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Mushenge 27 Aug 2013 | 02:53 am
In Why Nations Fail we used the history of the emergence of the Kuba state in the 1620s as a model of both state formation and extractive growth. The old capital of the Kuba state was Mushenge where ...
Information Wars Continue 21 Aug 2013 | 06:21 pm
As we argued previously, a defining struggle of this decade may be over the control of information. As information becomes cheaper and cheaper to obtain and process, states, even in democracies, will...
As Egypt Burns 19 Aug 2013 | 08:06 pm
WH Auden wrote powerfully in 1940: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. He was referring both to the evils the great powers were infl...
The Roads of the Congo 16 Aug 2013 | 03:09 am
One of the key ideas that ended up in Why Nations Fail emerged out of a theory of why the Congo had so few roads. The original impulse for the idea was a critique that Congolese (then Zairean) presid...
Ergenekon and the Turkish Deep State 14 Aug 2013 | 02:32 am
The long-awaited verdicts in the Ergenekon trial were announced last week. 254 currently-serving and retired military officers, retired police officers, journalists, politicians and academics were con...
The Snake That Eats Itself: The Military and Democracy in Turkey and Egypt 8 Aug 2013 | 11:02 pm
You can read our article on this in Foreign Policy.
Whistle-blowing on and off the equilibrium path 6 Aug 2013 | 10:47 pm
The verdict in the Bradley Manning trial and the ongoing travails of Eric Snowden have kept whistle-blowing in the headlines. Their critics and detractors focus on whether Manning and Snowden were se...
A Charitable Industrial Complex? 1 Aug 2013 | 02:23 pm
In his farewell speech to the nation on January 17, 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the power and influence of what he famously called the “military industrial complex”. You can watch his ...
A Bazaar Economy? 30 Jul 2013 | 09:47 pm
It is useful to reflect a little about the nature of the Relay Economy of Kananga, which we discussed here and here and the nature of the market transactions that underlie it. In economics textbooks,...
The Bayanda Economy 25 Jul 2013 | 11:00 pm
Let us return to the Congo and its “Relay Economy”. One of the most amazing occupations involved with the Relay Economy is that of the Bayanda. Bayanda is a Chiluba word meaning “strong men” (singula...
