Wayne Moses Burke

Now here’s something worth writing about! I attended an event at the Brookings Institution yesterday entitled Weak and Failed States: What They Are, Why They Matter and What To Do About Them.

In addition to reflecting many of the sentiments that I long to hear more discussion of, they were announcing the release of the new Index of State Weakness in the Developing World — a policy tool to help policymakers understand the strengths and weaknesses of the 141 developing countries.

I will not pretend to speak at further length about the intentions of the Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development in devising this index, you can read that from the page itself. Instead, I will just talk about what interests me. After all, this is all about me, isn’t it.

First, a concern that I have about this tool:

• This is definitely a ranking and not a rating system. This means that there is no standard against which the countries are judged, but rather the scale that is used is determined solely by the data concerning the 141 countries in the survey. The bounds of the survey are thus set to equate with the best and worst of the group. Consequently, any sort of multi-year comparison becomes untenable due to the fact that the range itself will move each year (I have emailed Dr Rice about this to see if I have correctly understood this aspect of the index, and to determine if there is some rationale for it that I have missed).

That said, the index seems to be quite an accomplishment, and these are the important points that I took away from the event today:

Congressman Adam Smith (D-Wash)

• Opened the event with a very well presented speech about the importance of poverty alleviation to the military (what? I know - but seriously!). He sits on both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Armed Services Committee, where he chairs the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee. He says that no one knows the importance of poverty alleviation better than the special ops guys that are digging wells and providing basic services in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s nice to hear these things from both the military side and from the lips of a Congressman.
• He also spoke about the difficulty of drawing the correlation between global poverty alleviation and national security in the minds of the American people. This is a critical component, since as people come to understand how global poverty affects them personally, they will demand change from their elected representatives.
• Finally, his interest in poverty began when he travelled to Honduras with an NGO and had a real life experience with real life people who are in dire straights. I apologize for this if I offend anyone, but I am continually bothered by the politician’s (writ large) need to reference the plight of some solitary individual or talk about some ‘real-life’ experience that they have had that proves whatever point they’re trying to make. This was the weakest part of Congressman Smith’s speech.
• Oh! One more thing! In the Q&A, someone mentioned the argument that the connection between poverty and terrorism is tenuous (9-11 hijackers were all wealthy, etc…). Well, our man was havin’ none of that! He was adamant about the fact that we are fighting an ideological battle, and that alternative ideologies only gain a toe hold if the populace has no opportunities in their life. He makes a good point, although I feel like there is a naivete or an ignorance of some sort in it that I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on.

Dr. Stewart Patrick

• Before considering content, I have to say that I feel for this man who has been marked by the reverse of the name Patrick Stewart. Several times, his ‘friends’ on stage referred to him as Patrick or Dr. Stewart. He handled it well, although he and Dr. Rice did share a knowing glance once or twice when it happened. ‘Very entertaining’ would be an exaggeration, but nonetheless worth mentioning.
• Dr. Patrick covered the motivation and methodology for creating the index. This was a little dry (of necessity), but yielded some interesting aspects.
  • He mentioned Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, which it certainly seems that I should pick up and peruse.
  • He also mentioned the fact that their goal was to give a valuable policy tool, and that the entire project was oriented in that way.
  • They attempted to develop a reproducible methodology (admirable) and the data that they decided to rely upon is freely available, open source data that is consistently available across the span of countries.

Dr. Susan E. Rice

• Dr. Rice presented the data itself and explained the charts and graphs and color coding and gave some examples of how it might be used. Frankly, I found it very difficult to follow - not the speech mind you, but the mechanism of color coding and charting. I hope that they work with a good graphic designer or put it into a more readable format.I say this because their stated goal was to create something that would be a quick reference for policy makers with a built in ability to drill down to finer detail - to provide some level of granularity or explanation of the individuality of each state’s situation. If a policymaker is looking for information on a specific state, this opportunity is built in, but if one is looking for an overview or for specifics on a type of problem, it’s very difficult to keep all the colors in your head, while checking out the names of specific countries or reading the details of the numbers in the final analysis. See what you think for yourself.
  • Personally, I would start with a stacked bar chart for each country, with each of the four baskets assigned a color, and each of the five indicators within each basket assigned a shade of that color. Then a long bar chart could be created with all of the relevant data included in one easy to read location, that would also provide a quick, graphical overview of the status of all of the countries. Maybe I’ll do that. It shouldn’t take long (Ha! famous last words).

Q & A

The question and answer period drew out some additional interesting points and questions:

• In explaining some of the rationalization behind the decisions that led to the current state of the index, Dr. Patrick acknowledged that this was originally viewed as is the first step in a larger mission: to develop a weak states vs. threats comparison chart. That is, they were (or perhaps are) headed towards a means of legitimately evaluating the dangers posed by weak states through use of empirical evidence. This could be very exciting.
• Several people complimented them on the fact that they were making a statement about the importance of weak states (and the associated ills - poverty, poor education, poor healthcare, etc…) in terms of national security. I concur.
• And finally, there were a couple of questions related to using this index as a tool to measure the effectiveness of our current policies. The response to which was much to my liking: well-intentioned and a little vague. The results of the index allude to a need for a new system of dealing with problems the world over. This index highlights the interconnectedness of issues that we assume to be unrelated. Just as the Congressman was saying at the beginning, there is a strong tie between health and opportunities for people the world over and our own national security. There is a need for a unified approach in constructing solutions to these problems. While we may be making progress on dealing with HIV/AIDS, are we blinding ourselves to even larger issues in the countries that we’re helping by narrowing our focus to that one issue? These are big questions, but ones that need to be seriously considered by policymakers.