Alexandre Marc is a political scientist and economist with over 30 years of experience working in areas of conflict and fragility across four continents. Alexandre was the Chief Specialist for Fragility, Conflict and Violence at the World Bank, and is the lead author of the United Nations-World Bank flagship report Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict (2018). He also co-led the preparation of the World Bank’s Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020-2025. This is the second episode in a three-part series with Alexandre covering the Pathways for Peace report, the stories that underpin its core ideas, and his recent work on the geopolitics of fragility. We start by talking about why conflict prevention should constantly be on the minds of political actors, civil society, the private sector, and international organizations. Alexandre paints a vivid picture of how the ebb and flow of crises in the absence of prevention can get a country trapped in a downward spiral of conflict and how countries should aim to surf above the narrow corridor between peace and conflict. We then discuss how communication about the risk of conflict can interact with expectations about the trajectory of a country and the delicate balance between raising an alarm without degenerating into alarmism; and how to learn what works in prevention by looking at countries that come close to conflict but manage to avoid it. Our conversation then moves on to dealing with “wild cards” in prevention – from extremist groups to external actors – and how we can engage in prevention when key actors have an interest in maintaining or starting a conflict. We also talk about the need to capitalize on opportune moments to help a country get on the pathway to peace and whether there are red lines that international organizations should cross in order to prevent conflict. Further, we discuss the role of the private sector in preventing conflict and the conditions in which it should play a role. Alexandre makes it clear that while the private sector is an important actor, it is no panacea and warns us not to force the private sector into situations where it can only succeed by being a bad actor. As a preview to our next episode with Alexandre on the geopolitics of fragility, we wrap up this conversation by talking about prevention in an interconnected world: how the global stage has changed since the release of the report in 2018, what should motivate citizens in Western countries to care about prevention, and the shifting roles and interests of China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Listen to the episode to hear Alexandre deliver a masterclass in prevention! ***** Dr. Alexandre Marc Website: https://www.alexandremarc.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexanMarc1 International Institute for Strategic Studies: https://www.iiss.org/people/conflict-security-and-development/alexandre-marc Institute for Integrated Transitions: https://ifit-transitions.org/experts/alexandre-marc/ ***** Mihaela Carstei, Paul M. Bisca, and Johan Bjurman Bergman co-host F-World: The Fragility Podcast. Twitter: https://twitter.com/fworldpodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fworldpodcast/ Website: https://f-world.org Music: "Tornado" by Wintergatan. Many thanks to Wintergartan for allowing us to use their wonderful music! This track can be downloaded for free at www.wintergatan.net. Video editing by: Alex Mitran - find Alex on Facebook (facebook.com/alexmmitran), Twitter (twitter.com/alexmmitran), or LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/alexmmitran)
Alexandre Marc is a political scientist and economist with over 30 years of experience working in areas of conflict and fragility across four continents. Alexandre was the Chief Specialist for Fragility, Conflict and Violence at the World Bank, and is the lead author of the United Nations-World Bank flagship report Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict (2018). He also co-led the preparation of the World Bank’s Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020-2025.
This is the second episode in a three-part series with Alexandre covering the Pathways for Peace report, the stories that underpin its core ideas, and his recent work on the geopolitics of fragility.
We start by talking about why conflict prevention should constantly be on the minds of political actors, civil society, the private sector, and international organizations. Alexandre paints a vivid picture of how the ebb and flow of crises in the absence of prevention can get a country trapped in a downward spiral of conflict and how countries should aim to surf above the narrow corridor between peace and conflict. We then discuss how communication about the risk of conflict can interact with expectations about the trajectory of a country and the delicate balance between raising an alarm without degenerating into alarmism; and how to learn what works in prevention by looking at countries that come close to conflict but manage to avoid it.
Our conversation then moves on to dealing with “wild cards” in prevention – from extremist groups to external actors – and how we can engage in prevention when key actors have an interest in maintaining or starting a conflict. We also talk about the need to capitalize on opportune moments to help a country get on the pathway to peace and whether there are red lines that international organizations should cross in order to prevent conflict. Further, we discuss the role of the private sector in preventing conflict and the conditions in which it should play a role. Alexandre makes it clear that while the private sector is an important actor, it is no panacea and warns us not to force the private sector into situations where it can only succeed by being a bad actor.
As a preview to our next episode with Alexandre on the geopolitics of fragility, we wrap up this conversation by talking about prevention in an interconnected world: how the global stage has changed since the release of the report in 2018, what should motivate citizens in Western countries to care about prevention, and the shifting roles and interests of China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey.
Listen to the episode to hear Alexandre deliver a masterclass in prevention!
*****
Dr. Alexandre Marc
Website: https://www.alexandremarc.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexanMarc1
International Institute for Strategic Studies: https://www.iiss.org/people/conflict-security-and-development/alexandre-marc
Institute for Integrated Transitions: https://ifit-transitions.org/experts/alexandre-marc/
*****
Mihaela Carstei, Paul M. Bisca, and Johan Bjurman Bergman co-host F-World: The Fragility Podcast.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fworldpodcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fworldpodcast/
Website: https://f-world.org
Music: "Tornado" by Wintergatan. Many thanks to Wintergartan for allowing us to use their wonderful music! This track can be downloaded for free at www.wintergatan.net.
Video editing by: Alex Mitran - find Alex on Facebook (facebook.com/alexmmitran), Twitter (twitter.com/alexmmitran), or LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/alexmmitran)
EPISODE RESOURCES:
United Nations; World Bank. 2018. **Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict.**Washington, DC: World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/28337
World Bank. 2011. World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development. World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/4389
International Crisis Group. 2022. Considering Political Engagement with Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Crisis Group Africa Report N°309. 21 June 2022. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/somalia/309-considering-political-engagement-al-shabaab-somalia
Alexandre Marc, Bruce Jones. 2021. The New Geopolitics of Fragility: Russia, China, and the Mounting Challenge for Peacebuilding. The Brookings Institution. Washington, DC. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/FP\_20211015\_new\_geopolitics\_fragility\_marc\_jones\_v2.pdf
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:07 How to build a path to prevention
00:05:35 Prevention needs attention not alarmism
00:13:25 How to learn what successful prevention looks like
00:21:19 “Wild cards” in prevention and conflict: external interference & extreme beliefs
00:29:34 What to do when actors have an interest in undermining prevention?
00:34:31 How to break out of “indefinite conflict”
00:40:40 How to capitalize on opportune moments for prevention
00:47:22 Red lines and tradeoffs in prevention
00:53:44 The private sector - does it have a role in prevention?
01:02:10 Prevention in an interconnected world
01:06:42 Why should we care about prevention?
01:11:14 The competition between models of governance
01:16:46 Wrap-up
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Hi, and welcome to F-World: The Fragility Podcast. Together with our guests, we explore how the forces of fragility manifest across the world and in our day-to-day lives, and how we can build a more resilient future. I'm Mihaela Carstei, and I'm joined by my two co-hosts, Paul Bisca and Johan Bjurman Bergman. And today we are delighted to welcome back Alexandre Marc.
This is round two of our conversations around the flagship report Pathways for Peace. Alexandre is a political scientist and economist who brings over 30 years of experience working in areas of conflict and fragility across four continents. He was the chief specialist for fragility, conflict and violence at the World Bank and is the lead author of the UN World Bank Report, Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflicts, which serves as the basis, as I mentioned, for our series of conversations with Alexandre.
He has also co-ed the preparation of the World Bank for strategy for addressing fragility, conflict, and violence. Welcome back, Alexandre!
ALEXANDRE MARC: Thank you!
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, last time - and for all of our listeners, please do listen to the first episode in this series of conversations - last time, we touched upon institutions, conflict, the necessity of conflict, and so much more. Now we're going to talk about prevention. So, I was wondering, Alexandre, how do we build that path to prevention? Last time you told us that if we're just 10 years away from conflict, it's already too late. So, where do we start and how do we build that?
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, I think the different actors in countries should always have the issue of prevention in mind. You know, there's violent conflict, but there's also very serious political crisis, big uprisings, and these things are always a possibility, and they're more and more in possibility, in a much more fragmented world. That is the world that we know today. So, you should always think that no country is immune to the issue of conflict risk, of violence risks, crisis risks, political crisis risks and therefore, in a well-organized democracy, I would think that that's what institutions think of, what people who represent institution constantly think of. But in countries that are less well that have weaker institutions and that have much weaker political settlements or political pact among the different actors, then conflict is a much more of a risk.
So, what we did in the Pathways for Peace is we had, we designed a small model, that is more a model to explain to people how it happens - where you have basically, on the top the graph, you have situation of peace, on the lower part of the graph, you have situation of conflicts. And what you have is you have a society constantly going as a wave between the two, right? And coming closer to conflict, coming closer to sustained peace, and then going back to conflict, going back to sustained peace. But then when countries pass the red line of falling into conflict, then it's practically impossible for them or extremely difficult to come back rapidly into a positive element.
That's why you have to be extremely careful that this wave never falls too low. And it’s like physics because once you get into a dynamic that takes you down towards the violent peace direction there's a lot of factors that start to play in and the more you get closer to the red line, the more it's difficult to bend it back to the green line. That's why prevention should be constantly on the mind of political actors, civil societies, well-meaning people, private sector, they want to avoid situation of conflict. Unfortunately, in a world like our world, where there's a lot of tension building up inherent to the economic situation, geopolitical situation, other situation, you have sometimes politicians that have a short-term interest to push towards violent conflict just to get the dynamic behind them. These like apprentice witchcraft because they're playing with things that they don't know how to master. And then it can go down and down and then fall into conflict and then they will also pay the price, but they don't always see it going. There's a lot of case today of situation of this kind. And you need to do in conflict is to be constantly conscious that when the wave go in the wrong direction, it's really important to do whatever you can to bring it back the other way.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, since you mentioned witchcraft, I guess, let's talk a bit about incantations. How do you talk about prevention in a way that does not sound too alarmist to be dismissed as irrelevant? Because if you are the person in room saying, oh, something horrible, might going to happen, this is going to fall apart constantly. On the one hand, if it does, you are vindicated. If it doesn't, you are not necessarily vindicated, then you can easily be dismissed. So, what is the thoughtful way to navigate this line that you've just described for us?
ALEXANDRE MARC: Well, there's a couple of issues. I think what you say is very, very right because one thing also that plays into this dynamic of conflict is when everybody gets a sense that things are just out of sync, that things are going bad, it's necessary to create some sort of attention to the problem. But it's also this state, this general state of depression about the country. It's also not helping is one of the factors that push the wave down because there's so much expectations that things are going to get worse, then actually it get worse because the incentive builds around that.
So, it's very important to be able to do the prevention without being also too alarmist or without being too negativist about all what is happening and saying no, anything will go the wrong way. I think we're at a time in history now where we have a very strong tendency to be very, very dramatic about everything, to be very extreme about our views. But, I don't know if we're extreme with the problem of climate change with all those problems there, but it's true that sort of negativist thinking with maybe the exception of the countries that are booming like China, or were booming, China until recently, India until before COVID where, you know, there's a lot of hope for the economic dynamic.
But in many countries in Africa, in Middle East, in Europe, in other places, there's a lot of this negative feelings that, that are around. And you also have to deal with that. I think it's a difficult path to play. And again, when we say what should we do, the problem is that it cannot be only the government.
The government has a totally central role. It cannot be only civil society, but civil society, the organization of civil society have a central role. It cannot be only the private sector, but the private sector has a central role. So, there's a need for different groups to come together.
Of course, knowing that the government is the most important, in most case, when you have civil war, there's always a big part of responsibility of the government. They are also the ones that have the most tools to be able to sort of redistribute revenues and all that. But what is important is to think all this is not only about diplomatic negotiation, this is not only about persuading people, is actually showing to people that there are differences that can be made, which mean it's development policy, it's economic policy, it is security policies. All this is part of prevention. When you talk with the core of the UN, of course they are much more focused on the diplomacy.
They say, okay, well there are two actors. What you have to come is negotiate and there's a lot of theories about how you negotiate, how you build peace. But this is very often already too late when you are getting to this stage. What you need to make sure is you have a development policy that doesn't create too many grievances, that you have a security policy that is efficient but also don't create grievances, right - therefore the security sector is absolutely central - that you have a private sector that behave with enough responsibility so that it does not look like they're on their own and they don't care about anyone. It's all this that makes a society more cohesive and less at risk of falling to the red line of the bottom of our graph.
So, these things are very complex because prevention is most effective when it's led by the government, but very often it's not. Civil society have a lot of roles to play. Neighbors in the region have a lot of roles to play, international organization, but they have to somehow to play in sync for efficient prevention to play in. And therefore there's very, very different scenarios of how violent conflict have been avoided or political crisis have been avoided. It depends on many situations. In the Pathways for Peace, we had basically seen three elements, right? The structural factors, which are really the history the geographical position of a country - these are very important. You know if Ukraine was not close to Russia things would not have happened that way. If Ukraine, if Kiev had not been at a point in the whole history of Russia, seen as one of the first city of the Rus that was actually in some way the birthplace of Russian City, that would not, things would not have happened. So, structural factors are absolutely central.
But then there's many other factors that are mostly institutions. And institutions - that's what the WDR 2011 of the World Bank said very clearly that - institutions are very, very important. The problem we have today with institutions is that institutions have been questioned a lot because people are more and more fragmented, more and more individualists.
We tend to question a lot and trust less and less institutions - look at the UN, look at a lot of the big international institutions and organizations. So, the third thing that we brought in the Pathway for Peace that was not really developed in other models is the action of the actors. How do you deal with the actors?
And the actors can be political actors, they can be people in certain places. I mean, of course, political actors in a crisis like, Ukraine is absolutely fundamental, their role. You could think what Russia would have been 10 years ago if, you know, Putin would not have stayed in government and somebody, another group would have taken on, maybe things would have been totally different, but maybe not because there were structural factors that were there.
There was still a lot of confusion about who's Russian, who's not Russian, and who, what's part of being Russian. Right? That would have stayed, but still you could have had leaders that would have steered things in the different ways. So, actors are very important. Also, we cannot only rely on structural thinking of structural factor in institution. We have to look at how you deal with actors.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So, in that vein, the report, Pathways for Peace, also kind of took a further granular look at this and looking not just at the actors and kind of the processes, but also the different approaches and proposed this new paradigm which, which really gives, I think a very high level of granularity to practitioners in terms of what, what hasn't worked and what might work in the future.
Could you talk a little bit more about how you thought about that transition from kind of today's previous paradigm that is, you know, delayed, top-down, fragmented to a new paradigm that's, that is more proactive, people centered and integrated. and how that was then, or is then kind of can be applied in the field setting in the operational setting?
ALEXANDRE MARC: Yeah, so the big difficulties in doing that - because indeed that's something we try to do very much, we looked at country case studies - is that countries that manage to avoid the worst part and get back on track, they're not countries that people talk about. They talk about when they get to the red, and then once they're out of the red, they're completely out of the press of anyone, that's good. And the countries who are in the red, stuck in the red, they're constantly in the press. So, what we know is this impression that once you are down, you're completely stuck. And on that you have a lot of information, a lot of analysis, but the country who made it out, you know, you don't have much analysis.
You little and because we are in a very depressed period, I think people are demanding a lot about how people how countries fall into that. Few country in the press are demanding: well, how did this country have managed to get out of it? Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it’s pretty true.
And when we went starting to look at case studies, we realized that a member of countries, you know, a number of situations, people were unaware and there were relatively few studies and all that. So, what we tried to do is to look systematically at different experiences and what played a role.
So, for example, if you take the, Sahel - and I talked already last time of the Sahel, quite a lot in Africa because I know this region quite well - it's really interesting to see in this terrible crisis that now hits the Sahel, how much Mali has been doing much worse than Niger for. They’re all very much shaken by what is happening, but Niger is holding much, much better.
So, then instead of studying Mali, that has been studied for so much. And we also studied it, actually, to try to understand what was happening. We also looked at Niger and it was very interesting to see the combination of policies that were used in a country where you have to say tensions are also very high.
So, one thing that we realized, for example, is that there was a very good combination in the way policies were handled between trying to deal with minority groups and in particular how they handled the Tuareg war because in Mali now it's a very different war, but it really started with the Tuareg war. And what the Niger accepted - of course, the Tuareg groups in Mali and Niger very different, so, that also plays a role, they're much more fragmented in Mali, which means that there's much more risks of not holding together when there's a negotiation - but what they did in Niger is they actually brought, for a population that is a small minority, they brought a leader of the Tuareg as a prime minister for quite a long time, which is very, very difficult to do for a president, right. You have a group that represents minority in the country who suddenly has a lot of power for some time, right? But that has managed to bring back the Tuareg around the table, but that was the part on the negotiation. What they did also is they realized one other thing that is very important is not to let violence happen very rapidly without having a control on it. Don't let violence escalate. And sometimes when it's small violence, countries don't pay attention or go with a very repressive aspect.
There, they developed a whole group, an institution that is especially monitoring the risk of violence across the country with a system of monitoring that exists in every village so that when they realize that they starts to be problem, they can intervene much quicker. Something that never really existed in Mali, for example, and this was actually quite effective of trying to defeat violence in a country where a lot of the violence is actually not political. It starts by fights between groups at community level, and then it becomes political. So, avoiding those fights was very, very important. So, the sort of focused on this institution that was looking at it with a system of mediators that were deployed locally and all that.
And then they did another thing, they really focused on their security sector and they tried to reduce corruption, they tried to train them relatively well, which was totally different in Mali because they had the history of coups, so, for a long time they actually didn't want the army to be very effective or very developed, and now they're still suffering out of it, right? But in Niger they managed that much better, so they have actually a much better political force in Niger. But they also knew how to communicate to the population in a very complicated setting where Islamism is actually very strong.
How, why they were collaborating with the French, with other groups. They had whole communication policies while Mali had actually a very weak communication policies in the north, in the place where you had. So, when you do comparison like that, you start to see that it's very much rooted in the reality of each country.
But it's also a very very ad-hoc, it depends on each situation. But you have to have all the aspect, the security, the development policy, the political settlement. All this has to work together. And it's really interesting because the Niger created the Council for Peace, that is a council that has development ministers, minister of Defense, minister of Interior, that has statisticians that do the statistic, and all those people are on the council that advise the president when there's a risk to peace.
So, they see peace not as a problem of the military or a problem of other, but they see for example the Ministry of Development as a central figure in this council. So, you know, I could take many, many examples, but usually is this combination of things that happen.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, I wanted to follow up a bit on the example of Niger, because since you've outlined these positive developments, unfortunately Niger is now on the frontline of the violence that is spilling over from Mali, and the western part of Tillaberi is actually has a significant at least in 2021, there were a couple of really high profile events that hundred people died plus more. Plus declaring martial law. So, I wanted to take that and then link it a bit to your framework in the following way.
And, and you can help if the way I'm building a case maybe needs a bit of adjustment. So, you've described the process in which Niger made some positive steps in ensuring that internal conflict, let's say, is under control or certain grievances are responded to. And at the heart of the framework that you've put in Pathways for Peace is an assumption that if grievances are met, if all the actors work together, the violence will reduce and the incentives a bit will change.
Well, if we look at Niger and those perpetrating violence now, their incentives, actually they, one they come from outside of the country. So, borders are very porous, but it also brings a much deeper question as to what do you do with those actors, whether it is someone from, you know, an insurgent or whether it is someone like Vladimir Putin who do not respond to overtures, whether, who do not want to compromise, who believe they have a very clear vision of what victory is. And that involves almost the annihilation of the other. How, because you can imagine various scenarios here. What would be your answer to that? How is it connected to the Pathways framework? And if it's not, what's your take on that?
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, this is very difficult. So, on Niger, of course, I don't want to say that everything is perfect on Niger, but what I wanted to say is that in a situation that is extremely challenging, they have been doing things that I think were better. And as a result, now they feel, of course, the pressure of a situation that is degrading totally, especially in their neighbor. And I don't know how long they're going to hold this pressure. But I think a lot of the pressure is actually really from neighbors.
I mean neighbors that then. So the other thing that I think we said was very, very important before I answer your question, I want to say is actually working at the periphery of a country because very often all the attention is on the capital, on the center, and you don't look at what happens at the periphery.
So, that's also something that was quite important at some point. Now there's so much you can do in the periphery between the zone of the three frontiers that is between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, because there's very little resources there. So, what you have to do is actually sustain it. And one thing that the World Bank did after their strategy was actually to reorient a lot of their funding to the peripheries of those areas, right, of those countries because the government was naturally pushing for money to go to where the population is, right? So, I'm not saying that everything is easy, but I'm saying that it's actually, there's a huge stress in Niger, but they have been holding on better than others in a situation that is really very dramatic overall in the region.
Now, what do you do when groups, and that's probably the big difference when groups are very extreme in their thinking and we're talking mostly about fundamentalist groups that want to change things in a totally different way, that they will not go into a discussion. This is very different of subnational conflict, even in some of the worst, like at the moment between Ethiopia and Tigray, you can still, you have troops there, you can still have negotiation, the classical negotiation that you have, you can hold negotiation. But how do you hold negotiation with ISIS? How do you hold a negotiation with groups like that? You know, you have groups in between like the Talibans who are typically grouped that do a little of no negotiation and cannot accept the society, but still have elements of negotiation. And a lot of that's what the Malian believe, they believe they can negotiate with ISIS and others, but they will see that they cannot this is not possible - in Nigeria was not possible, in those places was not possible.
Those people have a, have a sort of the worst of anarchism, right? They think that by destroying the world they will actually recreate a new world that will be better. The worry is that you start to have a little bit of that on the international scene also today, right? And so you also have governments that now starts to behave like that, of saying, you know, the rules of the games in the world are really not worth, they're not what interests us, we have practically another vision of who we are and who we are, and table of negotiation of things like that don't work. So, that's, I think, one of the big challenges of the world today. Is that contrary to a lot of the conflicts that you had during the Cold War, that were about regime, you still had a possibility to negotiate.
But today there's no more possibilities in many cases, no more possibilities to negotiate. So, then what you have to do is that's where even the security sector becomes much more central, the sort of international alliance you can build are very central and accepting that you need to do a lot for certain population. But the problem is that some of those groups, extremist groups, they're not the poorest actually, those people there, it is just in their mind that they've disconnected. And even if you tell them that you will provide a lot of funding in their neighborhood, they will not. But this is the extreme, by the way, of the groups, is the groups that the French were trying to target or other were trying to target.
You still have undermining under that a lot of the issues that are the classical development issues. For example, in Mali, one of the big groups today is the Katibat Macina, which is actually Tuareg groups, right? It's a Tuareg group. It's a Peul group, a Fulani group, right? A group of people who were herders.
And these herders were constantly couldn't adapt because the development of agriculture and the fact that with the drought, their cattle had to move more and more to the south. And so they were constant tension with the agriculturist. And they had a sense that the state was on the side of the agriculturist, that the state was not on their side.
And then they went into follow up the jihadist movement because they also had, in their history, Usman dan Fodio, many, many big conquerors that were actually jihadist at their time in the 14th century or 16th century. So, they moved into that. So, I still believe that those groups, which are not ISIS, you can still find ways to discuss with them or with actually some of the people who follow them.
But the ones that are just too moved to the two extreme, like ISIS or Al-Qaeda in the Sahel just these groups are very difficult to deal with. And that's one of the big problem we have with today.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, I actually want to take us back to the elements of the structural factors, actors, and institutions and everything we just talked about right now made me wonder how do you talk to those actors who have an interest in not resolving the conflict, whether they are internal, whether they are in the region, whether they are larger powers - which will take us later on to your work on the geopolitics of fragility. So, how do you still engage in prevention when you identify that key actors might have an interest in undermining prevention and maintain either maintaining the conflict or starting a conflict?
ALEXANDRE MARC: Okay, so, first of all those people have followers. So, you, and that's the limitation of the, an approach that we are only an approach around negotiation or around diplomacy is they have followers and they will always have a small core of intransigent followers that are ready to do anything for their heads.
But you also have a lot of people that collaborate. That collaborate for many other reasons. And the problem is what you need to do this, unfortunately, some people call this counter-insurgency, but I don't call this counter-insurgency, I call this good development. Those people that have grievances, it has to be redressed now. You have to start to work in those area, in those zones and try to say, okay, well there's, there's a different kind of development that can come in.
The real problem is that for young people, they're very impatient now in the day-to-day because they hear, they connect to social media, they know what it is, they know what's happened. If you tell them we're going to develop your region in 15 years, we're going to start to have jobs in a place where you have no no rain, no.
You see, that's not a real answer. So, you have to be able to be relatively quickly present there, but you cannot offer many of those youth all what they want. So, it’s development with a lot of negotiation, development with a lot of persuasion development, with a lot of outreach, lot of outreach to the farmers, to the person there, but especially to the youth that leave their families to do, because they want to become something different than farmers. So, and you know, the world is communicate so much today. People know so much the situation of other place in the world. They can communicate with another jihadist in Pakistan very easily from the center of the Sahara. They are caught into all those both propaganda, but also they see how people live in other places.
They see what they don't have, they see what they would like to have, but they don't think it's reachable. All this makes it much, much more difficult. And especially the traditional, the worst of it is the traditional structures are sort of eroding. So, the problem is you have also to act a lot with those traditional structures like local mosques and local groups, societies of groups that were there for a lot of time. It’s huge policy of outreach at work that, for example, is with relatively weak results, but still some result is playing out in northern Nigeria now. You're trying to have a lot of groups that do outreach, that try to talk to different groups, to others because all those groups have talked to each other. And so it’s all the question you are asking me I don't think we have a magic answer to that, and that's why conflicts are so difficult to resolve today. But I think we have some elements of directions, right? But they're very, very difficult to get implemented by a government who has little capacity, who has little ability and who might actually find for short-term reasons also an interest in seeing the war remaining a war. Like, you know, I would say maybe Mali for some time thought it was better to have their military occupied in the north with the rebellion than come and do a coup at home. Well, unfortunately it went so bad that they came two times in one year to do a coup at home. So, you have to be really really careful on how you, you handled those things.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So, building on this idea that we have so many conflicts now with non-state actors, extremists in particular, as you were mentioning in Mali and the Sahel. Crisis Group, International Crisis Group published a report at the end of June that focused on Somalia and Somalia’s issues with Al Shabaab, where they proposed basically that the situation, this status quo now is just this indefinite conflict. And it might be time to start political engagement with Al Shaba to try and find out if they're, you know, one interested in talks and to what their conditions might be to try and somehow get to a resolution. What is your take on that? You know, if you put on your Pathway for Peace lens this suggestion that states have to start negotiating. With these groups to, in order to kind of ameliorate the situation for their citizens and perhaps as a prerequisite to even be able to do the kind of development that, that you were just mentioning.
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, you know, we have a lot of experience with the Taliban because there was a lot of negotiations always, parallel, in between that happened and all that. And what you realize very quickly is that those groups are never homogenous. They actually are very efficient because they are very flat in terms of their management structure. Sometimes they have a very very charismatic leader. But you've seen with the Taliban that you kill a leader there's another one that we appear in other place. The leaders is less important than the group of people that connect. In this way, those groups are very modern because they adapt in the way also of how business tends to work today of how, you know, using, with social media, with contact, with a very difficult to grasp structures. I still believe that when those things have worked, you have to be able to be sufficiently shrewd to find the groups that don't have a very strong interest in just getting the war to continue. Among the Taliban, they were nationalists, they were conservatists, there were people interested in drug trafficking.
There were people interested, and I've heard that it's probably relatively similar with El Shabab. El Shabab used to be at the beginning, a very, they had a group that were at the top that was very, very extremist joining ISIS and all that. But now that the bigger international groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda are actually pretty much out of the picture, you become now closer to the actual management of those groups locally, right? They don't see that they need to be in line with the policy of another. They give themself the name of ISIS because it gives them clout and all that. But, so inside them you will have the extremists, but you will always have people who are more ready to negotiate and discuss and see how you can do things.
Now, this is not a panacea and there's a lot of risk. The risk that you have in doing what you advise doing in Somalia or ICG advise doing in Somalia is what happened in Taliban. That means that the next thing you see is no more girls at school. No more education for girls. Very little education for men because they don't see that as important and they don't see that as reinforcing the control on the population. You know, a country that, that does not develop in some ways, that develops on the minimum that continues to hold on to drug production and things like that. And at the end, what you have is a slow degradation of the situation. So, maybe you would be very, if you are very cynical, you would say, well, that's what they have to go.
Because then people at the end will realize that they cannot hold on like that, that they need another life. And before they've given this chance to really realize that to the bottom you know, you will always have data seen as an alternative. So, that's the cynical answer to it. So, I would be, I would say yes, you always have to be in contact, see if there's some possibility, if you can do and that's actually what the Malian wanted to do.
They wanted to find, the military who did the coup, wanted to try to work with some elements of those group. But we know what it's going to mean. It's going, they are going to close all the western schools in the north of the country. They're going to take all the girls out. You're going to have dilapidation and things like that coming back. So, how do you handle that is very difficult. I still believe that Somalia is a country that have managed to get out of the worst of the civil war. The problem is that they have the hardcore Al Shabaab that are there, that now they're stuck into a place where they can basically manage basically with massive support of the West, but they're not managing to get to the next steps.
And that's possibility. So, I would say yes, but you have to be really, really careful of what you want as the end game. And maybe at one point, because we're just, the West is so involved in so many things, you have to say, okay, well, you know, people will have to resolve that for themself. That's the Afghanistan way. It's very difficult to say, but I think it's going to be very difficult to give easy answer to prevention of worsening of the situation in Somalia.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So, I wanted to pick up on another theme from Pathways for Peace, which is the need to capitalize on these opportune moments to really help a country get onto the, to the pathway that can lead out of peace, you know, as illustrated by, by the graph and the model that you laid out in the report. But this also implies waiting and organizations, international organizations, IFIs, et cetera, are not known for their great waiting skills. In fact, the whole setup with a project-based kind of way of working effectiveness, efficiency, judged by how much money is being dispersed over certain time periods is really geared towards creating results you know, quickly. And there may be a tension then between this need to wait for an opportune moment and really capitalize on that and, the way that the working model of a lot of the development organizations is set up, how do you think of that and what can be done to bridge that gap?
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, first of all, the issue of opportune moment is a very important issue because if you take the model we have in the Pathways for Peace, and you have those waves that go between very peaceful type of sustainable peace type of situation, down to violent conflict, political crisis. While you move around those waves that takes you down when you are into a descendant dynamic it's very, very difficult to reverse, right? Because I was saying all incentives start to align around this dynamic, which means that the positive dynamic can actually be very positive also. But you have this downward spiral that is very difficult, that actually the WDR 2011 was talking about this downward spiral in which you fall.
Now there are big events that happen that can be political, that can be physical, that can be geological, that can be all sorts of sorts that suddenly reshuffle a bit the cards and give opportunities to change the pathway. So, let me give you an example. The, maybe the most obvious it was when the civil war in Aceh.
So, you had this very long civil war in Aceh in Indonesia, and then you had this terrible tsunami that happened. And during this tsunami the whole region was, the whole coast of the region of Aceh was destroyed as well as most of the coast of Indonesia and Thailand and others. And there was this, the civil war at the moment and a lot of humanitarian aid came in and suddenly there was a chance for both parties to do a truce because both supporters of both parties needed humanitarian assistance. And out of this truce that allowed to engage discussions between the Aceh independentist and the government, and finally from there they moved in finding a settlement. And so this terrible situation actually for the peace in Aceh was very positive. Then there was a settlement that gave a lot of autonomy to Aceh and allowed peace to be back and relatively sustainable because now it's decades that this have been settled.
And you have other examples of this kind, right? So, most of those changes are of course political. You have an election that change things, or you have suddenly I don't know, a security event that happened and suddenly it changed the way people see the situation in the country. So, they are more open to some form of settlement.
Now, the big difficulty with the external actors is that they are programmed to work according to relatively define moments and especially they have to account for what they're doing. And every leader political in the West, for example, need to account of what they're doing. So, just saying, you know, in this country we have to realize that not much can be done, let's focus on development at the relatively low key, let's do what we can, but let's be ready to act when there's this opportunity. And this is very difficult to do. But also what is difficult to do is to get everybody mobilized on time, but in doing it in a way that they will not also harm the opportunity that is created. So that, all this is very complicated because very often when you have this opportunity, you have to have the diplomatic actors, UN, and others to be ready. But you have to have the development actors also ready to take the opportunity of that and, for example, pass to one of the party much more benefit of the development program and maybe management of part of the development program so, suddenly they can see that things are really changing, right?
So this is a challenge, but we've seen a lot of situation that were changed because of this. So, now for example, you take Sri Lanka, and you see what's happening in Sri Lanka and you see that here now suddenly there's a lot of opportunity to redraw things because you have a lot of conflicts there with the Muslims, but you have still the Tamil conflict that is very much there in the background. Are people readjusting and thinking also of that dimension, or only focusing on the terrible macroeconomic situation? Because they should also focus on those other opportunities and then engage the government on those other opportunities. You have a lot of things like that allow suddenly to turn around a situation.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, I had a question about the red lines that were mentioned earlier and kind of trails off of the answer you just gave us. And I'm wondering how should we think about the trade-offs between what we'd like to do to prevent the conflict with those pivotal moments and the red lines? Because it's not going to be an easy question, it's going to be a very sensitive question you just gave the example of Sri Lanka right now, in that case, for example, or actually more clearly in Afghanistan.
How do we? Do we have the ability as institutions responsible to particular donors, do we even have the ability to cross some of the red lines and should we, in order to prevent conflict.
ALEXANDRE MARC: I think it depends what red line you are meaning there's different red lines. But I think examples of when things have done have gone relatively well, you've passed red lines, right? So, I'm always have this little story of a program that was working with the Taliban, where a program of the World Bank where actually the government had no discussions with Taliban, right. But there were regions that were hold by the Taliban. And exactly what I was saying before, they were the type of Talibans that were the more development oriented, they were not the extremist type, but they were still part of the coalition of Taliban. And were quite interested in getting help on the health and education program of the social fund, that was the fund that was financing projects in the countryside. And there was a decision that was made, and I've heard, I have no confirmation that basically the manager of the program said, should I talk with those Taliban, and should I accept to actually pass money to communities in their area of control? And what should I do? And said, and the manager said, well, don't tell anyone about this conversation and think what would make the most sense. I just, I'm not going to look at what you're doing in this region now, for now. And so the head of the project, I'm sure it happened a bit differently, but basically that's what happened.
And the head of the project then decided to go ahead. I'm sure he had some understanding with the governors, and this was actually a relatively successful project on the short. It didn't create peace of course there, but it creates some stability in this region for some time because the Taliban saw that.
So, you crossed a red line, which at that time was don't work with the Taliban. And you crossed it enough. Actually, it was a positive element, but you had to have a lot of people there closing their eyes the right way, because there are people that close their eyes the wrong way. But it's very important to know how to close your eyes the right way at some points. It's a very difficult judgment to do. So, it depends very much on where you stand and again, with who you stand. I think the main problem you have is that a lot of people are not in the mind frame of thinking of conflict. That's why in the World Bank and many place now we have those conflict analysis that we do to try to awaken people to what's happening in the area of conflict. They see the conflict, like, lot of people see the conflict like an earthquake, right? It's something that happens outside of their possibility. This is not their field - for how many times I've heard macroeconomists and said, oh, if we have to think about the reason of the conflict, we will not never do anything in this country, we just have to make sure that the macroeconomy is stable. And yes, indeed it's very important that it's stable, but you have to think what are the opportunities that are there. On the issues that are driving this conflict to act on them. For that, you need people who are very sensitive about those type of issues, who understand the conflict.
They don't have to be big expert, but they need to realize that next to stabilizing the macro economy, they could do it in a way that will actually provide benefit. And especially if you have a big crisis and you start to see a moment of opportunity, you have to take this moment. And that's very difficult because you don't always have a government that thinks like that, because for example, a governor might not have an interest for a peaceful resolution at a specific time of a situation his especially if the governor is corrupted and does drug trafficking on the side and other things, right? So, you have to be able to play all that. So, you turn a development expert or security expert into a sort of anthropologist of conflict.
You know, not to know every detail, but to understand the, and that's what we're trying to do in the community of conflict to train as much as possible people, to train so that they can feel like that. And the red line, in my view, needs to be - there are many cases where the red line needs to be broken, but breaking the red lines will not mean that you will always be successful. You can actually be can actually take big risks and fail. So, you have to take these risks and accept to take these risks. It's very subtle. There's not one way of saying that's how you, there's not an easy recipe to do it.
It's about a sensitivity, a way of seeing things, a capability to connect and you have to be in the field. And I've seen in Central African Republic at that time, for example, some representative of the World Bank, representative of the French government representative of the UN that could managed to discuss those issues at night in small restaurants, in places, and come to do the right things, right. It never holds for very long, but for sometimes they were doing the right things, right? So it was quite interesting to see when they were doing that. And very often it was at the limit of the red line or passing the red lines.
PAUL M. BISCA: Well, one actor that is supposed to push the red line always and display risk taking sort of smart approaches is of course the private sector. And when you mentioned conflict analysis it's often the case that private companies contract other private companies whose deliberate goal is to understand conflict and to try to help them navigate these situations. I wanted to ask you what can the private sector do for prevention in your framework? And then as a follow up, it tends to be sometimes when you observe experts talk about this, almost fetishized that the private sector's role is to go in and do what the public sector cannot. And I've always wondered you know, is that really the case?
If the state is not there to provide the modicum of security and other elements so the private sector can take off how can that actually happen? So, what's your view on the private sector and prevention?
ALEXANDRE MARC: The first view I have on the private sector and prevention is that the private sector has been the big phantasm of the development organization, security organization, and diplomats.
It's this big fantasy that suddenly the private sector will come and will resolve the problem of a country. I never understood very much - though I was in many meetings about how the private sector was going to resolve the problem of Somalia, the problem of other places - I frankly never understood that.
I never understood the logic. I understand the reason why they're saying it. They don't want to spend their money. They want others to spend the money. I understand why they're saying it. The private sector is very powerful. They can do things, but this idea that the private sector will come in, create a lot of jobs in Somalia, and therefore things will be resolved with this conflict is total fantasy. It's a fantasy. That is probably the biggest fantasy that holds in the development community on this role of the private sector. Now, this being said, I think the private sector is a very, very big, a actor in society like every other actors. So, they can create the conflict, they can resolve the conflict; they can help in improving the conflict. They can help in making it worse. They can create a bad political situation. They can improve the political situation. They can do the same thing that everyone does, but they're certainly not the miracle answer. So, let me go back a little bit on why. People take it reverse.
They said if the private sector was there, a big private sector very good private sector was there, there would be no more conflict. Well, that's not how it works. If there was no more conflict and if there was no more corruption and fragility, then you would have a thriving sector. So, it's just like the logic works the wrong way when people do those arguments. I just don't understand how they can do it. So, the result of that is that there's huge energy put in trying to force the private sector to become a good private sector in place where they can only succeed as a private sector - because they have to have money if not, there's no interest to make money - by being a bad private sector.
So, you know, you bring the private sector, the only way they can do is by corrupting the people at the border that's the only way they can make money. And you push them in there. And you forced them to be there. And so I saw all this discussion, for example, in Burundi about the private sector, that's fantastic. And then I said, okay, that was the IFC by the way. Where did you invest? Well, we created two hotels in Bujumbura. I said, great, great. Two big international hotels in Bujumbura. So, what's the impact on the peace? Well, you know, all the peace negotiators and all the development organization can stay there when there's a need.
Oh, wow. I mean, in terms of argument for why you should invest in big hotels, because that's the only investment they could find. All the others in coffee, cocoa and all that, were all corrupt, so they end up doing two hotels. So, just to say that sometimes we engage into rhetoric that just really don't work.
Now there are cases where the private sector for their own interest, if you can match their interest with the situation, can help. So, you know, we know the case in Kenya where the association of private sector owners, the big Kenyan private sector, played a huge role in lobbying the presidential candidates that they were all coming from the private sector in order not to resort to violence.
That was in 2000 the election of 2013. And they already played a big role in trying to stop the ethnic violence that happened in the election of 2007. So these are cases, where it works. There are other cases like for example, of oil companies or companies of this kind that try to do a special effort to make sure that they create more job than they would normally do with an oil company, a mining company that actually usually uses very little employees in those area, create little labor. So, you know, you have those cases where the private sector has played more stabilizing role. You know, in Sudan, the private sector wanted to avoid the civil war in Sudan, so they actually pushed for negotiation and paid for some negotiation and all that.
So, you have indeed the private sector that plays like other actors, but the idea that just bringing the big private sector there, in a situation where you have bad governance that's a way to get the more government out of their primary responsibility, which is their primary responsibility to create the framework.
Now, once a situation moves into a more positive situation, and things are better, that's where you have to reduce the risk of the private sector so that they come in. So, in the path for improvement very important that at a certain stage the private sector is ready to take some risks because indeed they will create jobs.
Some jobs they will create a lot of the conflicts are not about jobs, but still they will create some jobs that will help, they will create a situation. They will pay tax. So, it'll give tax to the government so that the government, so in a period of restoration, that's very good. But I've seen so much effort pushed at putting private sector in situation that were just contrary to the basic incentive of doing business.
And what do you expect they do? Well, you know, private sector, the drug dealers of Colombia or Peru are private sectors entrepreneurs. Right. And they're very, very effective. You know, the Al Shabaab lives out of selling charcoal, right? But, but that's probably not the type of private sector that is very important in those country.
But these are the ones that are creating more war than they're creating peace. But these are the ones that are thriving in this environment. The other ones are not thriving. So, you first have to establish the condition for the private sector to come. And then when you start to have the basis, then it's very important to reduce the risk of the private sector so that they can thrive and protect them and all that.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: You talked about the entrepreneurial. organized crime members. And when you're thinking prevention, the report really laid out these three principles that prevention has to be sustained, inclusive, and targeted. But I'm wondering how does that work in the world we live in right now? Because I was wondering if you can just take us back to both the work at the report, but also update us since, because the report makes a case for prevention in an interconnected world. I'd say that since the report was published in 2017, the world has changed further. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
ALEXANDRE MARC: Yes. So, that's a fundamental issue and that's what, since I left the World Bank, have been working on basically is how those conditions are changing. And I did report that. I think we're going to talk soon at Brookings on that topic now.
You know, the world had known, especially since the end of the Cold War. So, from 1990, but we can say from 1980, from the time where Soviet Union had so many problems that even in Afghanistan and all that, that they were not really present anymore on the international scene to 2010 where you saw a full dominance of the western world on the development policies of countries, because at that time, China was not yet a big player and everybody was, and it was a period, actually, there was a period between 2000 - 2010 of relatively great progress on peace. It was the United States was an absolute superpower, it had in some ways won the Cold War, it was at the top. The international organizations were totally into the field where they were controlled by the west. So, World Bank, IMF, all this where they were already before, but then the control became even stronger and all the development actors were coming together and thinking about fragility and all that.
Well, since then, you have a big change. Not only you have China, that has become one of the biggest providers of international investments, but also in many place of foreign, just foreign aid to most of the development world, they have become bigger investors than any of the countries of the West.
And you had also smaller countries that started to see the opportunity to influence very much according to their own setup, their approach to those countries. And fragility is not part of their view of the world, right? So, all what we talk about fragility is not part of the view of their world, and they are becoming the biggest financiers or involved on, in those issues, very involved in those issues. And that changes completely the way you can influence your dialogue with governments, your dialogue with others. And it has a huge impact on conflict, on democracy, on many other things. And I think it's going to change fundamentally how we're going to work.
And I think what happened in Afghanistan is the first manifestation of that where you decide that maybe that's not where you should be. This is a country that will return to very old things, oppress women and all that. But you cannot be everywhere. You just have to be where you can be. That you will have to deal with countries when your own interests are directly connected to that.
But the big risks I see is that we go back to the Cold War proxy war system where we use fragile state for carrying our proxy. And it's starting. I mean, us when I mean us is all the power in the world, right? So, I see that happening in Mali now. I see that happening in Central African Republic. I see that happening in more and more countries, in Myanmar, in other places where you have and that might be dramatic, dramatic for the future of fragility.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, can you make the case, because we've all seen sort of the support even in Western countries for less involvement around the world, which means that, that sustained prevention might go away. You can't, if, if you can't be sustained, if you can't be there for 25 years continuously to ensure that the changes that take a long time, that the corruption takes 20 plus years, right, to even see a decrease, a reasonable decrease. Make the case for a citizen, the average Joe or Jane in the donor countries. How should they think about the world they live in today in terms of them needing to support, and their governments needing to support prevention in places they may not even be able to spell or pronounce, or really honestly care very much since they're dealing with so much in their day-to-day lives.
ALEXANDRE MARC: That's a, that's a very good point though. I think we have, you know, the situation of Afghanistan with what happened with Bin Laden and September 11 shows you that, you know, fragility can have - aside from I believe that the worst thing for fragility is the humanitarian situation for the people in those fragile country - but it shows that it can have a direct impact on people living in a city in the United States. And this is not finished, right? So, this can happen anytime. So, just saying that, you know, well, fragile countries just we're not just going to pay attention to them. First of all, they're close to one quarter of the countries in the world, so it's very difficult to say, you know, I move out of 25% of the countries in the world.
But it will certainly say that you have to do things differently. You know, you cannot work in Zambia with your development programs and your discussion with the government if behind this you have the Chinese that holds you know, 80% of the investments and they don't believe in your approach.
What I think is possible though, is that, that's where Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, they seem to play the same thing in the sense that they say, I don't want to play according to your rules, I'm going to have my rules. They still have very different interests. China has an interest of stability and doing things in a way where they can make money.
They're still into making money, Russia into disrupting as much as possible the West. So, it's a very different strategy. China will disrupt if they can, but at the end they want to make money. So, it's Turkey wants to make money. They can be disruptive, they can be helpful, they can be in between. They don't want to go the way the West, but they on some things they want.
Iran just wants also to be totally disruptive. So, each of them has different ways and I still believe that you can engage, that you can engage with some of those countries. Actually, I presented the Pathways for Peace in China, and it was relatively well taken. It was, the UN told me, you know, it'll be read by many people before to know that you can actually go and present it into a forum where there will be foreign guests, local guests, university, and all that.
So, they want to make, to be secure about what they can say. And, you know, it was well received and well discussed. In Russia the Bank strategy was presented. We never got invited to present the pathway for peace. And the Russians were happy, but from what I heard, they didn't really care much, right?
So, they said, thank you, and then they left. So, it was very different attitude towards that, right? The Chinese were very inquisitive. They were interested. They say, okay, there's enough there that will fit our agenda. We can discuss it. Others just didn't really want to get into the discussion. So, It's going to be very different the way you do business, but if you don't look at that, then continuing the same way just is meaningless.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: I wanted to pick up on what you mentioned about investing in, for example, Zambia and then having China being kind of an actor in the background. So, it's an interesting dynamic now and which has obviously grown over the last decade, as you mentioned, where China, the model of governance that they're promoting appeals to many African leaders who have been in power for too long, where democratic governance is not very well developed and also they are developing technology smartphones, for example in a company called Transition Holdings has almost 50% of the African smartphone market now because they're catering to the needs of people in the conditions like, the African ones where you can't maybe charge your phone that often.
It needs to, you know, overheat much less, et cetera. And so you have this situation where really despotic sometimes leaders are in favor of the governance model. And young people who are hungry for technology and a better life are really enjoying liking the soft power, if you will, that China is bringing to the table. So, in that connection, in that context, I should say, how do you promote a model of governance that we in the West perhaps think is, is better with increased accountability. And how do you kind of get those young people on board with such a change, if you will.
ALEXANDRE MARC: Yeah. So, once again you see China evolving a lot. China today is ready to adopt a lot of the most stringent social accountability rules because they need to get in deals with Western companies. And those western companies have they, they just don't have the technology, the access to market and all that to do it.
The Western companies desperately need the cash and the money. So, you have everywhere on lithium, on oil, on everything, you have those joint agreement. And for that, because it's a Chevron or it's a company that's American or European, they have to respect the social safeguards or the environmental safeguards, and they're perfectly capable.
They have now the tools to do it. Sometimes they feel it's easier to do it without it because you make more money, but if they have the incentive, they will do it, right? So you have now very sophisticated joint venture with all the responsibility environment and all that where the Chinese are part of those joint ventures, right? The Chinese, on one side criticize the West but they look also a lot what the West is doing. And sometimes, for example, in Sudan, they were very proactive in trying to support the UN involvement in peace talks because they have big investments.
So, the Chinese actually funded a lot of the peace talks in Southern Sudan to protect their investments. And you know that now they're the number one funder of the peacekeeping operation at the UN. So, with the Chinese, as you said, it's a bit of everything. And that's why you have to take this opportunity. That's what I believe, that not to see China as only negative, but see that.
Russia is a completely different ballgame at the moment. It's completely different ballgame because they're really trying to just simply undermine the West and they go to place where they have no strategic interest, just they see a hole like Central African Republic where they can shame the west and create problems.
And, and so they move in this, in this hole while funding it through a corruption and other ways. So, it's a completely different goal, ball game. But in all case, you have to be very aware of those different presence and how those other actors. In 2000, you didn't have to have to be very aware, you just didn't care.
Actually, the World Bank was implementing a lot of their projects through Chinese companies, and it was relatively well done, right? So, the, nobody was paying too much attention. Then we had the big crisis. And now for example, in Sri Lanka, the Chinese are the biggest investor with the Japanese, in terms of sovereign funds, that means government funding. And they are going to collaborate with the IMF and others because they have to see what will happen with all those investments they have done that the government cannot pay back. So, they will have to play the game at some point, right?
And see how they can get back into those forums where these things are discussed, the G7 or other, where they can have influence because that's a big pot of money in Sri Lanka, but in other places. So, all this will have to see how it, but it means that you'll have to approach fragility with this additional geopolitical lens if you want to be effective - that up to now people were not paying great attention to it.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Thank you so much, Alexandre. Just as before, I think we could keep talking for hours and we will talk again in our third installment in the series, and we will go much, much deeper into the geopolitics of fragility, and that's a report you published recently with the Brookings Institution, and we'll link to it in the description so people have a chance to see it and read it ahead of our next episode. So, join us next time for more on the geopolitics of fragility, how the new context and the global powers are shaping fragility, and whether or not peace is still possible. Alexandre, thank you so much for this round. And we are looking forward to seeing you in the next round.
ALEXANDRE MARC: Thank you very much. It was very challenging to respond to all your question. Thank you. They were very good.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Thank you! And to our audience, thank you so much for tuning into F-World today. We hope you found our conversation interesting and inspirational. If you're watching us, please hit subscribe here on YouTube. If you're listening to us, please do subscribe to us. And if you want to know more about F-World, visit our website f-world.org and follow us on Twitter @fworldpodcast. Thanks for listening.