 I'm Salvatore Bobonis and today's lecture is the world system peripheries. Peripheral countries are the poorest parts of the world system, but peripherality is not just about poverty. European colonialism often created countries where none existed before, disregarding the cultural and political entities that predated colonialism to create brand new countries with no historical basis for national identity. Other peripheral areas of the world, especially in Latin America, are still battlegrounds between indigenous and majority populations and colonial ruling elites. The peripheral countries of the world system are culturally very different, but are similar in many aspects of their social structures. On the periphery of the world system are mostly poor, often very traditional countries that have low levels of internal integration. To take a world tour of the periphery, we might start in sub-Saharan Africa. Pretty much all of Africa, south of the Sahara Desert, is in the world system periphery except for South Africa. Maybe Nigeria might be considered a semi-peripheral country as well, but everything else between South Africa and the Sahara Desert is part of the world system periphery. In Central America and the Andes region of South America, there are many peripheral countries. Pretty much all of Central America between Mexico and Venezuela and Colombia is part of the world system periphery. And then again the very poor countries of the Andean region, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are also world system peripheries. Parts of the countries of South Asia are in the periphery, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal. Even India in many regards is a peripheral country. Even though there are some very rich and successful cities in India, much of the rest of the country is really part of the periphery of the world system. But also parts of Southeast Asia, the relatively poor isolated countries of Southeast Asia like Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, and also the Philippines are all very poor and poorly integrated countries. There are also internal peripheries inside semi-peripheral countries. So a country like Brazil is so large that although most of the country is semi-peripheral, places like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are clearly areas where the government has secure control and people have ordinary jobs. Much of the interior of the country and the Amazon and even some of the favelas on the outskirts of those major cities might be considered parts of the world system periphery. Similarly, as I mentioned, most of India outside the major cities is on the periphery of the world system. India outside the major cities is very poor with most people in villages having no running water, no access to sanitation, very little education, and very traditional cultural practices. Most of the peripheral countries of today's world are countries that were given arbitrary borders by European colonial or occupying powers. These are places that did not set their own borders but had borders imposed on them by European countries. This is a map of the world as it existed in roughly 1935, and you can see here the colonies in Africa, these blue countries, are all French colonies, French West Africa, French North Africa, French Central Africa, and the pink areas are all British colonies, Egypt and Sudan, and then running down through Kenya and Tanzania to South Africa. There are also a variety of other colonies in Africa. Africa is the region that was worst affected by colonialism, but you can also see the legacy of colonialism in South Asia, which is also a peripheral area of the world system. South Asia was British India, which included today's India, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, and then Nepal and Afghanistan were on the edges of British India and partly incorporated into India at different points in history. These areas did not have borders of their own. In fact, the borders of India were drawn in a highly controversial way in 1947 on the eve of independence, and the separation of India from Bangladesh and Pakistan, or what's now Bangladesh and Pakistan, resulted in the deaths of some 10 million people in civil conflict over how the borders would be drawn. Being in the periphery of the world system is closely connected with being poor, but it's not the same thing as being poor, and nowhere illustrates this better than the country of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa. Equatorial Guinea is a very small country that has a very large amount of oil, and as a result its GDP per capita is over $20,000 per year, similar to that of South Korea. But one look at a street scene in Equatorial Guinea shows you that this is nothing like South Korea. A GDP per capita may be very high, but almost all of that GDP is oil money that goes to a rich ruling family and a few of their friends and colleagues. Very little of that money makes it to ordinary people. Equatorial Guinea may technically have a middle income or even a high income level of GDP per capita, but its society and its political structure and its culture clearly make it out as a peripheral country. Peripheral countries tend to be poorly integrated, both culturally and politically. Many of those arbitrary borders drawn by European occupiers cut against ethnic and linguistic lines. This is clearest in West Africa, where you can see a series of countries starting with Senegal, then all along the coast, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria. All of these countries were colonized at the sea front by European colonial powers, which then moved inland directly from their sea front fortresses. You can see this most clearly in a country like Togo, which was a colony at Lome, but then that colony extended inland to separate British Ghana from French Benin with a Portuguese colony in Togo. These countries do not correspond in any way to the pre-colonial political and cultural entities that predated European colonialism. This has led to massive internal strife in these countries, the most famous of which being the Boko Haram insurgency in northern Nigeria. The Boko Haram movement is the armed insurgency that resulted in the abduction of several hundred schoolgirls in Northern Korea that made international news a few years ago, but the insurgency continues on and there have been many massacres and abductions all across Northern Nigeria, resulting from both ethnic and religious conflict between the north of Nigeria, which is mainly Muslim and has Arab influences, and the south of Nigeria, which is mainly non-Muslim and mainly adheres to either Christianity or local African religions. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that when a country has a straight border, that is a good predictor of civil conflict and lack of democracy. And nowhere illustrates this better than the Middle East. In 1916, there was a secret agreement between the UK and France to carve up the Middle East at the end of World War I. This is known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It was negotiated in secret, but it later became public, and now we know that Britain and France agreed to draw straight lines across the desert to separate places that would come under British control, Iraq and what's now Jordan, and places that would come under French control, what are now Syria and Lebanon. These straight lines cut directly across ethnic groups. They cut directly across tribal political organization. They simply put lines on maps that were convenient for occupying Western powers and completely disregarded the existing cultural and political loyalties of the people in those countries. Of course, now in the Syrian Civil War and in the war against American occupation in Iraq, we can see these older patterns coming back to the surface. Poor political integration in peripheral states is reflected in the inability of those states even to collect taxes or for that matter to control their entire territories. Most peripheral countries rely on international donors for 20% or even up to 50% of their government budgets. In some extreme cases, this rises to over 80% as in the government of Afghanistan, which is almost entirely reliant on international aid to pay the government budget. As a result of this, government spending priorities often reflect the donors' preferences rather than being responsible to their own people, whoever pays gets to set the priorities. American governments are only able to collect indirect taxes and they don't collect any taxes at all that people realize they're paying. So across the entire periphery, for example, gasoline is a commonly taxed item. People pay a gasoline tax without realizing it because the gasoline tax is actually levied at the refinery. People pay no sales taxes or income taxes directly to the government. When people don't pay taxes to the government, they don't feel represented by the government. They don't feel they have a claim on the government for services or that the government should represent their interests. And in fact, when governments don't collect money from their citizens, they often don't feel responsible to their citizens to respond to their citizens' needs. If the donor is paying for the government, the donor sets the agenda. Governments also rely heavily on the profits of state-owned enterprises. All across the periphery, many large companies like telecommunications companies and gasoline companies are actually owned by the state and run as monopolies by the state so that the monopoly profits they gain can be used to pay the government budget. This makes the economy incredibly inefficient, but it is one of the few ways that governments are able to generate income. Governments also rely on mining contracts and oil contracts with big foreign corporations. Again, it's possible for the government to collect money at the site of the mine from a foreign corporation in a way that it's not possible for the government to collect taxes throughout its territory from its own people. As a result, mining companies tend to be extraordinarily powerful in peripheral countries. After all, they're the ones who are paying the bill. In many ways, the government protection of mines with armies and police forces resembles a kind of mob-gang protection racket where the government operates merely to protect its source of income from the very people of the country whom the government is supposed to represent. For obvious reasons, all of these problems tend to lead to endemic corruption. Endemic means that the corruption is part and parcel of the system itself. In core countries, corruption may be always present, but corruption in core countries is something that is against the system, something that is considered exceptional, something that when it's discovered is prosecuted and people can go to jail. In most peripheral countries, corruption is simply accepted as part of the way society operates. The crisis of political legitimacy in peripheral countries means that real democracy is virtually impossible. Even the simple rule of law often is impossible to enforce. The rule of law depends on the voluntary cooperation of most people most of the time. It's impossible to enforce laws when most people disregard them. People also routinely disregard the law when they don't expect other people to follow it. The most obvious example of this is if you go to a peripheral country, you will see people completely ignoring any kind of rules as to how to drive on the road. People driving whatever direction they want, whatever time they want. Stop signs and pedestrian crossings and stop lights are really next to irrelevant. The rule of law doesn't exist, both because the government doesn't have the resources to enforce the law, but much more importantly, because most people don't obey the law and others don't expect people to obey the law. If only a few people break the law, then governments can track those people down and prosecute them. If everybody breaks the law at the same time, it's very difficult for governments to do anything about it. In addition to their other challenges, most peripheral countries are dealing with one or more armed insurgencies against their rule. So as if it weren't enough that most people disregard the law, in almost every peripheral country of the world, there's some group that actually is occupying territory and actively shooting at the government to maintain its own separate mini-state. Under these conditions, formal democracy may be possible. It's possible to hold a vote, to have people dip their fingers in purple ink to show that they voted it in an election. But real representation is likely not possible at all. For people to be represented in any real, meaningful way, there have to be regular norms of obeying the law. When even the politicians who are elected to make and enforce the law don't obey the law, democracy becomes almost meaningless. Key takeaways First, peripheral countries are characterized by low income, low social cohesion, and inadequate governance. Second, arbitrary and often straight borders drawn by colonial occupiers can cut across cultural and ethnic lines, fracturing the very identity of peripheral countries. And third, poor rule of law in peripheral countries makes real democracy difficult, if not impossible to achieve.