Seth Kaplan is a Visiting Fellow with the Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange. He is also a Professorial Lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), USAID, and the U.S. Department of State. Seth is the author of three books: “Fixing Fragile States: A New Paradigm for Development” (2008); “Betrayed: Promoting Inclusive Development in Fragile States (2013); and “Human Rights in Thick and Thin Societies: Universality Without Uniformity” (2018). His new book, “Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time,” will be published in 2023. This episode is a grand tour of Seth’s core ideas about fragile and conflict-affected countries. We start by talking about Seth’s professional journey, which began out of his passion for travel and insatiable curiosity about why some societies work better than others. We then shift to the concept of fragility. Seth argues that social dynamics shape the institutions, understood both as “the rules of the game,” as well as the state apparatus. The pathways in and out of fragility or conflict depend on the interplay between formal institutions and informal social rules which govern collective action. Fragility and conflict can be prevented if social groups can come together and chart a unifying course of action that leads them towards prosperity – in other words, if they can manage political and social transitions. We then explore how these factors interact with politics, economics, and security. Seth provides a sweeping overview of situations where countries and communities made “good enough” progress to avoid collapse and even prosper, from Nigeria and Somaliland to Guatemala, India, and Indonesia. In most cases, leaders and elites were able to rally around a common storyline that enabled them achieve unity of purpose and navigate through tough transitions. We also talk about the hard cases, from Libya to Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. The conversation delves into many fascinating tangents. We discuss the work of the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and how it deploys its framework in Libya and Colombia. Seth also argues that multilateral organizations like the World Bank must create the conditions for brave leaders who can move their societies forward rather than focus on purely technical policy advice or project financing. We conclude with the reasons for hope in fragile states, and with a reflection on the skills needed to be an effective operator in the most complex societies (hint – it’s about the human soul). ***** Dr. Seth D. Kaplan Website: https://sethkaplan.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethkaplan28 Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University: https://sais.jhu.edu/users/skapla13 Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange: https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/seth-d-kaplan Institute for Integrated Transitions: https://ifit-transitions.org/experts/seth-d-kaplan/ ***** 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)
Seth Kaplan is a Visiting Fellow with the Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange. He is also a Professorial Lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), USAID, and the U.S. Department of State. Seth is the author of three books: “Fixing Fragile States: A New Paradigm for Development” (2008); “Betrayed: Promoting Inclusive Development in Fragile States (2013); and “Human Rights in Thick and Thin Societies: Universality Without Uniformity” (2018). His new book, “Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time,” will be published in 2023.
This episode is a grand tour of Seth’s core ideas about fragile and conflict-affected countries. We start by talking about Seth’s professional journey, which began out of his passion for travel and insatiable curiosity about why some societies work better than others. We then shift to the concept of fragility. Seth argues that social dynamics shape the institutions, understood both as “the rules of the game,” as well as the state apparatus. The pathways in and out of fragility or conflict depend on the interplay between formal institutions and informal social rules which govern collective action. Fragility and conflict can be prevented if social groups can come together and chart a unifying course of action that leads them towards prosperity – in other words, if they can manage political and social transitions.
We then explore how these factors interact with politics, economics, and security. Seth provides a sweeping overview of situations where countries and communities made “good enough” progress to avoid collapse and even prosper, from Nigeria and Somaliland to Guatemala, India, and Indonesia. In most cases, leaders and elites were able to rally around a common storyline that enabled them achieve unity of purpose and navigate through tough transitions. We also talk about the hard cases, from Libya to Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. The conversation delves into many fascinating tangents. We discuss the work of the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and how it deploys its framework in Libya and Colombia. Seth also argues that multilateral organizations like the World Bank must create the conditions for brave leaders who can move their societies forward rather than focus on purely technical policy advice or project financing.
We conclude with the reasons for hope in fragile states, and with a reflection on the skills needed to be an effective operator in the most complex societies (hint – it’s about the human soul).
*****
Dr. Seth D. Kaplan
Website: https://sethkaplan.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethkaplan28
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University: https://sais.jhu.edu/users/skapla13
Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange: https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/seth-d-kaplan
Institute for Integrated Transitions: https://ifit-transitions.org/experts/seth-d-kaplan/
*****
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. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/28337
Seth D. Kaplan. 2023. Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time. https://amzn.to/3la0FSG
Seth D. Kaplan. 2018. Human Rights in Thick and Thin Societies: Universality Without Uniformity. https://amzn.to/3RLAQ7Y
Seth D. Kaplan. 2013. Betrayed: Promoting Inclusive Development in Fragile States. https://amzn.to/3YwbH2Z
Seth D. Kaplan. 2008. Fixing Fragile States: A New Paradigm for Development. https://amzn.to/3Yu9BkV
Sunil Khilnani. 1997. The Idea of India. https://bit.ly/3DOyfnF
TIMESTAMPS:
00:01:04 Seth’s story – Wondering youth
00:04:29 Passion for societies in transition (Nigeria)
00:08:04 Differences between people: Western and non-Western cultures
00:10:21 What is fragility?
00:12:49 Social cohesion & strong institutions (Somaliland & Syria)
00:15:20 Social cohesion & impact on politics & economics (Botswana)
00:20:16 Historical exceptions and what makes them special (India & Indonesia)
00:24:37 Unifying leaders building on historical legacy (Nehru & Sukarno)
00:27:21 Transitions unveiling social fractures (Libya vs. Tunisia)
00:31:50 Shifting to a good equilibrium – decentralization (Nigeria), social cohesion (Libya), external anchors (Guatemala)
00:39:29 Tough choices: corruption & violence or total country implosion?
00:44:55 Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) approach
01:00:33 Inclusiveness requires courage (Democrats & Republicans)
01:10:04 How to create a common identity?
01:14:51 Transitions for Ukraine, Afghanistan, & Syria
01:28:38 People in fragile states – reasons for hope
01:34:56 Skills, knowledge, & a new vision to help fragile states
01:41:37 Wrap-up
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Welcome back to F-World: The Fragility Podcast. Together with our guests, we explore how fragility manifests across economics, politics, security, and society, and how we can build a more resilient future. I'm Mihaela Carstei. And today I'm joined by only one of my two co-hosts, Paul Bisca. Normally, we're also joined by Johan Bjurman Bergman, who is off this week with other commitments, but will join us for our next conversation.
Our guest today is Seth Kaplan. Seth is a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School for the Advanced International Studies, a senior advisor for the Institute for Integrated Transitions, and a consultant to organizations such as the World Bank, USAID, State Department, and the OECD. But that description doesn't really tell you the whole story because Seth is someone who defies categorization. He teaches political risk, has authored three books to own fragile states, and one on culture and human rights, has studied math, economics, business, and human rights, and has traveled to over 70 countries. Welcome to F-World, Seth!
SETH KAPLAN: Thank you for having me!
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, first we always like to learn our guest's stories. So, I'd love to learn how you grew up, how that influenced your desire to study what you studied and what brought you here today.
SETH KAPLAN: Well, thank you. So, I think what would make me a little bit different than I can tell you I grew up in New York. No one who knows me does not recognize the New York accent.
I was once very well known for having the best New York accent in Chinese, of anybody, anybody new. And that wasn't necessarily a compliment, but my response always was that as long as everybody understands me the Chinese is good enough. So, I'm from New York. I grew up in the United States, and I think what would make me a little bit different than other people who might work at the World Bank or other people you might interview is that I would say I came to what I do because I was a bit of a wanderer.
I like to see many places; I like to wander. When I was a student in college, you talked about what I studied, but I think more importantly, one summer I went to Istanbul, spent the summer in Istanbul, some student exchange, and the bug of seeing the world and getting to know different places sort of got inside of me. And as soon as I got out of school, I wandered some more. Ended up living in a Nigeria. There are very few places you can go to and learn more than going to Nigeria because there's so many things happening every day. I mean, good things, bad things, but society is right in front of you. The challenges of governance is right in front of you every day. Human relations, how people treat each other, always staring you in the face. And then I went to Asia, and I lived many years in Asia, starting with Japan later, China. In the middle of all this, I got my degrees, my master's later, my PhD. And I think what, so I would just say, if you're trying to say something that would mark me out is just simply wandering, desire to learn about a lot of countries and then eventually trying to turn that into something practical because I didn't have a master plan. My master plan was to learn about the world more than anything else. Simply a curiosity. Especially about people and society and how societies function. And at some point, I realized that the fact that I was doing a lot of reading, the fact that I'd seen a lot of places I realized that this understanding about why some societies work better than others was really applicable to work on fragile states.
Because there was a lot of discussion about fragile states starting about 15 or so years ago, a little further back the years after 9/11. And there wasn't a lot of clarity about what was this problem in these countries, what we might do about it. And so, I thought I had different ideas and that's when I wrote the first book and that launched me on the career. And that leads us to why we're speaking today.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, when you traveled to these places, did you ever get the question from the locals, like, why are you here? Because intuitively if you would say, you know, you would travel to Italy or France or other places, many other places around the world, the answer can be more obvious. But you seem to choose specifically societies that had a lot of challenges. You got the bug, but you got a particular kind of bug almost.
SETH KAPLAN: I mean, I think the bug was I mean I spent several years in Japan, and so that society was among the best function societies at that time. The bug that I got was, I would say non-Western countries, countries that worked very differently than what I was familiar with.
So, I certainly spent a lot of time in the Middle East, a lot of time in Africa, a lot of time in East Asia. Those were the three reasons I spent the most time in. I mean I have wandered Latin America. I've wandered parts of South Asia. And so, I literally have tried to go to many places, and of course I've been in large parts of Europe, but I was those three regions of particular. And the funny thing is people very rarely ask me that question. I think partly because when I wandered, I wandered a little bit differently. When you go on an assignment for a big organization, you fly in, you go to the hotel, you tend to meet a certain type of people. And when I was wandering, this is again, we're in my twenties I did none of those things.
I lived with families. I did home stays in over 30 countries. I went to Nigeria. I mean, people knew me. People knew that I just, I wasn't there - I don't know if, if it's me or, I mean, I was just, for some people it might be considered bold - I mean, in those days we had no cell phones. I would travel around Nigeria by myself, West Africa, by myself, only white person many people would ever see or had seen. I mean, later things became very different parts of Asia the same. And people didn't really ask me that. I was just, when you're among the people, so to speak, and you're living among the people, surprisingly, they just think of you as another person. I would say the more intellectual, educated classes, they're more likely to ask you that question.
The average people, there's a lot of diversity in these places, and they might just see you as another, another person in that diversity. So, I was very rarely asked that question. I mean, I had to, I had struggles, I was in Nigeria, I was about 21 years old, and I had lived with a family and the very few white people then - it was before democracy, before 1999 when it transitioned to democracy - and every day I had to go back and forth to a Nigerian company. And that itself was a master challenge. So, I would just say that it's very, there's no better way, in my opinion, to learn places and learn the problems of development and learn the problems of people in these countries than being actually among them and working in them and facing the challenges people face. So, for me this was a great education actually, but I didn't think of it in the same way as I might in retrospect, and nobody, very few people ever asked me that question.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: I have another question for you about this. What was the biggest difference that you saw from how you grew up to how those places were like?
SETH KAPLAN: That's a very good question. I mean, I would say what attracted me to fragile states, I mean, I chose it because intellectually I thought I had something to add, but it was also a personal choice. I found the people in these places consistently much warmer than people in my own country and in the West. So, one of the reasons why I mentioned I like traveling to non-Western countries, is that people treated me with a certain amount of warmth and welcomeness that I never found at home. And to some extent I appreciated that. I felt more comfortable in that. I felt it was closer to my own maybe personal culture than my country's culture. And so, it was very attractive. So, clearly the biggest difference on a personal level was this warmth and hospitality and just the way people treated the depth of the relationships. If you look at my books, you'll see that I focus very much on the role of relationships and social cohesion in determining how successful society is. I mean, some of that is that I went from Nigeria to Japan, the least, the least cohesive to the most cohesive country, more or less that you can find. And so, you can clearly see the difference, but you can also see it that because of this personal feeling, I became very tuned in to the dynamics among different people in society, eventually different groups. So, just to go back to that, the warmth of these people and the relationships that tuned me into them to this, the way people treated being so different that got me really interested in these other issues and sort of helped me set a trajectory towards focusing on fragile states and also help set me in a trajectory of focusing on the relational aspects of their challenges.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, you said you, you got interested in fragile states and we've already used the word fragile several times in this conversation. We always like to know how do you see fragility? How would you define it? What is fragility to you?
SETH KAPLAN: I would say that my, I would disagree with how most people see fragility. Most people look at fragility in a technical manner. They're trying to define a problem, a set of problems. They're trying to find indicators to indicate a certain level of fragility for me that's going backwards. It's trying to look it's like if you're looking for, if you're trying to prevent violence, you're not looking for violence, you're looking for a place that has, it's like Syria. Syria was a chapter in my first book on fragile states, and I said, Syria is a hugely fragile country. It was also the country with the least violence in the Middle East. It was a very peaceful country, but clearly it was very fragile to me. So, we have to be very careful with these definitions and looking for problems and looking for numbers.
I would define it as a group-based dynamic in terms of the relationships between different parts of a society. For society to succeed, it needs to have one of two things going for it. One, it has to have cohesion, and what I mean by cohesion is that different parts of society or the leading actors across society are able to relatively easily.
Come together, cooperate and they have a collective action capacity as a group, as a society to come together and solve problems. The other path is they get a pretty strong institutions. So, even if the different parts of society didn't want to work with each other, the institutions meant that there were clear rules of the game and that the institutions were able to enforce the rules of the game.
So, either you have the rules of the game determined by the cohesion, or you have the rules of the game determined by the institutions. When you have neither, you're a fragile state.
PAUL M. BISCA: What happens when you only have one?
SETH KAPLAN: You can have one or the other. You cannot you, if you have neither you have a problem.
I mean, you can have a cohesive country with, like, look at Somaliland, pretty cohesive, 70% one tribe, one clan ESOC, in 1991 they decided to split off, took some years to come together - they did have a leader they looked for - but by the mid 90s they were able to come together and agree upon how the country would work.
And their institutions to this day are not as important the formal institutions are not as important as the underlying social dynamic. And to a certain extent, the formal institutions are based upon the informal dynamics. So, that's the easiest way to build institutions is to build on the society. And the problem in many fragile states are the formal institutions are completely divorced from society, post-colonial or imported institutions.
They don't work because they're not embedded in society. So, you could have a place like India where you have, you have it was colonized. It is a common civilization, but to a certain extent, and this maybe is not politically correct, but there was a hundred years, and the elites were prepared to govern under the institutions that were introduced.
And there was a long, let's say 50 years or longer period of time where the institutions were adopted by the elites and they were carried forward and they don't work as well as they might work in a place where they were built on the society, but they were accepted as the rules of the game by the elites in places like Africa and the Middle East.
Col colonialism was very short, did not leave much of a legacy of institutions. And they group many different ethnic religious groups together. So, they don't have cohesion, they don't have institutions and they're, they're just fragile by, almost, by definition, by how they're organized. I mean, you can have one and that's all you need.
Zero is the real problem.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, you, you mentioned the institutions and the society and sort of, you, you looked at the, informal dynamics within the different groups in society. I'm wondering where do you include the economic environment, the political security environment, because those informal dynamics, so when there's little to go around, right, informal dynamics can actually be altered.
So, in times of plenty, you're far more likely to cooperate in times when times are, are tough. Like right now, you're far more likely to, to go into conflict and have insecurity. So, how do you include the other two areas between the institutions and the social cultural domain?
SETH KAPLAN: I mean, politics is always based upon society.
Economics to a great extent is based on society, a country without the social cohesion, and the institutions can certainly not develop economically. and it has high prone or high risk of violence. You can certainly have what Northwood Douglas North would call like a limited access order. When some elites come together and they agreed to divide rents.
You could have oil, you could certainly develop an oil industry. Think of Nigeria oil industry offshore. It can work onshore. Actually, it doesn't work very well anymore because they can't keep security. You can certainly have, so you can have commodities exports. To have economic development requires institutions, relatively robust institutions.
And those institutions depend very much on social dynamics. So, if you're a place like Botswana, pretty, pretty cohesive country. Also, the most successful country in Africa arguably, I mean, people could talk about Mauritius and other options, depends how we define. I mean, I'm talking about continental Africa.
And so why is Botswana successful? First, it was pretty cohesive when it was it's an accident of colonialism that the borders drew a pretty cohesive group. It's not completely cohesive. There are some groups that are marginalized, but it's cohesive. And then, then it was able to adopt the institutions that were formal institutions that were left.
But because they were cohesive, they're able to come to a consensus about the way forward. They're able to decide what institutions, whether it's just built on history or others, that they decide they can, they can, they can decide that those are ours. They can take ownership. The country is theirs, and they're able to build up and they're able to manage.
So, we talk about a natural resource curse. For me, it's a, I don't want to use a term, it's a lack of cohesion curse. If you're a cohesive country, you have no problems managing natural resources. If you're a country that's fragile, you have a lot of problems managing natural resources for the population.
Either a few elites benefit or it becomes a source of conflict. So, an answer to your question, I would say the risk of violence is very much a product of this underlying resilience in society. And the resilience is based upon either having a very cohesive society. Somaliland in 1991, if you look at the pictures, our gesu was bombed, the people were tremendously poor.
High stress situation that did not prevent them from coming together. Look at the East Asian countries that have thrived or succeed. They all are built on long histories, pretty cohesive institutions. Some of them are imported and with their own a lot, but the informal institutions are really, the cultural dynamics are really just built on their own histories with obviously some adaptation to modernization or other needs and they thrive.
The countries, the developing countries that have thrived the most are countries that are not fragile. You can almost divide all the developing countries on a continuum from being very fragile to being very cohesive with good institutions. And the closer you are to being very fragile, the more of a prom you have.
So, I would, I would say your security challenge and your economic challenge, and let's put aside commodities exports, I would say very much depends upon how cohesive. And what types of institutions, but again, in most cases, the countries have to start with the cohesion because they don't have institutions and they can only build institutions based upon their cohesion.
There are some exceptions.
PAUL M. BISCA: Can you talk a bit about the exceptions and what makes them special in a way?
SETH KAPLAN: I mean, the exceptions for me are, are the countries that were colonized for an exceptionally long period of time, therefore they have adopted the, I mean, think Indonesia, which the Dutch didn't do a great job building institutions, but the idea of Indonesia was, was, I mean, it’s a historical process that you have.
The idea of India, there's actually a really good book called The Idea of India. And you read the book and it talks a lot about this historical process. And yes, it's a common civilization, but there's never been a country on what is India today. There was mostly country, a country in the north or territory in the north, and the south was divided.
And the center maybe had a little bit different permutations, whether it's part of the north or not. And so, but the idea of India, what, what, what, how was the idea of India developed? I mean, you have the common civilization, so you needed that. You have the period of the British rule. You have the civil service being developed.
You have the trains being developed. You had a political system that was, was not very democratic, but it did, it did give generations of elites practice in terms of elections. I mean, it was very elite driven. I mean, the Indian Congress party. Goes back to the 19th century. It existed for half a century before independence.
And then of course, you had the leaders of this party were British trained lawyers, Nehru, Gandhi. So, and then you had, when independence came you had one leader, a unified figure that ruled for a whole generation, narrow ruled, and the congress party mostly monopolized politics for, for almost two generations.
When think about Indonesia, Indonesia didn't have great institutions didn't quite have that, but the idea of Indonesia was there. And then you had Sarno for all of his faults, was a very much a unifying figure. And Suharto for all of his faults, was a great institution builder and an economic developer.
And so, you had your cohesion, you had your institutions, and then you democratized. I don't think that's a politically correct pathway, but it does show what I would say are good examples of how you can import and adopt institutions and elites can be acculturated to them and take ownership of them.
And in both Indonesia and Indian cases, you'll see that the main co the main cases of disagreement with the idea of India, the idea of Indonesia are at, on the border areas you don't, so you have Northeast India, Northwest India being the main sources of conflict over the many decades. And in Indonesia's case, the far east and the far.
And in the center of these countries is a great, much greater because where does the idea of India and the idea of Indonesia and it's not always clear, but in the center it's very clear it's not here. And, and the colonial history, and again, I'm not, I'm not a proponent of colonialism the course, but the worst type of colonialism is come in, draw boundaries, predator, don't educate any people.
Think of the DRC or many other African countries. Very little education, very little preparation, very little investment in infrastructure and institutions. And the period of time is short. And by the way, let's bring lots of people together that have never cooperated and don't necessarily want to cooperate and put them in a country.
Well, that's not a great recipe for that country to succeed. And I think in Africa, you see, for example, the smaller countries are more likely to succeed because they can build some cohesion over time. And the larger countries are very disadvantaged. But
PAUL M. BISCA: in the examples you just gave, there was, let's say a, a very mixed legacy that had good and bad.
Yep. And then there were some leaders that, for all their faults documented and so on, they chose to build on that legacy in a way. So, this is the role of actors
SETH KAPLAN: and the leaders at independence. Countries reach forks. If you look at the Pathways for Peace report, we have this great diagram or illustration where you talk about there's the pathway and then you reach a juncture and that juncture you have to make.
And it could go, it go anywhere on a spectrum, but we give two options. So, I would say the biggest juncture for any country is that if, if it's a colonial country is the point of independence and the leader matters tremendously, the leader won't necessarily do everything. But the countries that have been most cohesive.
I mean, the legacy for me is important. But look at Africa. You have Tania, you have Senegal. Good examples of countries where you had unifying leaders that ruled for a significant period of time and did things domestically that, I mean, think of Tania Swahili. is the national language. In Indonesia, you have a form of, Malay is the national language.
So, you didn't have the language of a dominant group or one of the ethnic groups. You had a neutral language that was unifying. I mean, Senegal is francophone so I guess French acts that way, but that doesn't necessarily work in many African countries, the European language is not necessarily unifying.
But in the phrase you have a neutral language, you have a unifying leader. Steps are taken to include different actors. I think that's much harder in a place like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they're starting conditions are much more difficult. Nigeria, you might have had a leader who you didn't necessarily have that leader, but even if the leader had tried that initially in the 60s, I'm not sure you would've avoided the Biafra war.
Because the starting conditions are much more difficult. Tanzania has no ethnic group above 10%. Senegal is relatively small except for the South. That's, that's separated. Indonesian, India are huge, but again, they have a, they have a, they have a, a less negative or a more positive colonial legacy than any African or Middle Eastern country.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, just to, to, to close a bit on, on, on that, I wanted to ask you this, this follow up because what if I understood you correctly in. Countries that are trying to build institutions, but there's really no cohesive narrative that these groups having, having a really hard time to, to get along that effort, regardless of how much money you pour into it, to build the institutions eventually fails or, or reaches a really, really sort of, bad equilibrium.
Let's say. What you said then is that if you have the cohesion right, almost institutional performance matters, tends to matter less or maybe does not necessarily lead to violence.
SETH KAPLAN: I'm not saying quite that. I'm saying it's very hard to improve institutions when you're not building it upon.
Okay. Some degree of cohesion or, or at least consensus among elites that they're going to buy into those rules. I mean, think of Tunisia, which is going through a difficult time as we record this, but Indonesia, Arab Spring. Had four main groups. Those four groups, political parties, or political actors, they were meeting for many years before the transition in Paris, in Europe.
They had already come to some basic agreement. They start to negotiate. But when, when the transition started, transitions are great opportunities to understand, or I mean from intellectual, but it's transitions are, there's a vacuum. Whatever was there before disappears. So, you get to see society at its raw and its rawness.
So, to the extent that a country has cohesion, a transition will show that the actors will come together to, to solve the problem. When there's none of that, the actors will fight immediately for power. So, look at Tunisia. The main actors came together, other parts of society came together. There was an immediate.
Consensus. I mean, there's obviously parts of the country that were not part of this, but among the most important actors, immediate agreement that these are the basic rules we're going to follow to come to an agreement, they worked through a process. Again, it hasn't necessarily gone well, but there was no violence.
There was, there was, there was the rule. People came together, compare that to Syria or Libya. Libby, you also had the regime removed. And look what Libya they, they're this many years later and they can't even agree upon the rules for an election. They can't agree upon any rules. All they think of is locally.
There's cohesion because in fragile states, you have, it's not like you have no cohesion, you have pockets of cohesion, and it's hard to bring those pockets together. So, in Libya, I mean, Syria, the government never left. But even the opposition, you see completely fragmented. Levant very famous for being very fractious.
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq very fractious. And the opposition doesn't agree on anything, never mind with the with the awes and the ruling, the ruling the regime, Libya, the regime is removed, if it was, and you just contrast Libya with Tunisia, you immediately see the level of cohesion at a national level in this country.
And so, you can't build institutions in that context. You have a few legacy institutions like the oil company, the Central Bank. They work, but they're divorced from society and there's some conflict over their resources constantly. But you can't even have a single government in this country. And I'm surprised there's not more than two governments.
I mean, there's two governments because they, they're in opposition. But if, if the West was one government, it would probably be, there would be divisions within the West. The east is held together by, by force, more or less. And the south is not as powerful and of an actor. It's somewhat but don't, don't think the West is unified because they have one government and don't think the east is unified because it has one government.
It's complicated.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, when you're talking about this, it makes me think that the stability in these places is pretty much a stable, bad equilibrium. How do we break that? When you have lack of cohesiveness, or you have the way you said it pockets of cohesiveness. Those pockets of cohesiveness are the outcome of historical events, influences, and each one at each step in that their development, there were winners and losers. And it seems like you get - there's in a way a stable, bad equilibrium of permanent losers and permanent winners and breaking that stable, bad equilibrium seems very hard if you're trying to build the kind of institutions because the perpetual winners are not going to keep winning. So, what do you think about that? How, how can we get out of those bad equilibria?
SETH KAPLAN: Yeah. So, I would say, I mean, equilibrium is a, is very well said. It's, well, you might call a vicious cycle that that repeats itself. So, the question is how do you jump out of that? Well, there's, there's many things you can do, and I think this is I don't want to be too abstract theoretical because that's what we're, that's what we try to do.
We try to, but, but I can give you a few. One is decentralization. You can decentralize around the cohesion and empower the bottom instead of empowering the top. In Libya, I work on Libya and for the Institute for Integrated Transitions. And our theory of change, or what we try to do is we believe that the country can only succeed by getting away from a focus on the center.
The center is a zero-sum game for control and for resources, as opposed to the bottom. First of all, the bottom has to be more practical. The bottom is building a bottom cohesion. I mean, Libya is fascinating that you have a country in a state of civil war, and for the most part, you don't have any violence.
You have, you have incidences or a series of violence. I mean, Hef tried to invade the West, and you had certainly disagreements between different groups locally and but you, you can have months with no violence and it's a country in the state of civil war. So, why is that? Because locally there's a pretty good amount of cohesion.
So, you could decentralize. That's one thing. Another thing you could try and do is bring the top leaders together and establish something like a limited access order or political settlement that would come to some agreement. And, and on, on, on how, what would be some very basic rules or very basic distribution of resources.
I mean, you have that, I mean, Nigeria for all of its flaws has been on the national level pretty peaceful. I mean, it has been completely peaceful. I mean, it had COOs, but it didn't have large scale violence in over 50 years. It has a lot of low level. It has
PAUL M. BISCA: Boko Haram, I mean, 40,000
SETH KAPLAN: people. It has a lot of, it has a lot of low level violence all over the country.
Boko is the most obvious, but you have violence, many, many parts of Nigeria and increasing violence, but on the national level, you don't have a fight between the major ethnic groups because they came to some political agreement and they adopted a more decentralized constitution. So, that solved the problem of the major ethnic groups.
What it didn't solve was the problem of the secondary ethnic groups and the fact that the state simply doesn't work in many, many places and the proliferation of weapons and technology and so you have violence, bok makes the news, but Buram isn't necessarily the greatest source of I mean the, I work in the middle belt in Nigeria and you have a lot of low level violence and the numbers may add up to more people being killed than you have in the Northeast, but it doesn't make the newspaper, it's not an Islamist terrorist group that's doing the violence.
And so, but, but the point is, Nigeria shows that you could have a political agreement of some sort, and ideally the political agreement would be a develop, pro-development political agreement. And not just that we take bags of cash home with us. And we don't fight. And you need to do more than that.
You want to have a political agreement. That, and, but I would say a third way that's very, really tried that I'm also trying in Libya is you have an external anchor. An external anchor is for me the best example is in Guatemala, you had an anti-impunity external anchor worked for, I don't know, about 15 years.
The elites eventually kicked it out because the elites didn't want it in Guatemala. But from 15 years you had a UN sponsored I believe from the Secretary General's office, a UN sponsored externally anchored institution. That was basically going after people that could not be, could not be handled by the domestic judicial system.
They didn't prosecute, but they would work with the courts. They would dig up the evidence. They did an incredibly good job, had presidents put behind bars and basically dun did what the domestic institutions were not able to do. And, and you'd be surprised how many countries are like Guatemala, that corruption is throughout the institutions.
The institutions are run by cliques or gangs. I think this is much more common than we want to discuss. And without an external anchor, it's very hard to break that cycle. So, if you're, if you're in a place like Libya, if you could decentralize and you had an external anchor that would go after anti impunity and that would also arbitrate differences between these different parts of the country, so as some sort of federal or confed system.
And then have a mechanism that would arbitrate disagreements that the government institutions can't do. That type of combination for me it’s very hard to do because it's not what, it's not on the agenda. These things are not, are not what most international actors try to do. They try to solve other types of problems, but foundationally, to get at a fragility, you must do something at the relational or institutional level that breaks the, so all these things I've talked about is either leverage the cohesion or find mechanisms to arbitrate between different groups or finds ways to anchor institutions.
And we could come up with other, other, other mechanisms. But fundamentally you have to work with one of those two things, and you have to find creative solutions that will work. And you have to be very clear minded. And I don't think technical training, I don't think missions to talk to government officials or sending people.
Or money clearly you need money for some things, but I don't think, I don't think those you have to do a change in the relationships or the institutions at some foundational level. But
PAUL M. BISCA: I just want to touch on something you've said quickly because when you are describing the situation in Libya, but also in Nigeria, you were at the same time making the case for decentralization, while acknowledging there's fairly high levels of violence and corruption going on.
Yes. But not at a level that the country implodes. And what this would mean would be for, let's say, international actors. I mean, essentially, if I understood you correctly, what you're saying is, you'll not have the perfection. You'll have a situation that is kind of an un, you know, there's still many problems going around, but you, if you're going to strengthen the relation, the relational side of it you must accept the kind of situation whereby there will be corruption, there will be violence.
Not everything will work out right, but the country will not implode if there is that kind of a national dialogue or, or agreement on what matters most. And let's say the overall direction of the country. So, essentially, you would go to an international organization who's there to help and say you're going to give us, you're going to support us, you're going to give us money, there's going to be corruption, violence, and so on.
And that's a very hard sell to make.
SETH KAPLAN: I think you're on, I first of all, let's go to Libya. There's massive corruption, there's periodic violence. The state doesn't work. And you're telling me that the answer is to keep working with the sa a political settlement nationally. I mean, they've been trying that for 10 years, doesn't work very well.
So, I'm telling you that, that won't work for another 10 years. And I'm not telling you I have a magic bullet. I'm just telling you your theory of change doesn't make any sense. Given, given, given the situation in the country and every country's different. What what's needed in Nigeria is not going to work in Libya and so on and so forth.
And not every country you can decentralize, sometimes decentralization. The, you don't have pockets of cohesion to leverage. Nigeria doesn't have great local pockets of cohesion. It has in some parts of the country, but at least you have sharing of resources to some extent, which diffuses a certain type of tension.
It over 50 years, it's created different types of tension. But in a place like Libya, you have, you have, you basically have no state working outside of you have some institutions, but most of the country, there's no, the state doesn't work. People can't even agree on a government. So, I'm not arguing, I'm arguing that, yeah, we still need elections, but we need elections that are designed more bottom up.
We still need the state, and we still need to improve those national institutions, but we have got to focus much more on the local. We have got to move more resources to the local, to where the people are. I would say my approach is the things we are trying to do are the same, but the way we're trying to do it is differently.
If you're trying to climb a mountain, you don't go where the rocks are worse. Do you, you try to go where you might be able to work with the flow. It's like about, or if I'm trying to go down a river, I'll, I'll try to go with the waves, go with the strengths of the society, the assets, I won't go against the waves or I won't go where the worst conditions are.
So, I would still say we need to build the state, we need to have elections we need to fight corruption. All those things exist now, and they will exist in the foreseeable future. But if we could leverage some strengths in society, things would work, things might work better, or the tension over the national might be reduced, so there might be an easier way to get to an agreement.
Or so I don't think my approach, the goals or the tools are not different. It's the me it's the way I look about how things might be done in terms of where I would put the emphasis in society, because I, and then, and then what types of people I would focus on working with to move things forward.
I would certainly not, not want any violence. I think it's hard to avoid corruption and if you understand limited access order thinking, which I'm a big fan of you, the corruption to some degree. It's a payoff to have no violence. And I'm not, and the World Bank is not going to go around to pay off people that have no violence.
But it's hard to think, hard for me to think of any country including Western countries that developed without some periods of violence. And a lot of corruption and incrementally building institutions very much from their own history. So, to some extent, we have to reproduce this process in countries.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, this approach is definitely different than that of the World Bank. I
SETH KAPLAN: believe so.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, actually I'm curious you, you work with an institution that you've already mentioned, I F I T, and I'd love for you to describe their approach and why is this approach needed? And talk a little bit more about how they approach these issues and why they get results and where, if you also could speak to where did they fail?
SETH KAPLAN: Okay. So, I would say that I mean I’m very fortunate because if it is very entrepreneurial, you might call us peace entrepreneurs and I would say that one of the big challenges for international actors like the bank the un bilateral donors, other international actors, especially these more official versus the non-profits, the NGOs, is they're very state centric and they're very locked into a relatively narrow set of the tools in their toolkit is relatively narrow.
And, and if I look at countries around the world, the countries that have done best, you know, the World Bank and international donors have performed miracles in healthcare. Think about the healthcare improvements in the last 50 years. They perform miracles. Education is dramatically improved. Not as much as healthcare, but so individuals have benefited a lot from international donors where donors have failed.
Is they have failed to deal with the politics of fragile states. Countries that are relatively cohesive, cohesive or are relatively good institutions. Think of China, think of Turkey. They're able to take advantage of these international mechanisms because they're already, they have enough strength internally.
They have what I would call, you might call collective action capacity to go and take ownership and lead the process. It's the countries that are fragmented, stuck in what you say, a, a bad equilibrium, a vicious cycle. They don't have it. And the tools that these international actors are using, in my opinion, are not, are not, are not sufficient to deal with the challenges.
They need to think out of their toolbox, out of their box and be creative. So, the advantage of, if it is that we're able to do that and we emphasize creative thinking, new ideas. And, and so what is our method? Our method is, of course, we're bringing the comparative experience across countries to the table, but we very much believe in bringing together local leaders.
So, in all of our main engagement countries, we do other things. We were involved in the mince process, for example, in Ukraine, but we didn't do that, wasn't one of our long-term engagement countries and our long-term engagement countries. We build brain trust. We have a very special method of building brain trust.
We look for leaders from different parts of society, different sectors at a certainly certain high level, and we bring them together and we convene them, and we form a cohesive group. Again, this, this idea, food is very important. For example, we meet over food, we have retreats. People get to know each other.
They, they literally are spending years of their lives in this group. and we, we want to use the group or help the group develop creative solutions that are fit to context. Again, every place is different. The comparative knowledge is important. The problems are social, social, political, institutional. You need very deep context knowledge to address them.
We form a brain trust. We facilitate the brain trust. Our staff supports the brain trust. We try to come up with creative solutions. So, what I do in Nigeria and what I do in Libya and what we as an organization do, in about a dozen countries, I think we're actually 11, not a dozen, 11 countries are all based upon some big picture idea that comes from some comparative knowledge.
And then the brain trust. Takes it, shapes it, bends it, whatever. And all the details are completely from the brain trust With our job as facilitation and their value add is that they're, again, looking at the prom inside out, not outside in. And the value add is that it's the synthesis of comparative and context, and it's the value add, it's led by people.
And then once you develop ideas or once you have things that you want to initiate, we have these networks, we have staff. We're deeply into the social and political systems. And a place like Columbia where we have, we have an office in Columbia, and we've been engaged since one of my colleagues was in Havana at the Peace Talks representing the Columbian government.
One of the nine people on the Columbian side. And then we, we basically took the Peace Commission and formed the Brain Trust around the Peace Commission. And some of the people from our office come from the Peace Commission. We are, we have a unique position in this country as they were able to engage with everybody at a very high level.
And we have this deep, deep knowledge. And the Venezuela, it's the one organization that brings all these different opposition actors together and are able to engage all parts of society and then you go and so on and so forth. Not every country where we have the same reach, you go to a place like Mexico, 120, whatever, million people, we don't have that types of historical entry point we had in Columbia and in Venezuela.
So, you have to look for a niche, you have to look for some angle. But I think the key thing is our approach is completely different than other international actors. So, you can see from that that we're coming up with very custom fit solutions and that we're able through our, our convening, our influence networks, our relationships with everyone from the media to keep political actors to have influence.
And I'll, I can just give you I believe your questions were, so that's our method and that's where the method is very different. And I think you can see why that would have tremendous value add when it's done right. And again, we're all in, we're all in difficult countries. We do not go to easy countries.
We're not here to handle easy places. Nigeria, Libya, I mentioned Latin America. We're in Zimbabwe. We work in Syria, actually. More on, we're focused on foreign aid. So, you can see we're in Sudan. So, the point is, so I'll just give you some examples of I can give you examples from my, from example in Nigeria.
I've mentioned a little bit of a Libya stuff before. For me personally, Nigeria, so I believe in Nigeria you have the federal government, and you have a lot of international actors are working where there's violence. They work at the community level in mediation or, or they work at the policy level, typically, sometimes at the state, sometime nationally, but they basically work at the policy or the community mediation level.
Or if you're the bank, you're thinking, what projects can I fund that might reduce violence? We don't work at any of those levels. And, and then the community level is very short term, and the policy is, it could be medium long term, but again, it’s very abstract. What do we do that's different?
Well, well first. We see the sweet spot as being the midterm. We see the sweet spot as being at the state level. We see the sweet spot as bringing all the leaders together from the governor to traditional rulers, to religious figures, to other key people. Could be sometimes people from companies or nonprofits.
We bring them together at the state level. We convene them. We do very, very detailed research in a way that nobody else does. I mean, you look at all the material that's being published. We did we chose one state in our region. We're in a region of Eastern Middle Belt, about five states, and we went very, very deep, very comprehensive.
and we're looking at the systems. We're looking at the systems of institutions, formal, informal, we're looking at the key actors. I mean, all of this makes sense. This is stuff that we, we actually study that we should do it this way, but I could, I can find mostly everybody else thinks policy. So, by the combination of this deep research and combining of this convening and engagement with all the key actors, I'm trying to form cohesive cohesion and collective action at the state level that nobody else is working on.
And I'm trying to get to the nuts and bolts of how the actual, particularly the grievance management system, because a lot of conflict in Africa, Nigeria as well. But Africa as a whole is over land. It's over resources, growing populations and groups coming up against each other and fights over land and resources.
So, if I can reform the grievance management system, which is basically creating a system for traditional leaders to play a more important role, playing a, doing something that reforms the land administration, doing something that helps the judicial system be more useful, doing something to make the governor and their commissions of inquiry and different tools they use to settle conflict more useful.
I look at, we basically have four different areas that we're looking at the grievance management system at a state level, and then we want to use that model and reproduce it. So, you can see that our entry point is different. Our, our focus on engaging with actress is different. Our focus on building cohesion, our focus on the institutional system.
All this stuff is very different. Too much international work is focused on policy as if we get the policy right. Something actually might change, doesn't actually change a lot in these countries. It's not a problem of policy. Yes, you have bad policies, but we're actually working on the relationships and the institutions and an entry point where I can make a difference.
That's basically our whole theory of change there. And I can give you in Columbia because we're so engaged in this country, for example, we literally have initiatives to bring Congress. We're right about polarization in Columbia has become a focus of ours. So, I can give you two examples of we do for polarization.
For example, we have an initiative which I’m indirectly involved because I asked to run a group focused on narrative and conflict or narrative and polarization. So, because there's polarization around narrative is a huge issue. There's an election now, but more broadly, We have an initiative to do with all the young Congress people across political parties, to work with them, to try to engage them with a narrative lens to re, to basically create relationships, create a different framing of problems.
We have, Lilly have an initiative with the media such that one of the debates among the presidential candidates, one of the questions that was asked of the presidential candidates was based upon if its work, if its name was used, about how, how do you see, can you name a strength in your opponents to try to change the discussion about negative polarization?
Because if you want to address polarization, we have a whole set of tools. One of them. Making or encouraging different polarized actors to talk about strengths in others. That's like one of the things that could be done. Another example, Columbia. We have a, we actually have two brain trusts in Columbia. One of them is for the areas that were controlled by the FARC because one of the problems in a place like Columbia, as in a problem in lots and lots of fragile states is the state doesn't exist or doesn't extend across the territory.
You have the state works relatively well in the capitol or a few cities and the rest of the country, the state doesn't work very well. That's actually one of the huge problems around the world that never receives any attention. About one third of Africa has no, no state, it has other forms of public authority, but the state does not reach about one third of Africa according to the information that I use.
I even use this one political risk class and so and so the problem in Columbia, we have a brain trust to think about how do we extend the state. It's got other issues, but one of the issues is how do we extend the state so it's more effective, it offers more services, it offers more rule of law across the territory of Columbia.
So, these are very practical things that we try to do. In terms of your question about where does this not work, I would say it's harder to there's great challenges. We're in a number of countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, in which I don't think I could say what we're doing is not working, but you're, you're, it's like a pre-transition.
And so I would say it's great, great challenge to try to make a transition happen. I mean, it's Zimbabwe has been attempting transitions for, I don't know, 30 or 40 years. And who are we to help a transition happen in this country? I would say these are very difficult. I mean, we do not take on easy problems.
And so, in these cases, we could be trying to reduce polarization. We are trying to come up with creative things. If there's a, there's a piece negotiation involving Venezuela. I mean our, our, our ideas will always be at the table because we're the one place that's in the country with people in the country.
And it would be very hard to come up with creative solutions and even the intelligence of what goes on in Venezuela, I mean the US removed its embassy, they want to know what's going on in the ground, they need to consult with us and so on and so forth. So, I would just say that I would say the hard thing is change is very hard in these countries.
We're not very large. Scaling up things are hard. Trying to make a transition happen if you're in a pre-transition situation is hard, it's easier if you are post-transition and there's problems. It's easier when you're working at a certain scale where you can get, you can reach I mean Mexico, 120 million people, that's, that's, that's large for us.
That, that's that, that's I mean there's things that we can do, but hard to affect the whole system of Mexico.
PAUL M. BISCA: There's something I was thinking when you were talking first, that I would not wholly agree with you, that these institutions, international organizations, misunderstand the social dynamics or focus too much on policy.
I think their challenge is exactly how to bring that understanding. into and make it work within the range of instruments which they have. And often this is where things get very, very
SETH KAPLAN: difficult. I don't think they lack understanding. I mean, Alexander Mark at the bank, he was, he knows everything I know.
Nobody knows more than him. And, and the thing is, their tools, they don't have the right set of tools. Could they expand their tools? Their man, the mandate of the bank limits the kind of tools it can use. Sure. But
PAUL M. BISCA: the. The thing I wanted to ask though, which, which is kind of trying to, to fill that gap. You talk on in one of your reports about inclusiveness as a disposition because many, many people from within that, that world try to think of a, sort of a concept that is clearly defined that it's easy to work with.
That is sometimes quite a linear theory of change behind it. And when you defined inclusiveness as a disposition, it brings together things like ethics, like psychology and so on. Yeah. And, and that also links a bit to something we spoke earlier about, which is the fact that when you had transitions, when you had these structural legacies, it was actually leaders that were actors that kind of, sort of made the pivot in a way.
It was those actors that had that inclusive disposition to some extent. Yeah. That, that made that change. So, how would you explain that, that idea of an inclusive disposition and how would you to use a, to use a jargon piece that is always very popular in these places. How would you operationalize
SETH KAPLAN: it?
Thank you. Well, I, again, it's what we mean by that again, it's very hard to be perfect in terms of doing that. I mean, societies are ever more diverse and through technology. Many more actors are empowered, and it makes it harder and harder to some extent. The fragile states have a greater and greater difficulty compared to before because the nine state actors are stronger and the states are not stronger.
So, the power, the balance of power between the two have are, are working and are working against the states' becoming, be overcoming their challenges, becoming more effective. But to me, to an ex an inclusive having a disposition of inclusiveness means that every, I mean, the absolute form is every speech someone makes, every policy, someone adopts the daily calendar in terms of, especially if you're a political leader, the daily calendar in terms of what you do, where you go, who you talk to.
Needs to be seen as including different parts of a society. Your cabinet, your cabinet is one of the clearest signs that you're inclusive. I'm in the United States, and it's a question I often ask, why does a democratic person who wins the presidency, why doesn't he bring in several Republicans into his cabinet or vice versa?
I mean, it just seems simple. If you wanted to unite the country, you're not going to talk about it. It's the Lincoln model. Two things to set an example that you're doing it and that you, and also the policies that you will adopt would be, would be not always that your base may like. And there are presidents like that.
There are people who've been more like that than others. We're not in an age where that's common and there's a lot of pressure. And the way politics works is that you don't get elected if you're, if you give signs that you want to do that. But ideally, if you're going to do this, everything you need to, you need to push back.
You need to lead by not following your supporters. You need to lead by, by calling out what is needed. And you need to set that example. And there's certainly many examples of people who have done this throughout the ages at, I'm not talking about a magic formula, but it, but it basically means going against the grain.
In some cases, you may not be strong enough to do it. If you're strong enough, you're able to overcome. If you're not strong enough and you act like this, you may be removed because you're, you're, it's long enough in what sense? So, that's, that’s very, it’s a difficult, it's a difficult challenge.
But I would say it involves something that you have to, you have to have that lens throughout everything you do every day.
PAUL M. BISCA: When you meant strong enough. In what sense? In terms of your influence, your personality,
SETH KAPLAN: politically strong. If you're again, if the independence leaders were uniquely strong because they, they had, I mean, they often had charisma, but they also had, they had the reputation of leading the opposition for decades that they could do that.
Think of Naru. I mean, I can't say Naru was perfect. We can always talk about his economic policies and what have you, but he was he made, he made the rules of the game politically decentralization. India can, is from the beginning, a pretty decentralized state. I mean, there, there are things that he did that were not inclusive.
He, the princely states, he says the princely slates are going to be incorporated into India. So, it's a question of what we mean by inclusion. But the fact is he led an idea of India that was an idea of India for everybody, ethnic, religious cast, and Sukarno, who in many ways was awful economic manager.
He had his five big principles. And he was a nationalist. I mean, we're talking about, talking about a nationalism, a positive form of nationalism that brings people together a critical juncture. So, they, they're willing to give up things for the state, the nation, and it works if the nation is seen as being inclusive and involving everybody.
And the leaders need to act that way. Of course, if a leader is not powerful, if Assad had said in, I mean, Assad has done some awful things, should certainly be tried. I mean, how do we have an ICC and someone like Assad has not been tried? Is baffles the mind to some extent. But if he had tried, and I talk about this in one of my classes, if he had tried to compromise and share power, would he have survived as a leader?
I don't know. Because there might have been forces in his, in the government that saw that as a threat to their positions in the system. And they might have said it's better to replace him. So, we, we don't know what goes on. It's like a black box. But I certainly would say that to the extent that you have that authority, the more you're able to do everything.
And this is everything from your cabinet, which is one of the most clearly the clearest ways to send science from your cabinet to your policies, to what you emphasize to, to the fact that you reach out to people across the political spectrum. and you chart a path that is seen as neutral. It's what brings people together.
And, and you don't have to be at the top of society to do that. You can do that in any institution. It takes a certain amount of bravery. I don't think we talk about bravery a lot in this field, but to be a good leader in a difficult, in any society, but especially a difficult society with competing factions and the potential for violence, it takes a lot of bravery to sometimes do what's necessary.
And that's what we're calling, that's what we would call for, is bravery. And I think the job of policy makers and multilateral institutions is what do we do to create the conditions to make that bravery more likely to happen? Does that mean that we think about certain reforms or certain sequence center reforms, or does that something about the institutional design that we need to work on?
or does that mean that we need to we need to focus on different priorities in terms of what we're doing. I mean, every context is different, but there's certainly, we need to think about how do we encourage that behavior and not discourage it or give incentives. I think too often their incentives to not be brave.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, you talked about the inclusiveness, sort of at the leadership level, and as I was reading your 2015 IFIT report about the transitions framework, you have that broader understanding of inclusiveness that also mentions the public. And the population having a common national identity and accepting of differences.
Can you, you just talked about courage right now and that courage it's hard to be found if you feel the population is incredibly divided and you're going to lose elections. You just mentioned Assad how he might have not survived if he were to strike any deals and take a different position than, and the very unfortunate one that he took.
So, how do we create that common national identity or common identity, whatever, broader group that supersedes the fractured society?
SETH KAPLAN: I mean, this is a, this is a, I mean, obviously leadership matters, but it's every case is different, and I don't want to give you one recipe, but it's about bringing together it's about media on one level.
It really helpful if the media is not polarizing, if there's some common media, common activities, whether it's sports, whether it's national celebrations things that people can do together, national service, which is exist in some countries to the extent that allows people to live in different parts of a country.
Things that bring future leaders together. I mean, Ghana, I don't know the situation now, but it used to have it was very well known and had like a high school that would be elites from all over the country would come together and go to that high school and they would spend many years together.
And they would get, they would get the idea of Ghana would be certainly they would acculturate to the idea of Ghana and then they would go off and play prominent roles throughout society as they got older. So, I think you have to think about all these things. Universities, there's very little, surprisingly little investment among international actors and universities.
Universities that would bring l future leaders together and give them a national perspective, a national identity. Very important, I mean, these are things that will take time. So, I will talk about the media. I'll talk about natural NA national events, natural national rituals. Again, it's the behavior of leaders.
If a leader acts unifying, people will feel that this is their country. If a leader acts Divis, it becomes much harder, especially if you're starting already with a fractured society. But there's certainly activities, there's certainly educational things we can do. There's certainly programs that allow people to go around different parts of a country and leaders, I mentioned youth, but you also can have programs that bring leaders from a society together.
Nigeria, I'm not sure how effective they are, but they have, they have they have platforms to bring religious leaders together and traditional leaders together. I mean, things like that are helpful. And the big question is, can you, can you create enough relationships? Can you, you want to create what we might call bridging ties.
Bridging institutions, bridging ties, as well as this overarching narrative identity, some combination. Again, the social being, the identity and the relationships and the narrative, and then some sort of institutions that bring people together, that combination. And you have to assume it’s a, it's a generational process and needs to be sustained.
And I don't think it ever ends. I mean, developed countries have not focused on their social cohesion in recent decades, but it's a process that never ends. If you don't constantly invest in your cohesion and the belief that everyone is in this together, and that we have to work together to solve problems, you get more polarization, you get more conflict, non-violent conflict.
than you might have otherwise. And I think we do see that in many developed countries in recent years.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, I actually we've been talking for a long time, so I actually want to bring us to a topic that is on everybody's mind right now. Ukraine. Ukraine, Ukraine. But not only, so, just a common first.
It's interesting how Ukraine could have been in that category of lack of social cohesion, even just 10 years ago. And if you're looking right now at the society, both at the leadership level and at the people level, they are truly an example to the rest of the world. So, My question was going to be about Ukraine only, but then I've started thinking that there's two other places, one you've already mentioned, that one you haven't that maybe we can compare as we're thinking about transitions out of the state they're in right now, and I'm thinking here, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Syria, how should we think those are?
three places pretty close together if you're thinking of the map of the world. But if I think about them, could not be more different. And I'd love to hear what you think about. So, how should we, how should we think and what should we think about their transition out of the current state they're in it whether war, conflict and for Ukraine, especially since it was one of your case studies in your 2017 report. So, can you walk us in a theoretical scenario, how should we look at those transitions for Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, and what sort of pathways do you think they're going to take?
SETH KAPLAN: Okay. Well, if, if you've been in a car and you tried to drive from Ukraine to Afghanistan, it doesn't look very close actually to be given I've been on some of those roads.
But I know if we look globally, Ukraine is first, Ukraine has historically had a fracture between the Ukrainian and Russian speakers between the east and the West. And I think the last 31 years has, has I mean the Russian invasions help but it certainly has developed a strong national identity and cohesion that I'm not sure it had three decades ago.
And the fact is there are some people in Ukraine that are sympathetic to Russia. But that percentage has certainly gone down with every source of violence and what have you. And so, I don't think it's a hundred percent cohesive, but it's incredible how much more cohesive. it is than it was 20, 30 years ago.
The change is dramatic, but I also think it's important to understand that the difference in the conflict in Ukraine from another two is there's an external threat. And an external threat is among the best ways to build cohesion internally. It doesn't work every time. The country could divide, some could side with.
I think in Lebanon's case when, when the Syrian army is involved, parts of the Lebanese society are not unhappy with that, and parts of it are very unhappy with it. So, any type of external intervention divides society in the Ukraine case external, external threat has unified the country. So, I would say yeah, at the same time you see the institutions in Ukraine have been consistently not good reforms, have consistently failed.
Oligarchs control disproportionate amount of the country. Corruption is not good. If you compare the data on income per capita, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Poland has done exceptionally well. It's arguably the, of the Eastern European countries or central European countries as they may be today, including Romania.
Again, what is East and what is Central as depends on your perspective. I mean, you could argue that Poland has done the best, 40 million people, probably more, a bit more than that now, 40 some million people, and it might be, might be closer to 50 and 40 now. And it has had wave after wave of reform, major institutional changes.
It's been criticized for some of the reforms to the judicial system, but in general, Poland has been very successful and after a dip with the Big Bang in the early 90s, it's been actually the most successful economy in it's had a lower base in Europe, I think. I think it's, I don't know if it had a recession during the pandemic, but it did not have a recession for 30 years.
Even in the financial crisis, Russia, after the bad nineties, after Putin kept the power, they had about, I don't know, at least till 2014, they did very well. Income surpassed the, so the point of, I'm saying this, the Ukraine's income level is significantly lower than it was in the late eighties. So, the country has failed economically in the last 30 years, and institutions don't work well.
I think this cohesion is, is wonderful and could lead to significant reforms that would make things better. I’m modestly skeptical because of this decades-long legacy. They're not fragile internally because they're so cohesive. Are they institutionally strong enough to translate that cohesion into robust, broad-based economic growth?
It's to be seen in terms of the future. It's not easy to know the outcome of this war. It's not easy to know. Will Ukraine be able to push back? Will it be forced to compromise? I think compromise would not be in Ukraine's favor or in the in the best interest of the international community or the or anybody in the world actually, unless you're unless you're, unless you're in the similar position to Russia and you're looking to expand through your military force.
But it's not clear they have the strength to push them back. I do think that they will, there'll be much greater determination to reform economically. And, and the Europe. Europe will be much more pressured to provide stronger link links and if not membership in the EU, which doesn't seem likely, but much more weapons and much more maybe e the EU could become a stronger external anchor.
And this is something I've criticized for many years. The EU does not have a good, has not had a good enough policy for Ukraine. If you can't be a member, well come up with something good enough for Ukraine. And they haven't done that. They haven't, they, Ukraine needs an external anchor of some sort and a more determined effort at policy reform and only the EU can help with that.
And this is the time for the EU to step up. And if it does step up, I think there's much more opportunity in Ukraine. Wherever the boundary is. I'm hoping the boundary is more like it was a few months ago. Afghanistan and Syria. Syria looks like a, a stalemate at this point. The side regime has won the war, but not rec conquered all the territory.
I mean, I have to say I mean, Syria, very difficult. There's still millions of people across the borders or elsewhere. Large parts of the country is not reconstructed. There's some pockets that like the Curtis Park in the Northeast they're not quite in the control of in the Northwest's areas.
I don't, I would be very good if they could have some decentralized solution, but of course, I don't think a side would accept that. The Iranian influence is now very strong in Syria. It looks like, looks like a frozen conflict with not a lot of optimism. And in that situation, the best you could hope for is how do we improve lives?
How do we take the pockets that are outside the government control and give them a, some dynamism? How do we improve some the lives of people in the s Syrian government control with treading very carefully given the government. I don't think you can have high expectations. But you always want to improve lives.
You want to try where you can to improve the society institutions. And how much do you work with the government on education and healthcare? Big question, which I don't have an answer for. Those are hard questions. A lot of people depend upon those. And if you go to Damascus now, and I have been in most of Syria, if you go to Damascus now, there are places that are, that are in very bad condition.
But throughout most of the world, Damascus has been very diverse as opposed to the opposition areas are not very diverse anymore. And that you have all ethnic, religious groups represented in Damascus and large parts of the city are not terribly affected in terms of the buildings. Of course, you have, you have guns and sometimes other things that fell, but the city is intact And they're mil there.
I don't know, I don't know the numbers, but there's well over 10 million people under the government control. What do you do with those people? How do you improve their lives? These are very hard circumstances. I can tell you that if itd, we have asteria resource group, a brain trust, and they think very hard of.
About that, and I would, I would refer anybody to that work on the IFD website. And they've, and they've spent years asking these questions. Afghanistan, I wanted to, I wanted to be optimistic after the fall of Kabul that there might be some avenue to work with the Taliban. I know the head of the largest Afghanistan think tank and she's out of the country and her whole think tank more or less, everyone is in Afghanistan, and they cannot easily leave the country.
There's prominent woman and what have you working for them and how do they continue their work? Spend some time talking about that. I would've liked to have, think there would've been room for compromise. Over some key issues like the role of women in society and other basic things that there might be some room for agreement.
There doesn't appear to be a lot of that. How sustainable, stable is the government, I don't think we know. In the short term, again, you have great humanitarian needs. How do you, how do you, how do you meet those needs? And not, and not, and not strengthen the Taliban Very hard questions. I mean, here you have, again, in these deeply authoritarian countries.
There's, there's this, I mean, you have this in many places actually. I mean, with different Venezuela, there's some scope for civil society. The opposition still exists in Caracas and can more or less function. They can't organize large scale, but they have protests and things like that. And there's room for civil society within limits.
Zimbabwe, the limits are narrower, and the use of violence is greater. You go to Syria, you go to Afghanistan, that scope is much narrower. So, there's this broad question that international actors have to face is how do we help people in these places? And again, there's a spectrum where you, for me, you always have to try to empower different parts of society.
You have to give voice to different parts of society, and you have to reach them. I would not be terribly optimistic about Syria and Afghanistan. But it doesn't mean that, that there shouldn't be efforts to try to reach the people and try to always look for avenues and look for parts of governments.
I remember co governments and leaderships are not monolithic. Look for parts of governments, parts of countries where there'll be more room. and increase your engagement and try to increase the carrots that you can provide and sometimes sticks to try to provide more space and more opportunity to deliver aid.
And I would still like to think that there's some practical figures in the Taliban that might over time have influence, but in the short term it doesn't look very good. I'm not sure I've answered those questions, but in this business, you have to be a realist and not be an optimist always.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, in that same spirit I believe in one of your earlier books, you, you raised a question about fragile states Must we live with them. And so, what, what was your answer when you first thought about it and how does, you know, what is the kind of pragmatic optimism that you would espouse now, given what you've just said about those four countries?
SETH KAPLAN: I would say that, I mean, the first thing I understand is I consistently find that the people in these countries are wonderful. I mean, I started, we started the conversation with the, that the reason why I did this more than anything else, there was intellectual reasons, was I simply felt, I mean, the people are warm, the people are generous.
The people are in some ways kinder than I hate to say kinder than wealthy people. I mean, wealthy people are, are very interest driven, career driven. They don't have much time. They're very professional and that's one reason why their countries are wealthier. And they're cold. That's why their governments work better.
They're calculating, they're cold. I mean, you can just look at Europe, the I can't find a country with warmer people than Italy, and you can't find many governments that, that work worse in Europe than Italy. So, there's some, it's hard to have a proof of that and hopefully there's no Italians.
Listen, that will be mad at me. But in general, I think in, in, you can even look at the Europe, how Europe did in the financial crisis. Most of the countries that have problems were in the places with the warmer, not only the warmer climate, but the warmer relationships. If I was living in Europe, I definitely would be living in one of those countries.
I mean, if it is based in Barcelona, because the founder thought that that was a great place to, to start. And not in not in, not in London, not in Paris, not in Brussels, not in Germany. And it's again, the people. and the place that matter. So, if I was to be an optimist, I would say these countries are, again, every place is different, but in the places where you get more and more educated people and you get more and more businesses and the businesses develop, I look at Nigeria, so many problems, so violence in so many areas, but you also have a lot of entrepreneurs.
You have businesses coming up. You also have pockets of better governance. I mean, of obviously you have some ministries that have, have made progress. You have some states about let's say a half a dozen or more states are considered pretty well governed. That's a small minority of the states.
That's about one. I think there's 36 states. But it's you, it means you're gradually making progress. So, for me, the optimistic scenario is we need to educate at a very high level, more and more people. We need to encourage those people to build businesses, to work in government, to grow their capacity.
We need to build cohesion. We need, we need, every generation is a little better than the last. And this is why smaller countries have advantages over bigger countries. To the extent that we build cohesive, a cohesive generation of people with high skills that are committed to their countries, that's where we can see change happen.
We also can try ourselves to think, how can we be more creative? Our toolkits need to be expanded. We need to focus much more on these foundational questions. Yes. Economic reform, yes. Better healthcare. Yes, better education, yes to less poverty. But ultimately to make the states work better, we need to build these relationships, these bridging institutions this type of caliber of people, not people who are literate per se alone.
We need people who can run governments, run companies, and there's not a lot of, there's not enough resources being poured into building those kinds of people, like the MBAs and the top universities and the engineering and entrepreneurship programs, but then also these institutions that bring people together and that create some sort of cohesive generations of people.
And also, if there's a country that's in a conflict or has problems, we need to think more creatively about entry points. External anchors. We talked about decentralization; we talked about the solution to the problems are not always at the top. They're not always vertical. We need to think more bottom up and more horizontal.
We also need to shrink conflicts. Trying to end the conflict is often unrealistic. Let's think. Let's not think comprehensive and about a magic bullet, which seems to be our approach in many countries. Let's think about piecemeal progress that shrinks conflicts and builds momentum. And we talked about Equilibriums before, which was very, very well said.
I think of vicious and virtuous and vicious cycles to the extent that we can gradually shift the equilibrium. Incrementally piecemeal and build a different kind of momentum. We can change the dynamic and get countries onto the right trajectories.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: And we want to let you go because we've already been talking for an hour and a half. But I have one.
SETH KAPLAN: My pleasure. Thank you for the interest.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: No, but I, it's fantastic. I think we could keep talking for hours, but we want to be mindful of your time and effort.
SETH KAPLAN: People who are paying me would be upset at some point but it's OK.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, we, you, you, as a last question with a very quick answer.
You talked about education in those countries, in fragile states, but a lot of times we have to think about what else do we need to know? We, those from the outside that are trying to help these countries and you've, you've worked with international finance institutions, big business. In your opinion, what are, what skills, knowledge, and attitudes are missing or should be acquired, learned by those that are actively tried to help those countries?
And you could limit your answer if you want to, to international financial institutions since you know them
SETH KAPLAN: Well, so I would say I would say a few things. First of all, if I'm working on a country, country, knowledge is very important. That means more sustained engagement with countries. I would say a broader set of knowledge.
I mean, I'm very big on when I, when I when I study a country, I want to wander around the country. I want to see the physical. I literally will take buses. You, I won't, don't recommend this. It's not. It's not always comfortable, but I'll just take buses to visit secondary cities and rural areas and see, see, see mountains and geographies, get a real feel for a place.
I would I study history. I study history very closely. I look for patterns in history. I studied different actors, social actors, religious, social, political actors. I study novels. I try to get, try to understand, I try to visit homes. I mean, I like to have a picture of a country so I can actually try to, try to understand what they're thinking about and what they're, and of course, I've done this in many countries, so, I'm not doing this.
It's not, it's not one country off. I've done this. Dozens of countries. So, I, it gives me, I have, I have some under, I have some starting point that might be different than other people. So, I would start with that. A second thing I would think of, we need to think more strategically about the challenges of these countries.
And that's why I don't necessarily mean that you need to read my material, but you need to read material like my material. And you need to think more about these social political dynamics and these, what I would call upstream. I mean, I'm in the prevention business, so I'm thinking upstream. I'm thinking foundational issues if you remember that Inclusive Transitions framework booklet.
There's some illustrations there and I talk, there's like three tiers. And the most foundational is we have to all agree we live in this house together and this is our common house. I don't think I use that metaphor. And then we have to think about, well, what's that? What's that? Something like, so, and what's the rules of that house?
So, I mean, something about we have to, we have to develop our relationships, our cohesion. Then we have to build the frame of the house. What are the institutions that, that we all agree upon? And, and that's, and then, and only then do we work on the questions of education and healthcare and other things like that.
And I think too often international discussions, they jump to the roof and they haven't built the foundation. So, I would think much, I would think much more strategically about these very foundational issues about how countries work or don't work. And I would be investing more in the foundational issues that are, make, make the policy and then, and the institutions and the policies more likely to work.
Again, I would use the example of decentralized institutions, they may not work well, but they probably will work better for people than centralized institutions or, or external anchors, as an example. Or what types of, what type of interventions are going to, are going to lay this foundation very strong or strengthened the existing foundation.
So, anything else we do is more likely to succeed. Of course, the timeframe you need a longer timeframe for this, you need a more strategic perspective for this approach. But I don't see how these countries change without, without their leaders at the least, and ideally us as well, thinking in this way.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, it almost sounds like you're saying, We have to know a country's soul, not just its mind.
SETH KAPLAN: Ultimately. I would say yes. I mean, I talk about software versus hardware. Yeah. People work very much in this business on the hardware. They don't think about the software. I mean, software can, every is a, again, about relationships, but informal norms.
It can be any, everything from religion to the trauma or the grievances people are experiencing from some historical legacy. You have to really understand. I'm not always psychology, sociology. It’s the soft stuff that matters. You can build. I mean, think about, think about people who work in countries.
We build lots of schools, but the schools are only going to work within the Ministry of Education. They can have as many employees and as much money, but they have to have the systems. To work well to manage the schools. And too often we build schools or we vaccinate people, but we don't build good systems of government. And that's about, that's about management, that's about that's all people. It's all people. It's about middle managers. I mean, the biggest problem in these countries, you're going to have some good ministers. You don't have good middle managers. How do you create middle managers to manage ministries? I mean, it's, it seems like a small point, but central banks work well all over the world for the most part.
Give or take a few countries because you can do a central bank with 15 people. Ministry of Agriculture, ministry of Education. Very few of those work well in most of the world because you need a lot of people and you need a lot of, you need a lot of management. The soft stuff. It's not about the policies. It's about that soft skills running organizations that are so lacking in these places.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Wow, what a great answer. So, thank you so much Seth, again, for taking so much time to talk to us. This was a fascinating conversation and I also want to thank our audience. Thank you so much for tuning into F-World: The Fragility Podcast. We hope you found our conversation interesting and inspirational. Please subscribe where you listen to podcasts. If you want to learn more about us, please visit our website f-world.org or follow us on Twitter at @fworldpodcast. Thanks for listening!
SETH KAPLAN: Thank you so much everyone! Thank you. The two of you.