Chris Blattman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Chris also works on violence and war and conflicts. I have a whole host of questions for him on these topics. I’ll start with a real softball. There’s a survey article you did, and it showed in the data that civil wars seem to rise from 1960 to 1990, and then after that point, they fall dramatically. Why do they first go up so much in terms of their number and then go down? I think especially in sub-Saharan Africa, but certainly all over the world, you saw this period after the First World War and after decolonization. One of my favorite things ever written about this period is by Bob Bates and Jeff Williamson and John Coatsworth, who were these famous political and economic historians. They compare this period in Africa to the late 19th century and a period of war and instability and gradual political consolidation after a period of rapid and unexpected decolonization. I think of Africa, which is the site of many of these wars, as undergoing a period of political instability followed by consolidation after a rapid and unexpected decolonization — at the same time that you’re having experimentation with economic systems and political organizations that turned out to be failures, which interacted with that to make it so much worse. The end of these wars and the political consolidation that comes from essentially identifying an economic system and a political system that tends to work a little bit better explains a lot of the peace since then. It seems, though, if you look at Latin America, they’ve been independent quite a long time. There were many more civil wars in Latin America, say, when I was growing up than what we see now, or even the prospect thereof. Do you think there’s some notion to there being a general spirit of the world that’s either more peaceful or less peaceful?…

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