draining development.pdf - Khazar University

54 Draining DevelopmentLatin America and the Caribbean, and Central Asia in which politicalsettlements are highly vulnerable to collapse in the near future. IFFs mayappear to be at the heart of their fragility and, indeed, may be fuelingconflicts. However, we argue that it is difficult to define what is illicit insuch a context of conflict. Fundamental disagreements about the distributionof benefits are unlikely to be resolved without recourse to systemicviolence.Violence is, nonetheless, not the distinctive feature of fragile countries;there may also be pockets of intense violence in intermediate developerssuch as Bolivia, Brazil, India, or Thailand. Rather, fragile countriesare characterized by a significant breakdown of the political settlementand, in extreme cases, also of social order. While pockets of rudimentarysocial order may spontaneously emerge in such societies, this is largelylimited to the organization of violence and subnational economies supportingthe economy of violence. There is a grey area between intermediatedevelopers facing growing internal conflicts and a developingcountry classified as fragile. Nonetheless, in intermediate developers,while a few political groups and factions may be engaging in significantviolence, most significant political factions are engaged in the normalpatron-client politics of rent seeking and redistribution using the formaland informal mechanisms through which political settlements are constructedin these countries. A political settlement is possible becausethere is a viable distribution of resources across the most powerfulgroups that reflects their relative power and that can be reproduced overtime. This is a necessary condition describing a sustainable end to significantviolence and the emergence of a political settlement.The defining characteristic of fragility is that a sustainable balance ofpower and a corresponding distribution of benefits across powerfulpolitical actors have not emerged. Violence is the process through whichcontending groups are attempting to establish and test the distributionof power on which a future political settlement could emerge. But thismay take a long time because the assessment by different groups of whatthey can achieve may be unrealistic, and some groups may believe that,by fighting long enough, they can militarily or even physically wipe outthe opposition. In some cases, this belief may be realistic (Sri Lanka in2010); in other cases, the attempt to wipe out the opposition can resultin a bloody stalemate until negotiations about a different distribution of