work that way. Earlier in the chapter (and in chapter 3, when we examined homicide across the world), we came across the concept of anocracy, a form of rule that is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic.41 Anocracies are also known among political scientists as semidemocracies, praetorian regimes, and (my favorite, overheard at a conference) crappy governments. These are administrations that don’t do anything well. Unlike autocratic police states, they don’t intimidate their populations into quiescence, but nor do they have the more-or-less fair systems of law enforcement of a decent democracy. Instead they often respond to local crime with indiscriminate retaliation on entire communities. They retain the kleptocratic habits of the autocracies from which they evolved, doling out tax revenues and patronage jobs to their clansmen, who then extort bribes for police protection, favorable verdicts in court, or access to the endless permits needed to get anything done. A government job is the only ticket out of squalor, and having a clansman in power is the only ticket to a government job. When control of the government is periodically up for grabs in a “democratic election,” the stakes are as high as in any contest over precious and indivisible spoils. Clans, tribes, and ethnic groups try to intimidate each other away from the ballot box and then fight to overturn an outcome that doesn’t go their way. According to the Global Report on Conflict, Governance, and State Fragility, anocracies are “about six times more likely than democracies and two and one-half times as likely as autocracies to experience new outbreaks of societal wars” such as ethnic civil wars, revolutionary wars, and coups d’état.42
Figure 5–23 in the preceding chapter shows why the vulnerability of anocracies to violence has become a problem. As the number of autocracies in the world began to decline in the late 1980s, the number of anocracies began to increase. Currently they are distributed in a crescent from Central Africa through the Middle East and West and South Asia that largely coincides with the war zones in figure 6–5.43
The vulnerability to civil war of countries in which control of the government is a winner-take-all jackpot is multiplied when the government controls windfalls like oil, gold, diamonds, and strategic minerals. Far from being a blessing, these bonanzas create the so-called resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty and fool’s gold. Countries with an abundance of nonrenewable, easily monopolized resources have slower economic growth, crappier governments, and more violence. As the Venezuelan politician Juan Pérez Alfonzo put it, “Oil is the devil’s excrement.”44 A country can be accursed by these resources because they concentrate power and wealth in the hands of whoever monopolizes them, typically a governing elite but sometimes a regional warlord. The leader becomes obsessed with fending off rivals for his cash cow and has no incentive to foster the networks of commerce that enrich a society and knit it together in reciprocal obligations. Collier, together with the economist Dambisa Moyo and other policy analysts, has called attention to a related paradox. Foreign aid, so beloved of crusading celebrities, can be another poisoned chalice, because it can enrich and empower the leaders through whom it is funneled rather than building a sustainable economic infrastructure. Expensive contraband like coca, opium, and diamonds is a third curse, because it opens a niche for cutthroat politicians or warlords to secure the illegal enclaves and distribution channels.
Collier observes that “the countries at the bottom coexist with the 21st century, but their reality is the 14th century: civil war, plague, ignorance.” 45 The analogy to that calamitous century, which stood on the verge of the Civilizing Process before the consolidation of effective governments, is apt. In The Remnants of War, Mueller notes that most armed conflict in the world today no longer consists of campaigns for territory by professional armies. It consists instead of plunder, intimidation, revenge, and rape by gangs of unemployable young men serving warlords or local politicians, much like the dregs rounded up by medieval barons for their private wars. As Mueller puts it:Many of these wars have been labeled “new war,” “ethnic conflict,” or, most grandly, “clashes of civilizations.” But in fact, most, though not all, are more nearly opportunistic predation by packs, often remarkably small ones, of criminals, bandits, and thugs. They engage in armed conflict either as mercenaries hired by desperate governments or as independent or semi-independent warlord or brigand bands. The damage perpetrated by these entrepreneurs of violence, who commonly apply ethnic, nationalist,