One of my favorite songs is one recorded by Martina McBride, “Love’s The Only House” and I thought of a bit of the lyric when I was reading this article.
And here I am in my clean, white shirt,
With a little money in my pocket and a nice warm home
The article is the Failed States Index at Foreign Policy.
Yemen may not yet be front-page news, but it’s being watched intently these days in capitals worldwide. A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al Qaeda ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state.
It’s not just Yemen. The financial crisis was a near-death experience for insurgency-plagued Pakistan, which remains on imf life support. Cameroon has been rocked by economic contagion, which sparked riots, violence, and instability. Other countries dependent on the import and export of commodities—from Nigeria to Equatorial Guinea to Bangladesh—had a similarly rough go of it last year, suffering what economist Homi Kharas calls a “whiplash effect” as prices spiked sharply and then plummeted. All indications are that 2009 will bring little to no reprieve.
Instead, the global recession is sparking fears that multiple states could slip all at once into the ranks of the failing.
The world my children will live in is one ripe for the wars we thought were too big to happen. Multiple failed states, fractionalization, independent players intent on expansion; it’s a recipe for another world war. The countries listed in this report form a band that starts in Equatorial Africa and goes east, across Asia. The transition to economies that are not dependent on Middle East oil which will happen around the middle of this century will be rough. These countries all have high birth rates and failed political systems. They can’t feed the people they have now.
I’m sitting in my clean shirt and there isn’t much I can do about it. But maybe my kids can.