 Well, thank you all for joining us here today on a blustery and cold time. Rachel, as many of you may know, one of the many pieces of evidence that she's a lot smarter than the rest of us is that she's moved to Santa Fe. So the shock of stepping into a Washington winter must be pretty terrible. Well, you know, I'm from Alaska, and so actually, there's a hole coming for me. Rachel explains why she's moved to Santa Fe. So let me just tell you just a little bit about Rachel. You got her bio in front of you, and it's on the flap of the book. And the book is so fabulous that every one of you will want to walk out with a copy. And we will arrange for that right outside. But Rachel is, of course, a senior fellow here in democracy, conflict, and the governance of that program. She spent a decade, when I first met Rachel, she was the extremely cool CEO of the Truman National Security Project, which is a great way for young national security professionals to get their start. She helped found the security project. She, during the Clinton time at the State Department, she was on the State Department Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which did the quarterly advice to the secretary. I could go on with a much longer list, but it's all available to you. What we thought we would do is have a conversation for probably 35, 40 minutes, something like that about the book. I've got a bunch of questions for that. I learned a huge amount reading this book. I was delighted that you wrote it when you did because I just finished a book in the spring and I discovered you can write a book or you can read your friend's books, but you can't do both of those at the same time. Rachel's done something even more amazing. She has written a book while producing a child, right? And this is a particular skill because raising a child means that you never get to sleep because the child's crying all night. And you never have a peaceful waking hour because you're crying because you haven't gotten enough done on the book. So I have double admiration for what she's accomplished here. So, Rachel, let me just start with one observation about what I walked away from. As a news person, we write about conflict between states all the time. And sometimes we write about, frequently we write about, state failure. But rarely do we write about it in a way that conveys to our readers that if you go around the world right now, there is more violence underway within states because of failed states, because of states that are struggling either with democracy or kleptocracy or various forms of poor governance than there is in interstate conflict. And I think one of the brilliant things that you've done here is explore for us a bit about why that's true. And so let me ask you to start off there. What was the big question in your mind that you were trying to answer as you tackled this topic? Sure, it's a great way to start. And first of all, thank you. Thank you for coming to speak. And as many of you know, David has his own book out. And so breaking from a book tour to speak about someone else's book on book tour is really quite- It's actually a real pleasure because you get tired of talking about your own book, as you will soon discover. Not quite there yet. But so I started writing this book because I really wanted to know about how one brings down violence. Think tanks are famous for admiring rather than solving problems. And I wanted to help solve a problem. And the first thing I stumbled across, just as you mentioned, was that violence wasn't largely happening in conflict zones. That conflict zones have been getting safer and safer over time, surprisingly enough because the nature of conflict has changed. We've gone from set piece battles in World War II, where you'd have 10, 20, 30,000 troops lined up against one another in 10,000 casualties, to eight men in one unit versus a platoon of 20 in the Ukraine fighting each other. And you have three casualties. So the nature of war has changed and it's become much safer. Meanwhile, the nature of these highly violent semi-democracies has also changed. And as they've metastasized into this sort of violence, they've become real zones of carnage. And we don't know it in part because the media doesn't cover it as much, but in part because of the way it's covered. So Syria, for instance, front page day after day after day, but Brazil has had more violent death than Syria in 2015, 2016, 2017, and the trajectories are going like this. As the Syrian war draws down, Brazil is getting more and more violent, and the new president oversaw huge upsurge in violence in Rio de Janeiro and is likely to do the same now that he's president. The same thing with Iraq and Afghanistan, always in the news, but from 2007 to 2014, Mexico had more violent death. Even though it's on our border, we weren't talking about that. And that has to do with how we keep the statistics. So I wanted to solve that problem. And I brought together, actually here in this very room, a bunch of violence experts. When I first started the project, I said, let's bring together everyone who knows anything about gangs, organized crime, election violence, and try to figure out what we know about solving those kinds of violence. And it turned out we knew a lot. And so we compiled a literature review, all the solutions to these kinds of violence. And then I asked the room, OK, well, if there's a corrupt police force and we want them to adopt one of these technical solutions to policing that we know works, how do we get them to do it? And there was just crickets in the room. And I realized that was the question that I needed to answer. So one of the remarkable things about the book is you survey so many different parts of the world. And so just as a reporting experience, this must have been quite something, because you had to really move around the world to go do this. While pregnant, yes. Have an extremely well-traveled child, right? So let me start just by asking, how did you choose which parts of the world you were going to look at? Because as you said, you have cases that vary here as far as Georgia to India to so forth and so on. So talk to us through that a little bit. My original goal when writing this was not to write one master thesis. It was to write a more typical think tank book. Here's a lot of different problems. Here's a lot of different solutions. And I wanted to look for variants. So I looked at some cities. Why was Naples still fighting a worse and worse problem with the mafia when Sicily had managed to quell its mafia problem? And I'll shout out to the culture of lawfulness folks who got me started in this business. I wanted to know from a state level, why did Bihar India manage to fight malice quite successfully when Jihar Khan to its south couldn't fight its problem, even though it was a smaller problem than Jihar Khan? I wanted to look at the national level. Why could the Republic of Georgia come out of civil war and gangs and militia, a kind of violence that looks a lot like Libya today, when Tajikistan, which had similar kind of violence, became a dictatorship rather than a democracy and quelled its violence in that way. So I was looking at difference, and I thought I'd have a lot of different answers. And instead, I kept seeing these same patterns recurring over and over as I traveled to all of these different places. And as I was trying to make sense of all the material, and you do reporting, and so you just have so many interviews, and I was trying to make it all come together. And I did the fun case, which was the United States. I wanted to look at the US after our own civil war. And why was it that the Wild West, which had violence at the level of Bogota or Medellin during the Colombian drug wars, just extraordinarily high levels of violence, how did that get better so soon, when in the South after the Civil War, as the decades passed, it got more and more violent. So that by 1892, you were seeing a lynching every 36 hours in the South. And so I wanted to solve that problem. And that turned out to be the key to the puzzle. The American case showed me what the pattern was that I was seeing in all these places. And so instead of writing a lot of little things, I wrote one big idea. Follow that thought one more beat. What was the pattern you discovered starting coming out of the American case? So the pattern had to do with the Klan violence in the US South. And it went something like this. You had a democracy that was weak, unconsolidated, middle-of-the-road democracy. We have a lot of names for these things academically. But you have a weak democracy with a leadership class that doesn't think it can win elections legitimately. In that case, because African-Americans were newly enfranchised and the old Confederate leadership thought there's no way that they're going to vote for us. And at the same time, because it's a weak state, you have social violence going on. In that case, you had the Ku Klux Klan and a whole lot of other night rider groups that had started for just racial reasons. They were violent racists. And the two came together. And so the governing leaders said, if we encourage this violence, if we stoke this violence, it will help us, because it's not only targeted at African-Americans. It's targeted African-American voters who happen to largely be Republicans at the party of Lincoln. And they'll drive the opposition voters out. And so you see these big increases of violence right before elections. And after that, we'll give them impunity. And that's just what they did, as the Confederates came back into power. And a decade after the Civil War, they were in charge of all the states of the South again in Congress. As they came back into power, they offer more and more impunity to the violent groups that helped them get into that position. And so I saw that pattern repeating. And the reasons that the governing leaders would partner differed. You had everyone from the former president of Columbia having his campaign paid for by the Kali drug cartel. So campaign financing was a reason. Sometimes it was outright bribes. Sometimes it was opposition voters being kept down by violence, different reasons for partnering with these violent groups. But in every case, they had to offer that kind of impunity. So I can't help doing this. It will come up in the Q&A, I'm sure. But you've read a lot in the past six months or a year, really, since Charlottesville, about the rise of largely right-wing violence in the United States. And you've also read a lot about a sense among disenfranchised, largely elder, but not entirely elder, white voters that the concept that a majority of the US would be non-whites has driven the sense of disempowerment. Are you seeing echoes in modern American life to what you saw in, say, the post-Civil War or the 1890s? So yes and no. I would say the good news about America is that we're in an incredible low point in violence. We don't feel it because of how the media reports on violence. But we're actually at one of the lowest levels since the 1950s. If you took out Chicago, Detroit, you took out basically four cities, St. Louis, Baltimore, you would end up with violence levels at the 1950s level. And we hadn't been that safe since before the turn of the century previously. So we're in incredibly low point in violence right now. We do have this racial fissure that's gone through our country. And all of the countries I look at is I tried to trace how they got better. I call them broken vases. Because like a broken vase, you can sort of see the lines. You can see the cracks. And if you're an enterprising politician, you know just where to push. And if you want to recreate those breaking points, you can. They're always more fragile societies after they've gone through this process of what I call privileged violence. And I would say the US is similar to that. A man named Randy Roth came up with the best research on American homicide and violence. And what he found, I find quite disturbing. So even though we're at a low point right now, what Randy found was that, and he's really a researcher's researcher, what I talked to him about his findings, I caught him in the basement of an Ohio municipal vault trying to find homicide records in the 1930s. He's that kind of guy. He's not a political type person. And he said, look, the homicide in America correlates very, very tightly with two things. And it's been found by other violence scholars. And it's been replicated in Europe, actually, which is the amount of social trust amongst Americans, between different Americans, and the amount of trust in government from Americans to government. It started to come apart in the 60s a little bit by race. And so you saw elderly white Americans trusting their government less in the last decade. But violence has not been rising. That has a lot to do with the fact that elderly folks don't commit violent crimes. But basically, those are factors. I mean, then I'll think about it. They might. But it's a young man's business committing violent crimes. And so because of that, I'm pretty worried. Because if you look at those two indices, two variables in America right now, trust amongst Americans, a sense that the social order is just, and trust with our government, we're at a pretty bad point right now. But you mentioned privileged violence. And I want to get back to that in a moment. But one of the big surprises as you read this is the degree to which violence takes off in democracies. Because there's a very Americanized concept that I find among our readers, but my ordinary Americans that once a country shifts over to democracy, it should necessarily become more peaceful. And of course, the conclusion you come to after you read this book is the exact opposite is the case, that democracies end up, because of this disempowerment issue, becoming pretty violent. So you spend some time in this book in Northern India. Tell us a little bit about how the world's largest democracy became such a violent place. Sure. So let me take a step back. As someone who cut my teeth in the democracy world, I want to preserve this idea of democracy a little bit, because the book actually talks about is repression effective, is the way out of violence to let strong men rule. And it's pretty attractive when you look at Rwanda. I heard that a lot when I was researching the book. Oh, have you looked at Rwanda as a way of getting out of violence? And so I did look at Rwanda. And I looked at Tajikistan. I looked at various countries like that. And I found two things about the repressive countries. One is that they lie about their statistics. So we think that Russia probably has a third more homicides than they report. We have no idea how many homicides China really has, nor do we know their extradition execution level, but it's probably fairly high. So there's a lot that we don't know about autocracies that makes me question whether they're as peaceful as they say. But the other thing that we found is that democide, a country killing its own people, is by far the biggest killer over the last century. And so even if democracy doesn't seem a safe bet, autocracy is worse. And the final thing is that in the autocracies that do manage to quell violence like Rwanda, what you see is a spreading out of violence around them. So you see Kagami and Rwanda managing to keep a lid on his own country's violence, but financing rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who are causing much more violence in the Congo than ever happened in Rwanda. So I think you have to be careful. You're aligned on this in the book. It's in repression also. And I underlined it because it struck me so. Rwanda is a similar case of repression succeeding spectacularly at quelling internal violence only to export it in a more virulent form. Exactly. So preserving the idea of democracy, but I also think we in the democracy community have done a disservice to the idea of democracy by defining it too narrowly. We basically thought in the early 90s that if a country was coming out of an autocracy, it was going to become a democracy. And we just needed to help it along, help that transition process along that that was clearly the theological directionality of the world. And it turned out that what was much more natural was oligarchy. What was much more natural was the powerful few controlling a country. Being sort of a ideological about it, they would have elections if they needed to have elections and they would find a way to rig those elections. Whether it was an oligarchy that was communist, an oligarchy that was repressive, right wing, left wing, it didn't matter. Those were what took hold. And we called them transitioning countries, but they weren't transitioning anywhere. They had a system. And the savage order is what results from an oligarchy that's forced to become a democracy that doesn't think it can really win in a highly unequal, highly polarized climate. So give us some examples of countries like Columbia that dealt with this problem and actually came out the other side. Not fully, but pretty well. And it's a lot better than it was before Plan Columbia, although you make the point that the first iterations of Plan Columbia were spectacular failures before you actually got to something that worked. So what's the formula that works here for repressing the lines? The road out of violence is really interesting because the road into violence was not a weak state. You know, the general thinking of the policy community has always been, oh, if you're a democracy and you're overrun by violence, you're just too weak and we need to give you training. We need to give you capabilities and then you can fight your way out of it. And a lot of times that's the story told of Plan Columbia that Ribe came, President Ribe had the will to fight. We helped arm him and we helped train his military and he succeeded. But as you point out, we did a very similar military mission called Plan Lazo in 1965 when there was a very small guerrilla problem. And we succeeded. We killed almost all the guerrillas. There were only a couple hundred left. And at the end of that whole situation, those couple hundred guerrillas got together and formed the FARC. And the FARC then grew into 18,000 guerrillas and we had to deal with it all over again. So the path into violence has to do with a governing order that's maintaining its government through violence by partnering with these non-state violent groups, offering them impunity, and then weakening the security services deliberately on purpose, weakening the security services so that it can give that impunity to its violent groups. And what happens is that the poor, the marginalized, who start getting preyed upon by these weakened security services that become predatory, they invite in mafios and gangs and terrorist groups for some protection. Because in fact, when you're looking at a predatory state, the predation of some of those gangs can be less. And so, paradoxically, even though they're facing the worst of all worlds, they're giving some legitimacy to these rebel and criminal groups. In the New York Times, a man was quoted at Pablo Escobar's funeral saying, in the future we'll go to his tomb the way we would a saints and pray there because he fought so hard for so many people. So you see these criminals using a Robin Hood image to win legitimacy amongst the poor because the state is so predatory. Jesse James did the same thing and they use the PR. Jesse James said that he was fighting Northern Railroads and Northern Corporations. That's why he was stealing from them was because they were from the North. And it worked so well that the Missouri legislature voted that you couldn't offer any ransom to capture Jesse James. And so he could continue to fight. So these criminals pose and gain legitimacy. The path out therefore has to be gaining a more legitimate state. You have to make the state more legitimate. How do you do that? Well, the first step is the middle class has to care. One of the surprising things about these unequal democracies is that violence can get really bad before it starts hitting the middle class that votes. I tell the story in there of Los Angeles in the 1990s and the fact that in Los Angeles in the 1990s the homicide level was about seven per 100,000 for most people, which is a little elevated. It's five per 100,000 in America right now. If you were African-American, it was 71 per 100,000. And if you were a young black African-American, a guy, it was 368 per 100,000. That's the kind of stats that mean that a lot of people ignore a problem that is happening to a lot of other people for a long, long time. So the middle class has to decide this is their problem and they usually do when the violence gets too much. They start to get religion about the problem and decide to do something and then they have a choice. Do they vote for repression? For three strikes and you're out? For iron fist policies, zero tolerance policies? Or do they vote for a more inclusive society that treats all life as worthwhile? So this links in with your concept of privilege violence because it gets to the fact that there are certain sectors of the society that are much more hit by than others. Talk us through a little bit the idea of privilege violence. Sure, so that's this idea that there's a path that violence takes in these societies. It starts with the state partnering, making these implicit deals with these violent groups. The second level is this weakening of the security services, this politicization of the security services so that they can let off the people they wanna let off and so on. The security services then become of a different character, people who want to move forward on merit leave and people who are willing to move forward based on this kind of political wasta connections move in and that they tend to become more brutal over time. The poor then are faced with this devil's bargain of a predatory state or criminal groups and rebel groups and so then you see violence growing within society itself. And as inhibitions to violence decline and I have a whole psychological chapter in there but as the inhibitions decline, you see just regular violence growing. You see people murdering each other in bars, that kind of thing happening much more and that's not because the politician is saying, go and kill someone in a bar, it's because as the impunity works its way through society, the othering of people grows and grows and the anger grows and grows. And so that's the privilege violence cycle and the way out of it is to start rebuilding the ties amongst your society. It's an important lesson for us today. Follow that sort of one more. You make the point early in the book that there are two main ways that democracies get engulfed in this. So one is the classic weak state problem and then the second one as you point out is what happens in the leaders of the country basically team up with these violent groups to bolster their power. You spent time advising the Clinton State Department. It strikes me that our policies are pretty well developed in trying to develop weak states into strong states even if we fail on regular occasions, Iraq, Afghanistan, those were all based on those and that our policy and our aid is almost never designed to address the second condition. So what do you do with the leaders who basically embrace these groups? Am I right? Can you think of an example where the United States in allocating its aid and its advice has managed to deal in an effective way with a state that was embracing such violent elements with them? Or better in complex situations. So when Dick Holbrook went to negotiate with Milosevic for instance, that was a state that clearly was dealing in violence and it was very obvious because it was at war and we're very good in that kind of situation in a traditional diplomatic way of addressing the incentives of such leaders and having them shaping the incentive environment to help them move out of that situation were extremely bad with this kind of internal violence because we have this paradigm that the problem is a weak state and there are some weak states out there but the number of deliberately weakened states is much larger and those deliberately weakened states we don't even think of them as deliberately weakened and so it doesn't occur to us to try to shape the incentive environment. Moreover, even if we were trying to it's very difficult because this is about power that's why I call it a savage order. It's an order, a whole governing structure that's based on this kind of violence and so it would take a lot for an outside actor to threaten the incentive structure of a leader enough to get them to change that order. It's really a more endogenous internal process of the people of a country deciding enough's enough than those of us outside helping those people and getting out of their way with not making their situation harder. So when you're reporting out a book like this and I use the word reporting, not researching because this is a book of reporting by a large and it's informed by your research but you've done a huge amount out there. You always walk away with those incredibly memorable moments or days when it finally dawned on you what's been going on all around you, right? These usually take a while in my case but sooner or later they happen. Give us one or two of those from your work on a savage order. Sure, I think the two most memorable, one was in Columbia and one was in Georgia. In Columbia I've been chasing down this investigative reporter, this guy who went by the name of Nacho and we kept trying to meet up and he kept canceling our meetings and being very squirrely about it and he really knew, he'd been reporting for 20 years on all sides of the conflict and he'd faced 22 assassination attempts and so he was very, from everybody basically, everyone who was trying to kill Nacho, the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, the state itself, the military, the DIA, the intelligence agency and so meeting with him. Well Nacho, even before he gets to his editors. Yeah. And so meeting with him was very, very difficult and finally we managed to meet. I went up to his fourth floor apartment, walked in, I was six months pregnant so I walked in and just sit on his couch, this huge person sitting on his couch and he says, my bodyguard didn't show up today and in Columbia, that's one of those tells, there's a whole history in Columbia of the state provided bodyguards not showing up and that's when something bad happens and so I'm sitting there thinking I really need to research Nacho and they need to talk to Nacho and this is a really bad idea, I should not be here but he provided one of the keys because he was talking about why everyone was out to get him and why journalists are the canary in the coal mine and it was after I talked to Nacho that I sat down with one of my research assistants, a woman named Elena Barham who's a junior fellow here, just a terrific one and we did this graphic where I said is the problem a weak state? Because Columbia doesn't look that weak to me and so we graphed out countries that had scored really well on delivering World Bank projects. They get an excellent rapport, they could clearly do World Bank projects really well and could they deliver public services to their people, sanitation and then water and so on and if they could do both of those things they were in the upper right hand quadrant and then we mapped the journalist murders on top of that and guess what, in the book as you know, there's a big cluster in that upper right hand quadrant and we realized this is not about weakness, this is something else and journalists are the canary in the coal mine because they are the ones exposing this order and the leaders don't want it exposed and the other really interesting way to back up is Nacho is still among us? Nacho is still among us, yeah he's a very able guy. Did we ever figure out why his body guard didn't show up? I think we were overreacting perhaps. But the other one was in Georgia and the Republic of Georgia, I took this overnight train to Zugdidi which is this post-Soviet kind of no man's land right on the edge of Abkhazia. It used to be that that was the entrance to all the beach resorts that Abkhazia and the Black Sea and the Kremlin elite would go there and lay on the beach and have caviar but after Abkhazia broke away Zugdidi was the end of the road and it was just nothing and that's where the civil war started and I wanted to interview the warlords who had started the civil war and the militia leaders to find out why they stopped and so I went there and overnight train I got there at five a.m. and I just sat in the park because nothing was open at five a.m. and then all the drunks were there and me with my own reporting information and until the NGO opened up that was where I was supposed to go and this NGO that worked on post-war trauma had agreed to set up these meetings for me and because it worked with children we were sitting in these bright red yellow and blue children's chairs and there were children's pictures all around of their escape from Abkhazia over the mountains, all these children's pictures of war and we're sitting in these little children's chairs and suddenly the warlords start coming in one after another. I had a whole day of interviews and they all have the comb-overs and the gold teeth and the fake leather jackets and it's really post-Soviet. It was kind of almost comical and I would ask them one after the other okay, why did you stop? You know, why did you put your gang down? Why did you step down? And they all said the same thing. They all said, well, when we saw the Russian fleet in the Black Sea pointing their guns at us that's when we stopped our violence and that was this dawning moment because if you read the story of Georgia in the book that was a result of what I call in the book a dirty deal, which is that the president at the time had to make a deal with the violent actors to get them to step down and he does it in that case with Russia that's backing some of that. Because the way we looked at that here was the Russians pointing their guns at Georgia and doing everything else they did from cyber attacks to destabilizing elements of the society and all that was sort of a pure form of aggression, right? And this was Russia at its worst and so forth. But what you're telling us is it actually served a useful purpose in turn. At that point in Georgian history, and Georgian history is a complicated beast as you know but at that point in Georgian history I wasn't sure, it was a very murky story so as a good reporter you're going out and you're trying to triangulate your story. The first story that I heard was that in that moment Russia was just falling apart too. I was living in St. Petersburg then and so I was witness to the falling apart of the Soviet empire and a lot of people said oh the head of that fleet had just been paid off. He'd been paid a certain amount of money and a couple of cases of Armenian cognac and had agreed to just turn his boats around and that it wasn't the Russian state at all, it was just this guy. But I spoke with a parliamentarian, Tato Jeperidze, who was at the meeting where Shevardnadze met with the Soviet leadership and he said that they came in with a deal already signed to join the CIS, the Soviet, sort of post-Soviet attempt at re-empire building and that was the agreement, that they would agree to have a minister of defense that came from the Soviet Union and that they would sign this agreement and the Soviets or the Russians at that point would turn their ships. Well I've had all the fun here and I promise that I would only dominate the conversation for so long before we let all of you add it. So let us know your questions, please make sure that you identify yourself and actually ask a question that's a question and that we have a microphone coming for you so that you can be recorded here as well. Hi, my name is Roger Betancura, I'm a professor of economics at Maryland. You made a comment about the relationship between democracy and these weak states and these oligarchic states that repress in order to survive and courage violence. If you take that a little bit farther, don't you think that our views of democracy in a sense are flawed because we emphasize so much elections that we lose sight of the other aspect of democracy, which are civil liberties. Civil liberties are far more widespread among the population. It's hard to have a high level of civil liberties if you are killing half your people, letting them. So if our concept of democracy was understood more properly, maybe we realize that these so-called democracies that are not democracies because you have all these violence are really not democracies. There is a distinction in the literature sort of liberal democracies and liberal ones and all of the both classes that you identify, the weak states and the ones controlled by oligarchies are liberal democracies and so on. Shall I take a few questions and group them together? One in the back there. Hello, my name is Alejandra and I'm a reporter for the Latin American Division of the Voice of America. So you told us how in different countries you saw similarities, but I wanted to ask you about, did you see, because I'm from Medellin, so I think about my society is that life doesn't have any value and violence affects how people think and how society relates, right? Did you see any similarity regarding to that in the countries you visited? How the overall violence affects the way people relate to each other and communities relate to each other also? Thank you. I'll take those two, because that's a really nice kind of high-political, or there's one more here and then I'll. My name is Sufi Lagari. I'm with the Sindhi Foundation. In Pakistan, the violence especially by the religious, frenetic, fundamentalist organization like the Demetri Dawa and the many, many, other Lashkar-e-Tairba, these all, and Pakistani, like either in democracy or in the dictatorship, and the state is not only encouraging them and helping them, toileting them, and I don't know what will be the solution of these kind of the violence in society and how the solution, how to take a lead. Okay, so let me try those three. So democracy, we ask that word to do so much. And words are in a way tools. You know, we're using them in order to do something. So when we talk about democracy as if we use the thin version of just we're talking about civil liberties of a certain sort and elections and so on, that serves a particular purpose. And what I'm saying is that purpose is sort of past its prime. And when we were trying to distinguish the free world, the democratic world, from the unfree world of the Soviet empire, it made sense to focus on something like elections, but now everyone has elections and some of them are real elections and some of them are less real and sometimes it doesn't matter because the problems with the society happen long, long, long before the election takes place. And so I'm arguing for just a richer concept. That's not to say that the thin version of democracy doesn't have a use. I think it does, but I think a richer concept of how people function in their society, what they value and how they live their lives is more valuable at the present moment. And so at this particular moment, I think paying a lot of attention to the structure of power and the book has a whole section about looking at power structures rather than at these ideologies and that a power structure of oligarchy and control by the few held together by violence can take place, whatever the ism at the top line, whatever it's communism, fascism, left wing or right wing, you can still have that structure and that really inhibits human life and talent and ability. And so it's an argument for that. On Medellin and the overall violence on how people relate to each other, absolutely. There's a part of the book where I talk about this a little bit, I'd love to get more into it, but one of the things that struck me in Columbia, I talked with, there's a whole field there called violentology because they've been violent so long, they have these experts and they have great data and they really study the violence of their society. And in Medellin actually, I was at a university they were talking with a professor who had been a longtime violentologist and he said, look, there was a moment in Medellin where basically all the organized criminal and violent groups put down their arms simultaneously. There was a moment when President Uribe had made a deal with the paramilitary consortium and it was a very unpopular deal that gave them a lot of impunity. And the man who ran that paramilitary consortium, Don Berna, also ran most of the organized crime and gangs in Medellin. And as a result, at the same moment, he basically told all of his minions stop shooting because we're trying to win over public opinion and we don't want to have a bloodbath scotch this deal because it's a really good deal for us. And so overnight, you got this perfect natural experiment and what you saw in the data was that you still had, the violence fell precipitously. It fell from the hundreds per 100,000 to 50 per 100,000 to 34 per 100,000 but then it stayed around there. So it's still 34 to 24 per 100,000 which is of epidemic rates for anywhere else in the world. A lot better and so I trace that it's a lot better but it's incredibly high and the violence is happening around casinos, bars, Friday, Saturday nights, payday nights. And we saw the same thing in Kali, anywhere where they do this kind of study of violence. And what had happened was this cheapening of human life and I call it in the book, Decivilizing which is not to say that any culture is less civil. It's that anyone can become decivilized. Anyone can lose their inhibitions to violence. Any culture can if human life is denigrated for too long. And it's one of the reasons why one of the last pages of the book I basically say, look, we need to treat all human life with dignity. Even criminals killing criminals, which is often the call in these societies is that, oh, we don't care about the violence because it's just Maoists killing Maoists, let them kill each other. It's just gang members killing gang members. Well, you know what, you uncover those numbers and it's actually human beings killing other human beings. Many of them are innocent and that innocence hides under those large numbers. So I think you're absolutely right. And on Pakistan, boy, I wish I had an answer for Pakistan. I think America could try to contribute less to the problem. And we have, you know, partially our erratic policy in Pakistan is because Pakistan is so good at playing America left, right and center. And they have things we need like an overland route to Afghanistan. But for Pakistan to really solve its problem, the intelligence agencies will need to step out of politics more and that will require the Pakistani middle class to kind of step up and demand that. And I don't see that yet. And made more complex by the fact that those agencies on the military are controlling a good sized nuclear arsenal. So we're worried about actually letting them loosen. We may talk about them loosening control, but we don't really want them to loosen control. Absolutely. Which is where the nuclear part of the world, if you put some merges in with your work. Exactly. Bob Berg Alliance for Peacebuilding. Gosh, Rachel, can you only have a hundred pages of footnotes? It's a shorter book than it looks like because it's a third footnote. Two concerns. One is whether you found a constructive role for religion. And I ask that because the Catholic Church is in the middle of a big internal discussion now about whether to reverse the just war theory of 16th. One of seeking just peace and trying to really put an effort to have the church be useful. So, second, I guess I have to raise another. That is the case of ongoing conflict and what's your advice? Might be the last question. Yeah. The couple more, I'll take a couple more and we'll group them together and then there's a number. My question is actually directly related on the issue of civil war. So I'm just curious where in your cycle of privileged violence, which the beginning, if you look at the initial factors, some of them look kind of similar to countries that then fall into full on civil wars. I'm curious if you saw any differences, kind of what are the deciding factors of whether countries experience this complete breakdown and conflict or whether it moves into this direction of just kind of criminal, political, privileged violence that you're describing and what some of the important factors they are. My name's Charles Cadwell, I'm at the Urban Institute and I have sort of almost a follow on question. You described the socialization of violence as coming from the more serious political or other conflict. And I'm wondering whether that's in fact the case. I'm thinking about things like violence against women, other issues that might indeed be canaries of a different sort as the sort of social order breaks down that as the violence come afterwards. Again, looking at how can you actually think ahead to some of these problems? One or two up here, I'll just do this final round. I'm impressed that you can actually keep track of these. After three, I'm a goner. Yeah. Hi there. I'm Sarah Logan from the Migration Policy Institute. I wanna see if you could comment on Central America and the Northern Triangle, specifically looking not just the homicide rates, but if you can tell us anything beyond how you measure violence beyond homicide rates in places that homicides may be decreasing but violence otherwise is not. Hi, I'm Sarah Logan with USAID. My question is if you could talk more about the idea of weak state, not necessarily being the main factor in high rate of violence. I think there's a fairly well accepted notion that violence thrives, violence and crime and thrives in an environment where the state is absent and violent actors can come in and act as a surrogate sort of government and provide services to populations. So if you could just comment on that. We'll take them all together and then round up, yeah. My name's Paul Fisher. I'm a first year in the Master of Science and Foreign Service program at Georgetown and I'm wondering if in the cases that you examined of countries successfully exiting privileged violence, what was the role of cultural heritage in creating the sort of social or linking or bridging capital to create that social or government trust? These are great questions. Clearly I should be writing a number of other books based on them, because I don't have the answers to a number of them, but I'll take them from easiest hardest but that way I might not run into time for the last one or two. So the weak state, not the main factor. So I'm not saying that these states aren't weak. I'm saying they are weak, but there's a reason they're weak and they're weak because they've been deliberately weakened. And so the book takes a while to go into the weak state literature, but the weak state literature is all based on correlation. It doesn't really have a theory of causation and when you look at the theory of causation that it does offer the extent it does, it doesn't hold up a whole lot in these states because they actually have the ability to do many things. And we're finding that in the weak state literature that these are spiky weak states. They're weaker in some areas than others. And what I'm arguing is it is a causal theory within the weak state literature basically saying, yes, these are weak states and we know a lot about weak states. Why are they weak? And is that weakness amenable to solutions by capacity building of the technical cert? And what I'm saying is they are weak. They're weak because they're political decisions that want to keep their security services particularly weak and absent from certain areas. So there's a reason why when Honduras deploys its police, it's not deploying them to the slums of San Pedro Sula, it's deploying them to the tourist area and the top business area and why those places have street lighting and other parts don't. Those are political decisions about where to put your money and where to put your resources. There's a reason why the tax base is so low in so many of these countries. There's a political decision about whether to collect taxes and from whom to collect taxes so that in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch, the fast food restaurants got a tourist deduction so that they didn't have to pay taxes on their revenue. Well, why is that? The person who runs most of the fast food restaurants is one of this sort of oligarchs of the Honduran elite and got that tax break for himself. So what I'm saying is these states are poor and weak to the extent that they have allowed themselves to become and that particularly the security sectors are weakened quite deliberately. So when you go to these countries and the police say, I don't have gas, I can't prosecute a crime, I don't have any forensic training, all of that's true, why? And that's the question I'm wanting people to ask. Northern Triangle measures beyond homicide. This is a great question and it was a really hard question that I grappled with a lot. I actually have a whole nother paper that people know as sailboats not trains. It's basically on the measurement of development aid and I came up with that paper trying to answer this question of how you measure violence because I noticed something in these countries which was that if criminals make a deal, the violence goes down really quickly because the people who have the ability to make the violence go down quickly are the criminal groups that are controlling the violence. So the governments can make the violence go down slowly. Society can make violence go down slowly as they start to self-police. Criminals like that. And so when you start seeing these miracles, the Medellin miracle, the Bihar miracle, be really skeptical because what that means is that the criminals are in control and what you see is this very spiky pattern of violence where it goes up, you have a criminal war, a mafia war, a cartel war, gang war, huge amount of violence, a deal is made often just between the criminal groups, the violence falls, it goes underground or it changes character and often it changes character into extortion. So when I was doing a project for the US government in Honduras, which was at that point the most violent country in the world, we were interviewing lots of people about the violence and trying to figure it out. And everyone we interviewed wasn't complaining about murder, they were complaining about extortion because that's what hits the middle class but it's also what happens in between the violence spikes. So I really argue in the book a little bit and since then more publicly that we need to start looking at violence across different forms of violence making much less distinction between political violence and criminal violence because they morph in these countries and thinking much more about issues like extortion which are based in violence, they require the threat of violence to be credible to carry out because they're really good tells of what's actually going on in the society. That leads me to the domestic violence question. So this I cannot prove in any way because the statistics are horrible. Statistics on rape are notoriously paradoxical for all sorts of reasons, but if reporting goes up it tends to mean that women suddenly believe something will be done, it doesn't mean that more rapes are happening. Many people don't even count certain things as rape that our country would count as rape. Domestic violence is socially determined and a lot of countries don't have any statistics on it. So I can't prove anything about it. I looked at homicide and murder and death of violent death basically because it's the only kind of violence that has any kind of statistical legitimacy and data. Even that is really bad and I have another paper on why the data is so bad, why it's really important to get it better. But I would say anecdotally that I saw this fractal nature to violence and I think it has something to do with the psychology of it. This fractal nature that meant domestic violence seemed to increase, criminal violence seemed to increase, political violence seemed to increase. There was something about this violence just metastasizing through society. And I speculate a little bit in the book about kind of genetics and what seeing violence at a young age does to people. We know that violence at a young age can affect people and cause post-traumatic stress disorder and that that can lower impulses, lower inhibitions to using violence and so if you have post-traumatic stress disorder you might be more prone to violence. But there's some speculation that it can actually cause epigenetic changes that lower your impulse control. And if that's true then that can percolate through a society and I don't know if it's true. I leave that to the scientists but I do see this fractal nature. And that gets to the cultural heritage question. I think a lot is placed in culture that is sort of a catch-all and this is stepping back. My last book says culture really matters and Roy back there in the culture of lawfulness is culture really matters and I do think culture matters. I'm not saying that it doesn't. Culture matters a lot but it's not a culture like the Latin American culture or the Georgian culture or the Nigerian culture and so I try to deconstruct that idea. I mean first of all what is a Nigerian culture? There's a bunch of different cultures within that country. They didn't even come together until what Saskia knows this better than I do. There's a state made up of a lot of different people who don't agree that they're necessarily one culture. If you look at cultural change it doesn't happen nearly at the rate that violence change happens. So Venezuela has suddenly shot up in its violence. Colombia has fallen down. There is not a huge amount of cultural difference between Venezuela and Colombia. That kind of culture I do not think holds a lot of water. A culture in which your sort of political and interpersonal culture accepts violence that does matter a lot and that's what the whole cultural lawfulness work is on. And I think I'm running out of time here so I'm just gonna really quickly touch on civil war. I don't know why some countries go into political violence and some into criminal and it's part of why I want more study into this that looks across silos. When I took this book to Stanford I originally got a lot of pushback by them saying what are you doing here? You're mixing apples and oranges. You're looking at terrorist violence and criminal violence and civil war violence and it's all. And I said well you know you get to the bottom and look at Don Berna. Don Berna ran the paramilitary groups in Colombia but he started life as a Marxist guerrilla. And then he became part of the Medellin drug cartel. And then he ran the paramilitary groups and the violent criminal groups within Medellin. Is he a political actor? Is he a criminal actor? Is the Taliban political? Yes. Are they criminal? For sure. They're running a lot of drug smuggling. Is the government of Afghanistan a political actor? It's a government. Is it also running a drug smuggling ring? Parts of it are. And frequently they finance the political side. Absolutely and so I think these questions of who's who are really obscure as much as they help and by taking them away we could start looking at this question of why is it that some states the political motives for violence channel themselves into criminal behavior so that you see people championing criminals as if they're political leaders. I don't know but I think the first thing to do is to strip away that sort of fake siloing so we can get at the question. Well Rachel I want to thank you for what's been a really fabulous conversation. I want to thank all of you for coming out here. The books are right outside. Rachel will be there to sign them and to answer the questions of anybody who didn't have a chance to ask during this time. It's a fabulous read on top of being as you could tell from the conversation a really fascinating topic. So thank you all and thank you Rachel. Thank you. Thank you.