 Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome you here to the Institute of Peace. We're very pleased to have you join us. There will be a couple of more people coming in as we speak. Traffic is still a little bit of a challenge here, not for our main speaker here, Alex Walcour's coming from Boston, a city that is used to this kind of snow, unlike the city we're living in, can deal with it. So he has absolutely no problem, and is surprised at the difficulty that we're facing. But here we are. We're very pleased to have this discussion, Money, War and the Business of Power in the Horn of Africa. Institute of Peace has focused on a range of these kinds of issues over our 30 years. We're now in our fourth decade, and it's been a challenge in every area. No bigger challenge than in Africa, and no bigger type of challenge than the corruption and the influence of money that we're going to be talking about here today. The money and political transactions play a big role in any political system, and the political marketplace is developing in the Horn of Africa is a troubling one. Networks of patronage and bargains are increasingly over, replacing other forms of governance. Horn of Africa is already home for some of the highest corruption risk countries in the world, including Sudan, South Sudan as well, Eritrea and Somalia. Patterns of monetized patronage and bargaining is increasingly pervasive across society from local, provincial and interstate relations. More troubling is that these political systems are increasingly militarized. Across the Horn, defense spending is growing. Since 2005, total defense spending across the African continent has increased by 91%, and due to a lack of documentation and transparency, many of these institutions are largely exempt from scrutiny or accountability. So it's this combination that's creating a paradigm that perpetuates the cycles of fragility that leads to violent conflict, which is what the Institute of Peace focuses on, violent conflict, that have plagued the region for decades. Bargains struck to allocate and reallocate resources and alliances are potential spoilers for peace agreements that are reached or will be reached in countries after conflict like Sudan and South Sudan. So it's a great opportunity this morning to take a look at this range of issues, and our panel here, which Ambassador Lyman will introduce in his turn, is well suited to help us talk this through. We look forward to your questions and comments. We have here today a great group of people, both sitting here as well as sitting up here that have been assembled by Susan Stegand and her team. She directs our Africa program. She's sitting right back there, where Susan and her team. We have Ambassador Johnny Carson, who is also a part of that team, known well to everyone in this room. So Ambassador Carson and Ambassador Lyman are great assets for the Institute of Peace in our Africa program. So please welcome Ambassador Princeton Lyman to kick off this discussion. Thank you very much. Thanks everybody for coming on this difficult day to move around in. I'm very grateful. We have a good group because we have a very important discussion here today. I'm going to be very brief in the introductions of the panel, so we may have maximum time for discussion. But the focus of this discussion is Alex DeWall's new book, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, Money, War and the Business of Power. This is not your to borrow phrase. This is not your father's book on the Horn of Africa. It's different and distinctive. Alex is, as many of you know, probably the foremost scholar, certainly one of the foremost scholars on the Horn of Africa. As young as he looks, he's been involved in it for at least 30 years, did his PhD on the problems of Darfur, has worked on aspects of HIV, governance and poverty. But he's both a scholar and a practitioner. He was a member of the Africa, he was an advisor to the Darfur Peace Talks. He was the member of the Africa Union Mediation Team for Darfur and very recently, senior advisor to the Africa Union High-Level Implementation Panel to complete the work of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. So, Alex we're very delighted to have you here. It's going to be very, very good discussion. Following Alex's presentation, we have two commentators. We have Manal Taha. She is a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow here at the US Institute of Peace. Manal is an anthropologist and conflict analyst expert with a wide degree of research in North Africa, Sudan. She's done a lot of work in Sudan. Several research projects there, including qualitative research on land tenure systems and water rights in the Nuba Mountains for the Martin Luther University in Germany. She's been a lead researcher for the National Center for Research in Khartoum, working on various programs in cultural anthropology. So Manal, great to have you here. And because money is at stake or involved, we're very delighted to have Brad Brooks Rubin here. Brad is the Policy Director at ENOUGH. I think everybody here is familiar with the ENOUGH project. Brad served as a Special Advisor for Conflict in the US Department of State. He has served at the Treasury Department. He's an expert on things like sanctions and money and movement of money. So we'll have Brad talk about that, and then we'll open it up for questions and answers. So Alex, it's over to you, and we're looking forward to it very much. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. It's always a pleasure to be at the US Institute of Peace. As one of the occupational hazards of being Director of the World Peace Foundation is everyone assumes that if you work for an organisation with peace in its name, you have to be a little bit soft in the head. You have to be either a beauty queen or a practitioner of levitation. And as you can see, I'm neither of those things. World Peace Foundation, I should say, is venerable. It was set up in 1910, but relatively small. Just three of us attached to the Fletcher School at Tufts. Now I have some slides. So those of you who are on very odd angles may wish to take this opportunity to sort of shift a little bit. Because I want to start off by talking about the cover of the book, because I think this is a book that can be judged by its cover. Now I'm going to see if this clicker works. I'm going to go through what's in the cover. The first is real politics. Now by real politics, I don't mean the sort of the secrets that can be revealed by those who've been actually at the coal face, though there may be one or two. I talk about the politics of transactions, which is not something that political scientists do, but something that policy makers and decision makers are always intimately engaged in. And I use this rather nice, pithy definition by Lenin. Who did what to whom? So that's real politics. Now money and war, the cover that my publishers initially wanted was this. To which I resisted. I said, what's driving what's happening in the horn is not guns. It's money. And they, I'm glad to say, were very amenable. And we got the cover that I wanted, which I must say rather pleased with. I thought it conveys precisely the right message about the significance of money. Now I'm talking really about money in politics. Now corruption, I think, is a sub theme. What I'm more interested in is political finance, political money, how money drives politics. And this of course, is a theme that is common not only to the Horn of Africa. Here is Senator Mark Hanna, a hundred and something years ago, who is famous for saying there are two things that are important in politics. The first is money. And I can't remember what the second one is. So it's, I don't need to remind a Washington audience of the significance of this. Now a lot of what I describe in the book is, derives from the fact that I was, and to some extent still am, as involved, had a sort of front row seat in a number of different political processes and so on. As a member of African Union delegations. And I think that perhaps the fact that I was part of an African Union delegation rather than a US government or British government or UN gave more of an immediate feel for what was going on because there was a level of candor in the interactions between African leaders with their peers compared to the interactions with outsiders. And one of my main tutors in the real politics was this fellow, Magdoubal Khalifa. The late Magdoubal Khalifa who was the Sudanese party manager and chief negotiator for the Darfur peace talks back in 2005, 2006. A man who saw his chief job as identifying the price that needed to be paid for every one of the participants in the peace talks. Primarily the rebels on the other side, but also his own delegation. And how much they needed to be paid off, calculating the price and paying them off. He was what the Sudanese like to call a Jalaba politician. The Jalaba being the trade, the class of traders who historically have gone around the Sudanese peripheries and beyond trading in salt and matches, real retail merchants. And he was a retail merchant in the field of politics. And what he used to say was what is important in politics is having the political budget, the political pocket, the money that can be dispensed without needing to be accounted for. Needed for the political market, the price of loyalty. So what was important for him was not just money but political business skills. And so that is the third element in my title, real politics being money, violence, war, business of power. So these are the three sort of animating concepts which are drawn really from the lived experience of political elites. If you like this is an exercise in social anthropology and ethnography of these elites, not only in Sudan but elsewhere in the region. And these are the indicators that they themselves use in a discussion with a security or senior security official political business manager. And they are making an assessment of the viability of a politician, a political movement, or a state. They won't read the foreign policy or fragile states index. They won't look at those indicators derived by state department or whatever. This is what they will use. How much money, political money does that individual have? What is the price of loyalty? Is it going up down? Can it be afforded? And what are the political skills that that individual has? How many people does he know? And it's very much a male thing. It's almost entirely men running this running this show. And then the other contributory concept is turbulence. And there's an old joke in Sudan, which is it changes week by week, but you go back after 10 years and it's exactly the same. And it has the characteristics that you have with a flow when you open a faucet, when you open a tap and unpredictable chaotic from one moment to the next, but retains a recognizable structure over a period of time. And the political business skill that is required is not one of building institutions. It's not one of state building, of predicting how things will work out in the long term. It is one of managing this type of immediate turbulent flow. For those of you who are academics, this is a nice quote from an economic historian, Jane Gaia, who is challenging our sort of intellectual homing instinct on what is stable, on institutions, on regularities, on principles of long term stability. She says, the stable, cumulative, systemic concept of institutions becomes blunt and illogical when applied to a reality that seems to those who live it altogether less settled. The requirement, she said, is to apply reason and judgments to horizons of contingency rather than applying a narrow, calculative rationality to given variables. And I think one of the problems with much of the policy literature that's developed by political scientists, and indeed by think tanks, is it doesn't take account of that uncertainty, that turbulence. And another nice quote I have is from Jean-Marie Gehena, one of the supreme sort of political intellectuals, somebody who really read a great deal, but when in high office at the UN, he said he was uninterested in reading. Political science or indeed what crisis group or whoever was producing. What he needed, he said, was the fraternal companionship of other actors before me who had had to deal with confusion, grapple with the unknown, and yet had made decisions. And so in a way, in looking at political business strategies and the situations of turbulence, what I'm trying to do is elucidate the types of lessons, the types of practical lessons that can be learned from those who actually are the skilled practitioners of this craft, who are actually on top of it. Because as outsiders, we will never be as skilled at managing Sudan as the Sudanese, at managing Somalia as the Somalis. But we can perhaps derive a few lessons from looking at that. Let me very briefly, none of you need to know where the Horn of Africa is, but an interesting remark, which is when I started working on the Horn, it consisted of, if we set aside Djibouti, three major countries, which are now de facto five, de jure five, de facto six, if you include Somaliland as a separate entity. And I know Ambassador Awad will not take offense at any such references like that. Welcome, yeah, yeah, excellency. But I don't want to look at the territorial politics, which are in themselves very, very interesting in this area. What I'm more interested in is the sort of the organic connections, the circuits of power and patronage, the transactional politics that does cross boundaries. And I tried to convey this with an organic metaphor of trees. What we have in the 1970s was we had some geographically located trees, which were had sort of dense branches in the central areas of their countries, and then a few branches sort of reaching out into their peripheries. Uncrossing boundaries, the Somali one crossed way into into what was legally juridically Ethiopia, because of course the Somalis invaded for to war. By the 1990s, these had really withered the under the conditions of extreme austerity. The extent of governance had really, really reduced, not just the formal governance of institutions and those of us who traveled in these areas. The state was absent in the most rural areas, but also the patronage of the state was much, much reduced, but very selectively far reaching. So cartoon reached deep into chat, into Central Africa too, and so on. And then today, much, much richer, much dense sets of interactions, both within the countries and cross borders, much more complex cross border ones. A lot of financial, a lot of political money coming into our region in the last couple of years from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates. And if you look at South Sudan, very complicated, a lot of political involvement from the neighbours. So visualise this, not in a realist sense, as blocks which are countries, but as trees that are competing for sunlight, fighting for space and whose branches are intermingled. I also did a little map of interstate and transnational conflicts. There's really no such thing as an internal war. All these wars involved in one way or another, the neighbours. They are all very much intermixed. So let me get back to the business of power. Let me just give a couple of examples from across the region. Some of the political business managers in this region are very skilled. I think President Omar al-Bashir is exceptionally skilled. He may not be skilled at the things that we particularly value as people here in this city, but he's exceptionally skilled within his own domain. Siyad Bari was moderately skilled and very unlucky, and I'll come on to that. Salva Qiyar unfortunately not very skilled. And Isayas Afawaki has his own particular sort of skills. So let me just run through some of the scenarios and how we can analyse their particular political business management strategies in the political market using a business lens. And I will skip very briefly over this because of time constraints. Anyone who's been to done an MBA and done a business administration will be familiar with Michael Porter's five forces that shape industry. I got a student of mine to revise this for the five competitive forces that state that shape political business. And this is the chart. And I think if one begins to use the lens of business management suitably you know adapted in Mutatis Mutandis to political power in this region one can begin to get a much more of a handle on how business how politics is managed and how it's likely to move in the future. And one of the key factors of course there is the flow of money. How much money there is coming into the system. And this is if you like the master graph of Sudan, which is the, I haven't got a graph for the political budget of Sudan, but I have a graph for the overall budget which is a more or less a fairly good proxy. And what we see is from the 1970s right over on the left it was a threefold increase because of the scale of the overall chart. You don't see quite how dramatic that threefold increase was under Nimeri. During that increase in the 1970s made possible by aid and principally by borrowing. It was possible to make peace agreements. It was possible to bring in the south bring in the sectarian parties because the cake was expanding because people could be paid off. When Nimeri's political budget crashed 1985 he was overthrown. He just didn't have the money to grease the wheels of that patrimonial system. Sadiq Al-Mahdi came in, you see that spike in the middle with democratic government, spent lavishly trying to put together a coalition. Bankrupted himself in doing so because he was not able actually, didn't have the skills to put it together. And when he was forced into austerity again he was overthrown. Then for 10 years the government of Sudan ran a budget, ran on a budget of a less than a billion dollars per year. How can you run a country, the largest country in Africa, in the middle of a war with that time 30 million people on less than a billion dollars a year? Well it's very interesting I'll come on to that. And then 1999 oil, suddenly they got oil, the budget went from nine hundred and something million to eleven point five billion in the matter of six years, a 12-13 fold increase, enormous increase. It was that that made possible the comprehensive peace agreement, the eastern Sudan peace agreement, all the all the agreements were possible when you had this massive increase in budget. Budget stalls, no deals. Basically the rule of thumb in Sudan, if you want a peace deal, expand the budget and centralise power. You have to have a decent political manager. Very rudimentary rule of political business management. So let me just go through how those political markets were structured in four different eras of Sudanese history. The first is Numeri. He ran as far as he could a centralised patronage system. Borrowing an aid came in at the top, World Bank, USAID, the Gulf States. He exchanged access to those resources for loyalty with intermediate elites, secular elites, the Southerners, the army, etc. The one political player in Sudan who had independent, significant independent source of political financing was Hassan of Tarabi through the Islamic banks that were set up in 1977-78. And the Islamic banks were, and still are, political banks par excellence. They directly funded his party. So he had that, so over there, that symbol on the top right, the green symbol, that is the Faisal Islamic Bank, directly was able to fund Tarabi. And guess what? He's the one who inherited power, precisely because of his ability to control the political finance of the country, ultimately. Let me skip over Sadik Al-Mahdi because his was both uncertain and messy, his chart. It was not possible to put his chart on a single slide. Then we have this very, very interesting decade of the 1990s when Sudan was run on $900 million a year. And how was it run? And there were actually several parallel channels of political finance. And I simplified them to three. On the far left are the Islamic finance through banks, through Islamic foundations. And it's interesting that the second most influential Islamist in the country, Ali Osman Muhammad Taha, was put in charge of Ministry of Social Affairs. In what government do you have the number two in charge of social affairs? Well, if he is actually has his hands on possibly the most significant source of political finance, which is extra-territorial Islamic finance, that's a very good place to put it. So he can actually use that money to further the Islamic project and do all sorts of necessary things. Then you have down the middle, the central bank of Sudan and Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamdi, who was the Minister of Finance, who for many years in the mid-1990s ran a cash budget, believe it or not, every month. They used to count up the numbers, the amount of currency they had in the central bank and make their allocation according. Imagine running a government on a cash basis. Well, he did it. Impressed the World Bank and IMF no end, but they weren't able to normalise relations because they were on the terrorist list. And then you had the military finance that came from various sources, including Iran, which was handled separately by the national intelligence and some of the military intelligence people. And as the sort of, the two sort of, what's the right word, the sort of conductors of this orchestra, you have Hassan al-Turabi and Bashir, who are managing this, not as dictators, but as conductors. And then when oil began to come on stream, they had a contest, Bashir won. And you had a highly centralised system of political finance because all the, well, not all of it, but the great majority of political finance came from oil and you have this bargaining, exchange of resources for loyalty and cooperation. Then the oil went away, or most of it went away and you get something akin to the previous system, again recurring, where you have different political sources of political finance at the top and different competitors. And the significance of this, I would say, is that some of the Islamists directly get money from Qatar in particular. And our poor friends in the SPLM North don't have any external source of political finance as a special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan. I'm sure you were not allowed to put money in their pocket directly. We were accused of doing so. You were accused, I mean, had you been able to, had you been able to do what the Qataris did, then it might have made a difference. But as it is, they're basically orphaned in the system, as you see. They're supplicants, rather than having a real substantive role in this political market. So, Bashir now has a double bargain. He has to bargain with his suppliers as well as with his supplicants. And currently, his main bargaining is with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And he's going along with them for reasons that will be obvious to all of you. Now, one of the consequences of this is a particular function of violence. Violence has many forms in this type of political system. And one of them, not the only one, but one of them is laying claim to these resources through advertising your presence and advertising your strength in a political market. There's a nice quote from a Mariel de Beau, who's a superb anthropologist who studied Chadian. Chadian military commanders and rebels. And her book is out in French. It's going to be out in English later this year. And she writes, war belongs to politics. Violence derives from the situation rather than from radical enmity. War is waged because there are enemies. Sorry, war is not waged because there are enemies. There are enemies because war is waged. And anyone who's worked in Sudan or indeed in Chad will notice that members of the political elite are incredibly cordial and courteous to each other because tomorrow's just as today's friend can be tomorrow's enemy, today's enemy can be tomorrow's friend. They don't hate each other. They may kill each one and others, followers on the battlefield. But actually, the violence and the talking go hand in hand. In fact, the violence is a hand made to the talking. And we see that in the way that the Darfur War evolved. And this is from 2003 to the current day. This is the number of violent fatalities in Darfur, not overall fatalities. Deaths from hunger and so on. These are violent fatalities as monitored by the armed conflict location and event data set. Probably an underestimate, but not by a great deal. And you see the big spike 2003, 2004 when the massacres were going on, which incidentally, the members of the Sudanese security elite will candidly say, we made a mistake. We miscalculated the price. We got it wrong. We could have paid these guys off. We were too mean when we could have bought them in. Violence got out of hand. But then you see it bumping along. You know, for eight or nine years, there was more recently a bit of a search. But during that period, an incredibly complex mosaic of violence. When you try and map this violence, you get that number of actors and that number of incidents. This is from a couple of years ago. It's a pattern that doesn't make sense. The only way of making sense of this pattern is by identifying the individuals who are behind each of the sets of initials and their particular interests and the way they are using violence to promote their cause. Let me move on very quickly because I want to speak a little bit about some of the other countries. South Sudan, this was a cartoon we commissioned last year in which has a version of that sort of centralized political market chart with Bacchia, with Salva Kier, saying, I need your support. I have the cash, name your price, and it's all coming out of the oil. And then all the members of the political are making their demands. The full cartoon is on the World Peace Foundation website. And then what happens when the money runs out? They find. And basically the collapse of South Sudan is, in my view, not only, I mean, the underlying cause is it was a kleptocratic system, but the key reason for the collapse was it was a mismanaged kleptocratic system. You can actually manage a kleptocratic system quite well so as to minimize conflict or maintain a modicum of stability. And many political leaders around the world have done that. Unfortunately, Salva Kier was not able to achieve that. So in the eyes of his peers, Salva Kier's era was not stealing money. It was doing it in a very clumsy way. Let me look at Somalia briefly. This is the chart that I developed for Sead Barrie. Now, Sead Barrie's misfortune was that he was not able ever to regulate the Somali political market. He was not able to control the price of loyalty so that interestingly, in comparison to Nimeri, who was overthrown when he lost that political budget, Sead Barrie never lost his political budget. He always had money. The problem was the price of loyalty was bid up by outsiders so that he could no longer control it. And as it was bid up, corruption became so entrenched that it was an entitlement rather than in allowing people to be corrupt. He was not buying their loyalty. They were just saying, okay, we'll take it. Unfortunately, I see the current predicament of the federal government of Somalia as not being that different. That it is not able to, it is a government that fundamentally is in the same predicament. It has to run on a patronage basis. And it is not able to control, regulate the price of loyalty at all. In fact, even less so than Sead Barrie was 30 years ago. So it really is a challenge to establish political order under these conditions. And I put in a rather provocative extra thing on this which is I think the, what we're going to see this year is the Gulf Cooperation countries, Gulf Cooperation Council countries coming in with major political funds in advance of the election. And that money I expect will determine the outcome of the election. That would be the prediction of this analysis. It would actually make Al-Shabaab rather marginal, possibly irrelevant. But it would give it a different political trajectory to the country. It says Afewaki, his particular skill has been to separate the flows of political money from the security establishment. So that the security establishment, the generals, the security chiefs in Eritrea do not have independent flows of political finance with one or two little exceptions. Again, the flows of money from the Gulf are changing that dynamic. Ethiopia, very different. And in part, this book is actually the outcome of almost 25 years of conversations with the late Prime Minister, Melis Anari, and who was developing, theorizing the democratic developmental state for Ethiopia. And my principal argument with him was that he needed to update his analysis of what he was up against. His idea was that, and it was sort of caricatured in the World Development Report of 2011, a sort of spiral growth out of fragility, violence and fragility into security and developmentalism as represented by that trend. His argument is, it can also be schematically represented in this diagram, which was from Mushdak Khan, one of his intellectual collaborators, who, the argument being that there were two possible trajectories from a poor developing country to an advanced capitalist country, one being you reform governance first, that is, go along the bottom axis first and then grow, which is basically the formula proposed by the Western donors, the other being you grow fast and then you reform, which is the one preferred by Melis. My argument with him was actually there's a third thing you're up against. You are not facing an old fashioned patronage system, patrimonial system that will be superseded. You don't need to just get a threshold of institutionalization which will lead to a takeoff into a developmental stage. You're actually facing a radically updated, modernized, very dynamic political marketplace, which is a modern system of government which will be challenging you. And could indeed reverse or bring down the process of state building that you have in mind if you are not careful. I will quickly go through the last couple of slides. I had a particular disagreement with him actually on Somalia. I felt it was an error for him to send his troops into Somalia nine years ago. And then what would it mean if the political marketplace is the direction of the future? If, contrary to all our expectations, our sort of inbuilt prejudices about the emergence of developmental states of our particular model of development, actually it is this monetized, marketized political system that is the future. What would a more competitive political market look like? It would be more integrated regionally and globally. It would be dollarized. The institutions would become subordinate to particular political interests. And interestingly, violence would be reduced. This is what the model would predict. They would not be reduced to zero. The levels of violence would actually be very hard to eliminate because violence is embedded in the system. But high levels of violence actually are dysfunctional in a political market. And so you would expect violence to be somewhat reduced. How do we get out of it? Maybe we can turn to that in discussion. But I would just suggest two things. First is demand from below, mobilizing citizens. And the other is mobilizing the political financiers. And here just a word about Somaliland, which seems to be sort of a very interesting anomaly of stability in the region. And I would suggest that the principal reason for that stability is that those in charge of political finance who were 20-odd years ago, the Somaliland business class, particularly the livestock traders, the bankers, were the ones who determined the political settlement. Basically, I see Somaliland as a profit-sharing agreement appendix A, Constitution of the Republic. And if those in charge of political finance actually get it together to have some form of agreement among themselves to have a particular form of politics, they will get it. And I think that is a lesson that we should reflect upon. So there we have the Somaliland parliament and the Somaliland currency, which is actually the currency I put on the front cover of the book, to give it a slightly hidden, optimistic if hidden twist. So thank you very much. Thanks very much. Well, I told you it wasn't your father's book on the horn. Very good, Alex. Thanks, and I have to tell you it's a very rich, rich book that I recommend to everyone. It's filled with a great deal of both history and analysis. I'll give you a few minutes to comment on this. Yes. Actually, let me start that. When I read the book, I got really scared because I'm from Sudan originally. And just to find the reality that this is the environment our politics is working on and it's very scary. First of all, when I read the book, I felt like Dr. Dual wanted us to imagine that we are in a big auction, a political auction. And he likes to call it a political marketplace, but for me it was an auction. Who pays more, he will win the politics. And for ordinary citizens from Sudan, it's very scary that our life is in those hands. For me, the book has evidence for that. And that makes it more complicated. Like for some evidence that Dr. Dual was speaking about some like Darfurian rebels in one of the negotiations with Abdul Wahid. He received a phone call during the peace negotiation for Darfur peace talk. And he said that they offer me $30 million, but I will negotiate for $100 million. And that is very scary. That means it's about money. Like there is some, a lot of people have beliefs and ideology and a lot of political stance and grievances in Darfur. And then it's been handled in the book by the money. This is examples for what Dr. Dual is giving is there is features in every political market which is loyalty could be tradeable and rentable for politicians. So it's not about, in the marketplace, the loyalty of politicians is about money. And it just follows the money where the money is going on. And for me, if I just want to deal with this as a reality, I will look back to the content. I feel like it's away from the content itself. When I think when Abdul Wahid was offered that money is for compensation, which is deep rooted in the culture in the Darfurian communities. It's what you call it the blood money, or DIA, for even we call it reconcilations, part of reconciliation process in the region. So I think the way it should be reading that I, or I tend to have some way to go away from political markets is it has a reasons. It has reasons of people that they fought for reasons and they want this money for reasons, that legitimate. But legitimate for their own asking or demands. And then also the book spoke about those political traders are everywhere in the Horn of Africa, in the Horn of Africa. They are everywhere. There are too many. They are the smart players. Yes, some of them are very smart. I agree with what you said about President Omar al-Bashir. He's managing a country in a very, very limited resources, in a very long time international sanctions. I'm sure he has a very, very rare talents. But at the same time, there is other factors that helped him, in my opinion, which is the regional, the collapse is happening in the region. The whole situation in Syria, in Libya, in Egypt, specifically after the Arab Spring, people, Sudanese, themselves, they start to look at their neighbors and they say, like, what are we going to do? Why are we doing any moving against the regime? And that's helped him again to continue and managing his existence in Sudan. Sudan has no money, but it still managed to be strong. At least the institutions of the government is somehow working compared to other neighbor's countries. But at the same time, I see there is other realities that is not only just money for politicians. For example, in southern Sudan, the ethnic and tribal loyalties, it's something that is really important for them. So that also can take us away from the only money part. And also, Dr. Dual connected this marketplace with the international economy. And I agree with him, this is very, very smart and this marketplace is very strong with international donors' money. Specifically, money comes from the region of Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China. They have a lot of money, even the US here. Also, they have interest and there's a lot of money going on these regimes to continue. And in Europe, of course, from Europe, the money from EU or from some specific countries. All these three features, which is summarizing, we can say it's the interpersonal skills of bargaining for what your interest as a politician is. How you bargain to get money and how you bargain to get your interest is a part of the features that all these three countries are sharing. Plus, there are too many, as he said. But still, we have some people that they are not really, some politicians are not really working in this marketplace. And they manage to hold it for a long time. For example, we have Yusuf Kuwait in Nuba Mountain. He was not really compromise his beliefs. And you have many other politicians that stood against this, I will call it corruption. The book didn't say it's corruption, but it's a part of the whole corruption is going on in the world. For us, I think, as people practitioners in the democratic and government system, this book is really, you should be worried about that. Because it seems that the nation-building approach or institutions, capacity-building institutions, it may not work. So that's also the question we'll ask. And the last question is, where do we go? How we can break these visual cycles? We need to know some answers. At least we start. Thank you. Thanks for all. Right? Thank you, Ambassador Lyman. Thanks to the US Institute of Peace for the opportunity to be on this distinguished panel and in a distinguished audience. If I may, Ambassador, I want to two slight amendments to your introduction. I was the Special Advisor for Conflict Diamonds at the State Department. Conflict Diamonds? That modification is, it was already big enough, but at least that modifies it a little bit. Kimberley process. Exactly. Kimberley process. No, that's OK. I used to glibly refer to myself at times as the Special Advisor for People Fighting Over Rocks when I was in the State Department, which is not to diminish the impact of a conflict, but at least to narrow the types of conflicts I worked on. And in addition to being the policy director of enough, I'm also a policy director of our joint initiative called The Century, which is an initiative of The Enough Project, not in our watch, and an organization called C4ADS. And it's really through that lens that I'll try to pick up on where Manal left off with just sort of what do we do from here. And the century analysis of the five countries that we work on flows from much the same starting point that Alex laid out today. And in his book, politics and governance has been captured or hijacked by this marketplace and that understanding and impacting the networks involved in that capture are the keys to effective policy and action moving forward. As the century, we see this through a term we call violent kleptocracy, where the criminal networks running government do not simply exploit the system, but rather capture and become the system, working through layers of perpetrators, facilitators, and enablers. The kleptocratic network then relies on violence, sometimes in overt and horrific ways, but leading to atrocities. But in other cases, as Alex noted at the end of his talk, on a more limited or indirect basis where the threat of violence looms but is not actually needed to be enacted. So from the century perspective, we aim to pick up the story and act on it from there. We work as practitioners to try to impact the way these particular political marketplaces that are functioning as violent kleptocracies actually operate, focusing our efforts as much as possible on what Alex, in his book, lays out as the fourth variable of real politics, which is the integration back into the global marketplace. Put another way, there may be competition within a subset of actors in these political marketplaces, but the systems as a whole function closer to monopolies and as such will likely fail or at a minimum create disastrous consequences for their consumers. For the century looking at integration back into the global marketplace means the global political and the global financial marketplace, because in the end, the rents and the proceeds of what is gained in the dynamics that Alex describes in the political marketplace will almost always have to come back these days to the global financial system. Although the political entrepreneurs and operators may focus their efforts on maintaining local, national and regional systems to maintain their kleptocratic networks, they need to move the proceeds elsewhere and that's where the opportunity comes in if we can mobilize more effectively than we have in the past. The global political and especially the global financial marketplaces have evolved substantially in the last 10 to 15 years, at least with respect to the tools that they use to regulate themselves. Effective use of the regulatory tools in place requires two key steps. One is political will, direction and understanding, much of which we gain from, we can gain from Alex's book and actionable information. The trouble is that in many cases when we speak about this particular region, those who understand the political context and political aims and policy aims do not necessarily have familiarity with the regulatory tools and conversely those who understand the tools generally have little to no experience in the region, meaning that little to nothing gets done other than what are often superficial steps with no follow through, the mediators curse that Alex refers to in his book. Our aim with the century is to fill those gaps so that the relevant policy makers who understand the local political marketplaces know what tools that can impact those marketplaces and the market regulators know a bit more about how to effectively apply what tools we have in those situations. In terms of the first step, political will and direction, this must always be the starting point. Identification of clear foreign policy goals must define how we move forward. Within the US system, there is often frustration in places like the Treasury Department and the Justice Department when the foreign policy machinery cannot agree on what we want to achieve in a particular country because we have competing ideas about who those actors are and what those actors are seeking to achieve in their political marketplaces. Alex's vignettes and his book demonstrate this very well, especially around the case of Sudan. Unfortunately, without clear political will and direction, the regulatory tools themselves become the policy and as such, will almost always fail because they're deployed to achieve something they cannot. But once we have appropriate direction and will, we can start to use the tools provided we have what is essentially the second step, accurate and actionable information. The efforts of the century and our partners now are to develop investigative networks and data analysis tools from the ground to fill those information gaps. Transaction documents, corporate structure and beneficiary information details from the ground about how the day-to-day activities within these marketplaces. These are what regulators need not only to deploy the tools, but then to implement and enforce them as we have seen happen in other contexts. When I was a treasury in the State Department, we often did not have anything like this kind of information for countries like Sudan or the DRC, for example. I know outside the horn, but a country relevant to our work. This takes time, patience, resources, consistent and focused effort to check and recheck what you have to ensure that you can act on it and it is the most useful and actionable information. So if we can actually develop the right political will and this type of actionable information, what tools do we have to try to impact the political marketplaces, the violent kleptocracies that we focus on today? I'll list three or four very quickly, as I know I have kind of a limited amount of time. The first is modernized sanctions. Most of the discussion around sanctions when it comes to Sudan and the horn is limited to the comprehensive form that we have in place related to Sudan, which is really a vestige of older models, or asset freezes and travel bans that are placed on certain individuals. These are both old models in what is an ever-changing marketplace when you look of sanctions tools. Individualized sanctions themselves have actually only been in place used for about 20 years, but are now understood well enough by those that they impact that they can often be circumvented unless effective enforcement is in place, which it often is not. But we now have modernized tools for sanctions, such as sectoral sanctions, where particular elements of a marketplace can be impacted whether through targeting a company overall, or if we don't want to target a company for an all-out asset-freeze and ban by limiting their future access to capital, by impacting their ability to receive, to benefit from procurement, to receive the benefit of U.S. exports, development bank financing, et cetera. We have approaches to secondary sanctions where the U.S. system can limit access to correspondent banking accounts, take other measures to limit the access of the kleptocratic actors to the global financial system. And the sanctions tools that have been developed over the last, say, five to seven years have really shown how that can be done. But again, they can only really be effective if we have clear political direction and we have actionable information. The second category I'll focus on is anti-money laundering tools. People may be familiar with the Financial Action Task Force and Eggman Group, which act at the international level to set standards and establish cooperative frameworks. But if we look at the range of tools that, say, our U.S. Financial Intelligence Unit, which is called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the tools they have at their disposal through the Section 311 of the Patriot Act, the Bank Secrecy Act, give them a wide array of a very precise and surgical means to get at particular kinds of transactions. For example, Section 311 of the Patriot Act has five, what are called special measures, that can be taken, only one of those five has ever been used, and even the one that has been used, only a part of it has been used. So the agency itself has barely scratched the service of what can be done, and most of what can be done is actually simply to gather information, to require enhanced due diligence, to give law enforcement regulators the power to understand how these networks are moving money, where they're moving network, and to more surgically try to deal with it. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network also has the power to do something, what are called geographic targeting orders, which they did recently in a very interesting way to target those who are attempting to buy real estate in New York and Miami with cash, to require those who are involved in those transactions to gather beneficial ownership information, and try to impact how these transactions happen. Other kinds of tools, and I know I'm limited, direct action with the private sector, because of the way sanctions are impacting banks, as well as things like the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, conflict minerals regulation, laws in the UK and California that require due diligence around supply chains for human trafficking, the private sector is more and more willing and able to act on specific information, where it has actionable information. Two final quick thoughts. All of the tools I talk about often can have a debilitating effect unless information is also used to mitigate their impact. There's often a problem of de-risking, where an action is taken to affect a particular country, private sector or even governments will over comply, and refuse to do business in an entire region. The more we can develop actionable information, the more we can help facilitate the development of open channels so that necessary business can be conducted. And finally, with the right actionable information, we can work to think build on what Alex ends his book at is the develop of better governance systems. And as the push comes from below for proper systems that are properly regulated to development of information that can show how those can be developed and enforced. Thanks, thanks. A lot to talk about. Let me just ask one question and then open it up, Alex. Because it seems to me that there is a suggestion, and I realize less in the book than in presenting it quickly, that the types of rewards that go on in the ways that loyalty is bought is highly personalized. That is, someone gets a lot of money. But the question is, what do they use it for? And in some cases in the book and elsewhere, people use it for development of their community. So that takes away some of the negative tone of it. And the question then is, is there a way to evolve toward a system where loyalties are indeed bought and sold in the marketplace, but the proceeds aren't all just put in people's pocket and sent away? Should I quickly respond? Yeah, I'll respond very quickly. First of all, a generic point. I mean, when we talk about markets, we tend to talk about the profit motive. The key issue, and yes, there are people who are in these markets to line their pockets and most politicians get wealthy. But the key point I want to make is that the, it is the logic of competing in a market that compels the monetization rather than the profit motive. If you go into one of these markets as an honest politician wanting to promote a political agenda to benefit your community or to create an Islamic State, you have to compete with, in the same way as, if you want to be an ethical business person, you want to create a line of cosmetics that saves the rainforest. You need to compete with those who are in the business for profit because you will be out of business within a month if you don't. The same principle applies. And I wouldn't want, and then on to, picking up on Brad's point, the political marketplace is not a criminal. There are criminals within it, but the overall phenomenon is not a criminal phenomenon. I had this discussion over the years with Sarah Chase, who has this terrific book, Thieves of State. And we're continuing our debate over the weekend. And her argument is that the Afghan State was taken, became a wholly owned criminal, vertically integrated, wholly owned criminal enterprise. And I said, that may be correct. But what concerns me is you can take, you can deal with the criminality in that, but you're not going to, that is not dealing with a political marketplace. That is dealing with one element. What the political marketplace is is mostly legal. Most of the flows of political finance are perfectly legal, come from oil rents, they come from security cooperation, they came from political payoffs from friendly countries in the Gulf, none of which is illegal. Most of the political money that is received by these leaders is recycled into patronage. It doesn't, political money is not corrupt money necessarily, in their part, in the vernacular. Some of it may, some of it, it's always, it is there to be creamed off, but most of it, out of political logic, is reinvested. It can be reinvested in a community, it can be reinvested in patronage, it can be reinvested in a militia or a security service. And this is the broader phenomenon. So I think the tools you're developing about are really important, but let's be clear that only dealing with a subset of the broader phenomenon. And some of the more extreme cases, like South Sudan, where they are violent and they are kleptocrats and you don't see, or the element of recycling is, has been limited. And then Manau, I think one of our, one of the phenomena that we see across the greater Middle East is that you have authoritarian systems that are highly regulated, highly controlled, like say Egypt or Tunisia or Syria. We dismantle them. We think we're gonna get democracy, we don't get democracy. What we get is this free-for-all that is a political market. So those dynamics of the buying and selling of loyalties which have been within a system then are released from that system. And the trajectory is in the wrong direction, which is tremendously demoralizing to Democrats. And we need to find a way of either redirecting this, this political liberalization, which is becoming monetized back into a more regulated political realm. Or structuring those transitions differently so that we don't get that deregulation to begin with. Thank you. Let me now open it up. I'm sure there are people with lots of questions. And please give your name and your affiliation and make your questions, questions. Who would like to go first? Gentlemen, right there, please. Do we have a microphone at all? Oh, go to the microphone. And others who I wanna go may wanna start hedging toward the microphone. Hello? Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Alex. I want to commend you for your presentation. Identify yourself, please. Yes, my name is Wal Bakwal. I'm an ambassador. I'm serving in South Sudan Embassy here in Washington. I want to commend you, Alex, for your book. I think it's a very good book. And I have followed your writings throughout the past few years, especially your interest on Sudan. So I feel that you have done justice about what you think about Sudan. What I failed to see in your presentation is your comments about South Sudan. As somebody who was born in South Sudan and lived in South Sudan and understand the politics of South Sudan, I feel this point of buying loyalty may, all the comments you have made about Sudan are in place. But in South Sudan, it's very difficult because in our situation, and you made some comments about our president, Salfakir, as somebody who has not been able to manage the problems in a way that he could have done to buy loyalties. But my question is that, or my comment is, there are some people in the world that you cannot buy. You need to understand the people you are dealing with. You need to understand their motivation as to why they are doing what they are doing. And in my opinion, what happened in South Sudan from 2013 until now is because some of the actors could not be bought, you see. And I also want to agree with the comment of my sister from Sudan, that South Sudan politics is very complicated. 40% of the population of South Sudan are not... I do have to apologize, we're gonna have a lot of questions. So I think your comments about South Sudan may not necessarily be entirely accurate, but I still want to commend you for your work. I think you did a good job, and maybe try to learn more about South Sudan. Thank you. All right, I'm gonna take more than one question, Alex, as that's okay. Do we have another question? Gentlemen, way in the back, yeah, you put the glasses with me. Can you stand up and speak loudly? About intervention, because we really have talked to you about it, would you just strike with your ability to promote this kind of thing? That's an interesting follow-up to the other question. And the gentleman right here, and then this one here, and then we'll have Alex answer. And I'm a graduate student at Georgia Attorney's University. I'd like to commend the special professor who's on the other side of the subject. My question is, you spoke about in a particular of days of your presentation, how there was one president who encouraged corruption to such an extent that the concept of buying loyalty became diminished, started to diminish. So what is this threshold at which the concept of buying loyalty is diminished? Because it's incredibly murky, you can elaborate on that. That's a very good point. And the gentleman right here, and then I'll take some more after that. David, it's true, from CSIS, I regret to say I haven't read your book, Alex, but after all presentation, absolutely fascinating. My brain was learning about how to make a fight between Europe, Uganda, and India, the whole of South Africa. And then I have a sort of second thought. It's very clever, and it's very dynamic and powerful. But does it actually, speaking as a political scientist, advance much beyond the idea of neo-patrimoniality? But basically what you have come up with is a more concrete version of neo-patrimonialism. But if you were to apply the concept from even the 60s and the 70s, you would arrive at more or less the same conclusions, except your diagrams make it extremely fascinating and powerful. So I'd be interested in your ideas about that. But going on from that, it seems to me that the logic of what you're suggesting is that the whole concept of the Washington consensus and the structural adjustment and the policy agenda of the 1980s, early 1990s, was actually the West shooting itself in the foot, that it actually undermined what was a critical hearing system and destabilized it and led to the eruption of miles. And I'd be interested in that. And then finally, the last people. Yes and no, to your points. Because it seems to me that the ability of the West to determine the operation of the global economy is contracting. You have all these funds in the Middle East, in China, in India, you have other rogue elements elsewhere. And given that, does the agenda that you have applied actually provide a mechanism to control these flows of resources? Or is it, in fact, irreparably damaged? Good. We've got a lot of rich questions. Thank you. All excellent points. Let me take them in reverse order. One of the sources I draw on, actually, is Bob Bates, who has this terrific book, When Things Fell Apart, which basically argues that the combination of economic mismanagement by African governments and austerity in the 80s and 90s made the basic function of governance impossible so that those in positions of power were forced into predatory, short-time horizon activities. And so I see that, yes, as a contributor to this. So that African countries have rebounded from that crisis, have rebounded in a different form. They've learned some very hard lessons. The imprint of that crisis is in the DNA as they've come back. So they've come back as governmental systems extremely well-attuned to responding to crisis at the expense of, so they're able to manage crisis much less good at building institutions. And that's also a response to globalization. Is it different from neo-patrimonialism? With many respects, I absolutely take your point. In fact, if you go back to Stanislaw Andreski, who coined the term kleptocracy in modern political science, I mean, it's fascinating that his definition is not the layperson's definition of kleptocracy, which is stealing. It is the application of the principles of supply and demand to the operation of public office, which is slightly different. And which is, again, a slight difference in the way we use the term kleptocracy. So, yes, I take that point. But I think maybe you can say breathing new life into neo-patrimonialism, saying how it's relevant. Which brings me to the question of the price of loyalty in Somalia and how Sia Bari. Basically, because of two factors, as I would analyze it, one is that he was not in a position to regulate the price of loyalty. So that however much he paid, he was just pricing himself out of his own mind. And secondly, because he was rather inefficient at doing it, he didn't have control over those institutions that were regulating and administering those payments so that people were able to take them and get away with doing whatever they wanted. So in those circumstances, there was a very heavy discount rate of patronage payments. They'd translated it into a very small quantum of loyalty under those circumstances. In other circumstances, much better. Now, South Sudan, Mr. Ambassador, there are some people who can't be bought. I think that's true. And in fact, I would take a comment from Salagoush, whom you know as the former head of national intelligence and security in Khartoum. His complaint was that however much we pay, we're not going to be able to pay enough to buy off the Southerners. So yes, there is an element of that. But I think internally within South Sudan, I'm afraid, the main analysis of the system is that there was, you know, quite some rush to self-enrichment and also for money to support political bases. It became very... from a system that was hardly monetized at all. And I, and Manali mentioned use of COA. I mean, there were political leaders from the SPLM SPLA in the 80s and 90s who operated without money. And use of COA's joke was when he ran for election, he took the money of the Jolaba, but then told people to vote. However, their conscience dictated. This is what he used to say. And so there were people who couldn't be bought. But the system became so rapidly over-monetized after the CPA, I'm afraid, it became corrupted. And then the really difficult question, for which I have no answer, where do you go from here? I mean, if you apply this logic in the most straightforward way, the answer is the only way that you can achieve a political settlement in South Sudan today unless you radically transform it, which is not being done. I mean, we can talk about radical transformation, but it's not being done, is whoever is in charge needs to have enough money in the kitty, enough political budget to secure position. And you see what happened to Salva Kier. He's bankrupt. You know, he has no money. The price of oil is low. The production is low. He's mortgaged most of it to oil companies. So what does he do? He needs to create something for his base, so he creates a lot more jobs in the system. Creates 28 states. He's handing out jobs. It is an act of desperation because it is the logic of survival in the system demands that he does that. And we're not helping him. We're trying to impose a model of governance, which however well-meaning, I simply ain't going to work in these circumstances. And it's a collective problem. I mean, we can point fingers as to who's to brine, but the problem is we are in a really structural mess without an easy way out. Did you want to comment on David's point? Yeah, just briefly. In some ways it gets to the point that Alex made in response, which is, you know, I think we can probably take each case and have a discussion about how much of the network is criminalized versus how much is just a general political network. I think from our point of view as the century, it's about impacting that aspect, which is criminal and the just degree to which you draw that line can be debated. I mean, certainly there is some diminished role of the West and really what we're not trying to, you know, we're not, what we're trying to do with the century is not really control the financial systems or control the way these systems work, but rather to impact that criminal element of them that no matter the somewhat, and again, we can argue about how diminished the real financial role of the West is, the simple fact is that the U.S. dollar remains the currency for most of the important transactions that are happening with either the rents going in or the way the proceeds are taken out. And because of that, and that can, will I think be the case for a long time, the U.S. financial system has tools to operate with, in order to impact, you know, any transaction that happens in U.S. dollars will almost certainly have, at least for a moment, a nexus into the United States and there is a way to increasingly to surgically try to impact those and you don't need to control the entire economy in a way that, say, comprehensive sanctions would try to impact, but by disrupting, by disrupting the way those transactions happen and disrupting the decisions that go into the way those political entrepreneurs, as they're described in the book, operate, you change the calculations and you change perhaps some of the way that the patronage is distributed and is taken in the first place. Do we have other questions from, yes, gentlemen, there and then there? Right there, yep, yep. Tom Wayno, Renner-Casalsico. Stand up, it's easy. My name's Tom Wayno, Renner-Casalsico, we're international, thank you to all the speakers. Alex, you talked a couple of times, a simple version of your argument is that the leaders just sort of funnel the money out. They get the money in, they funnel it to whoever needs it. But you talked a couple of times about regulating the marketplace and there's some other sort of building a marketplace, building an institution of a market that seems to be going on as well. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how the leaders are doing that and what tools they use for it. And then there was someone right, the person with the cap on, there we go. My name is Gdei, I'm independent. I believe that you didn't shade a good light into the Ethiopian development. The development, Ethiopian development aid, which averagely a year like $4 billion international aid, 60% of Ethiopian budget, 60%, this is documented, it can be proven, is based on the international donors, whereas the government is a tyrant and committing genocide and atrocity towards their people last December, alone last December, a month ago, 140 people were killed. 450 people were, Anuak people were massacred. And about several of them in the Bahadar were massacred, several were wounded. Where this, I believe that, do you believe that the U.S. aid or European aid, if it is based on humanitarian conditions, would have been better off? It doesn't correlate with the U.S. constitution or with the international laws. And I feel like, I don't know, I haven't read your book, I look forward to read it, but I feel like you miss that point. I thought in your brief statement, you were trying to shade light regarding violence as one who brought development. The country is just like in a time bomb about to explode. Okay, I appreciate that. We didn't have a lot of time on Ethiopia, so perhaps we can go into it more because there is more in the book on it. Why don't you take those questions, Alex, and then we'll see what time it is. Isn't it really 12 o'clock? Is it? Yeah, okay, so we only have a few. Regulating the market, I mean, that's a really interesting topic, and I will briefly say that the key elements over regulating, which are entry, regulation of political finance. If you can actually get those who are involved in providing political finance together to have a consensual dispensation of that political finance, then I think then that is a key entry point. And I would say in response to what Brad was saying, I mean, those instruments are only part of what we should be looking at. We should be looking at a much broader recognition that these countries rely on political finance that is partly generated internally, partly externally. And how are we to regulate political money? I know that's a huge debate here in the United States. It all ought to be the same debate needs to be conducted internationally because by regulating political money you regulate how the market works. The other thing is communication, and I didn't go into how the communication and transport revolution has actually transformed the bargaining power of those in the peripheries and those who are subalterns. So it's no longer possible for, or it's much more difficult for whoever is at the centre of power to set the terms, the pace of bargaining and control the information. And in doing so, the skills required for those at the centre are that much greater, but also the political expenditure becomes that much more greater. The markets become that much more expensive. So there's a whole lot of very interesting policy challenges which we haven't even begun to really scratch the surface of. Ethiopia. I think Ethiopia is in a very interesting moment. I was in Ethiopia just last week and I made the same journey that I made 12 years ago from Addis Ababa in the south. And it was extraordinary. I mean, I travelled on a six-lane expressway out of Addis Ababa, passing under the high-speed train tracks that are going to be opened. The infrastructure of the country is being transformed. There's no question about that. The political governance is, I think, in a very interesting moment in which the highly centralised rent allocation that was undertaken by late Prime Minister Melis Sanawi is breaking down. And Melis was very explicit that he was not interested in eliminating rent but in allocating rent. Now, his successors therefore have a huge amount of resources in their hands to allocate. And given that none of them has that same centralised command over everything that goes on in investment and development policy, the system is becoming more like a cartel of different power centres, each of which is allocating resources. This is likely to lead to a sharp increase in corruption. It does not mean that the developmental project is going to be derailed, but it's going to be based on a different character. And the extent to which, in that transition, the voices of the people can be heard, so there can be a democratic debate, is going to be really challenging because one of the things that happens when you centralise power in a single party with no opposition is that party rots from the middle. It always happens. And this is the challenge of Ethiopia. How do they prevent that rot at the centre so that the EPRDF is politically dominant? Otherwise it will be in trouble. Well, I think unfortunately the time is running out, but I appreciate that we should have, if we had more, we could have spent hours on this. In Ethiopia there is a long section on Ethiopia in the book, which I have a lot of questions. I would ask about Ethiopia as well. Time has run out. Alex, I want to thank you. No, thank Brad. But Alex, your book is very challenging. We're grateful for your being here at USIP. I think we could come back and go over these issues even more on another occasion, but I do suggest that this book is a very provocative one, and one that I think in a number of different ways, not only understanding the systems, but for us at US Institute of Peace and other institutions like it to think in maybe new and more creative ways about how we deal with the phenomena of violence and how it is part of the system and that some of the ways we get at it may not be as effective if we looked at it in the context of the system that Alex raises. So thank you very much. Thank you all for being here. I'm sorry we've run out of time to discuss it, but this is the beginning of a good long discussion among all of us. Thank you very, very much.