Count Ethnic Divisions, Not Bombs, to Tell if a Nation Will Recover From War – New York Times
The good news is that history suggests that the destruction of war has no lasting impact on economic prospects. The bad news is that most of these countries, especially Iraq, are filled with ethnic divisions and civil discord. The evidence shows that these problems, unlike bombs, cause lasting damage to the prospects for a nation’s economy, even if they do not boil over into civil war.
Boundaries between many countries of the Middle East, like those in Africa, were haphazardly put together in negotiations by European colonizers who had little regard for ethnic realities. Indeed, they sometimes even lumped enemies together on purpose, hoping that ethnic hatreds might reduce anticolonial feelings. In a new study, three economists — Alberto F. Alesina and Janina Matuszeski of Harvard University and William Easterly of New York University — document how important internal cohesion is for the health of a society. Continue reading “Count Ethnic Divisions, Not Bombs, to Tell if a Nation Will Recover From War”
Substitute religious for racial purity, and most ideological and organizational precepts of Nazism are essentially identical to the later precepts of the Muslim Brotherhood. This Marc Erikson series devestatingly traces the Brotherhood’s collaboration with fascism from the present-day brains behind al-Qaeda to the era of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during World War II.