Thank you very much. I'm probably one of the few economists here, and you might ask yourself quite rightly,
what economists have got to contribute to the whole topic of war and peace.
So let me tell you, T.J., a little bit about what Paul and I have been doing for the last 10 years.
So, first of all, we started by studying war, not peace.
So what type of war? If you sort of look at how many wars there are, so this is just simply the number of wars.
And then this is the end of the Second World War. And this is sort of more or less up to today.
The Upsala prio dataset gives you the numbers.
And this very light coloured one colonial war.
So obviously they've sort of run out of from fashion because they know colonies any longer.
And then they're international wars are the dark ones. They're very, very few of those.
And the overwhelming majority of large scale violent conflict.
So we're looking at conflicts that cause a thousand battle related deaths a year.
These are military and civilian deaths. So civil war is the most common form of large scale violent conflict.
So if you're looking only at those civil wars, again, I'm just looking at the numbers here.
And then they were quite a few at the after the Second World War.
And then it's sort of built up and reached peak in 92.
And since the end of the Cold War, basically the world has become a safer place in terms of large scale, violent internal conflict.
And for those of you who are in particularly interested in Africa, it's sort of Miro's very much the sort of global development.
So, yes, the chance of the universities. Right. The world is now safer then than it previously was.
So is an economist. I can sort of give you those sort of numbers and data handling sort of what I do day in, day out.
So my research always centres on civil war. And we're looking at what causes the civil war.
Why do civil wars break out once they've broken out?
What is their duration and then what happens? War.
So let me just sit and talk you through those. There's a diff different issues.
So I'd start with the onset of civil war.
And Paul and I have come up with a model of civil war which aims to sort of estimate which factors make a country more prone to civil war than others.
And the method we are using is a global panel study.
So let me be quite clear about this, because this is important to me that you understand how we work.
So we basically borrow a method from medical science.
So, for example, you can study what determines what makes a person prone to having a heart attack.
So you can score people. You can sort of say heart attack, yes or no.
And then you can sort of see does this person look at does this person smoke?
What's the exercise regime? What's their cholesterol?
And then you can sort of calculate which factors are most important at determining the risk of a heart attack.
And this is exactly the same what we did with countries. So we've got all countries and we sort of look at did a war break heart, yes or no?
And then what sort of characteristics does this does this country have said this was them?
It's really a string of papers, but in particular this greed and grievance in civil war paper.
So these explanations of civil war onset. So what sort of characteristics might make a country more conflict prone?
We were sort of agnostic. We looked at economics as as one way of explaining it, because for us,
the key in organising and maintaining large scale violent conflict is that you have to recruit and maintain a private army.
And you need money for this and finances. So we sort of thought it must have something to do with economics.
But we also look at political science. Explanations to democratic countries have less of a proneness, choose large scale bomb conflict sociology.
So the difference between people in terms of religion or.
Message to your class. Does that make a difference in the probability of experiencing a war history if you've already had a civil war,
does that make you more conflict prone geography if you're more mountainous?
If you a country's population is dispersed in a particular way, maybe more concentrated or more dispersed.
Does that matter? So we do which predictive Gnostic and such are looking at what makes a country more conflict prone?
If I give you a few conclusions from this onset model, we find very little evidence that the things that we can measure as grievances.
So diversity in society, but that matters of religious or ethnic diversity matters.
Income inequality also does not matter to does not make a country more conflict prone on average.
Yeah, I'm stressing on average because we all know Uncle Joe, who should have turned 90 and smoked three packs a day and didn't have a heart attack.
So there can always be a case, you know, where this is different.
But this is on average economic factors are very important, sets the level, the growth and the structure of income that we found to be important.
So first of all, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have a civil war.
So poverty really matters. And so that's the level of income.
And if you've experienced a recent growth decline, then you're also more likely to have civil war.
And these might have something to do with what we call opportunity costs.
So you've got nothing to lose. You know, you might as well join a rebel army because there's very little other employment, formal employment possible.
And you can sort of gain from taking part in this in this in this civil war.
It might also give you access to education and might give you access to medical help.
There are all sorts of different reasons why people might want to join a civil war movement.
So the structure of income, what I mean here is sort of in particular,
we found that if your country is rich in natural resources, then you're very conflict prone.
So one example, of course, are the blood diamonds in Sierra Leone and Angola.
But there are other examples of timber in Liberia.
And think of the drugs in Afghanistan and Colombia,
which have been financing those those wars fought for a long time and said these are very important.
So these sort of sources of income are very important. Well, we also found was that if you have a large diaspora community,
your wars have more conflict prone because these diaspora communities, for example, the Tamils.
But also the Kurds. I mean, a lot of diaspora populations basically tax their population and send the money back home.
And the hard currency actually can buy you a lot of weapons.
And in particular, the case of the Tamil Tigers. That's very well documented. And this is very intuitive.
The past conflict makes the country more conflict prone.
So these are the cycles of violence that we heard and heard about just now.
The good news is if you can maintain the peace for longer, the risk of a new civil war breaking out declines.
So if you can manage to sort of stabilise the peace for longer and longer, longer, the better are the chances that it will continue to.
That the country will remain peaceful. So this was more on the on the onset of of civil war.
But what determines once the war is broken out, how long it lasts?
So, first of all,
we found that all these sort of factors that I've just gone through are not very important in determining the length of the civil war.
In fact, there are very few variables that we could really nail down a sort of at explaining the duration of civil war.
One thing that was quite important was natural resource prices. So if they, for example, go up, then the war continues for a bit longer.
Statistically speaking, that's all I wanted to say about the duration of war for the for the moment because.
I do not only study war, but I do want to study peace as well.
So from my point of view, there are two main post-conflict challenges.
One is the economic recovery. And one is the risk reduction of risk reduction in the sense of really peace building.
How do you maintain the peace? So I'm first, can you talk about the economic recovery?
And then I'm going to talk about the reduction of risk.
And of course, this this is the development and this the security.
And one cannot happen without the other.
So Kofi Annan's sort of no security, without development, no development, without security is certainly right.
But the instruments with which we obtain one or the other might not be the same.
But these two are interdependent. Said the economic recovery.
We first of all ask ourselves, is there a peace dividend after all, these countries are not spending all this much on killing each other any longer.
And if there is such a spontaneous recovery process, is there teep peace dividend?
And can the outside world help? Does aid increase the growth post-conflict?
And does policy improve growth post-conflict?
So if you're making reforms, these sort of windows of opportunity,
some was talking about these sort of drivers of of of change in a post-conflict world.
Do they actually help growth? And we were able to do an empirical analysis of post-conflict societies.
There are not many studies of this ilk about. And as Simon already alluded to it,
you are only really able to study this since the end of the Cold War because
it was just too overlaid with all sorts of ideological problems previously.
So I'm always facing a data problem in the sense that I can only look at relatively few post-conflict societies.
I do find for the ones that I can study that there is about one per cent extra growth per year.
And the good news is that you can, with aid, increase this extra growth.
Interestingly, the timing is important here. It happens three to seven years after the end of the conflict.
That aid can increase growth. But traditionally, this is not what donors have done.
Just think what donors typically do, that the conflict stops.
And there's been some sort of negotiated settlement and they all try come in with a lot of money.
But the economy is really, really on its knees.
So the absorptive capacity is just simply not there to sort of really use this aid in a growth enhancing away.
Traditionally, those have also gone out really quickly.
So it's sort of like they've ever won this country with a lot of aid and then the next disaster happens and they go into the next problem country.
So our message has been quite clear. Go in slowly, build it up slowly.
There is a deep dividend that you can reap an increase.
And if the peace is maintained for about 10 years, then this poor country is just like any other poor country.
And you can treat it like that as an aid donor.
But you're really in there for the long haul. We're not talking to use here.
We're talking 10 years. And that's been quite, quite a potent suggestion to policymakers.
And we sort of looked at we, again, were gnostic about it.
What sort of policies are particularly important?
Is it the type of monetary inflationary sort of policies that the post-conflict people from the IMF would advertise?
Or is it structural policies?
The World Bank knows you go after trick, get your trade right, or you end sort of saying you have to really work on social inclusion.
And that little bit of data I have for this is sort of tends to indicate that the growth
process post-conflict is particularly sensitive to improvements in social policies.
Probably no surprise to an audience like this. So this has been on economic recovery.
So it's really important to sort of because we know we reduce the risk of a new conflict breaking out when people have opportunities,
when they have employment, when they have some sort of prosperity or at least hope that it will get better.
One, when there is sort of growth in this sort of trickle through process. Okay.
But can you actually sort of can we actually say something about the reduction
of the risk through military expenditure that we just think for a minute?
The the risk of having a renewed conflict is really high.
You have about a 40 percent, 40 percent of all peace processes collapse within a decade.
And so my question, one of my questions will be, can you actually reduce this risk by spending on the army?
And important, I looked at this. And we actually find that if the country increases military spending and post-conflict,
that it does exactly the opposite, it doesn't bring the rest down. So the idea I deter the rebel movement,
either the old one or this or any new ones by sort of increasing my military expenditure, that simply doesn't work.
It's also really tragic that a lot of post conflict governments do exactly that.
They do increase their military expenditure.
It's obvious to you that during the war, military expenditure goes up, but after the war's ended, it does not go back to the pre-war level.
And these are extremely poor countries.
We're talking about countries that have enormous needs in terms of health and education and infrastructure needs.
So this is really sad and it does not deter new rebellions breaking out.
So what about U.N. peacekeeping or coalitions of the willing?
Do they actually help to prolong the peace? Said coalitions of the willing.
I have got no data on. But what I can. Lockhart and what.
What we didn't look at were U.N. peacekeeping operations.
So at the moment that there is very little that there are very few studies cross country on peace building efforts.
I'm sort of trying to think a little bit through what typically happens in post-conflict practise.
And this is a sort of very rough sketch. And people who do this in more detail might be unhappy with this.
But I sort of think there's some typically there's a negotiated settlement.
About half of all conflicts end with a negotiated settlement.
A quarter of one by the government outright and a quarter are one by rebels.
So negotiated settlements is the sort of most typical.
And two to two war. Then there is very often a light presence of peacekeeping troops and there's some effort of pump priming democracy.
And the external actors maintain the light footprint.
Then you have post-conflict elections and then you have democracy and you can withdraw everybody.
So this is sort of my caricature of what seems to happen in a lot of post-conflict situations.
So we started this statistically. So we had these 68 post-conflict episodes and as had 40 percent of all of these conflicts record with in the decade,
says a really important issue to sort of get this get get this right.
So what did we find from statistical results? So what prolongs the peace?
First of all, there is really no safe period in the first decade.
It's not that once you've had two years of peace, you're in a much safer place.
Or once you've had four years of peace, you're a much safer place.
You really. There's no such thing. You really have to sort of be in there for that for for the long haul.
Keep in mind that the U.N. typically budgets for two years for for peacekeeping operations.
So this is certainly not enough. So growth is very important.
So a stagnant economy has a bout of a 42 percent risk of having another conflict.
But if you manage 10 percent income growth might seem very high to you.
But places like Uganda have come close to this.
Then you really substantially reduce the risk of of having another conflict.
So it's from goes from 40 to 27 percent. Elections, elections are always really featured is incredibly important.
And unfortunately, I must say very often also as a departure date for peacekeeping troops to withdraw.
So what do the elections do? The post-conflict risk? Nothing.
Statistically speaking, nothing. Just before the election, the risk is slightly down.
And after the elections, the risk is slightly up. But overall, there's no effect.
I haven't got that many subsequent elections. But they don't seem to have a different effect either of the few that I have.
Peacekeeping rarely works. If we double expenditure for for a post-conflict country, this risk of 40 percent is reduced to 31 percent.
So let me just sort of come up with some sort of ideas on the post-conflict.
General, general ideas about the post-conflict challenges. They are very fragile.
We've heard that term from Simon already. But, you know, the statistics are very clear on this 40 percent or so high,
a high proportion of post-conflict peace efforts that collapse democracy and elections are obviously intrinsically desirable,
but they don't give you peace. So would you have come to the conclusion that you really need a package of military
and economic assistance and you need this for a considerable period of time,
10 years? This is this is what, you know, international agency judges should be looking at.
Of course, our results are exclusively statistical.
And you really have to apply this knowledge to the local situation.
And I think this is very often being misunderstood. So, for example, we get military people who sort of come and sort of say to us,
you've got these models where you can predict that the peace will break down or that a conflict breaks out.
Countries sort of just give us an estimate of this in this country.
And I'm always sort of aghast. You know, people want to use our model line.
This, of course, I can crank the data through this, but it isn't a particularly useful way of.
It's not an early warning system. And you know what? Through your foreign office and all your other sort of channels of information,
you should be much better placed to sort of find out about these things than using a relatively
crass and crude method of of of conflict prediction and the call you have for a model.
So it's not very good about predicting the individuals countries risk.
Yeah. For example, if you wanted to find about your heart attack risk,
you don't go through this sort of big public health model because you know much more about that.
It's much more detailed information. You know, you know, whether your brother has died of a heart attack, you know the family history.
You'd know an awful lot more things than this sort of big mortal could sort of ever look at.
But for public health prescriptions, the model,
the heart attack model that I sort of laid out is very important because then you can sort of decide as a public policymaker,
how much money do I want to earmark towards reducing smoking and other visibly other health initiatives?
And this is exactly how I think people have to sort of see the statistical efforts that we're pursuing.
It does inform your agencies like the World Bank or defeat to whoever is interested in it to sort of see it.
Is there a peace dividend on average? You. Do we have to treat post-conflict countries differently?
Because you might laugh about this, but until relatively recently, the World Bank did not make allowances for post-conflict countries.
They were just treated like other poor countries. There were no special countries, country packages for them.
So to my mind, these are going to be my concluding remarks on such a security and development is the problem of failing states.
Everybody's got different names for these. So some people call them are failing, some fragile.
Some call them low income countries under stress, like US countries.
That's the World Bank. Countries in difficult partnerships.
But I think we all know sort of what it means.
And if I just sort of come up what sort of very broad definition these are countries that are not able to do basic things for their citizens.
So, for example, they are unable to provide security to to their citizens and they're not able to end or they're not able to provide public goods.
What do I mean by that said? These are they're not able to provide a framework that.
And Abels people to lift themselves out of poverty.
So these people who live in failing states are trapped in this cycle of poverty, underdevelopment and insecurity.
And this is an awful lot of people, because when you look at these sort of countries and again,
every agency is different, agency defines some differently.
Most development agencies never publish a list because, you know, Haiti and Angola obviously in there.
But what about Papua New Guinea?
Is that in or out?
Soren's who they don't want to have those sort of public discussions about it and they don't want to help sort of blacklists of of countries.
But about one billion people in this world live in these failing states.
And I've done some sort of statistical analysis on these states. And if we look at the countries that are low income,
so failing states in this definition sort of includes countries that are providing really bad policies like Belarus and and a couple of other places,
but they're actually not low income. So if you only look at the low income countries, then seven percent of the world's population live in those.
So that's the Haiti's an Angola's. But 15 percent of the world's poor live in those countries.
And over the last 15 years, they've had either zero growth or slightly negative growth rate.
So they are stagnant. And think of what happened to the other countries that have got a lot of poor people like India and China in the last 15 years.
Zoom. Yeah. They've zoomed ahead. So this is sort of decoupling effect is a divergence effect in the in the in the global economy,
where people who live in the failing states and in particular ones in the in the in the very low income ones,
they are sort of lagging further and further behind.
And if this trend continues, we estimate that about 30 percent of the world's poor are going to live in these countries.
And so on the topic of building political will, it's just a humanitarian concern.
You know, we we we cannot allow that these countries disconnect that much from being from the worlds from the rest of the world's development.
So since we economists, we've also put sort of a high price tag on this.
So we think that it costs the world about this at two hundred and seventy billion U.S. dollars.
Sorry, I forgot the dollar sign there per year. So these are the costs that are just generated by failing states.
What are these costs, you might ask yourself? Well, short war causes a lot of costs.
People get killed, but people don't only get killed. That also get you know, they have disabilities, which affects their sort of future lives.
You're losing income. But you're also causing poverty.
So the costs of war and poverty in the country. That's already quite a large cost.
But these costs also spill-over into the region.
Think of all the refugees and all the problems that bring this sort of typically they just people just walk across the border.
So it's poor countries like Pakistan that have had to cope with millions of Afghani refugees over the years.
So the highest. The overwhelming part of the of these costs of state failure are two countries in the region.
And I think that actually raises a big and uncomfortable issues about the sovereignty of nations.
So if their problems spill-over into the region and we didn't even try and attempt to look at the costs through the world,
through drugs, because they're basically do come from very,
very few places that are not Colombia and in Afghanistan, where a large parts of the country are not within,
where the state monopoly of violence is sort of broken down. And this is where the drugs are produced.
You get human trafficking, you get huge migration, forced migration from from those areas.
Worldwide, I say you've got enormous sort of spill-over cost.
And how does. Compared to the assistance that the world is at the moment giving to countries,
so aid to these countries is about 80 billion U.S. dollars at moment per year.
And even if donor countries fulfil their U.N. target of giving point seven percent of their annual income to to development aid,
then at the moment this is only a few countries that actually do this, like Norway and Sweden and the Netherlands.
Canada's sort of quite close to that.
But anyhow, if if we don't a country did this than we had, then we would have one hundred and thirty billion U.S. dollars.
You say it's nowhere near, you know, the sort of cost, just as a comparison.
What state failure costs the world? So we really have to tackle this issue because unless we break this cycle of sick development.
And and while underdevelopment and large scale violent conflict, these countries are going to fall further and further behind.
And I'll stop that. Thank you.