In their new book, Wreckonomics, David Keen and Ruben Andersson explore the Cold War, and the fights against terrorism, migration and drugs, analysing why disastrous policies live on even when it has become apparent that they do not work. In this written interview, Larry Attree asks the authors to share key insights from this new work.
Q: In your book, you describe the aftermath of certain recent ‘wars on…’ as akin to a ‘crime scene’: what do you mean by this?
In looking at the damage wrought by the war on terror, the war on drugs and the ‘fight against irregular migration’, we found evidence not of some one-off failure to plan ahead or a policy initiative that had gone wrong because of unexpected circumstances. Instead, the damage, the apparent ‘mistakes’ and the cover-ups have all been rather systematic. A case in point is the war in Afghanistan, with which we start the book, but there are many more – from the long-running US-led war on drugs to Europe’s ‘war’ on smugglers in the Mediterranean. In all these cases, powerful players have actually been able to extract a whole range of political and economic profits amidst the wreckage. These include enabling politicians to win elections; bureaucracies and security contractors getting funding for these various wars and fights; ‘cooperating’ governments obtaining aid and impunity; and all involved governments finding opportunities to suppress dissent. So we need to look not just at what went wrong but also at what went ‘right.’ This helps to explain why some fairly disastrous — and predictably counter-productive — interventions have renewed themselves over many years and even decades.
With a crime scene, we tend to look for individual culprits and smoking guns. And we must demand accountability, which has so often been sorely lacking: this is a key reason for using the crime scene analogy. But when it comes to large-scale wars and interventions, the instinct for individualising accountability and culpability can be very unhelpful. It can also actively feed the war. As we know, the long ‘war on terror’ needed its villains (Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar), and Europe’s ‘fight against migration’ needs its evil ‘mafia’ smugglers. The ‘war on drugs’ needs its drug lords and drug-funded rebels, while Cold Wars old and new need their terrible tyrants. Focusing on such villains tends to miss the systematic ways in which disastrous interventions reproduce themselves. Very often, it’s less helpful to ‘find the individual responsible’ than to try to tackle the underlying incentives that are feeding the problem at a more systemic level.
That’s why we think analysts (and citizens) need to try and become better ‘systems detectives’— to highlight and debate the patterns and incentives that produce and reproduce disastrous interventions in a rather systematic way.
Q: The title of your book ‘Wreckonomics’ is actually derived from an acronym – how do you define this term, and what are the 5 ‘wreckanisms’ that you believe the Cold War and the fights against terror, migration and drugs all have in common?
We aligned the five ‘mechanisms’ we identify in the book with the W-R-E-C-K acronym: if nothing else, simply to serve as a guide to memory!
The W is what we call the ‘war fix’. All our dysfunctional interventions have tended to begin with a dangerous manoeuvre: the enterprise of transforming a complex, systemic issue into a simple – and often inflated – threat that urgently needs to be combated. Along with this, there’s typically a fixation on an equally singular ‘solution’ or magic bullet. State officials, security contractors and the general voting public may all be involved. Scholars usually label this manoeuvre ‘securitisation,’ which is useful, though we see it as something broader.
Whatever we call it, there’s often a political appetite for a simple ‘fix’. And then when this doesn’t work out, we move onto the next fix, and so on. The fight against migration is a case in point, where talk of border ‘invasions’ has become routine from UK to European coasts, even as numbers are small in the wider scheme of things; and where each new crisis begets yet another round of security interventions — on the principle that if we just try the same thing again, only a little harder, it may yield different results.
R is for the rigging or fixing of the ‘game’ that follows. Every intervention that pursues a simple solution tends to be gamed by a variety of actors with a variety of aims. Declared ‘wars’ or ‘fights’ tend to bring about the conditions (secrecy, suppression of dissent, the imperative of ‘victory’) that are conducive to rigging. Such rigging or gaming may take the form of a ‘double game’ with covert winners subverting their own loudly expressed cooperation in a particular fight — as seen, for instance, when Libya’s Gaddafi blatantly used migrants as a bargaining chip in relations with European donors. This double gaming may involve actors looking the other way instead of enforcing, or selectively enforcing, whatever overt policy they are tasked with implementing – in the meantime consolidating their wealth, political and military power and/or the support of allies and the public.
Incidentally, documenting this is one of the areas where organisations such as Saferworld have done such important work, both in relation to global wars and civil wars. The war on terror in Afghanistan is a case in point: here, collusion among US-backed warlords and insurgents tended to feed a perverse cycle of further violence and political and economic gaming. What we find more broadly is that the very phenomenon that key actors claim to be opposing is also, surprisingly often, the phenomenon that is helping them the most.
E is for ‘export.’ Alongside the gaming of the benefits of intervention, we have found that there is usually an exporting or ‘externalization’ of its costs. In fact, the costs of intervention tend to be perversely distributed so as to minimise negative impacts on the powerful — and on those who created the intervention in the first place. Unwinnable fights tend to generate what economists call ‘negative externalities’ – costs that are off the books and that someone else has to deal with. The war on drugs, for instance, shows starkly how costs have systematically been exported in terms of violence to origin and transit countries, and in terms of public health and safety to poorer and marginalised groups. This cost distribution, in turn, has tended to feed the ‘war fix’, as those responsible don’t have to suffer the consequences.
C is for ‘cascade’. In our interventions, this is the process by which our wars and fights begin to spiral out of control owing to complex systems dynamics. Part of this is the cascade of escalating costs. There’s also a cascade of games, with many players taking advantage of the original intervention and the various blowbacks to which it gives rise. Also fuelling these processes is the interaction between our various wars and ‘fights’. Consider the US-Mexico borderlands or the Sahel region, both cases where spiralling crises have been fuelled by overlapping wars and fights variously staged against insurgents, cartels, smugglers and migrants.
K is for the ‘knowledge-fix’: fixing the facts in ways that both oversimplify the problem and exaggerate the effectiveness of the oversimplified solution. The public often gets a through-the-looking-glass view of what’s really going on. Meanwhile, the scope for questioning and dissent tends to be drastically reduced by the war framing. In practice, those who try to highlight the hidden costs of a particular way of doing things are likely to be marginalized or vilified.
Q: I’d always felt that the failure of such wars was good reason to be optimistic about the potential for a paradigm shift in security responses – until you identified the role of ‘knowledge-fixing’ in stymieing the potential for changing course. Can you explain that in a little more detail?
In the fight against migration, stated purposes include ‘combatting’ irregular or illegal migration. Another is often the ‘humanitarian’ one of limiting suffering and exploitation. And seen in the right light with the right set of mirrors, all kinds of ‘success’ can be observed, recorded and rewarded despite terrible death counts and perpetual crises. Even pushing a boat full of people back to Libya can be presented as discouraging dangerous migrations — and therefore a ‘humanitarian’ win.
Information manipulation is key to the conduct of all our various wars and fights, and it takes many forms. One common technique is manipulating the timeline of success. For example, one day some years ago during Ruben’s research, a Spanish central government delegate on Tenerife revealed a graph showing how migrant arrivals by wooden fishing boats into the Canary Islands had been successfully brought down by his government from more than 30,000 in 2006 to just a few thousand four years later. But his timeline had been chosen to start at the record year for irregular maritime migration into Spain, so it obscured the sharp rise that had preceded it. And this rise had a lot to do with his very own government pushing routes away from North Africa through hard crackdowns. It also had a lot to do with the ‘double gaming’ of regional powers. What looked like a simple ‘win’ obscured a much larger failure.
Across all our wars and fights, policy-makers have been able to disguise and distort the reality of longer-term failure (in terms of expressed goals) with the image of short-term success. Let’s remember, for instance, how George W. Bush prematurely declared the Iraq invasion ‘mission accomplished’ in May 2003. This turned out to be just one in a long string of ‘successes’ — defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq, defeating ISIS, killing Bin Laden, taking out terrorists with drone attacks, and so on. A mostly ‘failing’ long war can be broken into a set of smaller wars, each of which can in this way be conveniently framed as successful within its own narrow frame of reference.
A second distorting mirror is the failure to account for the counter-productive effects of intervention itself – or, worse, to turn these effects into a sign of success. Both the Iraq war and Europe’s border crises are examples of this.
Despite the penchant for cost-benefit analysis in management and accounting circles, proper and comprehensive assessment of costs and benefits — and crucially their distribution — tends to be gravely lacking in each of our wars and fights. In relation to the war on drugs, one incisive analysis of these official metrics notes that ‘[m]ost conventional indicators are process-oriented, in that they track the extent of drug crops sprayed, producers put out of business, and arrests and incarceration of traffickers and consumers. They do not, however, demonstrate whether drug supply or demand is increasing or declining.’ Meanwhile counter-narcotics initiatives have often been ‘associated with the most egregious forms of violence, including tens of thousands of intentional homicides and disappearances per year’. In this context, it is striking how favoured metrics give a sense of ‘how tough we are being, but do not tell us how successful we are’ — that is, how successful in reining in the drugs trade or achieving a progressive human outcome.
A third distorting mirror has been the failure to include in the tally the wider ‘negative externalities’ of intervention on third parties. Notwithstanding the numerous terror attacks in the West, one calculation suggests that only 3 percent of deaths caused by a growing number of global terrorist attacks occurred in Western countries in the period 2000-2014, with the bulk of terror attacks concentrated in a handful of mainly Muslim countries where the war on terror or its piggybacking smaller wars have been unleashed and cascaded. Drones and other technological ruses further insulate powerful external interveners (such as Western forces).
Q: As you mention in the book, this is a time of great uncertainty in which even democratic political systems and ‘progressive’ parties aren’t generating better policy responses to a range of escalating crises. In response to the pattern of self-serving malaise you define as ‘Wreckonomics’, can you identify any promising directions for changing what is going on?
Systems thinking may seem rather dry, but it holds important keys. War and security systems paradoxically depend upon rendering the issue in question as a simple — often a single — threat. While lip-service is sometimes paid to systems thinking (as in the projects that claim to address the ‘root causes’ of migration), such systems thinking tends to be shallow. Crucially, it rarely accounts for the role of the intervention itself in changing the environment in which the ‘problem’ manifests. Systems don’t like to look at systems!
We can start here by unfixing the information environment and bring the full costs (and benefits) of existing interventions into the open. It sounds simple but as all our wars show, it rarely happens where and when it’s needed the most. COVID-19 – another case we look at briefly – should prompt further caution.
We also need to ‘unfix’ the problem. This comes more clearly into focus if we look at approaches to conflict and counter-terrorism that depart from the war on terror. In research for Saferworld, you and Jordan Street recently observed that ‘Reinforcing — and failing to transform — partners’ abuse, corruption and exclusion is the single most important cause of failure in counter-terror and stabilisation strategies.’ That is crucial. Meanwhile, as you emphasised, the official ‘solution’ often involves state abuse that ends up fuelling corruption, exclusion and proscribed groups of one kind or another. In fact, terrorism is not infrequently designed to spark this overreaction, so as to win more recruits.
A focus on military confrontation distracts from the need for tentative dialogue, including with local communities. By focusing on the intervention and not just the threat, we get a much better understanding of how the threat is renewing itself.
We are not trying to write a set of policy prescriptions in the book. However, if we lose the habit of embracing and laundering belligerent solutions that are manifestly not working, this in itself should create the space — and the dialogue — from which better solutions can emerge. Aggressive supply-side approaches squeeze out more constructive and peaceable solutions.
However, many such solutions already exist and even thrive. Addressing drug dependency means engaging in various forms of harm-reduction of a kind that has already been extensively trialled and rolled out for intoxicating substances (alcohol and drugs) in many parts of the world. Addressing insecure migrations involves, among other things, adjusting labour market regulations in a way that protects both citizen and non-citizen workers, and separately, ensuring more equally shared global responsibility for refugees. Addressing insurgency and political violence involves supporting the criminal justice system, and it often means acting against corruption and supporting reform of the security sector. All these fields of intervention must involve boosting economic security, education, and public health while tackling deep-seated inequality. If there is one lesson that a final crisis we discuss in the book – that of COVID-19 – has taught us, it is that mending the fragility in our social systems is core to avoiding another crisis to emerge.
The underlying problem can become unfixed and reframed. The war on drugs, in particular, shows us how this can be done: here, a broad coalition of actors from origin communities to global leaders, from activists to academics, has for years pushed for a sensible approach that doesn’t involve a wrong-headed ‘war’ on a product. They’ve scored notable successes, including by bringing the costs of business-as-usual into the open.
Debate on how to respond to insurgencies, migration or global health issues can learn from this process – and we hope Wreckonomics can help manifest the (often hidden) costs and benefits, and thus counteract the self-reinforcing mechanisms, that underlie many contemporary wars and fights. Perhaps by becoming good ‘wreckonomists’ we may start finding a way through the wreckage.
Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything was published by Oxford University Press in December 2023.
Ruben Andersson is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University working on migration, borders and security with a focus on the West African Sahel and southern Europe. His other books include Illegality, Inc. and No Go World.
David Keen is is a Professor of Conflict Studies at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has researched civil wars, global wars and disasters. He is the author of The Benefits of Famine (1994) and Useful Enemies (2012), among other books.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Oxford University Press, 2023.
