This Policy Research Report was authored by a team comprising Muhammad Faisal Ali Baig, Quy-Toan Do, Daniel Garrote-Sanchez, Lakshmi Iyer, Chau Le, and Andrei Levchenko.
Executive Summary
With the increasing internationalization of conflict, crime, and violence, domestic political stability and law enforcement capability have now become regional and global public goods.
This report documents how permeable country borders have become in many different domains, and the troubling human and economic costs. The geographical spillovers of conflict and crime and political instability have intensified. Violence from armed conflict generates larger flows of refugees, who travel greater distances to seek protection and are distributed widely across many more receiving countries. In just 10 years, the number of transnational terrorist attacks has quintupled. The global trade in opium, cocaine, and other illicit drugs has reached a 30-year high, with production concentrated in a handful of countries. Elephant and rhinoceros killings are far above their 2000 levels because of persistent demand for wildlife products, and piracy in international waters is still a significant threat.
The increasing internationalization of crime and conflict is also reflected in their transnational determinants: (1) international demand and supply shocks for the major products a country produces; (2) foreign regulations (such as on illicit goods and services) that affect returns to producers and consumers along the supply chain; (3) technology diffusion; and (4) “conflict contagion” through either flows of tangible resources across borders (such as arms, fighters, and money) or flows of intangible resources (such as ideas, inspirations, and grievances).
Because political stability and law enforcement are, increasingly, global public goods, this provides a rationale for greater international assistance to countries facing fiscal and technical constraints that prevent them from providing stability and the rule of law. In a world where individual countries are sovereign, this report examines instruments of international assistance to alter the domestic social, political, and economic landscape. The report finds that the impact of foreign interventions (whether military interventions or development assistance) on violence is ambiguous and context-specific. Military interventions might increase the state’s ability to control crime and insurgency but might also worsen citizens’ attitudes toward the government. Similarly, foreign aid might improve livelihoods and thus provide youth with an alternative to violence. At the same time, foreign aid could have ambiguous effects on broader citizen support for the government: although aid can support a strategy of buying “hearts and minds,” it can also aggravate corruption or generate retaliation and sabotage by criminal gangs or insurgent groups.
The challenge of collective prevention of internationalized conflict, crime, and violence is compounded by the “free-riding” problem: no single country internalizes the full regional and global benefits of supporting a fragile state in its maintenance of peace and the rule of law, which leads to the underprovision of assistance. Multilateral institutions can play an important role in institutionalizing such collective arrangements while recognizing the possibility of competing interests between nations permeating multilateral institutions.
Global institutions have a role to play in the provision of security. The report identifies areas of relevance for multilateral institutions:
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Generating data and knowledge for better policies. The systematic collection of data on crime and conflict is a cornerstone of policy and research analysis for evidence-based policy making. The body of knowledge available to policy makers is heavily influenced by the data accessible for analysis. Given the public good nature of data, multilateral organizations have a comparative advantage in collecting data on crime and violence, and in making it available for academic and policy research. Innovation should be encouraged to alleviate the difficulty of data collection in violent or illegal settings.
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Delivering financial aid and technical expertise. An individual country’s political stability and ability to enforce laws have positive regional or global spillovers. In such cases, regional or global organizations can be suitable institutions to which countries delegate some aspects of their foreign policies so as to mitigate the collective action problem. Appropriate financial and knowledge instruments should then be designed to reflect the needs associated with and spillovers stemming from the provision of security and rule of law. This report also highlights the challenges associated with upholding the “do-no-harm” principle in volatile contexts and underscores the complementarity between aid and security as an important aspect of development assistance in fragile settings.
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Providing a forum for policy coordination. In an increasingly interconnected world, policies in one country can have a “beggar-thy-neighbor” effect on other countries with implications for the levels of conflict, crime, and violence, hence giving a transnational dimension to the “do-no-harm” principle. When policies are interdependent, multilateral institutions can provide a platform for coordination and collective bargaining to identify policies that are most desirable from a regional or global standpoint.
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