the developing world.32Their effects, though, interact with the country’s form of governance. The thickening of the civil war wedge in the 1960s had an obvious trigger: decolonization. European governments may have brutalized the natives when conquering a colony and putting down revolts, but they generally had a fairly well-functioning police, judiciary, and public-service infrastructure. And while they often had their pet ethnic groups, their main concern was controlling the colony as a whole, so they enforced law and order fairly broadly and in general did not let one group brutalize another with too much impunity. When the colonial governments departed, they took competent governance with them. A similar semianarchy burst out in parts of Central Asia and the Balkans in the 1990s, when the communist federations that had ruled them for decades suddenly unraveled. One Bosnian Croat explained why ethnic violence erupted only after the breakup of Yugoslavia: “We lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much.”33
Many of the governments of the newly independent colonies were run by strongmen, kleptocrats, and the occasional psychotic. They left large parts of their countries in anarchy, inviting the predation and gang warfare we saw in Polly Wiessner’s account of the decivilizing process in New Guinea in chapter 3. They siphoned tax revenue to themselves and their clans, and their autocracies left the frozen-out groups no hope for change except by coup or insurrection. They responded erratically to minor disorders, letting them build up and then sending death squads to brutalize entire villages, which only inflamed the opposition further.34 Perhaps an emblem for the era was Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Empire, the name he gave to the small country formerly called the Central African Republic. Bokassa had seventeen wives, personally carved up (and according to rumors, occasionally ate) his political enemies, had schoolchildren beaten to death when they protested expensive mandatory uniforms bearing his likeness, and crowned himself emperor in a ceremony (complete with a gold throne and diamond-studded crown) that cost one of the world’s poorest countries a third of its annual revenue.
During the Cold War many tyrants stayed in office with the blessing of the great powers, who followed the reasoning of Franklin Roosevelt about Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”35 The Soviet Union was sympathetic to any regime it saw as advancing the worldwide communist revolution, and the United States was sympathetic to any regime that kept itself out of the Soviet orbit. Other great powers such as France tried to stay on the good side of any regime that would supply them with oil and minerals. The autocrats were armed and financed by one superpower, insurrectionists who fought them were armed by the other, and both patrons were more interested in seeing their client win than in seeing the conflict come to an end. Figure 6–3 reveals a second expansion of civil wars around 1975, when Portugal dismantled its colonial empire and the American defeat in Vietnam emboldened insurrections elsewhere in the world. The number of civil wars peaked at fifty-one in 1991, which, not coincidentally, is the year the Soviet Union went out of existence, taking the Cold War–stoked proxy conflicts with it.
Only a fifth of the decline in conflicts, though, can be attributed to the disappearance of proxy wars.36The end of communism removed another source of fuel to world conflict: it was the last of the antihumanist, struggle-glorifying creeds in Luard’s Age of Ideologies (we’ll look at a new one, Islamism, later in this chapter). Ideologies, whether religious or political, push wars out along the tail of the deadliness distribution because they inflame leaders into trying to outlast their adversaries in destructive wars of attrition, regardless of the human costs. The three deadliest postwar conflicts were fueled by Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese communist regimes that had a fanatical dedication to outlasting their opponents. Mao Zedong in particular was not embarrassed to say that the lives of his citizens meant nothing to him: “We have so many people. We can afford to lose a few. What difference does it make?”37 On one occasion he quantified “a few”—300 million people, or half the country’s population at the time. He also stated that he was willing to take an equivalent proportion of humanity with him in the cause: “If the worse came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half