Notes on 'The Coming Anarchy' by Robert D. Kaplan

In interviewing a government minister, Kaplan uses the example of Sierra Leone as being "part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is more significant than any coup" (251)

Kaplan speculates "on what the political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century" and finds the answer in West African cities which, he says, give "an eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future" (251) 

The minister he interviews argues that the change from village life to city dwelling is a source of crime,  becuase the communal living in the former is not replicable in the latter.  Eval: is this empirically true/valid? 

the minister argues that West African cities, unlike the North African cities, lack a "social anchor", the "superficial Islam and superficial Christianity" are "undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power" (251)

Kaplan argues that rural polygamy when "translated into an urban environmental [results in] loose family structures [which are] largely responsible for the world's highest birth rates and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent" (251), a problem worsed by urbanisation, which is driven be deforestation and desertification
note: is this being cavelier with the facts, a broad-brush analysis? surely there are more complicated cause for the spread of the HIV virus

A premonition of the future

"West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges are the real 'strategic' danger" (262) note: A link to Merton's strain theory?
 - Kaplan asserts that these issues will come to confront the West

"There is no other place on the planet where political maps are so deceptive - where, in fact, they tell such lies - as in West Africa" (252)
- he gives the example of Sierra Leone which, he asserts, falls short of being an "organised nation-state", lacking as it does "functional sovereignity" (p.252) - only parts of country are under government control, and even those not all of the time

Kaplan arguesthat "Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occuring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease and the growing pervasiveness of war...West African's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world" (252)

he discussed the slums of Abijan in the Ivory Coast, explaing how they do not "appear on any of the readily available maps. This is another indication of how political maps are the products of tired conventional wisdom" (252)

for the Ivory Coast, Kaplan predicts "an anarchic implosion of criminal violence - an urbanized version of what has already happenned in Somalia" (253) fuelled by a lack of nationalism and increasing population

"The more fictitious the actual sovereignity, the more severe border authorities seem to be in trying to prove otherwise" (253)

Mazuri: predicts that the French will withdraw their influence from West Africa and their "sphere of influence will be filled by Nigeria - a more natural hegemonic power" just one part of a continent while border re-mapping

describes slums as "a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself would never have given credence" (254)

"to understand the events of the next 50 years...one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clashes, geographical destiny and the transformation of war" (254)

The Environment as a Hostile Power

the environment is "the national security issue of the early twenty-first century" (254)

used doughnut shape to describe US foreign policy; plenty of attention to various peripheral issuez, but an unwillingness to engage with the central issue; the environment

Homer-Dixon - military conflict as fuelled by environmental scarcity; "Neo-Mathusians my underestimate human adaptibility in today's environment-social system, but as time passes their analysis may become ever more compelling" (255)
- only a small minority will be able to shelter in a "post-historical" realm where the environment has been mastered (Fukuyama)

Homer-Dixon argues that political analysis should not be seperate from the natural world

"We are entering a bifuricated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well-fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes's First Man, condemed to a life that is "poor, nasty, brutish and short". Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it, the First Man will not" (255)

"Environmental scarcity will inflame existing hatreds and affect power relationships" (256)

Skinhead Cossacks, Juju Warriors

Huntingdon: In the 20th century, war was first nation-state conflict, then ideological conflict and finally cultural conflict

as refugees and urbanization grow "national border will mean less...more power will fall into the hands of the less educated, less sophisticated groups" this will mean that "the real borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture and tribe" (256) note: is the notion of tribe a valid one?

Not exclusive to the third world "Whatever the laws, refugees with find a way to crash official borders...meaning that Europe and the United States will be weakened by cultural disputes" (256)

Michael Vlahos on the US: "We are not in charge of the environment and the world is not following us. It is going in many directions. Do not assume that democratic capitalism is the last word in human social evolution" (256)

The past is dead

argues that 'slums' in Ankara are not really slums at all, in the sense that they are much more orderly that those in Africa, a Turkish/Muslim hybrid lends the neighbourhoods an "innate cultural strengths" (257) eval: empirically weak?

describes Islam as "the one religion that is prepared to fight" (258)

Turkey has access to water reserves, which seem destined to be very significant to the middle-east

The Lies of Mapmakers

as in Africa "the considerable territories controlled by guerilla armies and urban mafias" are missing from maps

at the birth of modernism/the enlightenment, "the map, based on scientific techniques of measurement, offered ways to classify new national organisms, making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them" (258)
- as printing got cheaper and the imperial age began "cartography came into its own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world" (258)

"this inflexible artificial reality staggers on" (259) in political discussion

Kurds in Southern Turkey/Northern Iraq demonstrate this problem

the problem of the Kurds cannot be solved by autonomey, independence or federalism "Identity in Turkey, as in India, Africa and elsewhere, is more complex and subtle that conventional cartography can display" (259)

A new kind of war

Martin van Creveld: fighting as an ends as well as a means - "Physical aggression is part of being human. Only when people obtain a certain economic, educational and cultural standard is this trait tranquilised. In light of the fact that 95 percent of the earth's population growth will be in the poorest areas of the globe, the question is not whether there will be war (there will be lots of it) but what kind of war it will be be. And who will fight whom?" (260)

"van Creveld explains [that] the period of nation-states and, therefore of state conflict is now ending, and with it the clear threefold division into government, army and people which state-directed wars enforce" (260) 

parallel between the 30 years war (at the birth of modernity) to the unpolitical conflicts of post-modernity

a "re-primitized man: warrior socities operating at a time of unprecedented scarcity and planetary overcrowding" (260)

Van Creveld again "existing distictions between war and crime will break down" (260)

As the nation is unable to protected its citizens, the state's power will fade "and with it the states ability to help weaker groups within society" (261),  less equalising mechanisism, more inequality, not less

The Last Map

a new map needs to be three dimensional "an ever-mutating representation of chaos" (261)

he questions whether the Indian state will survive given the population explosion,  similarly Pakistan, appears to lack a "cohesive national identity" note: this is based on fairly unrigorous observations

he also suspects that the US will struggle to maintain its national unity, with growing Hispanic populations, noting "racial polarity, education dysfunction, social fragmentation" (262)

"Africa may be marginal in terms of conventional late twentieth century conceptions of stratergy, but in an age of cultural and racial clash, Africa's distress will exact a devasting influence on the US" (262)

"As Washington's influence wanes...North Americans will take refuge in insulated communities and cultures" (262)

CONCLUSION - "we ignore this dying region at our own risk" (262)