Editors at the Boston Review couldn’t have known about the June coup in Honduras when they commissioned Paul Collier and leading scholars on development to write a series of essays on “development in dangerous places” for their latest issue. Yet the coup—and the policy conundrums it poses for the United States and other high-income countries—is an apt illustration of the problems the essays address.
Drawing on his newest book, Wars, Guns and Votes, and a previous widely read volume, The Bottom Billion, Collier argues that development will be possible in the world’s smallest, most impoverished countries only with direct engagement by richer nations—including a security guarantee to protect legitimate elected governments against coups and rebellions.
“The world’s poorest countries have diverged from the rest of mankind,” writes Collier, a professor of Economics at Oxford University and director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. “They will never tap their vast reservoir of frustrated human potential unless the international community provides basic public goods that go beyond the typical aid agenda.”
These public goods, Collier writes, must include security and accountability. He lauds the success of the United States' role in post–World War II Europe—a robust program that incorporated aid, governance, and security.
Six development scholars, including CGD president Nancy Birdsall, William Easterly, Larry Diamond, and Steve Krasner respond to Collier, who then responds to their responses.
Easterly’s essay harshly criticizes Collier’s work, questioning his research methodology and accusing him of wanting “to de facto re-colonize the bottom billion.” He worries that Collier’s proposals may open the door for Western powers to pass judgment on elections and influence the political process in developing nations.
“Foreign armies invade and control the whole political process,” writes Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University. “Such aggressive interventions will almost certainly have unintended negative consequences.”
Birdsall treads a middle path. She applauds Collier’s search for fresh approaches to the myriad problems confronting the world’s poorest people, the bottom billion, but prefers indirect means of strengthening security to outright military guarantees. For example, she recommends that donors support—and measure their contributions to—improved police training to increase domestic security.
“There are other proposals the development community should advocate as well, and first,” Birdsall writes. “Even though they do not involve guns and war, we ought not ignore and underfund them.”
CGD senior fellow Kimberly Ann Elliott offers a real-world example of non-military measures rolling back a Latin American coup. In a recent blog post, she describes how in response to a 1993 coup in Guatemala “the United States not only cut off economic aid within 4 days of the coup, it also threatened to revoke Guatemala’s preferential access to the U.S. market for its exports.” Other trade and aid partners took similar steps, and within days the Guatemalan military had ousted the coup leaders and taken steps to restore democracy.
Elliott argues that this history “shows that just the threat of restricting exports, when made forcefully, can be a powerful tool,” but she cautions that trade sanctions may also be “perverted for narrow, protectionist purposes.”
In a related Huffington Post article commenting on the Boston Review essays, GlobalGiving co-founder Dennis Whittle endorses Birdsall’s suggestions of more modest, pragmatic interventions.
“We need places where that human instinct [to help others] can be channeled in ways that may be modestly effective and are unlikely to have catastrophic consequences,” Whittle writes.
Collier, for his part, is undeterred. “My hope is to open discussion on an issue that has been too uncomfortable to face,” he writes in his closing argument.
“Birdsall perfectly captures my purpose. Do I imagine that as a result of a few calculations my policy proposals will be adopted? Of course not. Do I hope that I have opened a discussion on an issue that has to-date been too uncomfortable to face? Absolutely.”