Celebrating Fifteen Years of The Coming Anarchy

This month marks the fifteen year anniversary of the publication of The Coming Anarchy by Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic. It was written just as Kaplan was receiving attention as a journalist and author as Balkan Ghosts had given context to the violence in the former Yugoslavia and influenced President Bill Clinton in deciding not to intervene in the conflict.

The article is timeless. It was written when the establishment policymakers and academic thinkers were celebrating the end of the Cold War, the coming spread of democracy, the end of history, and a new age of free markets, peace and prosperity. Kaplan had read his classical philosophy, knew the history, and traveled to the ends of the earth and felt that the optimists had it wrong. So he wrote this article just months before the Rwanda genocide began, years before the carnage in Sierra Leone and the the Central African “world war” that brought in a dozen countries and resulted in the deaths of millions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a decade before the Ivory Coast and the Sudan. Kaplan traveled and believed he knew what was coming. Everytime I read it, I feel the power of history and travel on influencing one’s analytical prism with which to see the world.

The entire article is thousands of words long and difficult to excerpt for a blog post. But since the article is all about using West Africa as a potential model for an anarchic future, I want readers to look at the paragraphs below, which reference the future.

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real “strategic” danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization…

Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed, “blank” and “unexplored.” However, whereas Greene’s vision implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa’s future. And West Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world…

Fifty-five percent of the Ivory Coast’s population is urban, and the proportion is expected to reach 62 percent by 2000. The yearly net population growth is 3.6 percent. This means that the Ivory Coast’s 13.5 million people will become 39 million by 2025, when much of the population will consist of urbanized peasants. [An urban ghettos in the Ivory Coast called “Chicago”], which is more indicative of Africa’s and the Third World’s demographic present—and even more of the future—than any idyllic junglescape of women balancing earthen jugs on their heads, illustrates why the Ivory Coast, once a model of Third World success, is becoming a case study in Third World catastrophe…

The future could be more tumultuous, and bloodier… France will withdraw from former colonies like Benin, Togo, Niger, and the Ivory Coast, where it has been propping up local currencies. It will do so not only because its attention will be diverted to new challenges in Europe and Russia but also because younger French officials lack the older generation’s emotional ties to the ex-colonies. However, even as Nigeria attempts to expand, it, too, is likely to split into several pieces. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research recently made the following points in an analysis of Nigeria: “Prospects for a transition to civilian rule and democratization are slim. . . . The repressive apparatus of the state security service . . . will be difficult for any future civilian government to control. . . . The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable. . . . Ethnic and regional splits are deepening, a situation made worse by an increase in the number of states from 19 to 30 and a doubling in the number of local governing authorities; religious cleavages are more serious; Muslim fundamentalism and evangelical Christian militancy are on the rise; and northern Muslim anxiety over southern [Christian] control of the economy is intense . . . the will to keep Nigeria together is now very weak”…

Over the next fifty years the earth’s population will soar from 5.5 billion to more than nine billion. Though optimists have hopes for new resource technologies and free-market development in the global village, they fail to note that, as the National Academy of Sciences has pointed out, 95 percent of the population increase will be in the poorest regions of the world, where governments now—just look at Africa—show little ability to function, let alone to implement even marginal improvements. Homer-Dixon writes, ominously, “Neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability in today’s environmental-social system, but as time passes their analysis may become ever more compelling”…