Hence missed post yesterday and a short one today.
One thought I’ve had about nation building. In many ways it is similar to a classic system engineering or other optimization problem. Improvement in aggregate is possible, but it tends to require a good number of tough choices about on what issues to antagonize existing power brokers.
I think this gets to why we have such a hard time of it. As outsiders, it’s far from clear to us which compromises will undermine our long term goals and which are necessary to make any progress. Post-conflict reconstruction research does address this problem by suggesting the use of local inclusive councils to make allocations decisions. It gets trickier at the national level, particularly since local political leaders have ever incentive to free ride off occupiers.
Perhaps part of the solution at the national level are treaties like the Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq. Such negotiations force both the occupier and the local government to figure out what they care about most and how much they’re willing to sacrifice. Such agreements also can provide an exit, according to the SoFA we’re out of Iraq by the end of 2011, earlier if the referendum on the agreement actually happens and it fails to pass.
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