Chris Blattman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Many people say that, for numerous parts of Africa, national borders are a problem, that they don’t correspond to ethnic groups or tribes in the right way. If you look at the data, as I think Jeffrey Herbst just pointed out, among others, there are quite a few fairly small countries — Lesotho, Gambia, Guinea, Sao Tome. They’re not actually doing that well. It’s not clear they’re doing better than the big countries. Does this refute the misdrawn borders story, or do you still think there’s something to that? Going back to this question you had earlier about why was there so much instability in the years after the war, I think a set of misdrawn borders and trying to find a political equilibrium where all of these groups have to live together is one source of that political shock and instability. That said — and maybe I’m not understanding your question correctly — but I think that a lot of countries have been very successful at building national identities in a short period of time. Jeffrey Herbst is very fond of the idea that Rwanda, which is a very strong state and can exercise and project its power into the eastern Congo — maybe we should experiment . . . I don’t know if he’d advocate this now, but 10 years ago, he thought this was a useful idea to propose, that maybe Rwanda should be governing eastern Congo. At the same time, I’m not sure there are many places in sub-Saharan Africa where you would go to a peripheral place and you would find a stronger national identity than eastern Congo, where they really think of themselves as Congolese. There’s a bit of a paradox here. The national identity project has been very successful in a pretty short period of time in a lot of these countries, which makes me think that these borders are no longer so unnatural as they were, say, in 1950 or ’60. There’s a much longer historical continuity of the state in Ethiopia than in almost any other part, maybe any other part, of Africa. How much does this help Ethiopian development? And does this make you more bullish on Ethiopia than most other parts of Africa economically?…

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