by PETER LAWRENCE
The trajectory of much of sub-Saharan Africa over the past thirty years has been a standing rebuke to advocates of the free-market Washington Consensus. Successive waves of structural adjustment programmes, international conflict mediation, good-governance monitoring and the best efforts of numerous western-funded ngos appear to have done nothing to halt rural crisis, ethnic conflicts and spreading shanty towns. In the eyes of many critics, they have merely exacerbated the situation. Along with the impoverished narco-economies of Central America, the blight-struck ex-Soviet republics and the sprawling slums of Cairo, Kolkata or Jakarta, this is where globalization has most visibly piled up misery and destitution, just as it has accumulated undreamt-of wealth in Manhattan or Mayfair.
The popularizing works of Paul Collier—first The Bottom Billion [1] and now Wars, Guns and Votes [2]—are a robust rejoinder to such views . Collier is a former Director of Development Research at the World Bank and currently runs the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford. His research teams make use of the most advanced econometric techniques to identify the factors causing states to ‘fail’ and the policies that could make them succeed.
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