What went through your mind, as an economist, when you decided to write a book on conflict for the general public? Was it the return of war to Europe, particularly in Ukraine?
My journey of scholarly quest on understanding war and peace already started three decades earlier when in high school I developed great interest in geopolitics and history. And since the beginning of my PhD two decades ago, studying armed conflict has been my main research focus. Now, after having investigated these questions for two decades in dozens of academic articles, I have felt an ever-stronger urge to leave the Ivory Tower of writing solely for my peers, and to instead aim at reaching a broader audience and having a positive policy impact.
The economy is often seen as the “mother of all evils” when it comes to the causes of conflict. Is this right or wrong – and can you give some examples?
Some roots of wars are indeed linked to economic factors, such as for example our harmful dependency on fossil energies, which has been found to overall fuel corruption, autocracy and different types of wars, ranging from civil conflicts to full-blown interstate wars. If an oil- or gas-rich regime invades its neighbouring country, paradoxically the war may be “subsidised” by a surge in fossil fuel prices, which leads to very bad incentives for aggressive regimes.
At the same time, though, economic forces are not only part of the problem, but very much also part of the solution for sustainable peace. Investing in good institutions and in a productive economy allows for making it harder to recruit people willing to take up arms.
Could you outline the main idea of your book, namely that there is a magic formula for peace based on the equation “voice, work and warranties”?
Well, a great number of academic studies by an armada of scholars around the world have found that lack of democracy, a weak economy and security dilemmas are common culprits to fuel fighting, while strengthening democratic institutions, checks and balances, power-sharing, as well as economic productivity through education and health investments can make a key positive difference, together with security guarantees, for example provided by UN blue helmets.
My book provides a first easily accessible synthesis of this large body of academic work, illustrating many key findings with historical anecdotes. The book is targeted not only at a general audience beyond academia, who will benefit from an easy access to state-of-the-art research results on this crucial topic; it is at the same time a very useful read for students and advanced researchers, who enjoy the detailed source information and bibliography which includes all the underlying studies referred to in the book.
Your vision of peace is based on the idea of “smart idealism”. Why? And does this mean that you don't think this model is realistic?
If the first part of the book focuses on which policies work to bring peace, in the second part we approach the million-dollar question of why, sadly, these findings have not yet been widely picked up by policymakers, and why our leaders tend to perpetuate the ever-same policy mistakes over and over again. It is shown that ill-designed peace initiatives that backfire can be accounted for by the distorted incentives of many politicians, nudging them to cut shady deals with despots instead of investing in lasting peace. Thankfully, the book explains how “smart idealism” helps us to get the incentives of our leaders right. This refers to the right combination of having altruistic goals but pursuing them in an evidence-based way. You neither want a selfish bully as a leader, nor a well-intentioned ideologue who ignores evidence and pursues policies that backfire. Let’s always remember the famous quote that “l’enfer est pavé de bonnes intentions”. The book argues that a paramount role is played by the public opinion who needs to monitor what our leaders do. If myopic short-termist policies do not pay off electorally, politicians will stop pursuing them.
How do you get round the criticism of an ideal model based on work, democracy and law – in other words, a perfectly Western model – that is increasingly being called into question at the start of this century?
The book draws on dozens of studies spanning all over the world, in a great number of countries. Actually, most of the results stem from non-Western nations. Across a wide range of different contexts many academic studies have found that on average democratic institutions lead to greater human wellbeing, better health outcomes and greater economic opportunities. The vast majority of people are better off living in a democracy than in an autocracy. This being said, leaders of autocratic regimes such as, for example, the Afghan Taliban of course have self-serving incentives to tell their population and the world that democracy is a Western concept that does not apply to them. Still, there are clear-cut statistical relationships between benefitting from civil and political rights and human happiness. It does not come as a surprise that Afghanistan ranks last out of 143 countries in the World Happiness Report 2024. While Taliban leaders may claim that their regime guarantees the greater good for society, hard statistical facts seem to suggest that Afghan people disagree.
War now seems to be the horizon of the multipolar world. What can economics, as a discipline, offer in the way of solutions to the tensions arising from the consequences of climate change, pollution or the depletion of resources?
A study of two co-authors and me, called “Heat and Hate”, has been freshly accepted for publication in a leading economics journal. In this article, we indeed show that climate change increases substantially the risks of armed conflict, among others due to resource competition. We also find that sound and fair institutions are a big part of the solution. Thus, in a nutshell, to avoid the tragedy of “heat and hate”, we need to both get out of fossil fuels much faster, and also strengthen democratic governance.
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JAMES A. ROBINSON, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2024, says of The Peace Formula:
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Full reference:
Rohner, Dominic. The Peace Formula: Voice, Work and Warranties, Not Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009438322.
• Listen to an episode of VoxDevTalks, in which journalist Tim Phillips interviews Dominic Rohner about The Peace Formula.
Banner image: Shutterstock/Dedraw Studio.
Interview by Marc Galvin, Research Office.