Alexandre Marc is a political scientist and economist with over 30 years of experience working in areas of conflict and fragility across four continents. Alexandre was the Chief Specialist for Fragility, Conflict and Violence at the World Bank, and is the lead author of the United Nations-World Bank flagship report Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict (2018). He also co-led the preparation of the World Bank’s Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020-2025. This is the first episode in a series with Alexandre covering the Pathways for Peace report, the stories that underpin its core ideas, and his recent work on the geopolitics of fragility. We start by talking about Alexandre’s upbringing and how traveling with his parents – an adventure worthy of an Indiana Jones movie - led him to discover the wonders of different cultures. Experiences such as staying in an archeological mission in Egypt, crossing Afghanistan and Iran by car, and a road trip from Paris to Jordan sparked Alexandre’s interest in how different cultures coexist and led him to try to understand conflict. We then talk about to the relationship between the price of bananas and witchcraft in Cameroon – and we sure had questions about it! Alexandre then shares with us how caring about people, culture, and history helps you better understand the origins and dynamics of conflict, the need to differentiate between conflict and violent conflict, and how the rise in what he calls “conflicts of fragility” led to the Pathways for Peace report. The conversation also explores how actors, institutions, and structural factors can push a country towards peace or conflict, why peace is desirable, the dangers of horizontal inequality, and the importance of dignity. And there’s so much more! Listen to the episode to hear Alexandre share many more insights into fragility, conflict, and peace.
Alexandre Marc is a political scientist and economist with over 30 years of experience working in areas of conflict and fragility across four continents. Alexandre was the Chief Specialist for Fragility, Conflict and Violence at the World Bank, and is the lead author of the United Nations-World Bank flagship report Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict (2018). He also co-led the preparation of the World Bank’s Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020-2025.
This is the first episode in a series with Alexandre covering the Pathways for Peace report, the stories that underpin its core ideas, and his recent work on the geopolitics of fragility.
We start by talking about Alexandre’s upbringing and how traveling with his parents – an adventure worthy of an Indiana Jones movie - led him to discover the wonders of different cultures. Experiences such as staying in an archeological mission in Egypt, crossing Afghanistan and Iran by car, and a road trip from Paris to Jordan sparked Alexandre’s interest in how different cultures coexist and led him to try to understand conflict. We then talk about to the relationship between the price of bananas and witchcraft in Cameroon – and we sure had questions about it!
Alexandre then shares with us how caring about people, culture, and history helps you better understand the origins and dynamics of conflict, the need to differentiate between conflict and violent conflict, and how the rise in what he calls “conflicts of fragility” led to the Pathways for Peace report. The conversation also explores how actors, institutions, and structural factors can push a country towards peace or conflict, why peace is desirable, the dangers of horizontal inequality, and the importance of dignity.
And there’s so much more! Listen to the episode to hear Alexandre share many more insights into fragility, conflict, and peace.
*****
Alexandre Marc
Website: https://www.alexandremarc.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexanMarc1
International Institute for Strategic Studies : https://www.iiss.org/people/conflict-security-and-development/alexandre-marc
Institute for Integrated Transitions: https://ifit-transitions.org/experts/alexandre-marc/
*****
Mihaela Carstei, Paul M. Bisca, and Johan Bjurman Bergman co-host F-World: The Fragility Podcast.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fworldpodcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fworldpodcast/
Website: https://f-world.org
Music: "Tornado" by Wintergatan . Many thanks to Wintergartan for allowing us to use their wonderful music! This track can be downloaded for free at www.wintergatan.net.
Editing by Alex Mitran - find Alex on Facebook (facebook.com/alexmmitran), Twitter (twitter.com/alexmmitran), or Linkedin (linkedin.com/in/alexmmitran)
*****
EPISODE RESOURCES:
United Nations; World Bank. 2018. Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict.Washington, DC: World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/28337
World Bank. 2011. World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development. World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/4389
World Bank. 2020. World Bank Group Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020–2025. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/844591582815510521/pdf/World-Bank-Group-Strategy-for-Fragility-Conflict-and-Violence-2020-2025.pdf
Great Britain. Foreign Office. Historical Section. Cameroon. London, H. M. Stationery off, 1920. Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/a22000968/
Douglass C. North – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2022. Tue. 2 Aug 2022. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1993/north/facts/
Stewart, Frances. 2011. Horizontal Inequalities as a Cause of Conflict: A Review of CRISE Findings.Washington, DC: World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/9126
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). States of Fragility 2015: Meeting the Post-2015 Ambitions. Highlights, Revised editiion. Paris, OECD. https://www.oecd.org/dac/conflict-fragility-resilience/docs/FINAL%20States%20of%20Fragility%20Highlights%20document.pdf
Marc, Alexandre; Willman, Alys; Aslam, Ghazia; Rebosio, Michelle; Balasuriya, Kanishka. 2013. Societal Dynamics and Fragility: Engaging Societies in Responding to Fragile Situations. New frontiers of social policy. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/12222
Alexandre Marc, Bruce Jones. 2021. The New Geopolitics of Fragility: Russia, China, and the Mounting Challenge for Peacebuilding. The Brookings Institution. Washington, DC. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/FP_20211015_new_geopolitics_fragility_marc_jones_v2.pdf
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:21 Indiana Jones-like childhood and the discovery of different cultures
00:04:35 Banana trade and witchcraft
00:06:58 How to see the world in a different way
00:09:08 Caring about people, culture, and history helps you better understand conflict
00:12:25 What is conflict?
00:15:42 Does conflict differ across different cultures?
00:18:48 The rise of "conflicts of fragility"
00:23:57 The role of institutions in fragility and conflict
00:29:00 What is fragility? Depends on who is asking.
00:33:53 The interplay of actors, institutions, and structural factors
00:41:19 Leadership must come from inside
00:46:15 Actors have a choice - focus on structural factors that enhance dignity
00:47:55 Development aid shouldn’t be ideological
00:54:20 Why is peace desirable?
01:01:07 What people fight about, a.k.a. the arenas of contestation.
01:09:49 How do the actors, structural factors, and institutions interact in the arenas?
01:15:05 Horizontal inequality – when economic issues connect to identity issues
01:22:46 On the inequality of dignity & future episodes in the Pathways for Peace series
01:24:26 Wrap-up
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Hi and welcome to F-World: The Fragility Podcast. Together with our guests, we explore how the forces of fragility manifest across the world and in our day-to-day lives, and how we can build a more resilient future. I am joined by my two co-hosts Paul Bisca and Johan Bjurman Bergman. And today we’re speaking with Alexandre Marc. Alexandre is a political scientist and economist. An associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, he is also a member of the Institute for Integrated Transitions and was previously affiliated with the Brookings Institution. Alexandre brings over 30 years of experience working in areas of conflict and fragility across four continents. He was the Chief Specialist for Fragility, Conflict and Violence at the World Bank and is the lead author of the United Nations-World Bank flagship report Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict (2018). He also co-led the preparation of the World Bank’s Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020-2025. He has extensive experience in the areas of conflict and fragility having worked on related themes across four continents over the last 32 years. He joined the World Bank in 1988 in the Africa Region. Alexandre, welcome to F-World!
ALEXANDRE MARC: Welcome, welcome to all!
MIHAELA CARSTEI: We first like to ask our guests a very similar question across all of our conversations. We want to learn your story, how you became interested in fragility and conflict. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, where you grew up, the people, places and ideas that led you on this path?
ALEXANDRE MARC: You know, it’s a very logical story I think. I grew up in the center of Paris, but I grew up in a family that was fascinating, fascinated with traveling and discovering different culture.
I was very lucky. My mother was Russian, my father was French and they were looking into understanding symbolism in architecture, which is an unusual thing at that time. So, they were always taking time - when I could also, when I was very small - and hitting the road, but not as the standard tourist. They would be living in monasteries, we would be staying in archeological center, we would go all over the world. And with this, I started by going at four years old in Egypt and then staying with the archeological mission there for some time. And then I started - we did, we crossed Afghanistan by car. We went from Paris to Jordan by car also. We crossed I Iran by car at the time where it was not so easy. And all sorts of I would say adventure of this kind. This made me actually extremely interested in other cultures. And to understand how other cultures - which at that time were even more different than they are from each other than they are now - I wanted from the very beginning to make that my profession: try to understand how culture can come together. When you look at how different culture, how different minority group can live together, there's no other way, unfortunately, than to try to understand conflict because all that goes with conflict.
So, I actually didn't start immediately on conflict. I did a thesis on the political economy of Cameroon for my PhD. But looking already about how different groups inside the country were actually behaving between each other, I remember I did a model, which - I think was the most interesting in my thesis - was the relation between the price of bananas and witchcraft.
So, it was already, you see the connection between anthropology and economics. And then I moved into the World Bank to do what I'm doing now, also, which is studying conflict and how minority groups can live together.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, can you actually? - First of all, I think we should make a movie of your life. I think every single one of us wanted to have your childhood and, or even in adulthood, if we could do that. And second, what is the relationship between banana trade and witchcraft?
ALEXANDRE MARC: Well, it's an interesting, at the heart of what I'm really interested is the behavior of why people behave in certain ways and why people behave sometimes in ways that are very bizarre.
So, you had huge plantation of bananas at that time in the Cameroon, that was the sort of the, what is called now, the British Cameroon, the English speaking Cameroon. It was always a land of big plantation, and at that time they had switched to banana. But it was a period that was just between the two World Wars where the prices were fluctuating a lot. All those prices of agriculture were fluctuating a lot. And that was creating huge stress on the plantations because when the price would be falling, workers will be fired and there will be no more price. Plantation would be abandoned for two or three years until the prices would go up again. And so there was a huge stress.
And how did people relate to this stress? Was by starting to believe that there was actually zombies that were coming back from the Mount Cameroon, then taking their soul, and taking them to work on the Mount Cameroon for other plantation, that was in another type of life. And this was very, what was very interesting is that the Cameroon at that time was under the society of nation management which means that they had, there was a lot of reporting and there were a lot of reporting on prices, and there were a lot of reporting on incidents of witchcraft. So, you started to correlate to the two - nobody had thought about that before - and it gave you a really interesting description of the dynamic.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, it's interesting you say that because sometimes we try to understand how inflation is managed, it can seem a bit like witchcraft except done by certain people in suits. It's interesting when you mentioned your travels with your parents, that you would look at symbolism in architecture. That is an extraordinary exercise in observation in learning to notice and try and trying to link what is obvious, a building or something, with what is deeper in a way, the psychological aspects and so on. And I wanted to ask you: how do you travel in general? How do you - professionally you had to travel to fragile states, you had to work with these countries. What about that experience taught you to see the world in a different way?
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, you know, when I was at the World Bank, I was always famous for on my mission to say, you know, we work very hard on the mission, but we have one day where we only do the culture, whatever is the objective of the mission. It can be to set up a monitoring system on conflict, it can be to build up a fund for financing, small infrastructure - like we did in Armenia after conflict. But we will all go and organize with our counterpart usually the Sunday visit to the places or the people or the markets where there was really interesting things happening, representing the culture of the country. And that was a rule. Actually, I've heard from some consultant that they really liked to go on mission for me because they had this one day where you could go and do the cultural stuff. And I was trying to say, when they would say, oh, there's too much work and all that, I would say, okay, work more because, you know, Sunday, it's the culture day. You're not going to go and work on Sunday or maybe you'll do when you go back to the hotel, but you have to do that. That's part of the way you're going to understand this country.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: I think that is a really interesting and important view. And so, what would you say then, in just building on Paul's question, when you have a country that is fragile where it's, maybe it's challenging to go out among people's where there's a suspicion or distrust. Especially when a person who looks like me or you arrives there. How do you go about building that trust that allows you to make those discoveries and understand that culture on a deeper level?
ALEXANDRE MARC: Even if you do a very technocratic mission, you have to prepare it. And fortunately in the field of conflict, you don't have other way than to try to understand the culture, to try to understand the politics, what has happened before. So, I always myself, but pushed all my team to invest quite heavily into those type of readings when I was going first time in a country and then to improve on it. And that gave birth, I think, to an analysis that we developed in the World Bank, which is the fragility analysis, that tried to bring all those elements of culture and all that in there. So, what you need to do is to have this understanding. And then from your first meeting, you start to make some references. And people are just not used to see a bureaucrat coming in and starting to talk to them about this church of the 15th century or about these episodes in their history a long time ago. And they become immediately very intrigued and usually extremely happy - especially from a World Bank or an IMF mission, because this is not the type of things you expect. And that was very often a great entry point into anything. And people believe - because I'm being genuinely interested in those things and having recruited a team that are genuinely interested - I think people feel it very quickly that you are not just there to do the numbers and the things you are there because you actually like those people. And also most of those culture, which is really interesting, we tend not to feel that's a loss of time. If you come in the United States and go somewhere and start to talk about the culture of the place, I think people might think is displaced. But it's not at all in most of the country you work in. You go to Central African Republic where people usually don't know anything, and you start to talk about the past about what happened when the French were there about certain, how did the group in the Muslims North, and then people look at you and say, oh, this person knows something about us. And they start to discuss it and be much, immediately, much, much more open and also much more open to go and open up to what they see on the true dimension of the conflict that they might not tell someone else.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: I had a question then, as you were talking about the places, the people, and the different conflicts. What is conflict and how do we think about it? How should we conceptualize it? And I'm asking now both from your experience as a professional, but also from your life experience and all of that rich experience that you just described.
ALEXANDRE MARC: Very good question. I will start with a little anecdote when we were writing Pathways for Peace - that was a huge endeavor. As you know, there were more than 70 researchers working on it, about 40 institution involved, the UN management, the World Bank management. You can imagine what it means.
We started to have a conflict on the word conflict, and that was at the end of the report where suddenly an advisor of the UN took the report and said, but wait, conflict - violent conflict. This does not exist in the legal framework of the UN. What you have in the legal framework of the UN is armed conflict. So, you have to talk about armed conflict. You cannot talk about conflict, it's armed conflict. So, I went back to the chief economist of the World Bank and I told him that and he said, I'm sorry, but that does not go. As economist, conflict is very important. Conflict is exactly what people have to do so that they know what's the position of another. What you don't want is the conflict to go into being a violent conflict.
But if you don't have the conflict and all the points on the table about the conflict for sure will turn violent because you will not be able to know what are the type of issues that are really at stake. That was a huge issue. You know, this advisor of the UN, which I would not say the name, took the automatic spell checking and erases all the word conflict throughout the report to replace them by armed conflict.
Which means that even in the bibliography, when there was a book that was called conflict somewhere became armed conflict. But anyway, we're not going to talk too much about that, but this is the type of issue. So, in two words, conflict are very important, conflict's a part of humanity. That's in conflict that all - what is like the human psychology - all what is hidden in yourself, come out. But what you want is manage the conflict so that it does not become violent. And some people will tell you, well, unfortunately, sometimes violent conflicts are even necessary because when the excess is too big, you need to have some form of violence.
I don't believe in that. I believe that you need to have this resolved by different means. But conflict and violent conflict are two different things. Conflict can be very positive, violent conflict is the thing you want to avoid.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: And this conflict - the way we resolve conflict as people, because even in our families, we have to have conflict in order to actually resolve our differences. But the way we argue, let's say, or debate or enter a conflictual situation - how does that vary from your experience across cultures? And does that then have an impact in how you take action to prevent it from getting to the violence part.
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, it is very complicated. That's one of the most difficult thing, I think. Because very often, like in a family, you believe that the conflict inside the family are not worth being discussed outside of the family. That's actually something that is very private. But you know, if you don't go to a psychoanalyst or - now I'm doing propaganda for my parents' work - but to someone to help, you're not going to be able to resolve this conflict. And when you arrive as the World Bank or as the UN in a country, the first people will want to tell you: yeah, there's been an incident, but there's no conflict.
We understand those people very well. We understand their problem. And that becomes very difficult because you start, you have to start to tell them that, well, no, you know, there are problems - let's try to resolve them. A lot of those problem are actually economic and social. So, this is really the ground of the World Bank - because they first tell you, no, the World Bank should not go into that, that's for the UN. I said, sorry, most of your people there are unhappy about land distribution, the UN will not deal with your land distribution. This is a World Bank thing. So, that's one of the most difficulties - to try to make a nation, a government try to accept that it's okay, that conflicts are everywhere. And very often when we talk with them, I take example from France, from the United States, and all that. Because if not, they feel very quickly that being in conflict means that you are really underdeveloped and therefore you want to hide it. It's exactly like human psychology.
And so I want to hide it to be like the others, but yes, but you know, the others actually are like, you, they maybe have more powerful institutions to manage them, but there's a lot of conflict there too. So, in discussing with the countries, I always try to take examples from developed countries and I say, you know, we have a conflict in Corsica, you know how we are trying to deal with it.
That's a complex. And you see to the person of Central African Republic said, ah, yes, I've heard. So, how what did you do in Corsica with the people of the island? Because we have the people in the North also. It's a very different dynamic than if you arrive and say you're fragile and that means you have a lot of conflict, so let's start to work on your case.
PAUL M. BISCA: Alexandre, you foreshadowed in a way the two questions I wanted to ask you, and they're very much related. The first is: you've made the distinction between conflict and violent conflict and the Pathways for Peace report that you led opens with an overview of the most important trends and quickly first quickly, if you can tell us, what are those trends that you believe every curious person in the world should know? And then the second question is how - you mentioned the role of the Bank and of the UN why did they decide to write the report about this? Why was this so important?
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, well, the two questions are totally connected, right? Because the thing that happened is that conflict have increased, quite a lot a few years after the Cold War. So, you had many reasons for that, but what you had is you had sort of, you had some terrible conflict between the Cold War, right? You had Vietnam war, you had conflict in Latin America. But somehow, they were more maybe more managed than what happened after. And then after the cold war, you had a period where, because suddenly the former Soviet Union didn't care much and the US didn't care much where you had a sort of increase conflict in Rwanda, in Burundi, in different places. And also, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself and the Eastern bloc also create the Yugoslavia conflict. But after that, you had a period of incredible peace for about 5, 6, 7 years.
And then you had the terrorist event and things like that, that came in, some from 1995 to 2003, four before the, when the war in Afghanistan really started to go Aries that 2010, you had period where you had very few conflict. And we had so much hope that when the Soviet Union would collapse and the socialist world will collapse, it will be the end of history just to - how do you say it? - paraphrase a famous political scientist.
PAUL M. BISCA: We'll try to invite him too.
ALEXANDRE MARC: Yes, you should. You should. And so, what this very quickly seemed very wrong and actually from 2010, the number of conflicts sort of exploded. But they were very different conflict. They were conflict about countries collapsing on themselves. They were conflict of fragility. They were, there were civil war in countries with weak institution. And you didn't have much interest anymore at that time, at the beginning at least, for the world, for the US, or the Russians, or the Chinese to get involved.
So, those, you know, were trying and they were very un-institutionalized. So, it was very difficult for the UN to do something. And so this has really increased from 2010 enormously. And then you had all the spring, a lot was happening in Muslim countries because you have huge problems of identity there. And so you had all that increasing very strongly. And the World Bank had done not with the UN, but a very important report in 2011, which was the world development report, which is the annual report that the bank does on conflict, security, and development. And, but that was done just before the big rise in conflict.
So, they don't talk, they talk about conflict, what you have to do and all the new institutional economics that goes with it. But they actually don't talk about the rise in conflict. When we've been asked to write this report, the World Bank had about 40 countries with conflict that it had to deal with.
The UN was completely overwhelmed with all the civil war about the, and there had been a lot of thinking and study going on and both the World Bank and the UN, but also the OECD all the organization that supported this report said, we have to take stock. Now we have to take stock about what's happening, and we have to take stock about the new thinking about it because we really need to start to do more on prevention - because they realized very quickly.
So, the report was going to be much more on prevention than just about post conflict reconstruction and all that. So, that's your two questions I think answered in one answer.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So, building on that, you mentioned the WDR of 2011 on fragility, which was obviously a seminal report on that topic. And we've had one of the lead authors, Shanta Devarajan on the podcast before. But I wanted to ask you how the Pathways for Peace report and how you personally think about the issue of fragility as related to peace and conflict. And whether you think that there is something kind of qualitatively different about countries that are classified as fragile as opposed to those who are, you know, just have issues with conflict. And and so, and kind of how you guys took that thinking forward with the Pathways for Peace report.
ALEXANDRE MARC: Yeah. So, it's a complex story because fragility started to be, I mean, the diplomats and the politician were talking a lot about failed states. Obviously after the cold war it was clear that there were states that just had, were living from crisis to crisis, didn't had the right institutions. Their problem was that they were a country that just couldn't implement economic policies. And so the World Bank engaged with the program that was called Low-Income Countries Under Stress. And that was really what started the work afterwards on fragility, they were not called fragile or failed, but they were countries that were low income and that were stuck - like Central African Republic, like Solomon Islands. There was a lot of those countries, they're stuck into a situation of really very poor governance, very poor, but the main focus was not on conflict. The main focus was about why do these countries cannot get better governance, right?
Why they cannot get more political pacts that allowed policies to be implemented? And then there was another dimension that was added to that because the World Bank, the UN had a lot of work to do with conflict. And actually, by the way, the UN never liked the idea of fragility, but they understood very well the idea of conflict.
So, they started to say, okay, let's put also the conflict into that. But then the only thing we had was a correlation that was telling us that the countries with very weak governance indicators were the poor. The low-income countries under stress were actually countries that had very bad indicators of governance - which is capacity to do your political economy, accountability, corruption and all those indicators - that there was a correlation with conflict.
About 90% of them were actually had some form of violent conflict. If it was not violent conflict, it was actually just violence like gang violence in Haiti or gang violence in. So there was obviously a connection between the two, but it was never very well-articulated because you had also countries that were pretty solid that suddenly had in one of their regions - and that's the subregional conflict issue - had actually country going into conflict. Like Philippines was a country with relatively solid institution, but the Mindanao region was just under permanent conflict. So, they were added to that without having a good theory about one going with the others.
And I think that was an issue. But then we started to provide ammunition to that. And one central piece of that was in the World Development Report of 2011 was the role of institutions - that if you don't have institutions that work conflict will not be managed and they will become violent. So, through the angle of institutions, I think there was a good connection between governance, fragility, state fragility, and actual conflict. So, that's the way it evolved.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, what is fragility then? And you mentioned the resistance to the concept of fragility. And if we look out there, there's so many ways to interpret it and many working definitions, operational definitions from different institutions, but to you, what is fragility?
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, that this is a very interesting question because we never put our hands very precisely. You don't deal - there was a lot of attempt for an institution that is very quantitative, like all the development bank institution, the World Bank, and others to put a line. This country is fragile. This country is not fragile.
And because there was more and more interest to put quite a lot of money in fragility to start to help those countries, we needed to put a line, we just could not be in between. But I was always from the point of view that even if you put a line, you should not, the approach should not be just defined for some country.
You need to put a line because there are resources that you have to attribute and you know what countries can get the resource and what countries cannot. But in terms of your approach, the process, you should not put a line. First of all, because there are countries that are going down into fragility. You can see it, but the indicators are not yet at a level that would allow to pass the threshold. But also because there are countries with regional fragility, so their national indicators are not bad, but some of their regions are extremely fragile. So, you had all those problems that were very complicated to define. I don't like the idea of a line of fragility, but then what is fragility?
So, fragility was - first by the World Bank - seen as a very governance issue as I was mentioning, but, the OECD slowly, where there was much more freedom to think because there was a lot of, at the OECD there's a lot of bilateral government of, are represented of each country and some bilateral have actually much more freedom to.
Politically in other ways than an institution like the World Bank or even than the UN. So, they started to say, well, there's political issues in many of those countries, there other type of issues. And what is very interesting is in 2015, the OECD who was monitoring, the OECD was monitoring fragility and had a report on fragile states in 2015. It's a very important change, conceptual change - they moved the title of their report from fragile state report to States of Fragility report. Now this means that it's not, there's not a fragile state and a non fragile state. There are different states of fragility. And in the state of fragility, what you have is you have very different dimension. So, they had five big dimensions - the economic dimension, the security dimension, the environmental dimension, the human security dimension. So, they had the sociol dimension, the political dimension, they had five big dimension. And inside those dimension, they had a number of indicators and they didn't want to have a list anymore of fragile country. They were putting all their country and judging them along this list, which means that, along those indicators, which means that you had level of fragility and not anymore you know, which means that, of course they had the World Bank had about 30 countries on their list. They had about 52 because you had a lot of countries that they were monitoring that were not there because they were very strong on one dimension, but not on another.
So, that's, I think the way we started to think about fragility. And fragility in some ways is like, if you are depressed as a person, you know, you are depressed and you feel that things are not going, that you are not managing to get things straightened out. And you have countries that are collectively in this type of situation. And they don't always know what's the cause as we don't always know, what's the real cause of our depression and those countries have problems that might be at level of the cohesion at the level of the politics at the level of corruption. But they are different elements and those elements tend very often to reinforce each other.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So, in the Pathways for Peace report and as you're speaking now, you know, you mentioned these elements, these actors, institutions. So, I wanted to dive a little bit more into that. What would you say, you know, there is a model with actors, institutions, and structural factors in the Pathways for Peace report, could you speak a bit more to how they kind of shape, and as you say, reinforce each other, both positively out of conflict and as well as negatively into conflict and how that may relate to fragility and how you were thinking about that.
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, you know, we worked very closely, I think, to all the team of the WDR on security, on conflict security and development was involved in our report in one way of another, in terms of advisor, in terms of providing pieces and all that, they were all involved. And the interesting thing that, what the WDR came up when institutional economics were so, à la mode, were so, you know, the, which was very important so everybody at the Bank was uh, reading Douglass North, or at least everybody who was working on the analytical side, and he was invited, and there was all this idea about yeah, institutions, culture and all that. And it's indeed - that was the strength of the WDR for the first time, put the question of quality of institution, right in the middle of thinking about conflict and fragility, and seeing it - the linkage between fragility and conflict. That was very powerful. And, you know, as every WDR they had all the indicators, all the sort of elements. Some was very interesting, like they said, well, to get out of fragility, you know, we have to look at how country did it.
And they did this graph that, that is quite famous where you see that countries that have improved, for example, on corruption took on average 25 years, countries that have improved on trust of citizen took 35 years. But that was a big eye opening, you know? And the one that we're the most cared about that were the diplomats, because they said what do we do with that? Well, guys, you have to stay there for 25 years, not for six months or two weeks. Right? So, so this was this idea that once you are stuck into these things. It takes a very long time to change. Now, what did we say with our report? We said, yes, that's very fundamental - institutions are very fundamental. By putting institutions so centrally, we sort of forgot two things that were actually much more in the old thinking about conflict. One is the structures. So, you know, in the structures I would put the things you cannot really easily change. One is history, another one is your geography. So, you know, if you are close to Russia and you are part of a place where you had a lot of Russian involved for many years - I'm sure you're not understanding my example now - and then you have a number of historical, very complex, mixed historical, you are going to have a structural factor that is going to be determinant in any risk of conflict, right? It's a structural factor. It's a history, you don't change it. You try to disparately to interpret it in one way or another, but you cannot change it, the facts are there. It happened 2000 years. We don't yet have a capacity to change. What happened 2000 years ago or a thousand years ago in this case more specifically.
Now, those structural factors are very important. We have to look at it because it tells you the possibilities of what you can do. You cannot change them, but you have to really understand them much better and not forget everything about institutions, right? But when you do institutions, do not forget everything about those other factors. And then the one that I thought was the most, not innovative, but the most important to re-insert into the thinking was one of actors, especially because today you are in a world where I think a lot of institutions are weakening.
So, you know, before actors were constrained by institution. So, an institution is you need a lot of factors to come together and accept the rule of the game set by the institution. But today there's more and more problem in doing that because a lot of institutions like the UN and others, which are actually organization like institutional broader, tend to not be as powerful to constrained actors as before. And you have actors that come together and can change things very strongly, and we need to act on those actors. Now, the diplomats are much more happy because they believe that the actors is the one we can try to convince, and work with them, and build on the actors. The problem is that today it's not only the president of the republic that is an actor, is the association of former soldiers of I don't know what, the association of groups representing this ethnic minority, and these are institutions, but there are actors there and also the incredible, powerful role that some people can think.
You know, there's all this debate now: would the conflict be very different if it was not Putin who was found by Yeltsin in 2000? And there's a big conflict about that? I would say yes and no. Putin was - actually a lot of writing tells you that Putin was actually very much reflecting some of the current of Russian society and knew extremely well to build the right narrative, to push them together, and pull them together. But you can imagine that if somebody else with much more interest into the economy and much more skill into the economy, would have taken it maybe this person would have seen the capacity to make Russia great for their economic development, which I think very quickly Putin, sort of, is put on the side.
So, the actors, the people count very much. And that's what we wanted to bring back into the model where we say there's the structure, they're the actor, the institution. These are the three elements. That you have to have on your radar screen, when you try to do more preventive work.
PAUL M. BISCA: Alexandre, you have the actors, you have other also parts of the core concepts, like the arenas, which we'll talk about. But I wanted to ask you, you mentioned this sort of tension between actors and structures. And ultimately, to build on your sort of analogy with psychology, you cannot change adverse events in your life that have happened in the past, but you could change your attitude towards them and therefore reinterpret it in a new way, in a way that you can live with them and even grow from them. So, that is where leadership and actors have a chance to look at structures and to acknowledge that they're there, but then try to steer a bit the movement sort of the moment in a different direction what's needed for that in your view?
ALEXANDRE MARC: Well, the problem with that is that you want, you want to act very early. I mean, this is the whole problem of prevention - and we will go back when we talk about the arena and all that - on many conflict 10 years before the conflict starts, it's very often, already too late because you have those ingredients of conflict that have built, especially with civil wars, to have built in and built up. And then between those 10 years or five years it's already extremely difficult to go back. But politically it's very different, difficult, in a country that goes, well, where you want to do trade agreement and all that to say, "oh, that's not going really well, I want, I'm going to stop all my support to this country, all my investments." You cannot do that either because you're just going to accelerate everything. Right? So, the problem you have is you have structural factors that are sometimes the weak point, I would say, the fracture in a country.
So, for example, in the United States, you have big fracture that is racial fracture. Everybody knows that's a very, you have to manage that very carefully, because it can push to very extreme behavior, right? So, you need to manage this fracture, that is a fracture there, but the fracture is in big part, structural. This is the history of the slavery and how the United States became to be. But you have actors that have done a lot like Martin Luther King, and others, to try to change something that seems to be very difficult to change and manage to turn the population around. So, those two actors are very important.
The problem that I see in that, playing the actors and the structural is very difficult to do it from outside. So, for an organization like the UN, the World Bank, diplomats, it's very difficult. You have to have the country wanting to do it. And again, I always like to come back to those psychological elements. To resolve a crisis of anxiety you have, it's very, you need the people outside, but it's very difficult to accept, to go and talk about that with others. Right? So, it's very difficult. You have to have a willingness to change it from the country side, and it's not often that you have this sort of acceptance, especially from the government, but also from other members of society.
So, you prefer to close your eyes for sometimes. And then after that, it's a bit too late. And you see that in many conflicts. You know, they have another conflict, which is the Ethiopia conflict. You know, when you could see Derg arriving at power, you knew that there was going a problem with the Tigrean because the whole story of Ethiopia, since Mengistu was about how the Tigrean have taken on Ethiopia, at the beginning for the best, and at the end for the worst. And you knew that once someone who didn't was not part of that would take power, an actor is going to have to deal with those structural problem in an extremely complicated way.
And there was, we go back to the, to this idea of pathways, but there was a pathway to peace, there was a pathway. And at some point the pathways to peace just couldn't work and it moved into the conflict. And so this is very complex. I don't think we know how to do it, but I think we know that it has to take time and that you have to see the problem very much in advance.
PAUL M. BISCA: Sometimes it could also be sort of choosing which structure, as an actor, you focus on because you mentioned one structure in the United States that obviously had very detrimental effects under social cohesion, but there's also the huge tradition of individual worth, of dignity that applies to everyone in this country. And ultimately those actors who made the difference appealed to that kind of common sense of individual worth.
ALEXANDRE MARC: Yes. Yes. So, then here you bring you bring all a new notion that is extremely important is this perception of dignity. And this perception of dignity is extremely important in the way grievance built up. And it's your position in society, is the way other treating you - it's complicated to know what dignity is. But there's a lot of work that have shown that when collective dignity is being attacked, that's where you have the most problematic issue. That's where the grievances are building up very strongly. So, as a group, you see that your own dignity has been put into question. But in the terms dignity for me was always a bit difficult to open it and understand what's in there. You know, it's, again, it's very seen as an individual characteristic. When you put to group characteristics, it becomes very complicated to try to understand what's in there, but it's a determinant aspect of conflict today. So, I think the dignity dimension you're right to bring it up. It's really important.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: I wanted to follow up on something else you just mentioned which is this local ownership. And I love the parallels with psychology and how you have to own kind of your issues and be willing to work with them. And I think a lot of examples of, as you said, solutions that are supplied by external actors, or policies that are implemented by external actors that don't work, but yet it is so difficult to find and sort of help catalyze, if you will, that, that local ownership because of various factors that are structural, institutional, political economy, that drives and creates incentives for actors locally to not own what might be better in the longer term. So, how do you think of the task, as it relates to the task of external actors, to support and protect, and maybe even nurture local reformers, that can be those voices of changed, the Martin Luther Kings, if you will of conflict affected countries.
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, you know, we are development aid. And especially today in a world where there's big ideological difference and people are very much into this conservative, liberal, it's becoming very, there's very little compromise on things. Development aid - we have to say the truth - development aid has become sometimes, and it's perceived by the people as a way to impose a certain ideological model on countries. And you know, who can say that it's bad to put the priority on clinic for women in the center of Afghanistan, but don't have clinic for men really. That's an ideological element. I'm a hundred percent for it, but look how it's perceived from an extremely traditional society. You have to be much more sensitive of that.
I think Afghanistan was a huge demonstration of how overwhelming a country with aid and security, creates actually its own collapse because that's really what has happened. So, when you have money, and NGOs, and groups that will decide everything, or work with villagers and deciding everything for each villagers just that does not work anymore. Especially because in a period in the world where you have a huge confrontation between liberal ideas and much more conservative ideas. And you put your own, and I understand while you do it, but you put your own vision. I remember traveling in DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and in very remote place in DRC and each time you were stopping, you were finding a small clinic for raped women. So, that was great. If women get raped, they can go there. But there was nothing in the normal clinic. There was nothing in other place because the NGO who had money to do a lot of clinic for rape there. So, what is the message when you arrive in a country and the only place where you can get care is for women who are raped? This is had immediately the exactly opposite effect. More women were raped and more, and it was seen like an attack on the way those people were behaving and all that. So, you have to do things with extreme respect, for what is happening and accepting. If you don't like the situation, you have to accept that it's going to take time.
In Afghanistan also, we really, for some time took the most corrupt governors because they were pro Western and imposed them on the population. And, you know, people are not interested to see if a governor is Western or not on everyday basis. They want to make sure they pay less you know, for justice they don't have to pay money. Whether this is good, because then girls can go to school also, and all that. It just does not make sense, all these things. So, our aid, especially in very risky, is too ideologically charged - first thing. And the second thing is that we need to be very careful. I think the French, which are not doing things great either, but I think they've learned from Afghanistan and they have been much, much more careful with what they're doing and how they were engaging to Mali. And especially they start to disengage when they saw that the situation was very difficult and say, okay, we'll see what happened there, but we are on the way to Afghanistan and we don't want to be caught in this type of ultimate days where we're, so we're going to go earlier.
And then of course the situation became very bad. So, I think there's only, that's the big problem. I think there's only part of the problem that foreign aid can help address. And after that, you know, there were always the African Union had very interesting things of peer to peer discussion, getting somebody from another African country to go there, sending sort of, wise elders in countries. I really believe in those type of things. I really believe in those type of things to try to make things change, slowly. But we want to do a revolution too quickly through our aid, even in country that are extremely fractured. So, we have to be very careful about that.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, first I want to comment on the notion of dignity, I share the difficulty in defining that. And one, as you were talking, I was thinking with the example from DRC, regarding the rape clinics, the clinics for rape women. If I was a member of that society and that's all I saw coming from the outside, I would feel an attack on my sense of worth. If I'm a man or if I'm the rest of society, that's not that small slice of women that have gone through a terrible event and do need our help, but maybe we can help them without actually undermining the sense of worth of the rest of the members of society.
So, and I don't know if I'm right or wrong, this is just what came to my mind. But then that also made me - we've been talking about conflict here, we've been talking about fragility, but the other side, the desired state is that of peace. And it's, we seem to have forgotten collectively, across many countries and especially in the West, why is peace desirable?
And the fact that the whole UN system was started so that we stop having devastating, violent conflict across the world. And maybe we're too far removed from that event. What, you know, why is peace desirable and how can we better remember that?
ALEXANDRE MARC: It's a very interesting question. I remember very well when we were brainstorming on one of the books we prepared about 10 years ago, which was called The Societal Dynamic of Fragility, which looked at the societal aspects with fragility. And there was one of the expert here who said, but, you know, when you look back, the biggest progress in humanity followed war. It's you know, you can have hundreds of examples. Right? Now people are rediscovering because you like, everybody know, you read a lot on Russia now, and a lot on Ukraine now. And you know, there's this old question, whether the Mongol invasion, what did the Mongol invasion do for Russia? And there's a lot of theses that said the Mongol organization gave the sense of a state, structure. Because Mongols were raping and destroying, but they were also organizing structure of government that were very centralized and effective.
And so that's how was learned the sort of ability to then cover on bigger, on bigger territory. You know, the Westphalian Agreement that recognized the legitimacy of a state came from the, after The Thirty Years' War. The most elaborate system of multilateral agreements and all that was born after the second World War.
That, that is true. That even culturally and everybody was accepting, that war was very important until the age of the Enlightenment. Right? Where people started to say, wait a minute, You know, maybe we can do things without trying to kill ourselves. Because before the military was the most prestigious person in a society and still is in some extent. So, they decided that let's try to get a world that evolves without war, does not come as a easy thing. Right? If you look at 2000 years of history and that's how evolution will be made without war. For that you need extremely strong institution and the real willingness of people to put some of their worse instincts aside and try to see that.
So, the really interesting thing, and we talked before about that, is the work for example, of Stephen Pinker onto that, who wrote about The Better Angels of our Nature, right? This work looked at the attitude to war over 2000 years and at what war did for humanity at 2000 years. It's really interesting because when you think about war, you think about the second World War.
That was the worst possible time at a full time. No one had sent an atomic bone before. No one had put people in gas chamber before. That was the worst of the worst. And probably in terms of dis-humanity, it was the worst of the worst. But he said, if you take on 2000 years, actually, overall, you had a progress. Overall humanity over those 2000 years have worked themself to try to avoid more and more war.
And if you took the long term in comparison to the population of the time, so you will see for example, that in comparison to the population of the Middle Ages, the invasion of the Mongols was a huge disaster. But actually, it was less maybe of a disaster than the second World War, but it was still a huge disaster in terms of what was happening because they maybe killed less people, but they were much less people. So, they killed a much bigger proportion of the population that was there at that time.
So, this tells you that there was a huge effort over time through institution and all that for humanity to try to look at how to resolve the problem with peace. Because you don't want to have lives lost, you don't want to have, you know, you want to have to be able to invest you have to make sure things are not going to be destroyed. You want predictability, you want all those things that, that war destroys, to make progress. But the war was a great way in the past to get a leveling field so that you can rebuild new institutions. And you also get everybody wanting that suddenly because the war was so horrible. So, you have suddenly everybody accepting that you have to move forward.
PAUL M. BISCA: It's also the case though that historically wars also help craft nations in a way. And I don't know who said it, that the state made war and war made the state. But I wanted to, as you were talking, I thought of your earlier example of justifying the development intervention in Central African Republic because of the role of land disputes. And as you mentioned in the report, land and natural resource management is one of the arenas, the four arenas of what people fight about. Can you walk us through the others a bit?
ALEXANDRE MARC: Yes. Yes. So, this idea of arena, that's one thing I'm most proud that what would come together on the Pathways for Peace report. I think it's a really interesting way to try to understand the prevention of conflict. Is that at the very start, conflicts start usually in certain arenas and then it develops, then can go all over. It's a bit like a cancer, right? So, the problem starts somewhere and that's where things start to go. And then when this is not resolved, it start to spill over to the politics, to other things and other places.
When we prepare the work with the arena we've tried to do a big inventory of conflict by putting the different dimension of those arenas and tried to see what is the content of a certain conflict? Does it have the land? Does it have the other, does it have security and governance? Does it have the politics? So, we started to rate conflict, and it was really interesting for example, to see that more than 70% of modern conflict has a land dimension. You would not think that because you think that land are resolved somewhere else, but because there's civil wars and all that, there's very strong land dimension. But it gave rise to so many discussion that we decided at the end, not to put those numbers into the report.
And I was very sorry about that, but they were maybe not sufficiently - we would have need another two years of research on that to really be able to confirm it. What I'm sure is that it gives us the discovery that wow, if we were just focusing on land much more, maybe we would resolve many of those conflicts because if on time you resolve land. And so, those arena are the place that you have to look at the very origin and where you start to see the problem.
So, you see the conflict of Mali now, and you see where the most, I would say, lethal terrorist groups are operating and you realize that under that there's a very strong land conflict. So, the conflict is when the Fulani, the poor Fulani, who are the herders in the Northern Mali, who lost a lot of - to climate change and all that - they lost a lot of their cows and livestock. And they started to have more and more conflict with the agriculturists because they had to pull their cattle much more to the south of the country where you had much more agricultural land. And that's really started this big conflict between Fulani and agriculturalists.
And now you have one of the most powerful terrorist organization in Mali that attracts a lot of the young Fulanis that had this real feeling that they were really oppressed by the others. And it was not an easy thing to say to the credit of the World Bank. They had very early on massive livestock programs in all this areas of the country to try and manage that. But it was probably not enough, or enough so that the conflict does not get even worse. But that was, if you look at the conflict of Mai today and you look at jihadis and terrorism and all that, you very quickly forget about this arena, that is actually the central arena of where the materiality of the conflict is happening. This conflict between people who don't have a livelihood anymore. Right?
The second arena that is, was very strong, and the one that is the most uncomfortable to talk for development organization, and that's where we had the UN to hide behind, which was very convenient, was the politics. So, and that comes to horizontal inequality and all that. The fact that politics in Mali for example, contrary to Niger, was always seen as relatively exclusive of certain ethnicity. And that people were not feeling that they had, especially the Tuaregs or the others, were not feeling that they had a real role to play into that. And so, you had this element of how representative politics is, how inclusive is it, that has nothing to do with the quality of service delivery to the people it's just, people see themself in the representation. You know, like the Democrats here in the United States have understood that very well, that people, even if they don't see - the black population will not see their situation improve - if they see more of black people at central place in the administration, it'll give you a sense that you are actually included. And that's extremely important everywhere.
And Niger had the Tuareg prime minister for many years though the Tuareg were only representing, I don't not remember exactly, but about 15% of the population. And the Malians said for very long, never because those guys are just, they don't represent much. So, we have to have, you know, people who are really a representative. Well, this type of things are exactly what the political arena is. It's very, it's very internal, right?
And then we have other arena, the security and governance arena is really important because in countries like that security is fundamental. If you ask people, what do they want? Do they want school, education, health? What they want is to be able to move in the streets securely. That's in countries where you have a lot of insecurity, that comes very often, first. So, you know, when you arrive at the World Bank, say, okay, you have to have better health service, better education service. And what about if my girls get raped on going to school, every two days? Right? And what about if I have to pay so much to the police to get to the health center before? So, security and the governance of security and justice - absolutely fundamental. And that's what people want before they want better health, better education.
Now you can only understand how those arenas work by an in-depth analysis. That's why we created at the World Bank the Risk and Resilience Assessment, which was really an analysis of those dimension of fragility and conflict risk, that now was actually picked up at most of the institution in the world. And this is about trying to nail down those type of things. Because this is also things where a lot of people, you know, and we with Paul and others, we've tried to push a lot for the World Bank to look at security much more seriously because security is so fundamental. But that was a very big battle, very difficult because we were born with this idea that we don't touch security because we're a development organization. Development without security is not development.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, this has always been funny for me because you cannot do economic development, you cannot build a bridge if it gets blown up the next day by the rebels or by whatever group. And if you don't have a justice system, you can't start a company, you can't feel like you can have property rights. So, all those things that matter to us economists are zero if you don't have the security in place. So, I was thinking - those are the things we fight over or about, or have conflict about - the arenas you just laid out. But then, can you connect for us how do the three elements: the actors, the structural factors and the institutions interact in those arenas? And which one holds the power let's say, or which one is key to the success?
ALEXANDRE MARC: I think they all intervene sometimes in different fashion, but in different ways, in different arenas. But what was the whole message of the report is that once you've distinguished an area you have to see exactly you have to apply this model to see who's really - what's playing out. Right? So, to take the issue of land, for example, that is really important. You have a structural factor, which is that you have in Northern Sahel, if you look at Mali, my example of Mali, in Northern Sahel, you have a structural situation where climate change is making the land more dryer and dryer, that the cattle has to go to be to get fed more and more in the South. And that's in the South, you have the land with agriculturists. This is a structural issue that you can actually have a - we see it as a structural issue, but actually also by fighting climate change, you can sort of try to resolve some of that, but probably that it's already too late. So, you will have this move of population from the central Sahel to the Southern Sahel, which is already very engaged. And that even if you block the - if you improve the situation - this is gone, this is happening now, and it's going to be too late. In this place,so you have a structural factor that you have to understand and you have to try to address, right, is this problem of land use and land capacity and all that.
But you have also a very big aspect of institution - is that you always had, traditionally, institutions that were pretty powerful, that allowed the herders to work with the agriculturist. Because you know what, there was actually a symbiosis that was organized around that - is that the farmers also need the cow to come to fertilize their field.
But it had to happen at a time where it was the convenient time. Right? And so things are changing. And they were in very elaborate local structure of negotiation, about timing and things and all that. And these has - like every of those community institution - has suffered a lot over the last 30 years. A lot have collapsed a lot, have disappeared, a lot of the elders are gone, the new people are not so inclined to spend time negotiating on those things with the others. So, you had - the problem of institution is still - and you need somehow to get the government back because the government needs to help now and replace those community structure that have not happened. So, a lot of the project we're about establishing those negotiating system back, but this time with facilitators of the government and things like that. So that you had the institution that was coming there, that you needed to have. And then finally you had to manage the actors because along that you had a lot of young Fulani or young agriculturists that were not too happy of their life as actors, as herders and all that, who were becoming and really pushing fights and, you know, we're different - and we, and so you had, and you had the Jihadist Imam and you had all that. So, you had actors there that you needed also, and that was more for the security people or for the political people to try to manage them. So, if you want this problem of land - needed structural factors about trying to deal with climate change, needed this institutional factors about the negotiating capacity for the herders, and it needed to deal with those younger people who didn't want to continue the same life, who wanted to be separated from that, and who wanted to have more political way, to the role of the Imams who were trying to recruit those young people for their own aim, and all that. You had to deal with those actors also. So, that's an example, I think of how you have to bring pretty comprehensive policies around the problem.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: That's a really fascinating example. And then something we can really, I think, use to think about it in a very concrete way. I wanted to pick up on what you mentioned. As you were talking the concept of horizontal inequality, because I think it's so prevalent and so fundamental to these issues of fragility and conflict. Would you be willing to talk a little bit more about horizontal inequality, how it manifests in various contexts where you worked and how to support development of solutions to that?
ALEXANDRE MARC: So, you know, I’m a big fan of Frances Stewart and who's basically the one who built up the theory, based on the work of Gurr and other people who were the first to understand how ethnic conflicts had their own dynamic, a bit different than other conflict. But she built up on that with a, with a precision, she was always trying to get, you know, data. And now as a result, we have this incredible body of data that demonstrate really that vertical inequality, which means individual based inequality don't really create conflict. It creates a lot of problems. It creates depressions among people. It creates sometimes more people going to violent gangs, but it's the horizontal inequality, in other words, when you can connect a group belonging to the fact that you are actually, it's all your group that is actually in an unequal position with the rest of the society this whole element that is a real predictor of conflict. Actually, when this happens is a very strong predictor of conflict. By the way, Frances Stewart was an advisor, I think on all the book I've worked on. So, she was always brought in as an advisor on the five or six study we did and books we did.
This issue is really important, especially now, where information circulate very rapidly. People know the conditions of others very rapidly. So, if anything, this - because of identity issue that has become very prevalent today - this idea of horizontal inequality, which is really the connection between identity issues and economic issues is actually very powerful. So, once a group start to realize that they're really being pushed out in a lower situation because of structural factors there, they tend to mobilize politically. Right? And that's not, has nothing to do with fragility. It happens in the United States, it happens others. The problem is that we've been focusing a lot for the groups that are at the lower level, and that believe that they should be more integrated and that can see how all the others that have the main identity characteristics suffer from the same element. That's very mobilizing.
The problem is the group that believe they should be on top and that the others are progressing. And that is creating huge frustration. And that also something you have to look into, very carefully. This happened for example, with the upper class in India and the Dalit, and the others that are progressing now, and you have this rigidification of the upper class in India. It's obviously the case of the small population of the whites with low education that start to see their status put into questions by, it has a lot, by the black, the Afro-American population. You have the problem with immigration - has a lot of those horizontal inequality integrated into it.
And so this is very difficult because it connect actually to politics of identity. So, it starts with a problem that is very economic, that if it's not caught on time becomes a problem that's totally identity. And when it's identity based, then the other becomes very quickly the evil. So, they don't want you, with your identity, what you are, what you have been, your history, they don't want to accept you because - as their equivalent. Or because of your history, those guys want to be like you, but they have zero right to be like you because of this element. So, when you enter into the field of identity politics, it becomes extremely difficult to manage before. So, what I'm that, what we're always saying is when you start to see this inequality building up or this inequality that it's people start to be conscious about it - that's where you have to address it very rapidly. Right? And sometimes it's not only a monetary inequality. That's what makes things complicated. Remember very well in the whole debate in Mali again, in the north of Mali, you know, the Tuaregs we're saying, you know, we're just, we're just really marginalized now. We've lost our camels. We've lost our trade routes. We've lost everything. And then the bombers are saying, yeah - but when you do health wealth survey, you see that those guys have actually more money than the people from the south. Actually, the poorest are in the south. So, there's more money there.
Two, two different concepts of inequality, right? One was inequality of opportunity. What they had to become is become smugglers. They had to become smugglers. They were making money with it. But by being smugglers only, they were losing a lot of what making their status, their position in the society and all that.
While the others were saying, well, no, you have more money than us. So, we don't need to do special policies to integrate you. So, this problem of a horizontal inequality is actually pretty complicated to try to deal with. And I remember all those issue about the different - why do you still need an inclusion policy for Tuareg in Mali as being absolutely quite impossible to have a discussion on that, that is not totally heated. You know, I nearly was fired from Mali there because we put a report saying that the actual Tuareg had elements of - in the camps and all that - they had elements of vulnerability, that the data that showed that the people of the South were poorer than the North were actually not explaining. And they said, you are political. You want to push those people. This is not acceptable. It didn't happen too often to me, but that's where I thought I was not going to be re-invited.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, Alexandre, you just made me think about, your example just made me think about how we do not have enough knowledge about psychology or just human behavior and human nature in general, because ultimately what you described was an inequality of dignity. Not necessarily the way we measure inequality, which is economic, right? They had the money, but they didn't have the dignity and the sense of self-worth, just like we discussed previously. So, I think we, we could keep talking and we will keep talking. I think we could keep talking for hours now. And I think this is a good point to end, but we want to announce that this is just the first of our conversations.
We have enjoyed this one thoroughly, and we are looking forward to the next ones where we're going to talk more about the seminal work that, that you did in Pathways for Peace, and the idea of forging a path for peace in this kind of world we live in. And then you have some very recent work on the geopolitics of fragility that is very exciting, and that will help us - the next episode in this little series - will help us transition to that kind of work. And we can't wait to hear more about how Russia and China are making prevention different and more difficult in a lot of cases. So, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. We absolutely enjoyed and loved this conversation and are looking forward to our future ones.
ALEXANDRE MARC: Thank you very much.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: And to all of our listeners, thank you so much for tuning into F-World: The Fragility Podcast. We hope you found our conversation interesting and inspiring. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and if you want to know more about us, about F-World, please visit our website f-world.org, or follow us on Twitter at @fworldpodcast. Thanks for listening!