Political Violence

In my usual style on this blog of being pretty random, I'm switching from whimsical thinking about the circus to the much more serious topic of political violence in the Middle East and Africa. Events in this region have been moving so fast it is hard to keep track of which country is successfully or unsuccessfully overthrowing their dictatorial leader today.

On the bright side:
- The former President of Cote d'Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo, has finally been arrested and the newly elected President, Alassane Outarra, is taking steps to try to stabilize the country.
- The President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has promised to resign.
- Hosni Mubarak and his sons have been arrested in Egypt.
On the dark side:
- Protests in Syria over the brutal treatment of teenage anti-government protesters have led to the death of almost 100 people in a protest on Friday and more killings at the funeral of the killed protesters.
- The struggle between rebels with international support and the government and thugs supporting Ghadafi appears to be in a stalemate.
- Italian activist, Vittorio Arrigoni, was captured and killed in Palestine.

Where will the killing end? Where will the protests lead? Do the rebels have the capability and vision to lead these countries to a more peaceful future?

I have been looking over the recently published World Development Report on Conflict, Security, and Development for some context on the situation. The Report does a great job of emphasizing how the current upsurge in political violence is different from previous interstate war related violence and requires different thinking and approaches. The Report is also extremely critical about the ineffectiveness of international aid in preventing violence or addressing the multiple causes of cycles of violence. The Report comes with a interesting database and data visualizer that is fun to play around with if you are a numbers dork like me: http://devdata.worldbank.org/DataVisualizer/