Too Poor for Peace?

Transcript

LAEL BRAINARD: I think the thesis of the book is abundantly simple. It's that the fight against global poverty has become a fight of necessity, not just of morality, because global security demands it as well. I think the more that you look at the research, the stronger the links are established that extreme poverty literally kills.

Poverty-stricken states tend to have weak institutions, rendering them very weak and needing the most basic needs of their citizens. Weak governments, in turn, are unable to adequately control their borders, leaving lawless areas and natural resources to be hijacked, and the conflict has spilled over into neighboring countries. In fact, I think that realization has increasingly been seen throughout all different parts of the U.S. government.

The Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review talks about the U.S. military's humanitarian role in alleviating suffering in order to help prevent disorder from spiraling into wider conflict and crisis.

In this book I think what you'll find is that the simple and easy characterizations of conflict as stemming from ancient ethnic hatreds don't really stand up very well to the scrutiny of analysis, that in fact the kinds of things that drive conflict are very clear. Poverty drives conflict. The research is now unambiguous on that. Environmental degradation drives conflict. But natural resource abundance can also drive conflict.

And an interesting area that is probably given too little attention is that big demographic imbalances can lead to instability and conflict when opportunities are not there for young people to lead productive lives. The statistics I think are very clear. The reverse is also true. Civil wars may result in as many as 30 percent more people living in poverty, and the probability of civil wars being reignited is very high. About a third of countries will cycle back into conflict in a short period of time.

So, today what we're going to do is we're going to talk a bit about the drivers; we're going to talk a bit about why we should care; and we're going to talk a bit about the solutions.

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