Arms and the Nation

Context: In the recent tragedy in Afghanistan, it is all too easy to take recourse to debates over development and culture while ignoring the dynamics of armed conflict and the presence of weaponry that militarises society and embeds violence.

Analysing the failed states: There is an old adage that if you want to understand state building or state breakdown, follow the guns.

• Embedded violence: According to the Small Arms Survey 2018, Geneva, Afghanistan, has a rate of 59.8 violent deaths per 1,00,000, below Syria (187.9), El Salvador (87). This database is also a reminder of two other trends. 
  • Violence tends to be sticky. Once embedded, it is hard to dislodge. South Africa has a rate of 40.6; Brazil 36.3. Most countries with lower rates are in Asia or are European social democracies. In Asia, India has a violent death rate of 3.9 per 1,00,000; Pakistan is at 5.9 while Indonesia, China and Japan are lower than 1. 
    • This contrast between Asia and the Americas on this aspect of state-building and prevalence of violent death is striking and rarely made as central to the development literature as poverty.
  • Violence has complicated causes: Even settled societies can have violent political convulsions, and also the relationship between the presence of firearms and violence is also complicated.
    • India has 5.30 arms per hundred persons, China 3.2, Indonesia less than one. The US, not surprisingly, has 120 per 100, while Brazil and South Africa are closer to 10. 

Relationship between arms and violence: As Priya Satia argued in her book, The Empire of Guns, The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, the prevalence of guns has a social and political history. This also defines the different arms cultures in Asia and America. Colonial practices embedded guns in some societies and not in others.

• In the Americas, gun ownership was almost obligatory for whites as part of a racial strategy of supremacy and dispossession of natives and oppression of slaves. 
• The US has withdrawn from the UN’s Small Arms Treaty 2013 because of an ideological commitment to exporting weapons.
• Moreover, the Treaty is not strong enough on arms transfers to non-state actors.
• In India’s view, the Treaty protects arms exporters more than importers.
• In Asia, by contrast, colonial empires, for their own self-protection, pacified and built state and society by disarming citizens.
• The British empire in India not just dispossessed Indians of weapons, it also disarmed them of burgeoning indigenous knowledge in weapon-making, including innovative forms of metallurgy.
• The Arms Act of 1878, which tightly controlled arms ownership in India, was an exercise in colonial and racial subordination, such that even Gandhi wanted it overturned later.
• Fearing lower-class rebellion, Britain enacted restrictive gun laws in the 1920s as well.

Conclusion: The pacification of violence cannot take place with the indiscriminate spread of weapons. If we want to understand failed states, don’t get development consultants. Get people who follow the guns and political elites who are at least willing to control them.