Chartbook 404 Violence and (de)development: From Gaza to "fragile and conflict-affected situations"

Starting with Gaza and asking where else people starve and fight for their lives is an urgent and productive task. I wrote about the question a few weeks ago. I am prompted to return to it by a new publication by a team at the World Bank.

Right now, I find it impossible to think about violence and (de)development without forming this loop: Gaza-Israel-development-(de)development. The World Bank report includes West Bank and Gaza in its data set of “fragile and conflict-affected situations”, but the list extends to the entire world.

As I argued in the previous post: Gaza is an extreme case because it involves a rich and powerful state victimizing a tightly controlled and largely defenseless population under a state of siege with the explicit intent of ethnic cleansing in conjunction with an ongoing settler-colonial project. Writing in the 1940s Raphael Lemkin struggled to find categories to describe just such a case in Nazi occupied Poland. The neologism he coined was genocide.

In recent times it is hard to think of many analogue to what Israel is doing in Gaza. There have been instances of genocide. There have been plenty of instances of ethnic cleansing in the context of war. But the extraordinary disparity in means and the siege-like conditions are exceptional.

Gaza is exceptional also in the full-spectrum support provided to Israel by so many other rich countries, including the two from which I hold a passport. Here the closest analogue is presumably to UK and US backing of the war in Yemen waged by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They, at least, paid for the weapons we provided. “Liberal” institutions in the West preferred simply to ignore what was being done rather than ritualistically intoning their loyalty to the perpetrators. And the bombings and attacks generally took place in a relatively open battlefield, not the siege conditions of Gaza.

Gaza is a conflict that at least periodically transfixes public opinion worldwide. Other conflicts, affecting tens of millions of people go largely unnoticed by media in the West.

The joint Eritrean-Ethiopian war against Tigray between 2020 and 2022 is the most dramatic case in point. There, according to the lowest estimates, hundreds of thousands fell victim to a deliberate hunger campaign. There are growing signs this summer that Ethiopia and Eritrea may be about to go back to war, this time against each other. The risk of further misery is huge. Sudan’s civil war is the largest crisis of displacement and hunger in the world right now. DRC sees repeated phases of escalation and deescalation. The Sahel belt of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger as well as Nigeria suffer from recurring political violence.

Source: ACLED

What the World Bank report makes unmistakably clear is the way that such conflicts drive poverty and underdevelopment. Together they form what the World Bank calls “intertwined crises”, or what I’ve dubbed “polycrisis”. Furthermore, over recent decades such conflicts have not just continued, but at the global level have come to define what we mean by absolute poverty.

Whereas, since 2000, per capita GDP in emerging markets and developing economies has grown considerably, the same is not true for FCS.

In large emerging markets and developing economies absolute poverty at the direst level of $3 per day has been reduced so much that it is increasingly, a problem of the most marginalized and most precarious. These are no longer “poor countries”, but middle-income countries with extreme inequalities. In fragile and conflict-affected states, dire poverty afflicts one third of the population, a ratio that has not substantially changed in a generation. These are properly described as poor societies, or low-income economies.

Viewed globally, in 1990 absolute poverty was still the common lot of almost half of humanity (c. 2.3 billion out of a total population of 5.3 billion). Today roughly 10 percent of the world’s population are still in absolute poverty and the majority are in fragile and conflict-affected states.

Above all those fragile and conflict-affected states are to be found in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2023 42 percent of all absolute poverty worldwide was concentrated in that subset of states.

Food is the most basic necessity and amidst poverty survival dictates prioritizing food. But in conflict situations even that is no longer possible. Eighty-percent of those rated food insecure worldwide are in the FCS. The physical consequences are immediately obvious in figures for infant mortality, undernourishment, stunting and life expectancy.

The poorest of all and most vulnerable are those displaced from their homes, often several times over. Of globally displaced people 90 percent are in FCS. Even those who are not displaced lack infrastructure. Capital accumulation is extremely difficult.

Without infrastructure and capital accumulation, embattled low-income countries are either shut out from global trade altogether or inserted into structurally inferior positions as commodity exporters. Whilst they export commodities that are essential to global production, FCS themselves are in no position to buy-in commodities, raw materials, or energy to feed their own economies.

If you ask, what have “we” done? Are “we” providing assistance? What about peacekeeping? The answer is yes, aid does flow to fragile and conflict-affected states and there is peacekeeping. Both help to keep people alive, but they do not remedy the failure of development. Nor, however, can the Global North to be trying very hard. Aid and peacekeeping efforts are a drop in the ocean: a few tens of billions of dollars per year, scattered in vast regions of the world where hundreds of millions of people lack absolute basics. It is hard to take seriously blanket judgements about the efficacy or inefficacy of aid when the effort is so pitifully small in relation to the problem. Does a splash of water put out a fire? Well yes, in one small patch, until it is re-engulfed.

Gaza is a concentrated battlefield of genocidal ethnic cleansing in the full glare of global attention. In various more or less grotesque ways, powerful and wealthy interests are positioning themselves for “postwar” reconstruction, development etc. Nothing of the sort can be said for most of the other fragile and conflict-affected regions in the world. What is the vision for Yemen, Sudan, the DRC or the Sahel?

This is the larger point that the World Bank and other commentators are making. Poverty and the problem of development are being redefined before our eyes. Poverty was until the 21st century a general experience for most of humanity. The global majority were poor. In the 21st century, extreme poverty is increasingly a Sub-Saharan African condition, concentrated in zones of endemic conflict. We need to grasp the scale of these crisis zones, the number of lives at risk, and the increasingly radical decoupling and disconnect between regions where there has effectively been no development for more than a generation, and the “rest of the world”. Whilst billions experience real development, hundreds of millions of people are excluded from both the basics of survival and every accoutrement of modern life. Poverty is always a matter of inequality. It is in these zones too. But it also goes beyond the status of individuals, families or communities, within “otherwise” developing national economies and societies. In much of sub-Saharan Africa poverty and conflict combine to define a condition of de-development, stagnation or even regression that defines entire states and regional state systems. Those conflicts do not have the radical intensity or power asymmetries exemplified by Gaza, but in every case, “outside players” and regional powers are involved. In the process, in spectacular style, crisis states, like Rwanda, can emerge as regional powers in their own right. Woe betide you, if you are as fragile and susceptible to outside influence as Rwanda’s neighbor, the DRC. Not for nothing Israel is one of the role models of Rwanda’s current leadership.

To think development in abstraction from power is naive. There is no development that does not engage powers and interests. The important question is how is power configured and what material effects does it produce? It can produce genocide. It can produce anarchy and chaos. As part of a national or broader hegemonic strategy, political power and social interests can also be configured to reduce material suffering and raise the standard of living of those at the bottom of the global ladder. If Rwanda is the model, then the best case would seem to be a search for order in a new multipolar world of rivalrous middle-income powers. The alternative, if we put together Gaza, Tigray and Sudan with the wider panorama of fragile and conflict-affected states as described by the World Bank, is one of geoeconomic polarization, conflict and extreme inequalities of a kind we have never seen before.

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