotional resilience. Another is “right soul”—“effective crisis management requires a special type of inner spiritual growth. Nothing devastates the soul as much as a crisis.” These are lessons derived from over twenty-five years of experience. They point to the fact that even complex organizations can do “inner work” to build their capacity and resilience.
David Bolton established the Centre for Trauma and Transformation in Omagh, Northern Ireland, after a bomb devastated that community in 1998. The center worked for a decade in disaster zones around the world, from New York after 9/11 to earthquake relief in Nepal, and all points in between. The center always leads with the same simple, practical message to launch the rescue and recovery operation. It comes in two parts. The first is that, whatever the circumstances, we will recover: we all have the untold and usually untapped inner resource to manage this. The second is that the best way to find these resources in ourselves, to survive and recover from crisis, is to help somebody else do the same.3
Lesson 4: Hope
And finally comes the poet. So wrote Walter Brueggemann, the Old Testament scholar, about what he called “the prophetic imagination.” His contribution to the survival debate is less about technical skills and more about inspiration and leadership. But without these, there is no point in surviving.
The role of the prophet is threefold. To warn about the dangers and iniquities of the existing system. To paint a desirable vision of the promised land. And to maintain energy and commitment in the people during the forty years in the wilderness it will take to make the transition.
This is the role of imagination, and of hope.
When business-as-usual systems and practices begin to fail, the task is to innovate. Managers must keep the present system running while the innovators get to work fashioning offerings better suited to the times. Clayton Christensen identifies the moment when the new offerings become more successful than the legacy product as a “disruption.”
What Brueggemann adds to this model is a third horizon. The first horizon is failing. The second is innovating. But if there is no vision of a desirable third to which an innovation is heading, change is merely opportunistic.
The third horizon makes a distinction between “innovation” that props up the old system and innovation that paves the way to a new, sustainable system fit for changed times. Without a vision of a third horizon pulling us forward, there can be no such distinction, and all innovation will inevitably draw us backward toward an improved version of the past.
The philosopher Jonathan Lear, in his book Radical Hope—Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, tells the story of Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow Indians at the end of the nineteenth century. His tribe was coming under pressure from white people to give up their way of life and enter the reservation. It was a moment of cultural crisis. The bottom had dropped out of the Crow Indian world.
Plenty Coups described the transition many years later: “when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again.” As one Crow woman said, “I am trying to live a life I do not understand.”
Some tribes gave in to despair and accepted white people’s superiority—throwing in their lot with “business as usual.” Resistance was futile. Some—like Sitting Bull and the Sioux—chose violence. They went down fighting—to the bitter end, as it turned out. Their vision of the third horizon was psychotic and destructive rather than aspirational. Neither was successful in negotiating a cultural transition.
But Plenty Coups had a dream that, although the buffalo would vanish, the Crow—provided they kept attuned to changing conditions—would come through to find a new way of living. Lear calls this “radical hope”—the hope for cultural rebirth, but without any predetermined vision of what that rebirth will look like. In the event, Crow youth learned the white people’s law, negotiated favorable settlements, maintained far more of their land than any other tribe, and came to reinvent notions of honor and courage in a world without warriors.
Lear writes, “There may be various forms of ethical criticism that one might be tempted to level at this form of hopefulness: that it was too complacent; that it didn’t face up to the evil that was being inflicted on the Crow tribe. But it is beyond question that the hope was a remarkable human accomplishment—in no small part because it avoided despair.”
I regard this as a story for our times. As the skies turn dark and the “imminent collapse of civilization” literature grows, we too are in need of inspiration if we are to avoid the predictable future. How might we navigate our way through the present crisis “toward the hope of a better day”? Put simply, we need to find among us individuals and organizations willing to connect their actions today to a vision that is more than a patched-up version of the past. These will be the pioneers.
Where innovators and entrepreneurs are opportunistic, pioneers are visionary. They display all the characteristics I speak of in these pages. They are not waiting to be rescued. They are aware of the larger, shifting context for their actions. They are not afraid of big thoughts and wide ambition. They have strong values that feed their capacity to persevere through good times and bad. They provide inspiration to others. They are the individuals who turn radical hope into reality.
We all have this capacity within us. It is no more than the stuff of life. Václav Havel, in his inspirational essay The Power of the Powerless (1978), calls it “living in truth.” He boldly predicted at the time of its writing—shortly before he himself was imprisoned—that the accumulation of actions in that spirit would eventually bring down the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia. He was proved right. But he was not calling for acts of great leadership or superhuman courage. “Living in truth covers a vast territory whose outer limits are vague and difficult to map,” he wrote, “a territory full of modest expressions of human volition, the vast majority of which will remain anonymous.” In the end, he asked of himself and others only something very simple: “Most of these expressions remain elementary revolts against manipulation: you simply straighten your backbone and live in greater dignity as an individual.”
This may seem an embarrassingly simple response to the depth of challenge outlined elsewhere in this collection. But the fact is that if we are to fashion any viable alternative in dark times to “taking to the lifeboats captained by warlord entrepreneurs” then we must start—each of us, personally—from a strong sense of what it is we wish to save. Havel, like Heaney, encourages us not only to recognize but also to enact the marvelous, even in the presence of overwhelming oppression. They both speak from experience. If we cannot live in truth, they challenge us, even at the most modest of levels, are we really “living” at all? It was Havel’s conviction that seeing this capacity in others would appeal to the same suppressed instinct in his oppressors—and that eventually a system that denied it would collapse. He was right.
It is vital then that we find this capacity in ourselves and support it in each other if we are to thrive amid the worst of what may yet lie ahead.4 This is, and has always been, the true source of radical hope.
Epilogue
Into the Future
Daniel S. Gressang
The future is now. Technological innovation—not just in today’s digital age, but since the harnessing of steam—has reshaped society and governance in subtle and profound ways. As technology has advanced, it has both rapidly expanded the reach of government and dramatically increased the rapidity of that transformation. The telecommunications and computer revolutions have had the greatest impact, it wou
ld seem, in increasing, yet again, the reach of both government and the people, allowing rapid interaction across vast distances.
The contributors to this volume paint a picture that is both disturbing and hopeful. On the one hand, the emergence of warlord entrepreneurs and their ability to enter, control, and in some instances, dominate segments of society casts serious doubt on the future of government and its ability to function effectively. The governance space is becoming more contentious, with myriad claimants to authority and legitimacy challenging the prerogative of the state. Organized criminal enterprises, narcotics traffickers, warlords, and other non-state actors lay claim to neighborhoods, slums, favelas, and largely ungoverned spaces seldom touched by state authority, creating a parallel structure for control and social interaction. Yet that is not a new phenomenon, as we sometimes like to think it is. The Westphalian state has always faced challenges to its authority in both urban and rural backwaters.
And on that front, the authors here also offer hope in suggesting concrete, actionable ways forward, charting a path by which state legitimacy and authority can be extended to those areas where it has yet to fully assert its rights or where it has abdicated its responsibilities. Changing attitudes and patterns of consumption—while simultaneously doing better at managing expectations—offers opportunities to reshape social interactions and the relationship between government and the governed in such a way as to bring the benefit of globalization to a greater percentage of the world’s people. But, as the authors acknowledge, the choices that must be made and the behaviors that must be modified will present significant challenges far into the future.
One of the questions raised in this volume is one of the more fundamental issues we must address before any path forward can be identified: where are we? Does the Westphalian state represent the epitome of social and political development, such that the emergence and activities of warlord entrepreneurs represent a devolution of structure and process? If so, then the very existence of warlord entrepreneurs represents a serious threat to all nation-states, demanding determined effort to boost the actual and perceived legitimacy of government, to suppress the activities and curtail the spread of warlord entrepreneurs, and to strengthen and redefine the relationships within the governance space. Or, on the other hand, are we not at the pinnacle of social and political development? Is the Westphalian state instead a local maxima, a developmental mountaintop, to use a common complexity metaphor, with the “devolution” represented by the rise of warlord entrepreneurs perhaps little more than the necessary transition through a valley before we can climb to the next, higher mountaintop? If this accurately describes the evolutionary path we see, we may want to think more in terms of managing the transition process effectively and asking instead how we can leverage change to ultimately achieve greater good.
At the same time, the essays in this volume raise equally fundamental questions about our understanding of the Westphalian state. In considering the wisdom and insights offered in each chapter, we are left with a degree of uncertainty about the fundamental soundness of the state construct, particularly in terms of incomplete and uneven globalization. While many scholars have championed the Westphalian state model, it could also be argued that warlord entrepreneurs have found opportunities to emerge and, in some places, flourish, because they fill a need. If that need exists, it suggests the state is unwilling or unable to meet the needs of some segment of the population. Which should, in turn, prompt questions about whether the state construct is flawed or whether our efforts to apply that construct are flawed. Regardless of the answer, the question itself should point us to an area ripe for additional inquiry.
If the future is now, what does the farther future look like? We can envision at least three possible futures based on the essays here, each of which offers opportunities and dangers in the years to come. In the first, suggested by complexity literature, we appear to be in a transition period. The question we have yet to answer, however, is whether we are witnessing the transition to a Hobbesian future or a more equitable future, as suggested by visions of more complete and effective globalization. Are we, to use the terrain metaphor favored by some, heading down the mountain only to stay mired in the valley below, or will our trip through the valley be little more than the necessary path to greater heights on the next mountaintop? In the first, we could envision a future that is nasty, brutish, and short, with ineffective, incomplete, and uneven globalization creating and empowering more—and more assertive—warlord entrepreneurs who may, though their ruthless disregard for society’s rules, challenge and perhaps even replace government? Such a future dominated by warlord entrepreneurs would be rife with uncertainty, leaving us to wonder if the exercise of authority where government fails would be more akin to feudalism or whether it would be some form of heretofore unimagined benevolent sharing between non-state and state actors. In the latter, the emergence and activities of warlord entrepreneurs, while unwanted, could be a temporary phenomenon, soon to fade into the mists of history as society and government create a new model that more fully embraces the benefits of globalization. In this future, our study of warlord entrepreneurs may well be an interesting, but ultimately fleeting, arena for study.
A second possible future sees the continuance of today, a form of stasis, where little ultimately changes from what we have seen for at least several centuries. Here, we would acknowledge the fallibility and limits of both government and globalization, recognizing that the construct will remain imperfect and that that opportunities for warlord entrepreneurs will remain. In this future, the identities, locations, and relative strengths of the warlord entrepreneurs may ebb and flow, but government’s reach will not be pervasive or compelling enough to eliminate the ungoverned backwaters. Warlord entrepreneurs will remain, at the global level, irritants to society and government, to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Realistic challenges to government supremacy—and to the Westphalian state construct itself—will be rare, yet demanding of a not insignificant application of scarce resources.
A third possible future is a hybrid future, where the roles and responsibilities of the state are ceded to some degree to the warlord entrepreneur. Here, states come to recognize their own inability to meet expectations of one or more segments of the population, and they come to see the non-state actor as better suited and better positioned to provide specified, perhaps local and limited, goods and services, freeing government to focus on a separate and broader set of public goods. This future could offer a symbiotic relationship between warlord entrepreneurs and government designed to ease government’s burden in light of dwindling resources and growing demands placed upon it. The application of a hybrid form may be limited spatially or by specified service, and the non-state entities filling the breach may transition from charity to association to criminal enterprise and back. That future is not so hard to imagine in light of the examples we see operating today.
At present, the likelihood of each of the three possible futures seems about equal, with none enjoying a compelling advantage over the others. The actions of governments, as well as of the people and the warlord entrepreneurs themselves, will shape the future in unforeseen ways. Given the uncertainty of both the near and distant futures, the challenges to the state, and the growing awareness of warlord entrepreneurs, we should ask additional questions about the direction in which globalization—with its uneven application—may be taking us. How is the future unfolding, and are there signposts we might discern that can tell us where we’re heading? And if that direction is not to our liking, how might we affect desired change? We need additional research and critical thought to determine whether we can, indeed, understand the path we are on; what impact our decisions, both major and minor, will have on our developmental trajectory; and what might be the viability of our efforts to affect change.
Our perceptions of the present and expectations of the future color our analysis. A significant proportion of the literature on both globalization an
d warlord entrepreneurs seems to hold the Westphalian state as not simply the epitome of social and political development, but the ultimate desired end state. While there is nothing wrong with such a perspective, we must recognize that it defines the way in which we understand the state and warlord entrepreneurs, casting one automatically in a more favorable light than the other, to be protected and strengthened. It also defines for us, in a very real sense, the nature and scope of the problem. Warlord entrepreneurs are interlopers on government authority at best, devious and ruthless adversaries that must be eliminated at worst. The vision of warlord entrepreneurs, in turn, guides us to a predefined way of thinking about the problem itself and its possible solutions. Yet that thinking also predisposes us to see warlord entrepreneurs as a solvable problem, if only we can identify the appropriate countermeasures—whether it entails more effective globalization, extending the reach and boosting the legitimacy of government, transitioning to a more eco-friendly set of consumption behaviors, or any one of myriad other avenues for action. We may, however, serve ourselves and our efforts well by taking a step or two back and asking if, in light of growing expectations and demands for “more,” we might be looking not at a solvable or tame problem, but at a wicked problem that will defy both effective definition and solution.
One can easily interpret warlord entrepreneurs as a wicked problem. The problem is difficult to define in clear, unambiguous terms. Would Hamas or Hezbollah, both of which are providers of essential government services to specific segments of their respective populations, be on par with Mexican narcotics distribution networks and Afghan warlords? The boundaries of the warlord entrepreneur problem are vague, at best, leading to multiple interpretations of the problem that prevent us from making a compelling case about who qualifies for consideration and who doesn’t. Likewise, there are no definitive solutions to the problem of warlord entrepreneurs, as any solution brought to bear offers only a single attempt, unique in time and space, offering no opportunity to learn best practices by trial and error. What may work in Mexico is unlikely to be effective in Afghanistan or the Gaza Strip. Each warlord entrepreneur is as unique as the environment in which he works, suggesting that we cannot even enumerate all possible solutions. And were we to stumble upon an effective solution to the problem in one instance, that solution could be expected to disenfranchise, displace, disempower, or deflate expectations of others, giving rise to new opportunities for the emergence of new non-state claimants to authority and control.
