Oil And Water

Scarcity of oil and rising petroleum prices, and climate change driven drought, are a big deal. But there are fairly clear paths by which our society can adapt to both. Neither would be apocalyptic, even though it would drive significant, visible changes in our day to day material culture.

These matters are particularly worth thinking about on Earth Day, which is today.

Oil

A very large share of all petroleum consumption is for transportation, mostly cars, trucks, construction vehicles, boats, ships, and trains. Advances in battery technology, and EV manufacturing and infrastructure are making electric vehicle alternatives to all of those technologically viable. And, advances in renewable energy and nuclear power can replace almost all of the fossil fuels in the electrical power grid. Coal is well on its way to be phased out in the United States and much of the developed world. Alaska and Hawaii are the only U.S. states where a significant share of electricity is generated from petroleum. Heat pumps are paving the way as an alternative to heating buildings that were historically heated with heating oil in the U.S. (mostly in the Northeast). 

Heat pumps and evaporative coolers (together with better insulation) also dramatically more energy efficient than conventional air conditioning, and renewables like solar and wind combined with modern batteries are particularly well suited to meet the demand for electricity to provide cooling.

Lots of fertilizers that are petroleum based could also become unaffordable, as they have as global petroleum supplies have been interrupted by U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and its counterattacks. But organic farming techniques are now well established enough that these methods pose an obvious alternative path for agriculture is petroleum based fertilizers cease to become economically viable. Dutch models of intensive hydroponic agriculture suggests another off ramp from what is now considered conventional agriculture.

There are some applications where there aren't good alternatives to petroleum, like plastics and jet fuel. But these are such a small share of total petroleum consumption that these uses could be sustained, even if they become more expensive, even if petroleum prices soar and the supplies contract greatly. 

Of course, plastics and petroleum based fabrics like nylon, have only been in wide use for about sixty years. If plastic becomes too expensive, we can revert to using metal, glass, wood, and plant and animal fiber alternatives for applications like kitchen ware and trash bins that aren't uniquely suited to plastic, as traditional alternatives becomes more affordable relative to plastic with rising petroleum prices.

The changes wouldn't be geographically neutral. A collapse in demand for petroleum driving by electric vehicles and organic farming would crush the economies of petrostates in the Middle East, in Brunei, in Nigeria, in Venezuela, and in select states within the United States. West Virginia has already seen its coal based economy collapse, as have many historically coal mining economy based regions in Europe. Wyoming will follow suit. 

On the other hand, rare earth rich areas who supply key components of modern batteries and electronics, may see mineral economy booms.

Water

In most of the arid west, marginal agricultural activity consumes 80%-90% of all fresh water, while landscaping and golf courses consume about half of the rest of the fresh water. If water becomes scarce, entire regions can eliminate their water hungry landscaping, golf courses can close or become much more expensive or use artificial grass, and marginal agricultural operations can close.

In places like the Arabian Peninsula, Greece, Utah, and California, desalination technology might become more prominent as a water source, at least for high value municipal waters uses like drinking, cooking, and bathing, and gray water systems would use non-potable water (such as salt water from the ocean or salt water lakes) in applications where drinkability wasn't important, like flushing toilets.

Climate change that produces global warming ultimately both gives and takes away arable land. It renders much of the arid West unsuitable for farming and ranching, but makes places that were too cold for farming in the past, more suitable for it. Even when climate change doesn't actually change the total amount of arable land somewhere, it may change the kind of agriculture that is appropriate in that place.

Places that used to support subtropical orange groves may freeze more often and get dryer and become more suitable for cotton and the soft wheat varieties currently grown in places north of Florida in the American South. Crops now grown in the South might start to be grown in the Midwest. The abundant corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains and Midwest might move north to Canada. The Great Plains might transition from grain farming to cattle grazing.

I'm not a climate scientist. I don't have exact models of exactly when and where climate zones that are suitable for particular crops and livestock will relocate. But that's the basic concept.

The ongoing wars across the Sahel of Africa illustrate how ugly the process of having herders ecologically forced into historically horticultural land can be without strong geographically large states to force the transition to be made with money instead of violence can look. But with strong states that remove violence as a viable option, the transition, while still massively disruptive, could be less tragic in places like North America and Western Europe.

Similarly, the skiing industry might relocate from places like Colorado and Vermont to places like the Yukon and Alaska, in North American, and from places like the Alps in Europe to the northern Urals and the Himalayas in Eurasia.

Many Sunbelt communities in places like Arizona and Texas and Florida may see the waves of migration to avoid the cold winters of the north replaced by migration north to avoid the months of hundred degree plus water in the Sunbelt which are already commonplace in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, while the rust belt, with its winters made milder due to global warming and abundant fresh water, may start to look more attractive, and may attract mass return migrations.

One of these days, people in the Sunbelt may return to the traditional solution of having midday siestas, inside cooler, shaded adobe insulated homes, and becoming more active once the sun goes down and the air cools late into the evening.

Coastal communities will have to build dikes or lose land area as sea levels rise, and many will have to remake their architectural landscape in the face of increasingly severe storms, something that will hit the U.S. states of Florida and Louisiana and some islands in Oceania particularly hard.

Species limited to narrow microenvironment ranges will go extinct en masse, as human encroachment upon their habitats, ecological disruption, and human predation have already done to many species already.

How fast will it happen?

We are, in 2026, at about the place on this path that we thought we'd be in the year 2006, back in 1986. Events like the transitions to EVs and heat pumps and renewables and industrial scale organic farming happened, but it took about twice as long as futurists at the time thought that it would.

Climate change, on the other hand, is happening faster than expected by a decade or three. The changes that were initially looking like they would take a century to run their course are now looking like they will occur in half of that time.

Certainly, these transitions are medium to long run trends. They will probably takes decades more to run their course. These transitions probably won't be complete in my lifetime, although they probably will run their course in the lives of my children, or at least, in the lives of my future grandchildren. Less poetically, this time frame is about 30-90 years.

But these trends are both massive and inexorable, like plate tectonics but much, much faster. Fast enough that it will be visible in future tree ring records.

Conclusion

These are huge, traumatic changes that will force mass migrations and fundamental changes in people's day to day culture. But they don't mean the end of modern life as we know it either. And falling birthrates will eventually lead to smaller global and regional populations that put less strain on scarce water and fossil fuel resources.

Trump Cedes Africa To China

For better or for worse, the Trump administration's policy towards Africa is to completely withdraw from it: closing embassies, withdrawing any military presence there, withdrawing foreign aid, barring immigration, and discouraging trade with new tariffs. It isn't even seriously criticizing human rights violations there.

China is filling the vacuum that the U.S. departure is creating on all fronts.

I could source every point in this post from news stories. But I don't have the time for it right now (it might take a couple of hours), so this time, as an exception to my usual habit, I'm going to have to have you trust me that the points I'm making have solid backup that could be found and linked.

Christianity's Prospects

Globally, Christianity faces different issues in different places. In Europe (including heavily colonized formerly British Australia, New Zealand and Canada), in the U.S., and in South Korea and much of Asia, trends away from religion entirely are the biggest issue. In Latin America, the Catholic-Protestant divide is more prominent as Protestantism eats away at Catholicism although secularism is an issue too.

In the Middle East, North Africa, and much of the rest of Asia, the conflict between Christianity and Islam is center stage (except in Israel with its Jewish-Muslim conflict taking center stage and Christianity taking something of a bystander role).

As an aside, Iran despite being formally a theocratic Shi'ite Islamic state, is actually quite religiously divided and has surging levels of irreligion. This is atypical in predominantly Islamic countries which tend to be dominantly Sunni Islamic and more religious on average, by far, than predominantly Christian or Jewish countries. I have less of a finger on the pulse of the Sunni Islamic world and its prospects, however, than the religious tendencies of other parts of the world (despite having considerably more factual knowledge about Sunni Islam and these regions than the vast majority of Americans, even those with college educations). Secular, communist trends in predominantly Islamic places like Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq seem to have reversed.

Christianity in the U.S.

The continued decline "market share" of Christianity in the United States in the coming decades seems highly likely. It may drop to less than 50%, if not by the end of my life, during my children's lifetime.

This is almost certain to persist because young people are much less likely to be Christianity adherents than older people, so as older people die, the share of Christians falls, even in the absence of deconversion. 

This fall seems to be somewhat stalled in the last few years. But, there is a much lower tendency to convert to Christianity after leaving it than there is to deconvert from being a Christian. And, shifts in the percentage of people who follow a religion tend to follow a logistic curve, with the highest rate of change when the relative percentages of each category are most equal. 

We also have the precedent of Europe which is much less religious than it was shortly after World War II. So, this is almost sure to continue.

Of course, some new religious movement, more adaptive to current conditions, could change the picture dramatically.

Further, in accordance with the maxim that religions that protect threatened cultures thrive. Part of why Christianity declined in Europe is that most of those countries had state established religions which were particularly aligned with the secure, establishment culture, with exceptions like Ireland, where Catholicism was protecting Irish culture from English Protestantism, and Poland, where Catholicism was protecting Polish culture from secularizing communism.

White Catholics are on a trajectory close to that of White Protestant with steady decline associated with age, while Hispanic Catholics are on a different, more religious track, mirroring the predominantly Catholic but emerging Pentecostal trend of Latin America, as the establishment Catholicism with no culture to protect in Latin America loses it's shine but does better in the U.S. where it is protected Latin American immigrant culture.

In another illustration of this tendency, in the U.S. (and in Europe) religion thrives among recent immigrants whose homeland culture is threatened by the very different culture of their new homes, but fades as waves of immigrants assimilate.

The U.S. is more religious than Europe, in part, because it has never had an established religion, which left religious denominations from becoming as establishment, and in part, because it has such high levels of foreign born people who have non-U.S. cultures that are threatened in the new homeland that religion can protect.

 

The stall in deconversion is also related to the extent to which the large coalition of subcultures at odds with the establishment which is the Southern/Appalachian/rural subculture that is associated with the Republican party has members who find themselves in deep distress as their members are two to four times less economically productive than the members of the American establishment that is currently associated with the Democratic party, which is distinguished by its embrace of science, its acceptance of racial and ethnic diversity, its feminism, its acceptance of LGBTQ people, its acceptance of alcohol and recreational drugs, its globalism, and its lack of a culture of honor. 

Members of the Southern/Appalachian/rural coalition of cultures make up a third to half of the people in the United States. Its members are older than the rest of the U.S., whiter, less connected to the global economy, and more distrustful of science and education. One large share of them live in places that have very little racial, ethnic, religious, or immigrant sourced diversity. Another large share of them live in South and are deeply divided between conservative whites who identify as "American" and blacks who are the descendants of slaves and have not migrated to big cities who make up a large minority of the population.

Christianity in Asia

South Korea is one of most Christian nation in East Asia and Southeast, with about 23-31% who are Christian and about 60% who espouse no religion (historically classified by geographers and demographers as "Confucian" although younger generations may be less strictly Confucian than older generations).

Those only other countries in the region (and arguably these are Oceanian countries) with such a high percentage of Christians are East Timor which is 97% Roman Catholic (and 1% other Christian for a total of 98% Christian), the Philippines which is 79% Roman Catholic and 13% other Christian (for total of 92% Christian) with a notable Muslim minority.

Countries in East, Southeast and South Asia with smaller but significant Christian populations include Singapore which is 19% Christian (and about 31% Buddhist), the former territory of Hong Kong within China which is about 12% Christian, Indonesia which is about 11% Christian - about 8% Protestant and 3% Catholic (and 83% Sunni Islam), Brunei which is about 10% Christian (and 81% Sunni Islam), Malaysia which is about 9% Christian (and 63% Sunni Islam), the former territory of Macau within China which is about 9% Christian, Vietnam which is 8% Christian and 70% irreligious, Sri Lanka which is about 8% Christian and 70% Buddhist, Myanmar is 6% Christian and 89% Buddhist, Taiwan which is about 5% Christian and 35% Buddhist, China which is about 4% Christian and 65% irreligious, India which is about 2% Christian and 80% Hindu (with most of the rest split between irreligious people, Muslims, and a variety of other beliefs like Buddhism and Sikhism which originated there), Mongolia is about 2% Christian and 53% Tibetan Buddhist, Japan is about 2% Christian and about 77% a syncretic mix of folk Shinto and Buddhism. The rest of the region is less than 2% Christian.

Indonesia is a huge country with great regional variation, with Christianity being most common in Northern Borneo, West Papuan areas, and its smaller eastern islands, as well as regional pockets in its larger, eastern, predominantly Muslim islands (and with a notable Hindu enclave in Bali and a small Buddhist enclave in central Borneo).

Map from here.

In central Asia, Kazakhstan is 25% Christian and 70% Sunni Muslim, Turkmenistan is 9% Christian and 89% Sunni Muslim, Kyrgyzstan is 7% Christian and 86% Sunni Muslim, and Uzbekistan is 3% Christian and 90% Sunni Muslim.

Christianity in Africa

Islam is common in Africa in the Sahel, the Sahara, North Africa, and along much of its eastern coast. 

Map from here.

But Christianity is flourishing and growing in sub-Saharan Africa, which was historically animist. Twenty-seven Sub-Sarahan African countries (including Ethiopia and Eritrea) are majority Christian and many more have large Christian minorities or pluralities. It isn't unthinkable that Africa could be home to a plurality of Christians within the lives of my children.

Life After Death

Belief in life after death is an interesting choice to compare religiosity. 

It is a belief shared by all of the widely adhered to religions in the region without being strictly tied to any one of them, and also captures residual metaphysical beliefs in contrast to metaphysical naturalism among people who are nominally non-religious and may have a problem with particular denominational or institutional religious structures but not with a somewhat religious worldview at a broad level.

The percentage of people believe in life after death considerably exceeds the percentage of people who regularly attend religious services or pray regularly. But it is below 50% in most of the historically predominantly Christian countries  of Europe, and just barely above 50% in several of the remaining ones in the face of a long term trend towards declining belief in an afterlife. Most of Europe is majority secular, or very nearly so. In the homelands of most of my ancestors, belief in an afterlife is less than 40%.

Related from a May 12, 2016 post:

* For the first time in Norwegian history, there are more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. 

* For the first time in British history, there are now more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. And church attendance rates in the UK are at an all-time low, with less than 2% of British men and women attending church on any given Sunday. 

* A recent survey found that 0% of Icelanders believe that God created the Earth. That’s correct: 0%. And whereas 20 years ago, 90% of Icelanders claimed to be religious, today less than 50% claim to be.

* Nearly 70% of the Dutch are not affiliated with any religion, and approximately 700 Protestant churches and over 1,000 Catholic churches are expected to close within the next few years throughout the Netherlands, due to low attendance.

* According to a recent Eurobarometer Poll, 19% of Spaniards, 24% of Danes, 26% of Slovenians, 27% of Germans and Belgians, 34% of Swedes, and 40% of the French, claim to not believe in “any sort of spirit, God, or life-force.” 

The Data

Belgium, Moldova, Ireland and Kosovo are omitted, presumably for a lack of statistically significant amounts of data. Vatican City is almost omitted but one presumes that this belief is near 100% among its couple thousand permanent residents.

Poland, Bosnia, and Turkey are the only countries on the map over 60%. 

The lowest rates are in Bulgaria (25%) and Albania (22.7%), presumably as legacies of communism in places where religious institutions didn't play a large role in their emergence as non-communist states, and where the juxtaposition of these states against their Muslim neighbors, made an emphasis on state imposed atheism more salient.

In Turkey this is due to an overwhelmingly Muslim population. In Bosnia, the 51% of the population that is Muslim brings up the average. Predominantly Muslim Kosovo is probably higher than the 65.9% of Bosnia, but due to its long membership of nominally secular communist Yugoslavia and a somewhat larger non-Muslim minority, is probably less than teh 91.8% of Turkey. 

Poland is predominantly Catholic and the only predominantly Christian country on the map over 60%. This makes sense as Catholicism played an important and recent role in its departure from its former Communist regime, less than half a century ago.

Below Poland, but above 50% are Iceland, Lithuania, Romania, Croatia, Switzerland, Austria, and Macedonia, with a mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox adherents and a range of economic development and historical ties to the Western and Eastern economic blocks of the Cold War. And, more generally, there doesn't seem to be a strong Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox skew to the likelihood of believing in life after death among Europeans in predominantly Christian countries. 

Belgium probably splits the difference between France (41.2%) and the Netherlands (34%) and is probably under 40%. 

Moldova probably splits the difference between Romania and Ukraine, which are also former Eastern block countries that were historically Eastern Orthodox, and is probably close to Romania than Ukraine and may be a bit over 50%.

I don't have a great intuition regarding where Ireland falls. It is probably under 60%, but probably higher than the U.K. (41.7%), as it is one of the more religious observant Christian countries in Europe, and Catholicism played a major role in sustaining Irish culture in the face of centuries of English rule in 1921 (now more than a century ago). It is probably in the high 40s or low 50s, percentage-wise.

Muslim v. Christian Approaches To Heresy

The very high rates in belief in life after death among Muslims is notable in light of a big difference in how Christianity and Islam have historically approached heresy at the individual level.

Christianity conceptualized heresy as an internal and subjective matter - not believing in the doctrinal truths of the established church.

Islam, in contrast, has focused on insisting that people outwardly comply with religious edicts concerning prayer, fasting, etc., without trying to punish or even really condemn people who are outwardly compliant with its demands even though subjectively, deep down, they have doubts or even outright don't believe in Islamic doctrines.

Yet, modern Islam has much higher rates of belief in the afterlife than modern European Christianity does, where the median rate of belief in the afterlife is probably half what it is among Muslims, if not a little lower.

Paces On The Path To Secular Humanism

Another possibility is that predominantly Islamic countries are simply on the same path towards secular humanism induced by modern scientific thinking and modern societal conditions as predominantly Christian countries, but are just less far along that path.

Many of the Islam driven doctrines and practices that are striking to us today in historically Christian countries, were once present in Christianity.

Witchcraft

Saudi Arabia is executing people for witchcraft now. Christians in Europe and North America were doing this into the 18th century. 

The last known execution for witchcraft in Europe was that of Anna Göldi in 1782 in Glarus, Switzerland, while in the British Isles, Janet Horne was the last person executed for witchcraft in 1727. The last known witchcraft trial in North America was held in Virginia in 1730, where a woman named Mary was convicted of using witchcraft to find lost items and sentenced to be whipped 39 times. There are still witchcraft persecutions (and lots of focus on fighting demons and exorcisms) among African Christians and animists.

Witchcraft prosecutions died, in part, because nobody believed that witchcraft was real any more.

Charging Interest

Islam prohibits the charging of interest now (although work around doctrines exist in Islamic finance to allow the equivalent of simple interest but not compound interest).

Interest was condemned not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also in the New Testament, in writings of the fathers of the Roman Catholic church during the Roman Empire, and by Luther and Calvin at least as late as the 16th century, although usury came to be redefined in Western Christianity as a bar only unfairly high interest rates and not charging interest at all, and became a minor issue for Christian clergy, with the established or formerly established Christian churches now relying on interest on their endowments to operate.

The gap in the focus on barring the charging of interest in the period between the Roman era and the Reformation, moreover, was as much due to the lack of banking activity entirely during the Middle Ages in Christendom, where feudalism prevailed, as it was due to a change in Christian religious doctrine in that time period, per se. 

Modesty

The Islamic world is known today for its greater expectations of modesty in how women dress, and its less equal treatment of women than in the modern Western world. But this too was recently a part of the Christian world, often with religious justification.

Certainly, there is a range of how this manifests within the Islamic world. Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban impose absurdly strict modestly standards. American Muslims and Muslims in Southeast Asia, in contrast, are still more strict than modern Americans and Western Europeans, but are far less extreme than Saudi Arabians.

European and American styles of dress for women were common in Afghanistan and Iran in the 1970s, but this shift was rolled back in Islamic revolutions.

Still, Victorian England, and most predominantly Christian countries in that era, were similar in standards of female modesty to many Islamic countries today. In the early 19th century, women were still wearing swim wear that looked suspiciously similar to "burkinis" in Europe and the U.S. Women were still getting arrested and held in contempt of court for wearing pants in the United States, in the early 1900s. 

Not wearing a skirt or dress to school, even at the collegiate level, was something that women got in trouble for doing up to the early 1960s in the U.S., and skirts are still part of mandatory school uniforms for girls in Japan, much of Asia, and some places in the British Commonwealth.

Marriage

Polygamy and cousin marriage ended much sooner in countries that became Christian than it did in the Islamic world where it is still common in much of the Middle East, West Asia, South Asia, and Africa, although polygamy is banned in both Turkey and Tunisia as a matter of secular law and is quite rare in most Islamic countries. And, cousin marriage is not common in much of the Islamic world.

Polygamy has been very rare, outside the early Mormons in the 19th century and some small splinter Mormon sects after that, in places that have been predominantly Christian at the time, although tolerance for mistresses and concubines who are not Christian wives, instead of, or in addition to, Christian wives, has varied in European and Latin American history, and to a lesser extent until the early 19th century especially in places where slavery was permitted in North America and the Caribbean. Polygamy was at least as common as it is in modern polygamist countries in the Mediterranean world and Europe in the pagan era, and remains common today among animists in Africa.

In one exception to the trend, divorce has been allowed in Islam from the outset, while it was banned entirely until the 16th century, and was virtually non-existent in most Christian countries until the 19th century (with divorces generally only available from the legislature). Complete divorce bans for Christians existed in Ireland and Italy until a quite late date, and this is still the case in the Philippines.

Women's Rights

Mary Wollstonecraft was famously battling for women's rights in the U.K. and Europe in the 18th century. The Married Women's Property Acts that formally gave married women many private law rights and ended coverture law that absorbed women's private law personalities into their husbands were mostly passed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is close to where women's rights in private law are today in many Islamic countries. Shi'ite Islamic communities have tended to be afford women greater rights than Sunni Islamic countries, although this may be more a matter of coincidence and local cultures and conditions than it is a matter of the doctrines of the religious sects, both of which vastly predate widespread democratic government.

Political Rights

The United States, at its independence in 1776, was one of the earliest and largest Republics since the fall of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire (although the Swiss, Iceland, and some city states had it earlier). 

Constitutional monarchies afforded considerable democratic rights to a fairly narrow franchise of middle aged property owning white men in the U.K., but the British monarch had real power into the 19th century as the franchise was expanded by fits and starts there.

The French Revolution in 1789 was another early experiment in democratic government without a monarch, but this revolution was not stable with some form on monarchy persisting intermittently until 1870.

Most European and Latin American constitutional monarchies and republics arose in the late 19th century. The modal year at which European colonies with mostly non-European residents gained their independence in Africa and Asia was 1960, in most cases with Western style Republican government followed not many years after by military coups and dictatorships and multiple false starts before stable democratic government was established.

Much of the Islamic world was subject to European colonial rule for a long time. But outright strong monarchies now persist predominantly in the oil rich states of the Islamic world, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. Morocco and Jordan are fairly close to where the British constitutional monarchy was at the time of the American Revolution. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia have shed their monarchs for a while, but still struggle to make those republics stable multi-party democracies. The Middle East, generally, is still playing out the final acts of the fall of the Ottoman Empire which was formally dissolved with country lines redrawn after World War I, at a time when most of Europe and Latin America has republics. But World War II hit the reset button on democratic government in almost all of continental Europe, leading to the organization of new democratic regimes with the demise of most of them under fascism during World War II.

Eastern Europe and much of Africa and some of Latin America has Soviet style communist regimes until the fall end of the Cold War around 1989, and in some cases beyond, with holdouts like Cuba and Venezuela, and the post-communist era in these countries have only sometimes yielded multi-party democratic republics, and those that did persist still often have a political culture marked by authoritarian tendencies.

Women's Right To Vote

In the U.S. women's right to vote came late. The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women's right to vote at the national level was adopted only in 1920. Unmarried women who owned property in New Jersey could and did cast ballots between 1776 and 1807. Beginning in 1869, women in Western territories won the right to vote. And in the decade leading up to the 19th Amendment’s passage, 23 states granted women full or partial voting rights through a series of successful campaigns.

The U.S. was neither first nor last in the women's right to vote. New Zealand was the first country to allow a wide cross-section of women to vote in national elections in 1893, followed by Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913, and Denmark (including Iceland) in 1915. Many European countries followed in 1917 and 1918. But women in Switzerland obtained the right to vote at federal level in 1971, and at local cantonal level between 1959 and 1972, except for Appenzell in 1989/1990.

Women has the right to vote in national elections in Afghanistan's constitutional monarchy, a predominantly Islamic country then and now, from 1919 to 1929.

Relative to the time that Islamic countries have become democratic republics, in the places where they have, women have gained the right to vote, if anything, sooner than they did in predominantly Christian countries, often from the outset.

The British Navy Did A Lot To End Slavery

 

Best Case Scenarios

We spend a lot of time thinking about worst case scenarios. But we shouldn't discount the likelihood of better outcomes. Smart people of goodwill all over the world are trying to achieve them. And, by "best case scenarios" I mean outcomes that have some plausible chance of happening within time frames that people who are adults today can live to see.

China

China joins the rest of the world in backing away from coal as a power source and shifting to renewables like solar, wind, and tidal power, to nuclear power, and to improved energy conservation. Its high speed rail network and growing fleet of electric vehicles suggest that it isn't as indifferent to the environment as we might think.

A new generation of political leaders eases its authoritarianism and censorship, curbs its excessive use of the death penalty, checks China's territorial ambitions. It also cuts off tactic support for North Korea if it isn't conditioned on North Korean demilitarization and reforms.

Russia and the former Soviet Union

Putin dies. The Ukraine War is abandoned on terms not materially more favorable than the 2014 status quo. The Black Sea is demilitarized in a multi-lateral agreement. Maintaining a Soviet scale military becomes unsustainable and is curtailed. Ukraine joins NATO. Most autonomous regions of Russia gain more autonomy or gain independence.  

The declining importance of oil and gas in the global economy weakens autocratic powers in Russia and strengthens urban commercial and technology sectors. A grass roots political movement curbs the power of the oligarchs. Russia stops supporting North Korea, which together with Chinese tough love weakens that regime.

Former Soviet Republics continue to go their own ways with weaker ties to Russia and Russian expeditionary military activity is curtailed.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Belatedly, sub-Saharan Africa follows in the footsteps of Mexico, China, and Southeast Asia and becomes a global center for manufacturing, initially fueled by cheap labor and lax regulations, which leads to economic development, greater affluence, and a demographic transition. Improve rail, roads, and air travel link the continent. The declining importance of oil and gas weakens authoritarian regimes.

Regimes will start to leave the highly unstable coup and civil war prone phase of the transition to democracy and agricultural production in Africa will also improve and rise to global standards. So far, Africa has increased output by increasing the amount of land farmed, rather than by increasing productivity per acre, but this could easily change in the decades to come.

The Islamic World

The declining importance of oil and gas undermines the oil monarchies and authoritarian regimes of the Middle East, North Africa, Brunei, and Aceh. Without oil money to prop it up, fundamentalist Islam fizzles. Guest workers in the Arab world are replaced by domestic workers ending massive unemployment among young people in the region. Power shifts to commercial and technology sector firms forcing a transition to democratic regimes, peacefully or by revolutions.

The Islamic world, now in something of a Victorian era stage of cultural development, progresses, with less restrictive dress codes, less repression of women, less use of corporal punishment, and more commercial activity. Iran remains nominally a theocracy but with a great shift in the balance of power in favor of reformist politicians and away from religious leaders, until finally disestablishment arrives tracking the religious diversity and growing secularization of ordinary Iranians.

Latin America

More sensible regulation of guns and decriminalization of drugs in North America deflates and disarms the cartels of Latin America and opens the door for less corrupt government. Drug prohibition driven waves of homicides end, and a well-educated population comes to the fore. The disaster that is Venezuela eases as the declining importance of oil and gas in the global economy makes top down communist rule infeasible.

Climate change

We won't end the causes of anthropic climate change soon enough to prevent or reverse it. Sea levels will rise faster than expected, but not so fast that coastal urban centers can't be protected with sea walls that become island redoubts to a great extent, especially in places on the brink like Venice, southern Florida, and southern Louisiana.

Ski resorts move north with Alaska and the Yukon taking the center stage once held by Colorado, Utah, and Switzerland.

The great U.S. migration to the Sun Belt reverses itself as the heat in the Southern U.S. becomes intolerable and the winters in the Midwest and Northeast become more tolerable. The southern U.S. shifts in the direction of tropical and deep desert from subtropical.

The Sahara continues to expand before reaching a stabilized peak as fossil fuel use is discontinued worldwide. 

Petroleum and coal become as archaic as merchant and naval sailing fleets, while merchant ships start to universally rely in part upon wind power for propulsion. Natural gas fades more slowly but is eventually replaces by electrical grids fueled by wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and nuclear energy.

U.S. political divisions

As Baby Boomers die off and younger generations come to great power in society, Christianity withers, anti-LGBT sentiment fades, reproductive roots overcome a decade or so long stumble, anti-science movements return to crackpot status, and the Rehnquist court goes down in history as a second, regrettable, Lochner court. The filibuster is abolished, court packing ends the ultra-conservative Supreme Court, and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories gain their rightful political rights. The U.S. adopts a popular vote for the Presidency either by interstate compact or by constitutional amendment, or by the former leading to the latter. Gradual cultural homogenization, and continued migration to major cities eventually undermines the worst facets of Southern/Country/Western culture.

The global economy's shift away from fossil fuels undermines the worst political factions in places like West Virginia, Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The U.S. will finally get high speed rail in select, regional high traffic corridors, but will probably not develop a national high speed rail network.

Better Off African Women Have Fewer Kids

Even in poor countries in Africa where the average woman has many children per lifetime, more affluent "elite women" have fewer children.

Low fertility has been well documented among wealthier and more educated women in more economically developed sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Economic theory and historic literature predict that upper class individuals want smaller families regardless of the normative or contraceptive context. Here we ask: do “elite” women in SSA really have similarly low fertility outcomes, regardless of the national fertility and family planning contexts? Or is low fertility found only among elite women in wealthier countries with lower overall fertility? Using DHS data from 27 SSA countries since 2010, we find that TFR is substantially lower among elite than non-elite women throughout the region. Multilevel analysis shows national contextual characteristics are only weakly related to fertility for elite women, in contrast to non-elite women. These findings indicate that the profile of elite women across SSA results in similarly low fertility, regardless of national contexts.

Jamaica Corker, Moussa Zan,Clementine Rossier "Fertility of the Elite in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is Low Fertility Among the Better-off a Phenomenon Throughout the Region?" Population Association of American Conference (April 2019).

Africa Has Seven Coups In Two Years, Six In The Sahel

 

Details at the Washington Post.

This plays out against the ongoing "Sahel War" between Islamists from historically herding societies who are being forced south as the Sahara aridifies who have come into conflict with Christians and animists from historically farming societies to the south of them. In short, it is a cluster of African wars ultimately driven by climate change.

Piracy So Far This Year

From here.

Piracy is pretty rare, with the map above providing, while not a complete list of incidents, a very large share of them, worldwide - many of which aren't that serious.

Many of the familiar piracy hotspots remain. The waters off the coast of West Africa are the worst. Southeast Asia is next.

But piracy has pretty much ended in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the adjacent parts of the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, all of which have been places where there has been piracy in modern times. Also, the incidents in India, Mozambique and Brazil on the map involved ships docketed in port, not at sea.

UPDATE August 4, 2023: The tranquility of the Persian Gulf with respect to piracy needs to come with a caveat, however. The Iranian military is a genuine threat to civilian shipping in the Persian Gulf and its immediate vicinity, and has been involved in numerous incidents of illegitimate hostile acts towards both military and civilian ships there, but this doesn't count as piracy because piracy, by definition, involves non-state actors.

The Root Cause Of The Sahel Wars In A Nutshell

There are Muslim-Christian/Animist wars across the Sahel reason of Africa. This is why.

We consider the effects of climate change on seasonally migrant populations that herd livestock – i.e., transhumant pastoralists – in Africa. Traditionally, transhumant pastoralists benefit from a cooperative relationship with sedentary agriculturalists whereby arable land is used for crop farming in the wet season and animal grazing in the dry season. 

Droughts can disrupt this arrangement by inducing pastoral groups to migrate to agricultural lands before the harvest, causing conflict to emerge. 

We examine this hypothesis by combining ethnographic information on the traditional locations of transhumant pastoralists and sedentary agriculturalists with high-resolution data on the location and timing of rainfall and violent conflict events in Africa from 1989–2018. We find that droughts in the territory of transhumant pastoralists lead to conflict in neighboring areas. 

Consistent with the proposed mechanism, the effects are concentrated in agricultural areas; they occur during the wet season and not the dry season; and they are due to rainfall’s impact on plant biomass growth. Since pastoralists tend to be Muslim and agriculturalists Christian, this mechanism accounts for a sizable proportion of the rapid rise in religious conflict observed in recent decades. 

Turning to policy responses, we find that development aid projects tend not to mitigate the effects that we document. By contrast, the effects are closer to zero when transhumant pastoralists have greater power in national government, suggesting that more equal political representation is conducive to peace.

McGuirk E, Nunn N. Transhumant Pastoralism, Climate Change, and Conflict in Africa. Working Paper. https://scholar.harvard.edu/nunn/publications/nomadic-pastoralism-climate-change-and-conflict-africa

What Nation States Would Look Like In Africa

This is a map of Africa using ethnically drawn borders, rather than those drawn by imperial powers. Needless to say, an Africa made up of nation-states would have far more countries, almost all smaller than the existing ones, than the status quo does.

Indeed, ethnic division and small pre-colonial political units, none of which could on its own raise a large army or dominate trade in a region, were factors in addition to "Guns, Germs and Steel" that allow made colonial rule possible in Africa.

In contrast, in much of Europe and mainland Asia, wars of conquest gradually produced larger and larger kingdoms that the rulers of these kingdoms eventually homogenized culturally and linguistically, a process that much of Africa didn't experience. And, in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and much of Oceania, European colonists with more homogeneity replaced or overwhelmed local populations through demic replacement and cultural and linguistic transitions.

Of course, there is a certain level of subjectively involved in any such map. For example, one level of generality above individual ethnicities and languages is language families, illustrated on the map below, and membership in the same language family often coincides with cultural commonalities as well.

In between, you can look at both language families and individual languages in the same map (from here) in an image that captures not just those too levels of analysis but also the relative similarity of languages in the same family as a function of color shades:

Any map assigning a single language to a geographic area, of course, also fails to represent the fact that multiple languages are often spoken by people in the same vicinity, even the same village or neighborhood, and that in many places, multi-lingual individuals are common - often speaking one or more local languages and a national European colonial language as a lingua franca, albeit with a distinctive local dialect of that language.

The Comoros Genocide

Comoros is a small island country with 851,000 people between Madagascar and the continent of Africa which shares a largely common history with Madagascar up through its first encounter with Portuguese explorers in 1503, and was a trading post for Indian Ocean Arabian seafarers after early contact with Austronesian sea farers from Southeast Asia ceased.

The historical population of Comoros, however, was almost complete replaced in the time period from 1790 to 1820 in a little know historical African genocide:

In the last decade of the 18th century, Malagasy warriors, mostly Betsimisaraka and Sakalava, started raiding the Comoros for slaves and the islands were devastated as crops were destroyed and the people were slaughtered, taken into captivity or fled to the African mainland: it is said that by the time the raids finally ended in the second decade of the 19th century only one man remained on Mwali. The islands were repopulated by slaves from the mainland, who were traded to the French in Mayotte and the Mascarenes. On the Comoros, it was estimated in 1865 that as much as 40% of the population consisted of slaves.

France first established colonial rule in the Comoros by taking possession of Mayotte in 1841 when the Sakalava usurper sultan Andriantsoly [fr] (also known as Tsy Levalo) signed the Treaty of April 1841, which ceded the island to the French authorities.

Why Do Women Accuse Other Women Of Witchcraft?

Witchcraft accusations are alive and well today in Africa, often in the context of polygynous marriages which are very common in some parts of Africa.

There is significant cross-cultural variation in the sex of individuals most likely to be accused of practising witchcraft. Allegations of witchcraft might be a mechanism for nullifying competitors so resources they would have used become available to others. In this case, who is targeted may result from patterns of competition and conflict (same-sex or male–female) within specific relationships, which are determined by broader socio-ecological factors. 

Here we examine patterns of sex-specific accusations in historic cases from sub-Saharan Africa (N = 423 accusations). 

Male ‘witches’ formed the greater part of our sample, and were mostly accused by male blood-relatives and nonrelatives, often in connection to disputes over wealth and status. 

Accusations of women were mainly from kin by marriage, and particularly from husbands and co-wives. The most common outcomes were that the accused was forced to move, or suffered reputational damage. 

Our results suggest that competition underlies accusations and relationship patterns may determine who is liable to be accused.

Sarah Peacey, Olympia L. K. Campbell and Ruth Mace, Same-sex competition and sexual conflict expressed through witchcraft accusations, 12 Scientific Reports volume 6655 (April 22, 2022) (open access) via Tyler Cohen.

Geography and Economic Development In Africa

I apologize to the author of the article below for a full reprinting of their work, which I will truncate if requested. 

It is hard to capture the problems facing African development in summary fashion, and unlike much of what I write about a variety of topics, including Africa's political and economic and military woes, the analysis here is not amenable to hedgehog style knowledge of "one big thing." 

The relevant historical details are not widely known among educated lay people who are in the audience of my blog. But this is critical to understand the article by Abel Gaiya, writing in this February 9, 2023 article from Nigeria, that focuses heavily on the particularities of West African geography and economic history as the root of its current woes. 

Key Points

Some key points that Gaiya makes can be summed up as follows:

* Through the 1500s, Africa didn't lag far behind the rest of the world economically, educationally, technologically, or militarily.

* French and English colonial powers, oriented towards maritime trade, flipped the historical economic development patterns of West Africa from one focused on trans-Saharan trade from inland economic centers, to Atlantic maritime trade and investment. As a result, a narrow coastal reason has developed far more the the interior.

* Once West African countries gained independence (many in 1960 or shortly afterwards), populous but less developed interior regions gains political power in the new democratic systems, in connection with coups, military dictatorships, and civil wars that fragmented coastal regions with providing for forum for people from the interior to assert their grievances and reassert power.

* But, Northern and interior regions failed to turn their greater political power post-independence into economic development due to their lack of an economic foundation and weak ineffectual governments. Economic development programs were also politicized and as a result pursued wasteful and clumsy development programs that didn't make economic sense. 

* West African politicians focused on immediate and visible development programs even if they weren't the best investments in the long run.

* West African governments also distributed public goods on a broad geographic basis regardless of need to build political support, and decentralized political power to build support on a localized and ethnically organized basis: "national ruling coalitions often choose a strategy of ‘power-sharing’ to project power into rural localities where hierarchical communal structures exist (thereby giving these rural elites bargaining power with the central state) and where rural elite are economically dependent upon the state (for instance, through access to state-provided goods necessary for agrarian services). . . . state authorities administer rural localities by a deconcentrated network of state agencies and outposts spread across the villages and small towns, and the state rules the countryside indirectly, through chiefs and notabilities." Decentralization empowers pre-existing local elites, but is not conducive to economic innovation and isn't open to wide grassroots participation in local government. It "empowers local powerbrokers and weakens local democracy, and in the Sahel and Sahara, ‘the recent politics of decentralization imposed on national states has not brought more equality; instead, corruption has been installed as part of culture and society.’" Globally sub-Saharan African developing countries generally, and West African countries in particular have "the highest level of national dispersion of power." 

* Globally sub-Saharan African developing countries generally, and West African countries in particular rank "the lowest in Africa in terms of virtually all the variables identified as critical for industrial and development policy success." These include "not having a strong middle class, civil society and productive capitalist class to press for more developmental action by regional and local governments, while weaker administrative capacity limits the capacity for regional governments to effectively implement development policy." In these regions ,government is ineffective, there is "‘an unskilled human capital stock, large but weak private sector and weak civil society presence’.

* In part due to lack of unity, organization and weak human capital, "a large interior city with a strong historically commercial heritage has  ‘limited influence in the policy process compared to the well-organized and vocal minority of conservative Islamists.’"

* Local governments have insufficient resources and have trouble staffing a competent bureaucracy or providing public goods. "[C]entralized state redistributive interventions, market mechanisms and decentralization have had limited impact on spatial inequalities in West Africa," in part because local governments are ill suited to spatial redistribution of resources. Weak states, landlocked countries, and a lack of inland waterways have all contributed to making it hard to address coastal-hinterland disparities.

* Lagging northern and interior regions have become epicenters of transnational violence. But "relatively successful counter-insurgency efforts in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger risk pushing terrorists’ ‘territorial expansion towards the Gulf of Guinea countries and their desire to extend their influence beyond Sahelian countries’, especially northern Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, and also Ghana."

Critiques

Gaiya's analysis while providing an alternative perspective is inadequate in my view in addressing some other key economic and ecological and cultural factors that I've emphasized that influence the region's poor development outcomes:

* One of the key conflicts is between societies that have historically been made up of Muslim herders in arid regions whom climate change is forcing to move south as the Sahara expands into regions inhabited by Christian-animist societies who were traditionally farmers whose farming is becoming more marginal as the expanding desert makes their Sahel farming regions more arid. The Christian animist-farmers were prior to their Christian conversions particularly fragmented, as hundreds of years of decline post-1500 CE and colonialism degraded their secular institutions to build unity.

* The marginal farming communities are further undermined by mass migration and brain drain to comparatively modern and comparatively economically prosperous cities as rural farming economies gradually need fewer workers as they mechanism and use more modern agricultural technologies, or find themselves remaining poor and backward because they fail to modernize how they farm. Even in countries that have been far more successful in economic development than West Africa, like the United States, China, and India, economic lagging and malaise in rural farming oriented areas relative to rapidly developing major cities for very sustained time periods is the norm and this has let to predictable political and economic development dysfunction in the lagging rural areas.

* The transition from an overland trans-Saharan trade orientation to maritime economic trade was driven as much by economic and technological fundamentals as by colonial policy decisions. It would have happened even without domination from European colonial powers.

* The pattern of boundary drawing by colonial regimes generally, and in sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa within it, in particular, was at best indifferent to and at times deliberately cofounded in furtherance of a divide and conquer strategy, pre-existing divisions of ethnic, linguistic and religious geography or of ecological and climate zones. This undermined the formation of ethnically, linguistically, and religiously coherent nation-states of the kind that arose over centuries of religious missionary efforts, aristocratic alliance formation, wars, and nationalist political movements in Europe. This lack of a common identity at a level below pan-Africanism in response to a common European colonial adversary, made most newly independent African nations (particularly in West Africa) inherently fragmented and difficult to govern. Modern Western academics are reluctant to acknowledge it, but a shared national, linguistic, and religious identity does make nation-building much easier.

* Africa's ethic and linguistic units (and West Africa's in particular) were smaller geographically and in population than in Europe and Asia, because much of it hadn't undergone the process of indigenous consolidating wars, conquest and rule by larger political units that Europe and Asia by the time its colonial boundaries were drawn. Extreme decentralization in Africa reflects, in part, the reality that this region was highly fragmented with groups with shared identities that were comparatively tiny in geographic area and population, in addition to being fragmented across colonial power drawn national boundaries. It didn't have the homogenizing effects of mass waves of external colonization that the United States and Canada and New Zealand and Australia did, for example. It also bears remembering that African countries are much larger geographically than a casual review of a typical map projection would suggest.

* Newly independent and democratic countries usually experience bumps in the road like coups, corruption, and civil wars everywhere the countries become newly independent. These are the birth pangs of new democracies which Africa and much of Asia experienced later than Europe, Latin America, and North America. Smooth transitions to functional, competent democratic government are the exception and not the rule.

* Another factor that impaired African political and economic development was a shortage of competed, educated, well trained indigenous civil servants, educators, lawyers, politicians, and business people, when the modern Western political and economic systems that they adopted are designed assuming this kind of human capital is present. The colonial countries imported class of senior government officials left a vacuum having not trained sufficient successors to their roles. It takes lots of people with lots of acquired knowledge to run large governmental and business institutions effectively. India, for example, has a more smooth transition than many newly independent countries (despite the trauma of partition) because it has a larger corps of indigenous managers and professionals and civil servants and lawyers than many African countries did.

* Institutions work only to the extent that people who live in and utilize them are socialized into working in those institutions. New capitalist democracies are implicitly designed on the assumption that the ordinary people at the grass roots who are voting and participating in the economy have a sophistication and political culture that leads the people to make good political choices as they participate in democratic institutions and to find ways to function well in a modern capitalist economy. But, it takes many generations for this kind of collectively familiarity with and ingrained cultural capacity to function in these kinds of systems to develop. The people who made the quick and dirty plans to make this transition from colonial regimes had forgotten who traumatic and fraught it was in their own histories at a similar stage of economic and political transition to learn to function in an industrialized economy and to utilize Western style democratic political institutions productively. Social virtues for economic life in a capitalist, market based economy, and a worldview making sense of large scale collective political decision making don't become part of people's cultural scripts overnight.

* Writing new constitutions and new legal codes is all good and well, but this isn't sufficient to create the societies that they contemplate. This kinds of documents can be enacted more or less overnight, but until you have the indigenous elites necessary to operate these institutions and have socialized the masses into living with these institutions, they won't work. Africa has spent half a century backfilling the cultural changes and human capital it needs to thrive since its nations were decolonialized in order to prepare it to make use of its institutions. Overcoming corruption, in particular, is one of the latest stages of socialization that both elites and common people experience in the process of economic and political development.

The Article

West African scholars and politicians had high hopes for their region at independence. Even before this, in 1927 Ladipo Solanke had published United West Africa or Africa at the Bar of the Family of Nations, in which he argued that:

It took the white race a thousand years to arrive at their present level of advance: it took the Japanese, a Mongol race, 50 years to catch up with the white race, there is no reason why we West Africans, a Negro race, should not catch up with the Aryans and the Mongols in one quarter of a century.

Sadly, this prediction woefully failed. Instead, West Africa has gone over 60 years without the development Solanke envisioned, and Nigeria, the ‘giant of Africa’, ranks high on state fragility and features one of the highest poverty rates in the world.

We should not be too critical of the lofty dreams optimistic Africanist nationalists, economic liberals, dependency theorists and socialists had decades ago. It is only from the 1990s that the broader implications of West African (and African) development challenges have manifested empirically, in persistent poverty, greater difficulty in fostering growth-enhancing national political systems, the persistence of low intra-regional official trade and weak economic integration, high levels of parallel trade and violent extremism and droughts across the Sahel and Sahara.

It was only in 2000 that Frances Stewart, director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at the University of Oxford, convinced scholars to go beyond simple terms like ‘tribalism’, ‘prebendalism’, ethnic diversity and class struggles to emphasize horizontal inequalities as key for studying the roots of many conflicts in Africa.

Building on these developments, one could argue that West Africa is ‘malformed’—an idea based on three major arguments—spatial inequalities between coastal and hinterland spaces, the decline in functional interdependency between the desert-edge and the savannah, and the fall of trans-Saharan trade as a revenue source and environmental risk mitigation for its populations. Political scientists and development scholars have begun to give greater attention to the role of spatial inequalities in African politics. Development scholars have also come a long way from perceiving economic development as simply requiring political will to a better and more complex understanding of political economy constraints. 

COASTAL-HINTERLAND INEQUALITIES

By the 1500s, when Africa maintained middle position in global rankings based on technology, population, or power, and when development in Africa was strongly concentrated in the west of the continent, the bulk of West Africa’s population and the major centres of high population density were in the savannah interior, especially the Niger Bend. This subregion held very large cities—the best known of which are Niani, Jenne, Timbuktu, and Gao (all in modern-day Mali)—from the early centuries of the 1000s to the 1500s. Historian Joseph Inikori has described these cities as occupying a ‘powerful growth pole for all the subregions,’ and enjoying ‘geographical location advantages which made the region the centre of trade and manufacturing in West Africa until the middle centuries of the second millennium.’ The region’s interior also ranked highly in measures of urbanization (measured by city sizes), communications, agriculture, military, industry, transportation technologies, and literacy.

The growth of the trans-Atlantic trade empowered a few coastal kingdoms and, the subsequent emergence of nineteenth-century movements to replace it with Afro-European commodity trade, led to the coastal West Africa’s increased wealth. This led to the region representing nearly 33 per cent of the value of British exports to Africa by the mid-nineteenth century. The dawn of colonization, and subsequent colonial investments in rail to leverage coast to country movement, led to the eventual decline of the trans-Saharan trade. It also meant a reversal of fortunes between the coast and the Sahara-Sahel-Savannah occurred, because the end of trans-Saharan trade was accompanied by infrastructure spending that was mostly directed towards coastal spaces and colonies since they dominated in shares of Atlantic-exported products

Although the budget of the French colonial empire’s economic and investment fund increased development spending by 867 per cent between 1946 and 1960, the majority was allocated to port and road development in the coastal states, whose southern regions made up 91 per cent (in value terms) of exported products in French West Africa. Moreover, until 1955, almost all external private financial contribution to this public effort was channelled to the light industries of areas around Dakar. This investment deficit was even worse for desert spaces.

By 1960, it was the coastal states (Senegal, Ghana, Cameroun, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria) which had the highest manufacturing shares of GDP in the region. The result was that, by 1990, the countries in the Gulf of Guinea around Nigeria (Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Cameroon) accounted for more than 80 per cent of West Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is highly concentrated on a shallow coastal strip (within 25 kilometres from the coast) which generates 56 per cent of West Africa’s GDP (which could increase to two-thirds by 2050), and makes up 51 per cent of the urban populations of these countries, despite being home to only 31 per cent of the total population of the region. This situation is reinforced by market dynamics which concentrate private domestic, foreign, even public investment and sometimes foreign aid in these areas. 

POLITICAL POWER IN PLACE OF ECONOMIC INFLUENCE

Across West Africa, more inland regions regained influence through political power due to their large populations and/or the fragmentation of southern regions (as in Nigeria and Benin), through waves of coups and military rule (with West Africa having the highest share of Africa’s military coups), or both.

Economically lagging northern regions increasingly asserted centralized power in different countries in different ways. Some did so through military coups, as in Benin (first under Mathieu Kerekou in 1972), Togo (first under Gnassingbé Eyadéma in 1967), Sierra Leone (first under Siaka Stevens in 1967/1968) and Liberia (first under Samuel Doe in 1980, overturning 137 years of Americo—Liberian settler rule concentrated in the south-west).

Others leveraged their demographic power to hold political power through the electoral process, although waves of military rule centralizing national power further entrenched their influence, as in Nigeria (under civilian prime minister, Tafawa Balewa, in 1960 and subsequently under centralizing military rule). In the Sahel, only the Arab-Berber Mauritanians consolidated power over their Afro-Mauritanian counterparts (first under Moktar Ould Daddah in 1960), aided by the division of black Mauritanians between Haratin and Afro-Mauritanians.

Northern coup plots and rumours occurred in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1960s, with the attempt in 2002 failing and leading to the country’s civil war—although the country’s first northern president, Alassane Ouattara, has led the country since 2010. The demographically weak, but strategically mobile, Tuareg of northern Mali and northern Niger have launched rebellions multiple times, but insurrections and terrorism are yet to lead to a power shift in Bamako and Niamey. In another outlier, Ghana, the northern region possessed neither the population, high level of pre-colonial political centralization, nor the military seniority among the officers’ corps to succeed in capturing power.

It has led to uneven development between hinterland and coastal territories, within the region. On one hand, politically marginalized lagging regions (such as the northern regions of Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and Niger), too politically weak to channel central government resources to their regions, suffer from inadequate development expenditure channelled to their regions from central governments. However, conversely, politically powerful, but economically lagging regions in the rest of the countries suffer from weak states, inter-regional competition and policy incoherence which distort development action undertaken by both central governments and subnational governments in lagging regions. In Ghana, for instance, the Nkrumah regime set up a tomato-canning facility in Tamale in the Northern Region, despite production of tomatoes and the main consumer markets being located in the south. In Côte d’Ivoire where the state agency, Sodesucre was established to implement the policy of constructing and operating sugar plants and complexes to drive rural development across northern Côte d’Ivoire, but, as Dwayne Woods argues, ‘Sodesucre officials were not allowed to plan production exclusively around economic objectives.’ In Nigeria, the historian Olufeni Ekundare observes how there was systematic ‘duplication of projects, and an unhealthy competition among the Regions with consequent economic waste.’

THE CHALLLENGE IN FINDING A BALANCE

Ethnic inequality has contributed to the normalcy of ethno-regional party mobilization in West Africa and therefore the dispersion of power at the national level. First, as Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai proposes, the division of power itself, and its biasing of ruling elites, towards short-term political survival may make them more inclined towards immediate and ‘visible’ policy outcomes as opposed to long-term productive investments that would otherwise be necessary for reducing poverty in lagging regions.

Second, the need to capture a wide range of voters may push ruling elites, in the distribution of public goods, to focus on broader geographical coverage (irrespective of varied level of needs). A recent example is the hurried formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC) party in Nigeria with the short-term goal of snatching power away from a ruling party whose incumbent presidential candidate had been accused of disrupting an informal ethno-regional power rotation arrangement after having succeeded a deceased president descended from the north. Consequently, while the ruling coalition has made some progress on visible transport infrastructure projects, progress in addressing more complex security, development and macroeconomic challenges has been elusive.

Indeed, the first dataset quantifying political settlements developed at the Effective States and Inclusive Development Center (ESID) to understand how politics and distributions of power affect development, shows that among 44 developing countries, sub-Saharan Africa exhibits the highest level of national dispersion of power, while West Africa (only five Gulf of Guinea countries—Nigeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Guinea) ranks highest on the same metric within the continent. In fact, West Africa ranks the lowest in Africa in terms of virtually all the variables identified as critical for industrial and development policy success.

At the subnational level, being a lagging region comes with institutional characteristics which make it more difficult to overcome that condition. These characteristics often include not having a strong middle class, civil society and productive capitalist class to press for more developmental action by regional and local governments, while weaker administrative capacity limits the capacity for regional governments to effectively implement development policy. Alexandre Marc, Neelam Verjee and Stephen Mogaka observe that ‘Most lagging regions experience governance problems. In some cases, the problem is one of capacity, but frequently it reflects dysfunctions in the modalities of governance in remote regions.’ Zainab Usman notes that although the largest city of interior West Africa, Kano (larger in population size than Bamako, Niamey, Ouagadougou and any other savannah cities), has a strong historical commercial legacy, ‘an unskilled human capital stock, large but weak private sector and weak civil society presence’ have ‘limited influence in the policy process compared to the well-organized and vocal minority of conservative Islamists.’

Catherine Boone, in her Political Topographies of the African State, called Africanist scholars to focus on how ‘there are significant regional (subnational) variations in the political capacities and interests of rural societies and rural notables,’ in contrast to scholars in the 1970s to 1990s on both left and right whom often depicted rural Africa, ‘– often by default – as homogeneous and uniformly alienated from national politics.’

In continuity with colonial practices of indirect rule, Boone argues that national ruling coalitions often choose a strategy of ‘power-sharing’ to project power into rural localities where hierarchical communal structures exist (thereby giving these rural elites bargaining power with the central state) and where rural elite are economically dependent upon the state (for instance, through access to state-provided goods necessary for agrarian services). Power-sharing means that state authorities administer rural localities by a deconcentrated network of state agencies and outposts spread across the villages and small towns, and the state rules the countryside indirectly, through chiefs and notabilities.

Boone highlights that major consequence of power-sharing is its non-conduciveness to economic innovation and its non-openness to widened grassroots participation in local governance. She argues that ‘the most noticeable effect of ‘democratic decentralization’ in such cases, at least in the short run, is likely to be the further empowerment of the pre-existing local elite.’ This applies to cases like northern Cameroon and northern Nigeria, Chad, the Zerma and Hausa regions of Niger, northern Ghana and the Korhogo region of northern Côte d’Ivoire.

This also implies that the move towards decentralization and subnational unit proliferation (i.e., increasing the number of subnational administrative units such as states, local governments and districts) across West Africa does not solve this problem. Guy Grossman and Janet Lewis have observed a ‘rarely noted phenomenon’: the trend of proliferation of subnational administrative units particularly pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa, where almost half of countries increased their number of administrative units by over 20 per cent since the mid-1990s. Their list of sub-Saharan African countries that have increased their number of subnational administrative units by over 20 per cent since the 1990 shows that West Africa ranks first in administrative unit proliferation since 1990.

Generally, newly created administrative units face relative difficulty generating resources and staffing a full and competent bureaucracy, and as a result, are less capable of providing public goods to their constituencies. Decentralization also empowers local powerbrokers and weakens local democracy, and in the Sahel and Sahara, ‘the recent politics of decentralization imposed on national states has not brought more equality; instead, corruption has been installed as part of culture and society.’ In other words, centralized state redistributive interventions, market mechanisms and decentralization have had limited impact on spatial inequalities in West Africa. 

A CALL FOR BETTER UNDERSTANDING

Malformation is not inconsequential. That the Liptako-Gourma area (at the intersection of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso) and the Lake Chad Basin (at the intersection of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon) form ‘the two main epicentres of transnational violence’ in West Africa is not a coincidence. The epicentres of West Africa’s malformation are Nigeria and Mali because they are the West African countries where the reversal between northern and southern regions have been most salient.

Analysts are realizing that relatively successful counter-insurgency efforts in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger risk pushing terrorists’ ‘territorial expansion towards the Gulf of Guinea countries and their desire to extend their influence beyond Sahelian countries’, especially northern Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, and also Ghana.

Unfortunately, coastal-hinterland disparities are often persistent. It might not be that much of a problem for regions with strong state capacity, undergoing widespread development and characterized by sufficient inland navigable waterways which connect coastal spaces with distant interiors. This applies, for instance, to China which has experimented with taking inland the urbanization strategy successful in the leading coastal areas in the 1980s and 1990s, in order to enhance interregional equality.

This is not the case for Africa, however, since Africa is the continent with the lowest number of inland navigable rivers relative to continental size and holds the highest number of people living in landlocked countries. Solving West Africa’s crisis and addressing its spatial inequalities requires much more than conventional economic analysis, deployment of the ‘good governance’ literature and simple arguments to turn towards a population-centric and development-oriented counter-insurgency approach. ‘Good governance’ analysis must be replaced by that of ‘developmental governance’ and West Africans must analyse their countries’ problems from a more regional lens.

From The Republic.