ECONOMIC INJUSTICE AND SOCIAL VIOLENCE: MAKING THE
CONNECTIONS[1]
The Word Bank needs to be commended by
signalling to elites when it is time to change the discourse in order to
preserve the dominant economic paradigm. A
crucial legitimizing function whose importance should not to be underestimated. Every so often therefore the Bank feels
compelled or pushed to reach out –often through the WDRs---to try to explain
the development failures in terms other
than the development model itself. Just
when critical opinion faces up to the reality of inequality and wealth gap
across and within countries, the Bank comes to the rescue offering new
explanations and convenient cover-ups of the crude reality that the corporate credo
does not work for the poor anywhere.
More than a decade ago, we were told that the
problem was not the fundamental workings of the market system but rather the
overbearing presence of the State and a hefty public sector. Later on, we heard:
hold on, maybe there is a role for the State and more state was
needed. In 2008-2009 the World Bank, and its soul-mate across the street, the
International Monetary Fund, actually perplexed many of us when they seemed to
shift their ideology away from a hardcore agenda of promoting markets above
everything else. For a time the Bretton
Woods dynamic duo appeared to promote government deficits and a Keynesian
strategy: government should step in when the private sector fail. With the ensuing financial crisis, too-bid-to
fail failing big banks in the rich countries demanded nothing less.
For the non-rich however it’s back to
business as usual, namely export orientation and austerity as the sure recipe
for development, or perhaps only growth.
When economies continued to collapse on account of applied
neoliberal macroeconomic policies, we then heard that ‘sound’ economic
governance required equally sound political administration or, as it came to be
known, good governance. Similarly when
structural adjustment schemes failed and were quite correctly lambasted, the
Bank simply did a rhetorical about-face and introduced the PRSPs touting these
as a Bank reinvention. The problem was
that the fundamentals remained in place.
And then when global campaigns
demanded the wiping out of illegitimate ‘Third World’ debt, the Bank was quick
to respond with HIPC as a way to keep the debt system, and with it its own
lending power, afloat. Nonetheless, development continues on the
whole to languish, notwithstanding the numericPeral games around the
calculation of GDP to try to show
progress.
The latest smoke screen is called “A New
Instrument to Advance Development Effectiveness: Programme-for-Results Lending’ or P4R. It is described as a ‘radical’ plan to set up
new lending modalities, lending money according to project results. According to important NGOs Bank-watchers, the clear intention is to allow countries to
sidestep dozens of hard and expensive social and environmental safeguards which
the Bank itself had to assume as a consequence of earlier massive criticism of
its lending practices[2]. It acknowledged the criticism and then, in
these more conservative times, disavows its own acknowledgement! As a result scepticism is still in order as to
claims that Bank, and its principal patrons, has any intention of abandoning the
neoliberal model at the macro level with its focus on trade liberalisation and
reliance on foreign investment and foreign lending. Ironic that the WDR’s plea for institutional
legitimacy is made by an undemocratic institution like the WB dominated by the
principal creditors run on the principle of one dollar one vote.
It's The Model, Stupid
The central proposition appears quite
sensible: armed conflict stands as an
impediment to development; therefore it is imperative that the world at large
engage broad security sector reform and conflict prevention. Of course if there is shooting there will be
no growth. But what started the shooting
in the first place? Could it be that it
is precisely the very model of exclusionary development (growth) that is
producing inequality, wealth misdistribution, unemployment and conflict
particularly in contexts of shrinking resources? Five percent growth rates did not stop masses
of Tunisians and Egyptians from rebelling.
Could it be the same unruly
crowds that the Bank suggests be excluded by way of new ‘inclusive enough’
coalitions that can best counter civilian protests? Political governance failed—but was it not
simply the complement of the economic governance that the West wishes preserved
or imposed at all costs. And
surely the report’s new focus on police will not sit kindly with those who have
suffered at the hand of government security forces.
Violence broke out in post-independence East
Timor, but was it not, as The New York Times asked, on account of the
Bank’s own insistence that the Timorese government save most
of its petroleum revenues rather than spend them on social projects, an
approach that contributed to needlessly high levels of poverty, unemployment
and mass violence? [3]
So off we are to debate ‘conflict, security
and development’ with the startling discovery that joblessness is
fundamental. Violence and joblessness as
the new indicators of ‘bad government’—of bad politics not bad economics--as if
one can separate one from the other when both form part of the dominant growth
paradigm characterized by unsustainable
production and consumption patterns, which the World Bank in practice continues
to uphold.
The Bretton Woods institutions and the Washington Consensus show no signs in
desisting from supporting policies that reduce government capacity and increase
dependence on ‘aid’.
"Investing in citizen security, justice,
and jobs is essential to reducing violence," says Zoellick,. The same could apply to Greece but where is the money to come from? If unemployment is considered to be the
principal reason for youth joining gangs
or militias, what does this say about
the development model that generates exclusion and has more unemployed protesting
on the streets? Job creation may seem like a well intentioned aspirin. Donors and international resources? Even the WDR acknowledges that existing
development agencies do not yet have the capacity to adequately help fragile
states build up police forces and justice systems (even though aid in building
an military is more readily available).
In response to the report's discussion of terrorism, Daniel Gorevan, a spokesperson for Oxfam International, said, "One issue that the report fails to address is the impact international assistance focused on short-term military or security objectives may have on exacerbating violence… We're seeing a worrying increase in the level of militarized or politicized aid. That's problematic, especially if this assistance doesn't address the root causes of conflict and puts communities or aid workers' lives at risk… Since 2001, there has been a growing trend of aid being used to win 'hearts and minds' in conflict but it is often poorly conceived, ineffective, and in some cases has turned beneficiaries and aid workers into targets for attack. Aid directed to short-term political and military objectives fails to reach the poorest people. It also fails to build long-term security either in fragile states or, ultimately, for donors themselves." he concluded.[4]
The Thin Line Between the Legal and the Criminal: Filling the Wrong
Gap
The point is or should be obvious –when the
State fails to provide the most vulnerable of its population with indispensable
services/rights, citizens will adopt or be forced to live with ‘private’
services. These can be private entities
legally filling the gap and making a profit—water or private security –or criminals and gangs providing security
and services like illegal water and
electricity connections. Informal
settlements with informal service providers filling the gap experienced by
dwellers.
An analytical or even legalistic separation
between political and criminal violence will miss the point. In his study of Nairobi settlements, Patrick
Mutahi reaching the same conclusions of so many in different parts of the
world: we need to move away from the traditional perceptions of gangs to
understand deeper reasons for their existence.
The WDR will argue that the solution is more
jobs for youth. Fine, but what the
Report does not choose to underscore is the fact that the World Bank in the
very same report and particular in its ongoing practice propagates, along with
many South governing elites, a neoliberal model of development that itself
produces unemployment, reduces the provision of public services and therefore
engendering greater social inequality and structural incapacities to generate
dignified jobs and opportunities.
It is not simply gangs but masses of poor
people who live on the margins of the law.
If we are to be consistent with the dichotomy between political and
criminal violence, then it follows that the day to day struggle for survival is
itself an illegal activity. Illegal
takeover of houses, land, failure to pay taxes and illegal tapping of water
will place many—but never all poor people—at odds with the law.
Structural unemployment breeds its own model
of ‘privatization’ in order to obtain the services that the ‘public ‘services
do not extend to the urban poor.
Policing is one. Mutahi cites the
2010 Global Corruption Barometer report indicating at least 92 percent of
Kenyans perceive the police force as the most corrupt institution of the
state. 59 percent of respondents said
that either they or a member of their household had paid a bribe to police.[5]
If neoliberal fiscal policies make it
difficult for government to provide basic services/rights such as civilian
policing, then the poor will pay gangs for such basics, including justice, law
and order. In places such as Somalia,
where there is hardly a State, provision of justice and security becomes the
task of traditional authorities employing customary law and tribal
militias. In contrast to Kenya, it is
not a matter of a state unable to fill the gap, but of a gap that was never small
insofar as citizens and communities have always provided for their own security
and settlement of disputes. It is not a
so called informal state, but rather the real state of affairs.
Whether in Mogadishu or in the Nairobi slums,
we witness non-state or ‘informal’ security networks, especially are a complex web of linkages of different
groups that include gangs or militias, youth groups and vigilantes. The difference is not between one country and
another but between the ‘haves’ who can pay private guards to secure their property
and lives, and the poor who must rely on gangs or militias for security.
Academia and policy specialists will insist,
as the WDR does, in distinguishing formal from informal policing. Reality however is much more complex. The regulatory framework for private security
might exist in the policy mindset and even at the level of legislation. Unemployed youth, or even former police or
army cohorts group together to form gangs or private security companies—but in
both cases they are responding to the absence of a fair and firm state-provided
policing or courts. The poor then can
join the rich in objecting to paying taxes for services that are being provided
or contracted privately.
If we-- unforgivably-- set aside women’s
rights, some will even argue that the informal security networks—be they termed
gangsters, gangs, warlordism, or even terrorism— actually ‘work’ and indeed
form the basis of non-state governance. A lack of trust in the formal criminal justice
system gives way to a dependence on, and recourse to, an informal justice
system, which may be illegal, but not necessarily criminal or unjust from the
standpoint of the citizen customers. In
a 2010 survey by the World Bank, residents of Korogocho slum in Nairobi, were
asked to name three that are doing a good job in reducing crime and
violence. 56 percent named vigilante
groups; The Kenya Police ranked fifth with only 5 percent response.[6] Worse still, the same lack of trust in the
‘formal’ system gives way to high approval ratings for extra-judicial
executions.
We now know that one of the worst form of violence and human rights
violation takes the form of collusions
between the gangs and high-level civilian or military state authorities: the Guatemalan State and the PACs or some
important Kenyan politicians which last month faced an ICC prosecutor providing
testimony of linkages and patronage of the Mungkiki. The difference between a ‘legal’ gang or a
tolerated or instrumentalized ‘illegal’
one depends on the power of its patron.
But the objective is not to limit and
understand illegitimate violence, but to end it. More
jobs alone will not do the trick because we would be still be treating symptoms
and not causes, creating some jobs while continuing to lose many. At the
root of most conflicts, be they violent or slow burning, or take
the form of institutionalized violence,
lies a contestation of the use and control of economic resources and,
intrinsically linked to it, the creation of economic conditions which can
concentrate wealth in few hands but also create desperation, ignite or provoke
insane criminal behaviour . But in the US and Europe, people are also
rebelling against the same logic of that bestows not only impunity but further
wealth on corporate delinquents. The
elites are governing on the shared ideology of a radical
free market ideology that continues to insist that if we just create the
perfect, most hospitable, most gentle, less demanding conditions for private
investors to do business, then we’ll have a booming economy, and it will
trickle down, and everyone will benefit.
Our plea here is for a proper consideration of
the economic policies that constitute a frontal assault on democracy. Unless of course we believe, as the Franfurter Zeitung headlined on November
2 as regards a Greek referendum, Demokratie ist Ramsch. (Democracy is Junk):
“Increasingly it’s becoming clear that what Europe is going through
right now is not an episode, but a power struggle between the primacy of
economics and the primacy of politics.
The primacy of politics has already lost ground massively. And the process is speeding up.[7] Like US capitalism, Forbes
is less dialectical: “Instead of pouring euros down the drain, it would be much
wiser for Germany to sponsor a military coup and solve the problem that way.”[8] Similarly, the WDR would have us
believe that ‘smart security’ would be a welcome response.
Giving primacy to the economic logic over the
democratic process can only spur violence, direct or instititutionalized,
political or criminal, to use the WDR’s spurious distinction. Take
for example, the Bank’s warm endorsement of the Kenyan cut-flower trade in
spite of worsening water stress, commodity price volatility and inclement
carbon-tax constraints. Nevertheless, ‘Between 1995 and 2002, Kenya’s cut
flower exports grew by 300 percent’ – while nearby peasant agriculture suffered
crippling water shortages, a problem not worth mentioning in the potential for
violence in Kenya.
The prescriptions could only
work if one can demonstrate a reduction in the rate of poverty. The Bank now claims, that as the produce of
the ‘much maligned’ structural adjustment programmes of the nineties, poverty
in Africa is diminishing. The claim is
sustained on the basis of orthodox understandings of gross domestic product
(GDP) measure. However, as Patrick Bond
has argued, ‘Africa is suffering neocolonialism, and that means the basic trend
of exporting raw materials, and cash crops, minerals, petroleum, has gotten
worse. And that’s really left Africa poorer per person in much of the
continent, than even at independence. The idea that there’s steady growth in
Africa is very misleading, and it really represents the abuse of economic
concepts by politicians, by economists, who factor out society and the
environment. And it’s mainly a myth, because, really, the extraction of
non-renewable resources – those resources will never be available for future
generations. And there’s very little reinvestment, and very little broadening
of the economy into an industrial project or even a services economy”.[9]
GDP calculates exports of
irreplaceable minerals, petroleum and hard-wood timber as a solely positive
process (a credit), without a corresponding debit on the books of a country’s
natural capital. African GDP growth may have accelerated as commodity prices
rose, but Africa became poorer once we calculate the net wealth effect and
genuine savings. How then do we
reconcile Bank-perpetuated poverty with cuts in public spending and services with
the WDR’s emphasis on job creation?
No root causes?
Multiple studies on justice and security
provision come to the conclusion that neither the so-called formal or informal
provides full security or justice to minorities or to women. Some criminologists will continue to blame
violence on the gangs and the gangs for violence. But this
‘discipline, law and order’ perspective often fails to look at the particular
social, economic and political roots of violence, preferring instead to seize
on the violence as a vindication of their believe in inadequate police and
security responses. “The violent disturbances in Britain are
criminal, not political. Police need to be reminded to be ‘beastly to
scoundrels’, according to one source cited by Newsweek.[10]
But what can ‘beastly’ security forces do
about the equally beastly forces that transforms urban settlements and poor
youth into fertile breeding grounds for crime and anti-social behaviours, or
for legitimate protests and social mobilization that many in power will also
consider a criminal activity. Following
the recent protests and looting in London and the global mobilizations around
Occupy Wall Street, many are also asking the same question.
Who then is responsible for the unemployment,
idleness, despair and absence of opportunities that have contributed to crime
and violence? Is this a reflection or
the consequence of State “failure” or
‘market failure’ or, a new one, ‘political market failure’? As the
WDR admits, international advisory services have generally focused more on
growth than on employment creation, let alone violence prevention[11]. Research and experience point to the need for
dignified employment, but economic programming shy away, in general, from
employment-related interventions. “the role of jobs in violence prevention
argues for judicious public financing of employment programs’ says the WDR, but
in practice, donor-dependent governments and weak states simply are incapable
of or not allowed to finance employment programmes. “Repeated cycles of political and criminal
violence require thinking outside the box, beyond the traditional development
paradigm”[12]. Physician heal thyself.
The WDR does well to place emphasis on
legitimacy —however not even free and fair elections can provide full
legitimacy to a government or institutions pursuing conflict-producing economic
policies—be it in Greece or Central America.
Protesters may be illegal gangs, but also maybe ordinary citizens that
are morally outraged or indignados. And once again, as throughout history, the
‘system’ will protect itself by branding criminalizing social protests and
social movements or of youth itself, as social bandits, to employ Eric
Hobsbaum’s term.
Which Way Out?
The OECD has recognized that the reform of the
justice and security system requires a multi-layered approach which takes into
account support for a wide range of legitimate and non-state actors. But the question remains, and the WDR does
not provide an answer, of how human security and violence prevention can be
enhanced if economic policies are putting people against the wall? Police reform, accountability, civilian
control over security polices, eradication of impunity, transitional justice
are usually stated Rule of Law prescriptions.
Countries may throw out the entire police
leadership but are they free to do the same with the leadership of Central
Banks, Trade and Finance Ministries? Are they free to change the development and
growth model? Where is the
accountability of those who promote and willingly enact the privatization of public goods and basic
services, the liberalization of markets to benefit transnational capital, lowering taxes on capital, shrinking
the role of government through the deregulation of markets and reductions in
the social wage, the unequal insertion into an unfair trading and investment
system, the payment of illegitimate debt and the acceptance of other institutionalized
forms of appropriation of the resources of the majorities to the minorities, be they local or in the rich
countries? World Bank loan conditionalities
uphold the system of economic retrogression which is more accountable to rating
agencies than to citizens. Violence is
also the product of people—South and North (including Greece where the number
of suicides has doubled over the past year—trapped in an almost bottomless
economic pit from with there will be no escape until a new form of politics
forces shifts away from liberal integrationism defended by the WB to a
restructuring of economic resources, and with it the undermining of the
parameters of national and democratic self-determination.
Amartya Sen reminds us that the same plutocratic
neoliberal logic has even placed European democracy in danger: “ Suppose we accept that the powerful financial bosses have a
realistic understanding of what needs to be done. This would strengthen the
case for paying attention to their voices in a democratic dialogue. But that is
not the same thing as allowing the international financial institutions and
rating agencies the unilateral power to command democratically elected
governments”.
What are required are more investments—not
just in research on violence and conflict dynamics and not just on the reform
of public policy. Investments are needed
in the formation or recovery of democratic civic consciousness and citizen
responsiblity. A consciousness that can
take on violence in all of its manifestations across the world. Where social policy supersedes economic
policy—or indeed make a separate social policy unnecessary as the social
assumes its primal role in the construction of the economic. To envision what Walden Bellow and Focus on the Global South has called a ‘deglobalization’
paradigm: an approach that consciously
subordinates the logic of the market and the pursuit of cost efficiency to the
values of ecological sustainability, security, equity, and social solidarity.
In the language of Karl Polanyi, it is about re-embedding the economy in
society, rather than having society driven by the economy. And, we would add
today, re-embedding both society and the economy within Nature and eco-systems.
Today’s
protests have placed the wealth gap squarely back on the political agenda. We should strive to keep it there and not
learn the Bank and followers distract us from this central consideration. Those protesters are helping us come back to
basics: the need to interrogate not just
the symptoms of inequality—violence, repression, the disproportionate loss of
jobs, housing, healthcare and life itself—but, more fundamentally, the systems
of inequality, considering how and why corporations create and exploit
hierarchies of race, gender and national status to enrich themselves and
consolidate their power. It will be this
analysis—and not conflictology—and its consequent agenda that needs to be
convened and given collective social force so that inclusion and equity as ends
in themselves and as means to prevent violence are built into a new
system.
[1] Presentation at the Round Table on the World Development Report 2011 Conflict, Security and Development, Nairobi,
November 10, 2011 sponsored by the PhD Program in Political Science, Graduate Center of the City University of New York
[2]“ NGOs criticise World Bank's new lending plan for poorer countries”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/oct/21/ngos-criticise-world-bank-lending
[3] Poverty, already at twice the rate of Indonesia, “rose
significantly through most of the evaluation period and declined only after
2007, when the government, against bank advice, increased its spending using
petroleum resources.” “,World Bank Faults Itself for Slow Progress in East Timor”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/world/asia/22iht-timor22.html?_r=1
[4] Quoted in Kanya D'Almeida, “New World
Development Report Repackages Old Ideas”, IPS, April 11, 2011, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=55214
[5] See the Special Report in Saturday
Nation October 29, 2011 by Patrick Mutahi, “Thin line between the legal and the criminal in city slums’.
[7] “He who submits a vital issue to a referendum is a public
menace to Europe. This has been the message from the markets – and since Monday
night, from the politicians too”. http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1128541-democracy-has-junk-status. According to
the article, the financial sector was saying democracy is incompatible with
collecting debts, and when they can’t pay, with foreclosing on the public
domain and in effect further privatizie an economy and a country. You can be no democracy therefore if you
have debts grow beyond the ability to pay and impose austerity, as the IMF has long preached to poorer countries.
[9] Patrick Bond, Dodging World Bank schizophrenia Looting
of Africa continues?, Pambazuka News Features, 2010-09-08,
495, http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/66780
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