Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Welcome to the first edition of Trend Lines, a podcast on global politics brought to you by World Politics Review. My name is Peter Durrie. 0:14 In the second half of the show, Ian Quick joins us to talk about failed approaches to federal states and why realistic expectations and local perspectives are essential to state building. 0:24 But first, I'm joined by World Politics Review's Editor-in-Chief, Judah Grunstein, to talk about this week's main stories in global politics. 0:31 One of this year's major events in international politics, the climate conference, is currently ongoing in Paris, uh, a city still under the impression of a devastating terrorist attack in, on November 13. 0:42 Judah, you are talking to me from Paris. How are these two events coming together? What is the feeling on the streets? 0:48 Well, it's, it's an interesting juxtaposition of, uh, of these, this sort of immediate threat of the, the terror attack and this long-term, long-term threat of climate change. 1:01 Um, one thing that was, uh, very striking, uh, Sunday and especially Monday was that, uh, all sorts of traffic in Paris was diverted and major axes were closed to circulation so that all of the heads of state and heads of government could get to and from, uh, various side meetings and the actual conference and summit. 1:25 Um, and so in a city where already people are, are, are very much, uh, on alert, uh, where sirens are more frequently heard than previously and cause more anxiety, and where there's already almost, not, not a feeling of a ghost town, but the streets are a little, uh, a little more empty and, and the, the sidewalk cafes are a little less crowded. 1:51 On Sunday and Monday, you had, uh, uh, parts of the city that, uh, that, uh, were almost closed down. One of the things that always strikes me about, uh, climate change and global warming 2:05 is this, this, this aspect of human nature where we 2:12 respond very, uh, quickly and clear- clearly to immediate threats, uh, but long-term threats that we see coming but that are far off, uh, are, are further off, uh, 2:25 we even, even though the threat might be greater and there's more urgency, uh, we tend to, uh, delay our reaction, and it's harder to, to generate the momentum and the incentive necessary, uh, to create, uh, the urgency to act. 2:40 And, uh, and, and, and so this conference, uh, where already the, the, the, the criteria for success have been defined in such a way that it might not even meet the challenge, uh, in a way, uh, that will actually have a, a serious impact, uh, to prevent, uh, the kind of devastating global warming, uh, that's being predicted, uh, i- is an example of, uh, of, of that kind of difficulty, uh, to, to generate, uh, a response to a long-term threat. 3:13 Uh, one of the fixtures of earlier climate conferences was always a quite, uh, massive protest by, uh, civil society groups and activist groups. 3:22 And now, uh, in the, in the shadow of the terrorist attacks in, from, in November, um, the French government has basically, uh, uh, un- has basically closed all avenues for protest, uh, because it says the security risks are too high. 3:37 Do you feel that... 3:38 Do you think that the absence of activists, of, uh, street protesters, uh, will diminish the will to, for, for meaningful, um, uh, uh, meaningful reform on the, on the climate change ag- agenda, or will it limit the impact, um, that the negotiations, negotiations have? 3:59 I personally don't. Uh, it's interesting that, uh, it's, i- i- 4:04 it's a good point, uh, in, in the sense that, uh, these, these global summits, whether it's climate change or the, the G7 group, um, or at, at various times when the WTO had negotiating rounds for, uh, free trade agreements and global trade, uh, this kind of, uh, the, the kind of vibrant, uh, and sometimes violent protests, um, or, or protests that degenerated into violence or were, were, uh, provoked into violence, uh, have always been, um, a very, uh, a, 4:40 a, a very important aspect to show that civil society and people, not just diplomats, but people are concerned about this. 4:48 Um, I personally don't think that the lack of protest will have a big impact on the outcome of the summit, where the kind of horse trading that is going on, um, has, has more to do with, uh, various nations' strategic interests as they're perceived by heads of state and heads of government. 5:11 Uh, the kind of, the kind of agreement, uh, that a lot of activists are calling for, which would be, uh, a mandatory agreement, uh, where countries were obligated to meet their commitments, um, commitments that actually meet the, the goal of, uh, limiting global warming to two degrees centigrade. 5:34 Um, that kind of deal is not gonna come out of, of the conference in all likelihood, uh, and it wouldn't have even if there had been protest. 5:43 In, in the meantime, uh, the, the kind of global media attention that goes to these kind of, uh, conferences, uh, sort of pulls the limelight away from pretty major stories that are happening elsewhere. 5:59 Um, it's, it's always somewhat hard to, uh, to get Africa Into the spotlight in some ways. 6:07 That's changing recently because of the, the focus in terms of Chinese investment, and very interestingly, uh, Xi Jinping, the, the, the ch- president of China, i- went directly from the climate change talks to Africa, uh, to a summit, a China-Africa summit, uh, where he has apparently promised sixty billion in investments in Africa. 6:29 So Africa is becoming more and more of a global focus, uh, for policymakers and, uh, and investors, uh, and business. 6:38 Uh, but again, the, the major, the major problem, uh, that, uh, many countries in the continent, on the continent have is this question of stability, uh, 6:51 open liberal systems that allow for dissent and that allow for, uh, healthy policy discussions that, uh, that manage to create positive investment climates while also, uh, creating open, uh, political systems. 7:08 One particularly, uh, that's been through a transition recently is Burkina Faso, uh, where a little over a year ago, if I'm not mistaken, uh, Blaise Compaore, who was a, a long time, uh, strong man in, in the country, was driven out of power by a combination of, uh, popular protests and, uh, probably internal defections in the regime. 7:35 I know you traveled there, and you did reporting from there and wrote a, a great feature article for us on, uh, the, the transition from the transitional government to an election and, and the, uh, an elected president, which just took place Sunday. 7:51 So what are your impressions about the process between, uh, the, the fall of Compaore and, uh, and the, the election Sunday and its outcome? So I think it's quite interesting. 8:04 The elections, um, were, uh, deci- were decided in the first round. 8:09 Um, so Burkina Faso has a two-round electoral system, and this is in itself quite, uh, quite astonishing that after, um, after, uh, t- almost thirty years, uh, of one guy being at the top, you have, uh, you have a pretty decisive electoral win by one of the candidates. 8:27 And, uh, that candidate, his name is Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, and the interesting thing about him is that he was a very senior figure in the former Compaore regime. He was prime minister. 8:38 He was, he had, uh, different ministerial p-portfolios under him. And he only defected from the ruling party 8:46 with, uh, quite a few followers, uh, about two years ago, so about one year before Compaore, uh, then ultimately fell. 8:55 And, uh, his main challenger in these elections, uh, he called, uh, Kaboré's candidature, um, and I fi- I find this quite fitting, he called it continuity through change, um, basically say, arguing that Kaboré, Kaboré b- stands for the same system, uh, that, uh, Compaore represented. 9:17 Also, um, the, uh, members of, uh, Kaboré's party, uh, the MPP, uh, they are mostly people who have changed allegiances from the former ruling party, the CDP, um, to his new party. 9:31 So I have very, very little hope, uh, that this will mean rapid change or reform in Burkina Faso. It's, uh, it's interesting because it, it shows, uh, a couple things. The 9:46 f- that first of all, uh, real regime change, even from within, is extremely difficult, uh, because the power networks always remain in place or usually do, and we've seen similar things, for instance, in Egypt, even though there was a one-year interlude. 10:02 Um, and the other thing is that oftentimes what brings down the power structure or the figure at the head of the power structure is not a real ground shift underneath but internal defections, in this case, uh, Kaboré, who, uh, probably saw the, the writing on the wall that Compaore was going to try to, uh, seek a third term and wanted his moment in the, in the seat of power and, and that might have been driving his, his decision to, to leave the party the year before, uh, Compaore fell. 10:36 Oh, almost, almost certainly. 10:38 I, I even, I interviewed some members of his party, and, uh, because you said he, he wanted his turn in the seat of power, they-- one of, uh, the leader of his youth organization, he explicitly used the term, uh, when, when we talked about the old party, about the old ruling party, the CDP, he said, "Well, those guys, uh, they didn't give me my turn in the sun." 10:59 [laughs] He said this word for word. So one of the main, uh, drivers of this defection, um, wasn't really any differences over policy. 11:08 You could say this, this is kind of systematic political corruption, um, that took place in Burkina Faso and will continue to take place, uh, if, if history is any, any guide in that regard. 11:19 So but of course, corruption is not only an issue in Burkina Faso. 11:23 Uh, you ha- you published recently on World Politics Review a very interesting interview with Daniel Gros, the director of the Center for European Poli- Policy Studies in Brussels, on Italy's lack of political will to tackle corruption. 11:36 Uh, would you say that there are parallels between dynamics of corruption in Italy and other countries like Burkina Faso? 11:42 In Italy, the, the corruption takes place more at the local level of government, uh, from what Daniel Gros said in, in his interview. 11:50 Uh, but one of the reasons why we, we wanted to cover corruption in Italy and corruption in general, uh, because the, the interview with Daniel Gros is part of an ongoing series that we have of interviews on corruption and how it is driving political events around the world in various countries. 12:11 Um- Very recently in Guatemala, there was a corruption scandal that actually brought down not only the vice president, but the president of the country. The day before he was set to leave office, he was forced to resign 12:28 and stand trial, and he's under arrest now for an enormous corruption scandal that created such huge political outrage and public outrage that it brought down the government. 12:40 One of the reasons why we identified corruption as an issue that we want to track and cover regularly 12:48 is because we believe that in the current climate where you have generally low growth, if not recession in many countries, where the commodity cycle is now on the bust end of the cycle after a decade of boom. 13:06 And so in our estimation, over the course of the next year or so, we're going to be seeing more and more corruption scandals that actually create political events and that actually change the landscape of 13:23 domestic politics. Corruption is not just a developing world problem. It's not just a problem of the global south that corruption occurs in Western democracies. 13:36 So this is going to be an issue that we'll be following over the course of the next 12 months, 18 months pretty closely. 13:44 And unfortunately, there's no shortage of corruption scandals and corruption-driven political events to cover. And you mentioned that in Guatemala, this 13:58 one corruption scandal brought about considerable political upheaval. And you have another piece up this week where Frida Giddes makes the argument that among other things, corruption is also one of the 14:13 aspects of daily life that has people a bit disillusioned with the many left-leaning governments in the region. And 14:26 now you have in Argentina, you have a right-wing politician and a right-leaning politician, Mauricio Macri, who won the presidential race. 14:35 And in the article, Frida Giddes makes the argument that you may have actually a broad political shift to the other side of the political spectrum. Well, to begin with, in terms of the role of corruption 14:52 and then work our way back, corruption takes root especially in long-lasting political systems, political governments. 15:09 So when you have a regime that's in power, the longer it's in power, the more time corruption has to take root, the more the channels are developed, the more the relationships and the networks are developed so that it becomes a vicious cycle. 15:24 And one of the big stories in Latin America and especially South America over the last 15 or so years is this era of leftist governments 15:41 being elected into office. It starts with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and then you also have in Brazil with Lula da Silva an alternate model. 15:54 And this is the real story in South America over the last 15 years, these two models of leftist governance. Both of them made a priority of reducing poverty and with good success. 16:11 The difference is that the Lula model is a little more business-friendly. It's a little less revolutionary and more reformist and a little more stable and sustainable. 16:24 The Chavez model was much more revolutionary, much more aggressive, much more rhetorically combative in terms of Venezuela's relationship with the United States in particular. 16:42 And in terms of the poverty reduction, a lot of it was based on commodities and especially oil revenue subsidizing social welfare spending, 16:58 often in the form of handouts. So you have these two models of leftist government over the last 15 years. Argentina was sort of an in-between case, and Chile is much more in the Brazil camp. 17:15 The big problem with the Chavez model has always had to do with its relationship to political liberalism and to open dissent. It's become increasingly authoritarian. 17:27 It's this sort of creeping authoritarianism with constitutional reforms to allow for multiple terms where before there were always term limits 17:38 in Latin America, specifically because of the region's past history of dictatorial and authoritarian regimes. 17:49 And so, again, for these past 15 years, there's been a very strong state presence in the economy, a state intervention to redistribute wealth with a lot of good success in terms of poverty reduction. 18:03 Argentina is a particular case because Argentinian politics Are particularly, uh, personality-based, um, and, and not terribly coherent in, in some ways. 18:18 But at any rate, the Kirchners, and especially, uh, Cristina Fernández Kirchner, uh, was certainly more in the line of, uh, the, the Chávez model than anything else. 18:28 Um, in some ways, like all things, the pendulum swings. Uh, 18:33 the-- it, it's alm-- in some ways, it's almost easier to help bring people out of extreme poverty than it is to move people from, uh, lower middle class into the middle class or from poverty into the middle class. 18:48 And the problem with the Chávez model is that it te- has tended to stifle growth. Uh, and that was, that was, uh, that was, uh, in some ways obscured by the commodities boom. 19:02 Um, Brazil too, though, at this point is, is facing recession as well, so, uh, it, it's really a region-wide, uh, problem in terms of growth right now. But, uh, people, people also, as they have more, they expect more. 19:17 And one of the things they want is a say in, uh, a political say in terms of what, what, what policies are being implemented. 19:25 Um, uh, the, the Kirch- the, the Kirchner model in Argentina, uh, was also very combati- combative, very populist and, uh, and in some ways, um, not terribly responsive to various constituencies. 19:41 Uh, Venezuela is, uh, uh, having general elections this weekend on Sunday for, for parliament. And there too, it will be a major indicator of whether Argentina is a real bellwether or whether it is a, uh, uh, an outlier. 19:59 It looks like, um, that today we're, we're, we're seeing the beginning of the end or the beginning of the, the, the pendulum shift, in some ways due to the successes of 20:10 these leftist governments, in some ways due to the excesses, and in some ways due to their f- their failings. Thank you very much for joining me today. It's been a great pleasure. 20:21 [upbeat music] In this week's report, I talk with Ian Quick, author of Follies in Fragile States and founder of the consultancy Rethink Fragility. 20:37 World Politics Review this week published an in-depth feature by Ian on traditional approaches to fragile states, how they have let down both the international community as well as local populations, and what a better, more sane solution could look like for countries like the DR Congo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 20:54 That piece is titled Redefining Success: New Approaches to Engaging with Fragile States. And in this segment, Ian explores some of the issues raised in it further. [upbeat music] My name's, uh, Ian Quick. 21:11 I'm a management consultant. Uh, I work with public agencies, intergovernmental agencies, uh, to help them work smarter and more effectively in fragile states. 21:22 A fragile state, uh, can, can roughly be defined as, as one that is, uh, unwilling or unable to fulfill its, its core functions internally. 21:33 And by core functions, in particular, its basic security and, and political functions such that there is widespread violence or, or opposition or contestation of, of the government's role in that country. 21:47 [upbeat music] In Iraq, heavy fighting in the north as Kurdish Peshmerga forces hold the front lines against Islamic- According to some definitions, and each 21:59 institution that, um, has business in this sort of context has its own criteria, uh, it often seems. 22:06 For example, the Organization for Economic Coop- Cooperation and Development, by its definitions, there's around forty, um, which is quite a long list, and it includes places that I would not necessarily, uh, regard as at imminent risk of, of serious violence or of, of political collapse. 22:25 Another definition, um, to my mind the clearest definition are those where there has been, um, international security intervention, um, which provides you with a very clear indication that something has gone very badly wrong. 22:38 And by that definition, you have, uh, around, 22:43 um, fifteen peacekeeping missions deployed worldwide, uh, in addition to another half dozen so-called political missions where you have a, a very extensive civilian presence to, uh, to prop up the situation. 22:57 [upbeat music] But this is not the first time the United Nations mission in Mali has been targeted by groups linked to Al-Qaeda. [gunshots] It's found it difficult to secure this remote and lawless region. 23:12 The term agile state is of, of somewhat limited, um, analytic merits, uh, but it's of enormous practical importance, um, because it 23:25 influences the way that, uh, international organizations and, and bilateral aid works in, in particular countries. 23:34 In the, the clearest cut cases, it tends to denote a very interventionist posture, this idea that, um, these are countries that need to be stabilized and, uh, reshaped into, into a way that, 23:52 uh, promises, um, a sort of, uh, self-sufficiency. You know, the, the ability to, to muddle along without the need for, for firefighting by international security actors. 24:04 [upbeat music] The Niger Delta has some of the biggest oil fields in the world. 24:10 It's a dangerous place of guns and poverty where people need development and the environment is heavily polluted from fifty years of living with- 24:19 The, the clearer, the clearer cut or the, or the better-known cases, um, are places like, uh, Iraq most prominently, of course, at the moment, or Syria or Somalia. Um, the 24:32 current range of UN peacekeeping operations across sub-Saharan Africa, including, um, Democratic Republic of the Congo, states that have previously hosted an intervention of that nature, um, such as, as Burundi, which is currently in, in quite a fragile situation. 24:48 The ones that are, that are less well-known are or are, or are more contested even on which, on which perspectives differ are, are places like Pakistan. 24:58 Um, it's places like Nigeria, which, uh, are broadly functioning but still have very serious unresolved, um, uh, political and governance issues. Broadly speaking, um, 25:15 at the end of the Cold War, you have a much greater space, um, for, for intervention in countries that are experiencing serious instability or violence. 25:29 Um, and you have a, a seeming profusion of these sort of cases as the, as the global geopolitics shift. Now, that took a f- a little while to evolve into this, this conceptual, uh, apparatus, um, of, of fragility. 25:46 And it's, it's really towards the end of the 1990s that you have a very strong turn to, uh, in- institutions as the, the solution or the way out of political and, and security instability. 26:01 So within the space of a few years, um, between 1999 and really 2002, 2003, you have, um, 26:11 very rapid multiplication of state-building interventions as, as the solution to, to political and security crisis. So that's when I would say the, the rubber hit the road in a practical sense. 26:24 When you start deploying peacekeeping missions with institution building mandates, when everyone starts tracking the proportion of their development assistance that's going to so-called fragile states. 26:37 One of the great successes over the past decade has been, uh, a much better understanding, mutual understanding and set of protocols between Department of Defense and USAID on how to respond to natural disasters. 26:51 We now need to do that for conflict, for fragility upstream, and what I hear a lot from our colleagues at Department of Defense is, "Yeah, that's a priority." 27:06 The, the unreconstructed or the, the, the purest form [chuckles] of these goals we can find in, uh, tools developed by think tanks and by, uh, aid agencies and governmental institutions about, mm, 12, 15 years ago. 27:24 And what these looked like were sort of an ideal type, uh, of a high-functioning state mapping out the functions that it was supposed to play. And these include, um, external security, internal security, 27:42 um, judicial functions for pacific settlement of disputes. They include economic regulation. Uh, they include basic social services. And, and 27:53 opinions differed as to what exactly should be on that list, and some of them are extraordinarily long. The tools that a-- that have been used to, to, to close that gap, and this is a 28:07 approach of which I'm highly critical, can, can roughly be divided in, in two ways. The first is the, the stabilizing, um, toolkit, for lack of a better word. 28:18 These, this is the hard security intervention and international mediation that tries to, uh, tamp down violence and create space for a, a longer term solution. 28:31 And the, the longer term toolkit, up until very recently, uh, has been heavily focused on institution building. So 28:39 finding ways to rapidly ramp up the capacity of the, the institutions in the target country that perform those larger functions that I just outlined. 28:52 This is things like security sector reform to build higher functioning armies and police. It is, uh, reinforcement of the rule of law, quote unquote, uh, meaning the judicial and corrections and again, police apparatus. 29:08 Uh, and it's work on core political institutions, um. Somalia's recovery has been a priority for the international community. That's according to UN Chief Ban Ki-moon. 29:20 He was speaking at a high-level meeting on Somalia at the UN. Somalia has made a steady progress in building a federal democratic state. These are important steps, but the momentum must be sustained. 29:35 The problem is that it's fundamentally ahistorical because there is a, a limit to the amount of, uh, of change, of, of flux that, uh, can be tolerated by a society at any given time. 29:50 We simply can't rip up every single institution, uh, simultaneously and, and rebuild them. Um, and it is, is reminiscent in this regard of the very early days of international development assistance. 30:05 If we go back to the 1950s, uh, it seems comical to read this now, but it was very confidently asserted by many of the, the leading experts at that time that the 30:18 constraint for poor countries to become rich countries was simply capital investment. 30:24 Uh, that if you pumped in money in the right places to relieve that constraint, they would achieve something that was often called takeoff speed, and then, and then after that point, no further intervention would be needed. 30:36 Now It was a strange idea at the time, um, because it disregarded, give or take, a thousand years of economic history in, in rich countries. And I, I had the same objection to the, the 30:53 state-building paradigm, if I can call it that, that emerged fifteen or twenty years ago. It is premised on a very misleading idea of how social and political institutions actually evolve. 31:08 And one of the arguments or one of the, uh, uh, one of the 31:13 schools of thought that I reference in, in the article, which has thought about this in a much more systematic way, which came under the heading New Institutional Economics, was to look at the institutional history of, of countries that do have stable, high-functioning institutions. 31:29 And, and the big takeaway of that, uh, quite careful and quite meticulous historical study if, if one, if one reads it, is that it's a punctuated equilibrium. 31:43 It is a, a process of fairly slow and not linear change. And, and the reason for that is, is quite simple, that 31:52 anytime you shift the, the fundamental rules of the political game, there is a lot at stake, and there is consequently resistance. So it tends to be a process of elites who, who stand to lose coming to 32:07 agreement only when they're pushed on a relatively minor adjustment of the rules. That status quo continues for a while until pressure builds up, and then there's another adjustment. 32:19 And it's, it's very difficult to find examples of successful root-and-branch reform, um, of the type that seems to be contemplated in the, in the crudest forms of, of state-building intervention. 32:33 So to try and collapse that timeframe to two or three or four years in a, in a situation like a Congo or an Afghanistan is, um, [inhales] is very strange actually. Um, it's, uh, almost breathtaking in its naivety. 32:49 [upbeat music] Chaotic scenes in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the government takes steps that could delay elections for years. Tires burn on the streets of Goma. 33:04 People are under arrest amid outcry over the government's decision to delay a vote on proposed changes to election laws. Congo I know very, very well. 33:16 Uh, I worked there for a number of years and I'm, I'm still quite engaged. And this is a country that has hosted a UN peacekeeping mission now for fifteen years, uh, with no 33:30 signal really that, uh, that will cease in the immediate or even medium term. And after that length of time, [lip smacks] um, it's, it's striking that the 33:45 model that I outlined is, is applied in such an unadulterated way. So the stabilization strategy that, uh, was employed there, um, during the period I worked there, and this is roughly 2008 to 2012, uh, 34:01 was essentially an injection of, of resources into core state institution. And the fundamental flaw in that approach was that, uh, 34:13 it disregarded what the local population, um, were really interested in or, or afraid of. 34:21 And the reason for that is a nearly century-long history of, uh, utter and complete misgovernance in, in the eastern part of the, of the Congo, from the Belgian... notoriously brutal Belgian colonial regime through a 34:37 very hasty and, uh, unplanned independence that, uh, led almost immediately into chaos, La Pagaille, as the, as it was called there, the Shambles. 34:48 Uh, and then, uh, a weak yet dictatorial government, and then a series of major wars. 34:54 So the idea that, uh, the local population would welcome this sort of rapid expansion of the, the resources of the central government on the ground was, was clearly misguided. 35:07 And in fact, it was resisted and often resisted violently, uh, for the plain reason that the only experience of the local population, in most cases, with government was a very negative experience. It was, uh, extortion. 35:22 It was, uh, outright, uh, ethnic violence in some cases. It was land grabs. And to, uh, 35:34 fail to, uh, recognize and deal with that lived reality, to project our own idea of, of what state institutions did and of, uh, the s- the, their symbolic role into that very different context was... 35:51 It was deeply misguided, but it was also amazingly naive. What's critical at this point is really to redefine what good in this context looks like. What is a viable outcome that we should be working towards? 36:07 A good outcome would be something like, uh, Nigeria and not something like Switzerland. And there are, is a number of, there are a number of pieces of useful thinking out there on this. 36:21 So if I, if I stick with the DRC case, the approach that I described was succeeded by one with, with very in-depth local analysis in which, um, some very good analysts did some very granular, 36:34 um, and very ethnographic in, in style and historically informed analysis of what was really going on in these localities. 36:43 In what ways had the government failed from the perspective of those communities, and what, from their point of view, would, uh, would a better, uh, outcome look like? 36:52 And that is intended to inform what intern-international engagement looks like. The problem here, uh, 37:01 all that analytic work in this particular case, uh, has, has largely been done, and it's quite good, but it's stuck at the political level. So the, the problem really is the, 37:13 the broader normative and policy discourse has not really caught up with the reality that these older approaches have not been working. We don't really know the, uh, possible consequences of 37:30 intervening in, uh, local politics. And I analogize this to, uh, pre-modern medicine, where we have a, uh, a very rudimentary understanding of what's going on in there. 37:44 And if we're applying leeches or drilling into skulls or excising bile and humors, as they used to say, uh, we could be proceeding on, on quite the wrong assumptions a lot of the time. 37:57 And in very poor societies and in societies where there is not a, um, very good control over armed violence, that can lead to very, very negative consequences. 38:11 So the question is, do we, do we pin all our hopes on that institutional work, um, when it just-- it does not seem like it can carry the weight that has been placed upon it? 38:24 Or do we set that in a longer timeframe with more modest ambitions, um, and 38:31 instead of that broad spectrum approach, take a, a diagnostic or problem-solving approach of finding where the constraints are at any given point in time. 38:40 What is driving violence now at this moment, fixing that, waiting for, um, the dust to settle, so to speak, and then moving on to the next major problem. Given the very poor track record with the, uh, 38:57 broad spectrum approach, that to me is, is, is really the only ethical, um, approach to intervention in these contexts, um, simply from a, from a do no harm standpoint. My thanks to Ian for sharing these insights. 39:11 Also, I want to thank you for listening to our first episode. Please be sure to subscribe to Trendlines in your podcast app of choice. We are not yet on iTunes, but we will be in a few days. 39:20 In the meantime, you can find the feed to subscribe on worldpoliticsreview.com, which is also the home, uh, to articles on all the topics we spoke about today and many more. 39:30 This show was produced and presented by me, Peter Durrie. You can follow me on Twitter at, at Peter Durrie, P-E-T-E-R D-U-R-R-I-E, and you can follow World Politics Review at, at W-P Review. 39:41 The additional audio in the report was sourced from CCTV, Al Jazeera English, The Guardian, Devex, The Book Archive, and Reuters. 39:49 Links to all the original sources, as well as relevant articles to our discussion can be found in the show notes, which are also on worldpoliticsreview.com. 39:57 Thank you for listening, and please join us next week for the next episode of Trendlines. [outro jingle]
