Oxford academic Paul Collier is well known for his book The Bottom Billion in which he maps the links between the world’s poorest people and the world’s most war-torn countries. In a chapter in a new book for IPPR, edited by Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, Collier argues that what Africa needs is an “African NATO”.
He writes that the international community oscillates between “pusillanimous passivity” and “gung-ho intervention”. He puts Kuwait ’91 and Somalia ’93 in his gung-ho category, with Rwanda ’94, Ivory Coast ’99 and Somalia post-‘Black Hawk down’, into his passivity category. Although he sees Sierra Leone ’02 as gung-ho, he also describes Britain’s intervention as “spectacularly successful”, and he’s not the only one. I was chatting to a security guard in London the other day who told me that he and his family were alive today “thanks to Tony Blair”.
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