Fixing The Most Violent Countries On Earth | Rachel Kleinfeld

1. 0:00 – 2:53

   Why study violence: the gap between what works and how to implement it

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      (wind blows) Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Rachel Kleinfeld, Modern Wisdom, how are you today?

   2. RKRachel Kleinfeld0:12

      Very well. Great to be here, Chris.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:14

      Uh, I'm really excited to speak to you today. It's a, a turbulent time in politics and the, the 21st century for governments trying to make themselves work effectively, so I think it's gonna be a, a, a really interesting conversation. I'm reading your bio here. A senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for In- International Peace, and the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project. Is that right?

   4. RKRachel Kleinfeld0:39

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:40

      Those sound like situations where there's lots of serious stuff happening all the time.

   6. RKRachel Kleinfeld0:46

      (laughs) Well, there's certainly a lot of attempts to, uh, have serious conversations about serious issues, yes.

   7. CWChris Williamson0:52

      (laughs)

   8. RKRachel Kleinfeld0:53

      Um, but, you know, the, the, the world of think tanks in Washington, D.C. is, uh, is one of advi- advising, so we advise our government, we advise your government in Britain.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:03

      Mm-hmm.

   10. RKRachel Kleinfeld1:04

       Um, and all around the world, trying to, trying to make a difference.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:07

       Yeah, uh, something tells me that you don't get much time to just, like, crack jokes and kind of chill out. It's probably a lot of serious stuff.

   12. RKRachel Kleinfeld1:16

       Uh, we have our fun, but, um, you know, I'm not, I'm not present there very often. I spend an awful lot of time at 40,000 feet, so, um, you know, flying from place to place to ... so my fun is generally on the fly in different countries doing, you know, eating street food in Afghanistan or, uh, or riding lorries in Bangladesh. That kind of thing.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:36

       That's pretty cool. So, we're, we're gonna talk about A Savage Order, which is your new book.

   14. RKRachel Kleinfeld1:41

       Mm-hmm.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:42

       Um, can you tell us, uh, why you started writing this and, and what did you want to find out when you began?

   16. RKRachel Kleinfeld1:49

       Uh, absolutely. So, when you work in a think tank, eh, there's a lot of serious talk as you've discussed, but there can also be a lot of talk that doesn't really go anywhere. And so, I wanted to see could we do anything about the problem of violence? I spent all my time reading about it, thinking about it. How do we end conflicts? What do we do about violence? And it turned out, we knew very little about what actually worked. And so, I pulled together a big conference. I brought together the experts on electoral violence, on organized crime, on gang violence. You know, you have it, we had them all in a room together. If a bomb had gone off in that room, who knows? You know (laughs) .

   17. CWChris Williamson2:23

       (laughs) It would have been ruined.

   18. RKRachel Kleinfeld2:24

       It's a, a massive, uh, brain power on violence would have been ended. Um, and I said, you know, "What do we know?" And we put together a literature review on here's all that we knew, which was quite a lot. We, we had a great deal of knowledge, actually, about how you fight gangs, how you get better policing, all sorts of things. Um, and then I said, "Okay, well, how would you get a corrupt police force in X country to adopt these ideas?" And, you know, the room just went silent, and I thought, "Okay. That's the problem I need to focus on for this book."

2. 2:53 – 4:52

   Choosing global case studies: comparing places that improved vs. deteriorated

   1. CWChris Williamson2:53

      Wow. Um, so you must have had to include certain areas and exclude other ones. Were there certain geographic locations that you focused on?

   2. RKRachel Kleinfeld3:02

      Yeah, so when I first wrote the book, I thought it would be a pretty typical think tank book of, uh, lots of little ideas that, you know, lots of little different kinds of violence and different ways to fight it, and so I picked case studies on every continent on Earth that was settled. So not Antarctica, but everywhere else.

   3. CWChris Williamson3:16

      (laughs)

   4. RKRachel Kleinfeld3:17

      And, um-

   5. CWChris Williamson3:17

      If there's wars going on in Antarctica and gangs, roving gangs of, uh, like-

   6. RKRachel Kleinfeld3:22

      Emperor penguins-

   7. CWChris Williamson3:23

      Yes.

   8. RKRachel Kleinfeld3:23

      ... who are really upset at each other-

   9. CWChris Williamson3:25

      Yeah, I know.

   10. RKRachel Kleinfeld3:25

       It could be. I've never been to Antarctica, but-

   11. CWChris Williamson3:27

       Sequel.

   12. RKRachel Kleinfeld3:27

       ... uh, I focus ... (laughs) My husband would be thrilled.

   13. CWChris Williamson3:31

       (laughs)

   14. RKRachel Kleinfeld3:31

       Um, so, you know, we went to, uh, Italy and we looked at why the mob ended in Sicily or pre- or was really decimated in Sicily and, and, um, was still very present in Naples and was spreading in the rest of Italy. We looked at the Republic of Georgia, which was an ex-Soviet state, broke away. Why had it gotten so much better when Tajikistan had fallen into kind of an authoritarian dictatorship? Nigeria versus Ghana. Um, Mexico versus Colombia. Why did Colombia end its civil war and really fight its violence while Mexico is, uh, just getting worse and worse in terms of violence there? Uh, Bihar, India, versus Jharkhand and, um, that was one state had a lot of Maoist violence and criminal violence and insurgency, and right below it, the state that had been the breakaway, the two had been one state and they'd been separated by the federal government, the other one couldn't fight and one fought. And then, my sort of fun case, you asked about whether we have fun in think tanks, my fun case was looking at the US, the US South after the Civil War versus the Wild West, and why did the Wild West actually get better pretty quickly. It went from wild to not particularly wild in about 30 years, whereas the US South is still the most violent part of America and certainly was, um, back then. And after the Civil War, it became more and more violent over time. And so, that was probably the key to the whole book actually, was that, that case.

3. 4:52 – 6:07

   A unifying insight: violent democracies aren’t always ‘weak states’

   1. CWChris Williamson4:52

      That's interesting. So, did you find any common principles amongst all of these areas? Obviously, there'll have been characteristics that were particular to within them, I suppose. What were the overarching narratives that you came up with?

   2. RKRachel Kleinfeld5:05

      Yeah, so as I said, I thought I was going to write lots of little things. I mean, what does the mob have to do with the post-Civil War American West? But what I found as I went from place to place was these themes kept recurring. I kept seeing the same ideas, the same thoughts, and I was trying to figure it out. When you do a book like this, you travel all over. You're really jet lagged. You're talking to everyone you can get your hands on, so you, you, you know, you might do 80, 100 interviews in a country. You're reading everything. And my husband laughed at me 'cause he said, "You know, for five years, you never read a book that wasn't about violence."

   3. CWChris Williamson5:35

      (laughs)

   4. RKRachel Kleinfeld5:35

      "And I started to worry about you."

   5. CWChris Williamson5:37

      Yeah.

   6. RKRachel Kleinfeld5:37

      Um, you know, so I'm just, uh, taking all this information, then you're trying to make sense of it. And as I was trying to make sense of it, I was doing my fun case about American history, and that was the key because the Wild West was a very violent, weak state. And when we think about states in my profession that are very violent and that are democracies, and I should say, I only looked at democracies because I wanted to know how they got better, and autocracies have a very different way of getting bad and getting better. It's just a different kind of a situation.So when you look

4. 6:07 – 8:37

   Wild West vs. Reconstruction South: weak capacity versus state complicity

   1. RKRachel Kleinfeld6:07

      at a very violent democracy, people tend to assume that they're weak states. After all, if you can't protect your voters, you must be too weak to protect your voters- Yeah. ... because your voters must be asking for protection. It just goes to reason. But, um, the US West was that. So I tell the story in the book of Theodore Roosevelt, who was a president of ours 100 years ago, but he was also a cattle rancher before he was the president of South Dakota. And someone stole his boat, and he needed to get his boat back. And so, he got together a posse in a typical Wild West fashion, and they went down the river to get the criminals. And after three days on the river, they found the bad guys. They arrested them. They put handcuffs on them or whatever they had back then, you know, tied them up onto their raft. And then it froze. The river froze. And so for two weeks, they were stuck on a frozen river with three criminals that they had to feed. They had to keep everybody alive. (laughs) They had to ford this frozen river. They finally hit land. The posse leaves. They have jobs. They need to go back to their ranches. Theodore Roosevelt was independently wealthy, so he takes his criminals, and he walks for 36 hours. He walks with them to the nearest jail. And you can imagine that not being a particularly fun experience. Mm. Uh, and when he got to the, the town that had the jail, someone there said, "Well, why didn't you just shoot them?" And that made a lot of sense actually, because in that kind of a circumstance, you know, you can't sleep for 36 hours 'cause it's you against three criminals. You can't... Y- y- you know, the... just the sheer logistics of bringing someone to justice in a weak state that has poor capacity is a mess. And so, you get a lot of violence that is people trying to solve these problems for themselves. Mm-hmm. And you see that in a lot of weak states today. And that's the theory when we go to help Afghanistan or we go to help, uh, Nigeria. We say, "Oh, they're too weak. Let's bulk up their security services. Let's train them in how to shoot. Let's train them in logistics and so on, and help them fight people that they clearly want to fight." But that was not the issue in the US South, and so that was the key, because in the US South, you had courts, you had judges, you had police. You had all the things you need for a state. It wasn't a weak state at all. What it was was a complicit state. And so, in the US South after the Civil War, the old Confederate leadership wanted to h- be back in power, but they couldn't be because Blacks had been enfranchised. And so, they weren't going to vote for their former slave owners and so on, and most Confederates had been disenfranchised. So what do they do? Well, at the same time, you had the Ku

5. 8:37 – 13:57

   Electoral violence and ‘implicit deals’: how impunity becomes strategy

   1. RKRachel Kleinfeld8:37

      Klux Klan start up, and you had a bunch of groups, Night Rider groups as they were called, these white supremacist groups all over the South. They didn't start because the politicians made them start. They started because they were racist, horrible people. (laughs) But the politicians saw a confluence of interest. What the politicians saw was that if you harassed and terrified African-Americans, you would also be terrifying the voting base for the other party because they were going to vote for the other party. And so, if you chased enough of them out of the town, if you killed enough of them, if you scared enough of them, they wouldn't vote. And so, that's what happened. And so you saw pogroms and lynchings and so on spike right before elections. And you saw people get away scot-free because the deal that the Confederates made, an implicit deal, but, um, fairly explicitly implicit. The Ku Klux Klan had their big annual meeting the same weekend at the same hotel in Tennessee as the Democratic Party, um, of Tennessee. So, you know, it- it just happened. But, um, you saw a lot of parties back then write, uh, violence into their electoral plans, you know, their get out the vote plans had these, uh, parts in them that talked about electoral violence and, and using that as part of their strategy. Really? And the Congress at the time... Yes, really. People don't know this part of the- uh, US history. We don't talk about reconstruction. Um, Congress started this period- (laughs) I bet, I bet you don't talk about it that much. (laughs) It's... You know, it's a, it's a rough period. Um, Bill Burns is actually just about to do a documentary on it, so then hopefully people will know more about it. Wow. But the US Congress voided more than two dozen elections because of the level of violence, um, and sent people back, and, you know, h- you had to do recounts that, that were so bad. But as Confederates got back into power through these violent means, as they suppressed the vote of the other side and got back into power, they, of course, turned back the clock on federal legislation that would fight that kind of violence. Yeah. They made it harder to do. And, uh, the Supreme Court was quite conservative, and it worked with them and said, "No, no. Murder is a state issue. Federal law doesn't cover murder, so you can't try people." There was a Ku Klux Klan Act that was a law to make, uh, a murder a federal crime because they knew that the Southern courts weren't prosecuting it. And the... you know, they turned that back. So gradually, within about a decade, decade and a half, the old Confederates who had lost the Civil War won the peace- Mm. Mm-hmm. ... and they were back in power. And the deal they had made with these violent groups was, "Okay, you can commit your violence. We're not going to, um, help you. We're not gonna give you arms. We're not gonna give you money. But we're gonna give you impunity. You're gonna be allowed to do it as much as you want, and you're not gonna go to jail. It's gonna be impossible to convict a white person for killing a Black person, um, or raping or..." You know, that's what I saw in country after country were, were these implicit deals that are being made with states that aren't weak, but have deliberately chosen to allow a certain amount of violence by other a- by non-state actors, as we say in the business, by groups that are not part of the state for their own reasons. Sometimes it's bribery. Um, you know, sometimes it's electoral violence, like in the South. Yeah. Mm-hmm. They want to suppress the other vote. Sometimes they want money. So in Colombia, a third of the Colombian parliament was being... had their campaigns paid for by paramilitary groups. The paramilitary groups were deeply tied to the drug cartels.So, you know, who's not gonna get prosecuted.

   2. CWChris Williamson12:03

      Yeah.

   3. RKRachel Kleinfeld12:03

      Um, you see that same kinda thing. You also see just personal enrichment. You know, uh, uh, some particular leader... You're seeing that in Central America right now, um, where Jimmy Morales in Guatemala just kicked out the UN Council that was looking into corruption. As soon as they started moving from organized crime corruption to campaign finance corruption, suddenly they got kicked out of the country. Um-

   4. CWChris Williamson12:25

      Are you allowed to do that? Are you allowed to just get rid of the UN?

   5. RKRachel Kleinfeld12:28

      Um, in that particular case, yes, because they'd been invited in and the UN, uh, has to work with the member state mandate. So the attorney general that... s- basically the law enforcement had invited them in and said, "Hey, we want the UN to clean up our business here." And the executive, who had been elected on an anti-corruption platform-

   6. CWChris Williamson12:46

      (laughs)

   7. RKRachel Kleinfeld12:46

      ... but clearly with some problematic background to that, uh, would let them do what they wanted to do to a certain point, but not too far.

   8. CWChris Williamson12:53

      So within, within the confines. So there's a couple of things that have come up. First off is, the, um, campaign violence that you mentioned, to me, sounds exactly the same as the rule that you guys have in ice hockey where you're allowed to punch each other in the face until one person falls on the floor. Like, it just seems like a completely bizarre rule that's kind of s- loosely associated with the actual game, but t- totally should not be allowed. Like, you shouldn't be allowed to punch a p- s- another sportsman in the face in the same way as you should be allowed to use tactics which encourage people, persuade people towards your particular point of view, but not punching them in the face. Like, it just... (laughs) . It seems so-

   9. RKRachel Kleinfeld13:33

      That is how, how electoral democracy is supposed to work. You're... uh, violence is supposed to be eschewed by all sides, you know?

   10. CWChris Williamson13:39

       (laughs)

   11. RKRachel Kleinfeld13:39

       But it's so easy, right? If you can get away with it in these states and you don't think you can win legitimately, why not?

   12. CWChris Williamson13:47

       You got your fallback plan, right?

   13. RKRachel Kleinfeld13:48

       You have to be a pretty good .......................... And so, so you see this being used over and over and over again in these countries, um, because they have impunity they can do it.

6. 13:57 – 18:12

   What ‘weak democracy’ looks like: polarization + inequality + denial

   1. CWChris Williamson13:57

      Yeah. I get that. Uh, the other thing... So you mentioned... Right at the very start of that little segment, you mentioned about, um, countries that have weak democracies or pe- people that, uh, generally think about weak. What do you think, uh, that the general public at large, or potentially even your colleagues as well, what do you think that they think of when they think of a weak democracy? What do you think that word brings up?

   2. RKRachel Kleinfeld14:21

      Sure. So, I mean, a particular thing. I mean, a democracy that, um, that is highly, highly polarized and highly unequal. That's where you see this happen. Highly polarized, highly unequal. So the people are at each other's throats, um, and won't necessarily believe facts about the other party. So you see in Italy, for instance, the Christian Democratic Party was pretty tied together with the mafia, um, for many, many decades. They were using them for get out the vote. Um, the mafia would then get contracts. The mafia would be able to hire more people for construction and what have you. Those were more people to get out the vote, and it was kind of a tidy little system. Um, the Communist Party kept saying this. They kept saying, "Hey, look, the Christian Democratic Party is (laughs) working with the mafia." And the Christian Democrats would say, "Oh, that's just the Communists talking. Do you wanna believe the Communists? Besides, they're tied in with the Soviet Internationale." And that was also true. The Communist Party of Italy was deeply, deeply, um, uh, paid for by the Soviet Union. And so, th- they could, they could dissuade people from looking into the mafia contacts by undermining the credibility of the Communists. So you see that kind of polarization making it impossible to solve the problem, and you see high, high levels of inequality. And the inequality matters because it makes it really hard for the middle class to imagine what's going on in other people's lives. When, um, these democracies become violent, the middle class doesn't tend to face the violence. They tend to look different. You know, Guatemala, for instance, uh, they're lighter skinned. They're taller. They can be a head taller than an indigenous person. They live in different neighborhoods. And so, the violence is happening to poorer people, more marginalized people, people who look different. And when it happens, you read it in the newspaper, maybe. Maybe it doesn't even make the paper because it's so normal for people to be harmed in those parts of town.

   3. CWChris Williamson16:09

      Mm-hmm.

   4. RKRachel Kleinfeld16:09

      And you say, "Oh, well, they're in the bad part of town. It's just criminals killing criminals. That's what happens in those part..." And so you see a lot of rationalization on the part of the middle class where they say, "It's over there. It's not touching me. I can ignore it. And besides, they're probably involved in the businesses," as it's usually... in Mexico, for instance, even though 20,000 people, um, are dying a year, they say, "Oh, it's probably just people involved in the business. It's not regular people like me and so I can, uh, distance myself."

   5. CWChris Williamson16:37

      Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that... Uh, I'm gonna guess as well that the middle class will be a, a heavy bulk of the voters as well, and probably the ones who would be the ones that will swing also and make big differences in elections.

   6. RKRachel Kleinfeld16:51

      That's exactly right, because the, the poor and the marginalized, they just don't vote as much. Maybe they're being... Maybe they're facing election violence that's keeping them from voting.

   7. CWChris Williamson16:58

      Yeah. Punching in the face. Yeah.

   8. RKRachel Kleinfeld16:59

      Um, maybe they just... Exactly, exactly. Who's gonna play ice hockey following... Apparently, Americans do. I don't follow (laughs) ice hockey. But a lot of people won't play ice hockey if those are the rules, right? You're not gonna vote, uh, with, uh, with that. Um, but it might also be that there's just nothing on offer, right? If it's an oligarchic system, it's a dem- democracy, but basically it's the same elites who run the show. Whether it's right or left, whoever you vote for, nothing's gonna change for you. Why take the time to bother voting? And so you see a lot of people choosing not to vote because they don't see an option, even if the violence isn't specifically targeting them. So you're right. The middle class are the voters, and if they can pretend the violence won't hit them, it can go on for a really long time and get pretty darn bad.

   9. CWChris Williamson17:38

      I get that. So other than the issues of personal, uh, safety and personal privacy and then the, um, uh, I guess the manipulation of particular parties getting into power within these countries, is there a, a wider problem than this? Is there... downstream is there something that happens that you can see if these in- inequalities and these weak, weak democracies continue to roll forward? Is there a, uh, a 2.0 version of this, which is a bigger, nastier beast that we really need to be worried about?

7. 18:12 – 23:44

   The ‘nasty 2.0’ escalation: privatized security, politicized police, and alternative order

   1. RKRachel Kleinfeld18:12

      Um, in fact, yes. So that- that structure of governing-

   2. CWChris Williamson18:16

      I was really- I was really, really hoping you were gonna say no. (laughs) I really hoped-

   3. RKRachel Kleinfeld18:19

      (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson18:19

      ... you were gonna say no.

   5. RKRachel Kleinfeld18:20

      I wish I could say no. I wish I could say no. The book, I should say, is positive, you know? The book is about how you get out of this system.

   6. CWChris Williamson18:25

      Uh-huh.

   7. RKRachel Kleinfeld18:25

      So we can talk about how you get into it, but I'd love to talk some about how you get out of it-

   8. CWChris Williamson18:29

      Yeah.

   9. RKRachel Kleinfeld18:29

      ... 'cause that was what interested me. But yes, it does get nastier because what basically happens is, you have a group of politicians who think, "We can't win a legitimate clean election. We're not gonna get in power. We want campaign finance money from organized criminals. We want to enable violence that's electoral violence. We wanna take bribes ourself and if the voting public knows how corrupt we are, they're not gonna vote for us." So for var- various different reasons, they think they're not gonna win a particularly clean election. So, they enable this violence and, um, use these violent groups to help them fill up their campaign coffers. You know, maybe they don't care about the violence. They don't want that to happen. They just want the money, but they're gonna let it happen so they can get the money. Uh, whatever the cause, that violence starts continuing. Well, the middle class buy their way out. So they buy private security, they live in gated communities, they buy houses in nice parts of town, you know, th- like anyone in a- in any normal place, they try to do what they can to provide for their kids and so on. So, you see this proliferation of private security services in a lot of these places and the s- in Spanish-speaking Central America, every single country, they outnumber, uh, police, um, this private security. And you see that everywhere, in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan. Um, so that's what the middle class does. So the violence falls on the poor and the marginalized, and that's kind of the implicit deal with these countries. You know, you don't kill the voters, you don't kill the middle class. That only happens by accident or if it's sending a particular message to someone who's getting nosy, an investigative journalist or something.

   10. CWChris Williamson20:00

       Mm-hmm.

   11. RKRachel Kleinfeld20:01

       Um, the- the violence falls on the marginalized. What do they do? Well, they can't turn to the state because state has been politicized. So the second thing that happens is the- the leadership, these politicians, politicize their police and security services because they can't have the police and security services arresting the violent groups that they've promised to give impunity to. That would break their promise.

   12. CWChris Williamson20:23

       Mm-hmm.

   13. RKRachel Kleinfeld20:24

       So they have to- they have to make those groups more political. And it turns out when you politicize your security services, good people don't wanna stay in them. Um, perhaps not surprisingly, morale just plummets for people who really wanna do their job.

   14. CWChris Williamson20:37

       Mm-hmm.

   15. RKRachel Kleinfeld20:37

       And what you see is a lot of violence. Uh, if you're- if you're a good policeman in a bad system like that that's letting off bad guys, what do you do? Some people turn to violence and they say, "Look, I'm a white hat. I'm gonna use extrajudicial violence because I know that the- the judges aren't gonna convict these people and the prisons aren't gonna keep them." So you start seeing these death squads that start up, um, from poli-

   16. CWChris Williamson21:02

       That's a terrifying word.

   17. RKRachel Kleinfeld21:02

       ... cia who are trying to do their job.

   18. CWChris Williamson21:03

       (laughs) Death squad.

   19. RKRachel Kleinfeld21:03

       Sorry, I- I (overlapped by Mark laughing) ... worked in the world of terrifying things.

   20. CWChris Williamson21:05

       Oh, no. No. I just-

   21. RKRachel Kleinfeld21:07

       You know? Uh-

   22. CWChris Williamson21:07

       Death- death squad is really what I don't wanna bump into, like, at all. (laughs)

   23. RKRachel Kleinfeld21:11

       Yeah. Yeah. You really... It's true. It's true. Um, but you se- you see them proliferate and then what... And so those death squads are- often conceive of themselves as white hats, right? They're just gonna target drug dealers.

   24. CWChris Williamson21:22

       Mm-hmm.

   25. RKRachel Kleinfeld21:22

       But, you know, first you kill the drug dealers, then you extort some money from the drug dealers so as not to kill them. Then pretty soon you're a policeman running a criminal gang that's affecting regular people. And so that's what you see, is this kind of trajectory. And suddenly if you're a poor person who's being targeted by the criminals, you also can't turn to the police because for all you know, they're working together. They frequently are. Um, and if you call the police, you're just as likely to run into the person who's kidnapped your brother that you're calling the police about as- as to be helped. And so you don't do that. So what do you do? Well, the mafia comes in or insurgents come in, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or gangs come in and they say, "Look, we'll protect you, um, for a price or we'll protect you against the other gangs." Or you see vigilante groups start and- and the vigilante groups tend to be young men who wanna do the right thing at first, but you give a lot of 18-year-olds guns and a lot of license and pretty quickly those groups all go downhill too. And so what happens is you get these self-defense groups that become criminal groups. You get criminal groups that come in and act as more legitimate, uh, protection than the state does. And so you see these things like in Colombia, you had people at Pablo Escobar's funeral. Pablo Escobar ran the Medellín Cartel. He killed hundreds and hundreds of regular people. He killed hundreds of police officers. He set up bombs at bookstores for little kids. I mean, not a good guy, but he also built lots of low-income housing and he built soccer fields for people, and he gave away a lot to charity. And at his funeral people said, "We're going to go to his tomb the way we would to a saint's, to pray, um, because he did so much for the regular person." Right? So you get these Robin Hood criminals who pose as Robin Hood and they give away charity and you see them all over the world and they're- they're doing all these horrible things, but their persona is that, um, they're the good guys-

   26. CWChris Williamson23:16

       Mm-hmm.

   27. RKRachel Kleinfeld23:16

       ... fighting a bad state. And they can lodge within these, uh, poor and marginalized communities because the state is even worse.

   28. CWChris Williamson23:23

       So you-

   29. RKRachel Kleinfeld23:23

       In the book I tell (overlapped by Mark) and we can get into that, but, you know, it can get pretty bad.

   30. CWChris Williamson23:28

       Yeah, it seems like-
8. 23:44 – 28:45

   How countries recover: the three-step pathway (deals, inclusion, then targeted force)

   1. CWChris Williamson23:44

      So we've talked about the bad stuff. Um, how can we fix it? Did you come up with any solutions, and if so, what were the- what were the roots that you found that seemed to be the most, uh, efficacious at getting around these issues?

   2. RKRachel Kleinfeld24:00

      Absolutely. So it was a positive book, you know, that was my goal. If I couldn't come up with something good, I was just gonna go to Mexico City and open a cooking store or something. You know, I like-

   3. CWChris Williamson24:06

      (laughs)

   4. RKRachel Kleinfeld24:07

      ... to cook. I could do that. Um, there's no reason to keep studying violence if there was no way to solve it.

   5. CWChris Williamson24:12

      Yes.

   6. RKRachel Kleinfeld24:12

      But thank goodness for my livelihood-

   7. CWChris Williamson24:15

      (laughs)

   8. RKRachel Kleinfeld24:15

      ... um, and my normal life, uh, I did come up with a very common pattern that you saw in all these countries. The first step was the criminals. Um, the criminals would overstep-

   9. CWChris Williamson24:23

      Mm-hmm.

   10. RKRachel Kleinfeld24:23

       ... the criminals would, uh-... bring too much violence to the middle class. Usually, it was by accident. Usually, it was that, um, criminal groups were fighting amongst themselves and the violence just spilled over, um, or terrorist groups were fighting for recruits and so they were getting more and more, uh, elaborate in their terrorist attacks. But for whatever reason, the violence finally starts hitting the middle class, and then the middle class had a choice. They could either vote for a more repressive state. Um, in, uh, Central America, it's called mano dura, iron fist policies. In America, they call it three strikes and you're out. But it's basically give the state more license to kill, give the state more license to lock people up, um, for smaller reasons. And if they did that, the violence would get even worse. And I talk in the book about why those repressive me- measures tend to backfire. The gangs meet each other in prison, they learn from each other, um-

   11. CWChris Williamson25:17

       Oh, gosh.

   12. RKRachel Kleinfeld25:17

       ... they metastasize behind bars because what, what more can you do? They're already arrested, so they, um, l- learn how to run transnational networks. And so, you, you end up with a much worse problem if you throw a lot more young men in jail really quickly-

   13. CWChris Williamson25:31

       Yeah.

   14. RKRachel Kleinfeld25:31

       ... um, for all sorts of reasons. The other way the middle class could do- could go is to vote for a more inclusive state, a less unequal state, and that was the beginning of things going well. Usually, they needed kind of a social movement to help them make that choice 'cause it's much easier to vote for repression. It makes a lot more sense, you know? "Tough on crime," and politicians could claim to be tough on crime while not changing the basic governing structure that was holding up all this violence. So, to fight for inclusion, you tended to have a social movement that said, "Wait, wait, wait. This governing order is rotten, it's corrupt, it's violent, there's bad things happening." In the book, I tell the story of the US Civil Rights Movement, um, and then I kind of, uh, show how that parallels what happened in the Republic of Georgia and Colombia and so on. But if you get a lot of people who vote for a good politician who runs in order to fight this violence, then you have a chance, but, uh, the politician then has to do a couple of things that are really hard for one person to do. And in the book, I found that, um, sometimes one politician could do all these three things. In India, that, that happened. But often, it was politicians at different levels of government, because what they had to do was make dirty deals with the violent groups because the state was so weak that they can't just fight their way out of the situation. It's too weak to fight because... In, in Italy, one of the reformist mayors, for instance, said, "I don't even trust my secretary. I think the mob's infiltrated that far." And so, you know, how do you fight when your whole state is rotten? In Colombia, when they were trying to fight Pablo Escobar, the intelligence kept leaking out of the police and right back to the cartel.

   15. CWChris Williamson27:09

       Yeah.

   16. RKRachel Kleinfeld27:09

       So, you know, when you've got a leaky situation like that... So they need to make deals where they give these criminal groups some kind of get out of jail free card, often the chance to make corruption, um, from jobs in the state. In Georgia, they put the two big warlords into the state. They actually gave one the Ministry of Defense and one of the Ministry of Interior, um, so that they would stop killing each other in the streets. So, something not so pleasant, number one. But then number two, they have to make the state more inclusive. So, those things are absolutely at odds, right? The state has to then help the poor and care about the marginalized people-

   17. CWChris Williamson27:47

       Yes.

   18. RKRachel Kleinfeld27:47

       ... and make them feel part of the same state. Really hard for the same person to do that. And then the third thing they have to do is fight the remaining criminal groups and violent groups. So, you make, make a deal with them, get rid of as many as you can through the deal, create inclusivity which gets you more intelligence and gets you the poor people who had been, um, inadvertently or undesired... You know, they didn't want to harbor these criminal groups, but they didn't have a choice. They start turning, and they start turning to the state, and then you need to fight. If you can do those three things, and I saw that happen in a number of places, but often it was, you know, Colombia, the president made the dirty deal and did the fighting, the mayors were the ones who were willing to build a more inclusive state.

   19. CWChris Williamson28:26

       Mm.

   20. RKRachel Kleinfeld28:26

       So, fine. Together it worked, and together they made it happen. If you could do those two things, or three things, then the, um, state would get much, much better, and then people could start self-policing and really taking on the role of making sure violence came out of their society and wasn't normalized anymore.

9. 28:45 – 31:09

   Reformers as high-energy risk-takers—and the danger of authoritarian relapse

   1. CWChris Williamson28:45

      That's not an easy task, is it? Like, uh, we said at the very beginning, I just think that there's a lot of serious conversations that you probably are a part of. Like, that is, to sit down with someone and go, "Right, mate. Congratulations. You've become, like, king of the hill for the time being. First on the agenda, second on the agenda, third on the agenda." Like, that guy is n- not going to be a very happy or popular or have an... He's definitely not gonna have good sleep. Like, for the rest of his tenure, he's not gonna be sleeping very well.

   2. RKRachel Kleinfeld29:16

      Well, so one thing I found out about these people who, who run for office on these platforms is that, first of all, they don't sleep. They're like the Energizer Bunny.

   3. CWChris Williamson29:22

      (laughs)

   4. RKRachel Kleinfeld29:22

      In fact, in, um, the Republic of Georgia, Saakashvili, who's one of these, uh, reformer types, was known as the Energizer Bunny. That was his code name because he just didn't sleep. He had meetings at 12:00. He had meetings at midnight. He had meetings at 4:00 in the morning. He just... All night. They're, they're all like that. They're all hyperactive. At first, I thought it was just an aberration.

   5. CWChris Williamson29:41

      (laughs)

   6. RKRachel Kleinfeld29:41

      But... And also, I should say, they're not really reformers. They're very interesting people. The people who look at a country like that... You know, imagine. You look at a country that's basically a failed state. There's violence everywhere. There's corruption throughout the whole system. It looks like a complete basket case. And you say, you know... Look at Venezuela right now. And you say, "I'm gonna take over and make this place goo-" You know, what kind of person thinks they can do that? Well, it's a particular kind of person. It's a very egotistical kind of a person.

   7. CWChris Williamson30:11

      Mm-hmm.

   8. RKRachel Kleinfeld30:12

      Um, very high energy, and, uh, someone who really believes in themselves a lot, and you need those characteristics. So, they're good characteristics in that they need those things to get through and to do these incredibly tough tasks.... but they have a dark side. And so, you see these reformers start out on re- as reformers and then as they start doing things that are more and more gray and people start challenging them, they get upset and they get more autocratic and they get more authoritarian and they need to be thrown out by the same population that voted them in. So you see this kind of loop of reform that goes (laughs) like up and then down.

   9. CWChris Williamson30:49

      Yeah.

   10. RKRachel Kleinfeld30:50

       Um, and so it's really important for outsiders to help, help the reformer at the beginning, but then recognize when that curve starts to turn and not hold onto them too long. 'Cause if you, if you keep thinking they're a reformer when they become an autocrat, you know, that's the story of an awful lot of the independence fighters in a number of African countries, for instance.

10. 31:09 – 34:22

    A frontline research story: interviewing ‘Nacho’ under assassination threat in Colombia

    1. CWChris Williamson31:09

       Yeah. I get that. Were there any, um, really surprising stories or any kind of, um, shocking moments while you were doing your research? You said that you traveled to an awful lot of countries, an awful lot of interviews. Was there anything in particular which stood out? I mean, it sounds like there would've probably been quite a lot of highlights on the highlight reel, but was there anything in particular that stood out?

    2. RKRachel Kleinfeld31:31

       Oh, gosh. Uh, so many stories. We could talk for another half hour, but, um, I guess one of 'em when I was in Columbia, I was trying to track down this investigative journalist. There was an investigative journalist who went by the name of Nacho, uh, like the chips, and, um-

    3. CWChris Williamson31:45

       S- yeah. Sounds like a completely normal...

    4. RKRachel Kleinfeld31:48

       (laughs)

    5. CWChris Williamson31:48

       Yeah. Definitely, definitely ?

    6. RKRachel Kleinfeld31:49

       A fa- uh, absolutely, like, the, the guy who had... He knew what had gone on inside the Cali cartel and the Medellín cartel. He knew what was going on inside the paramilitary groups. He had been targeted for assassination 22 times. Every, everyone wanted to kill this guy because he knew so much. The Columbian military tried to kill him, their intelligence services, both the cartels, the paramilitaries, just everyone had it in for him, and I wanted to know some of what he knew because trying to figure out the violence in Columbia is really difficult. It's a really complex situation. So we made, we'd make appointments and then he'd cancel the appointments, and I'd make another appointment and he'd cancel. And I, I was getting ready to leave Bogotá, and I really needed to meet with him, and finally made an appointment at his... a four story walk-up apartment building, and I said, "Okay, I'll be there." And he kept that appointment. So I go up to the apartment building, I walk up the four floors. I'm heavily pregnant, I should add, at this time. I was six months pregnant when I was doing that part of the research.

    7. CWChris Williamson32:42

       Yup.

    8. RKRachel Kleinfeld32:42

       So I'm this bowling ball walking up these four flights of stairs and get to his little tiny apartment. He locks maybe five, six padlocks on the door and then he says, "My bodyguard didn't show up today." Now in Columbia, um, bodyguards are given by the government 'cause the violence is so much-

    9. CWChris Williamson32:59

       Mm-hmm.

    10. RKRachel Kleinfeld32:59

        ... that if you've been targeted a lot, you can request a state-funded bodyguard.

    11. CWChris Williamson33:03

        Oh my god.

    12. RKRachel Kleinfeld33:03

        It's an old, old tactic in Columbia that if the bodyguard doesn't show up, that's when you're gonna be targeted next, um, because the state will withdraw the bodyguard and then someone will target you. So they lost a number of presidential candidates this way. So he says, "My bodyguard didn't show up today," and I'm thinking... I'm sitting on your couch six months pregnant, you know, but-

    13. CWChris Williamson33:21

        Great. (laughs)

    14. RKRachel Kleinfeld33:22

        But, you know, his teenage daughter is in the room right behind me and she's this, like, lovely, beautiful teenage girl and I'm just thinking, "Well, she doesn't seem scared. She's making a snack." Um, I guess-

    15. CWChris Williamson33:32

        (laughs)

    16. RKRachel Kleinfeld33:32

        ... I will, you know, do this interview.

    17. CWChris Williamson33:34

        Right.

    18. RKRachel Kleinfeld33:34

        And so, you know, I just sat watching the padlocks on the door hoping that they held and, um, we did the interview and he gave me incredible information that was really useful (laughs) for the book and, um, you know, so far so good. He's, he's made it through, so.

    19. CWChris Williamson33:47

        Wow. Are you still in contact with him? I'm gonna guess he's a, a difficult man to get a hold of.

    20. RKRachel Kleinfeld33:53

        Off and on. I, uh, you know, I had to ask him for permission to use the language that I used in the book and things like that, so a little bit.

    21. CWChris Williamson33:59

        That's cool. That's really cool.

    22. RKRachel Kleinfeld34:00

        Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson34:00

        So-

    24. RKRachel Kleinfeld34:00

        Yeah. Well, it's... That, those are the guys that are... and women, who are really doing the brave work. You know, this, the kind of, uh, violence inquiry that, that they do, that's why journalists are the f- canaries in the coal mine for all of this. It's why they keep getting killed all around the world, 'cause they are really the ones who expose what's going on in these countries.

    25. CWChris Williamson34:17

        So they're a degree of lifeblood, I suppose. They carry these messages around.

    26. RKRachel Kleinfeld34:22

        Yeah, absolutely.

11. 34:22 – 38:19

    Advice for the U.S.: start with political equality, not just economic fixes

    1. CWChris Williamson34:22

       Um, so before we finish, I, I, I wanted to ask, most of the audience will be from the UK-

    2. RKRachel Kleinfeld34:29

       Mm-hmm.

    3. CWChris Williamson34:29

       ... but we are, we are exposed to the American, uh, politics, uh, withou- without exaggeration, probably almost as much as we are to our, our own. Especially in the last few months, we get the news... It's, it's as newsworthy to hear Trump as it is to hear Theresa May, which is, I think, a marker for how, uh, kind of dramatized, uh, to a degree the American political system has become. Um, moving forward, if you were, if you were writing, uh, an open letter to Donald Trump and to his advisors, what would you say with regards to trying to improve these inequalities and i- improve the way that certain areas of the country are at the moment?

    4. RKRachel Kleinfeld35:14

       That's interesting. So first of all, I should say to your UK audience that all the research was funded by DFID. DFID is really trying to figure out how to, um, how to fight violence in better ways because the taxpayers pa- passed a law in your country that, uh, 0.7% of the money has to go to development aid and of that money half goes to conflict-affected states and, and violent states. And so they fund research like this to figure out what do we do better.

    5. CWChris Williamson35:37

       Yup.

    6. RKRachel Kleinfeld35:37

       Um, and so I'm in deep contact with DFID and I feel very strongly that, that, uh, they do much better work than they get credit for.

    7. CWChris Williamson35:44

       Mm-hmm.

    8. RKRachel Kleinfeld35:44

       Um, really, really good work. What would I say to our government? I don't think I would start with Trump, to be honest. I mean, one of the, the findings of this research is that if someone is complicit with violent groups and wants to run this kind of criminalized governing order, y- you can't make headway with that group. That's how they stay in power.

    9. CWChris Williamson36:03

       Right.

    10. RKRachel Kleinfeld36:03

        How does Trump stay in power? He's staying in power in part with a very nativist audience in America. They're not necessarily violent, but their interest is in, uh, a nostalgic return to whites being in charge of the country, um, you know, pre-1960. If you look at the 20% of the voters that propelled Trump forward in the Republican primaries... Uh, so the other half of my brain works on American politics. I do international work af- after th- so I think about this a lot. And if you break down the polls, there were about 20% of voters who weren't all Republican, I should add. These were often swing voters, typical half Democrat, half Republican. You know, they'd vote for either side, who, um-... propelled him in the primaries after they, uh, th- they voted Republican for that. And they heavily, heavily believe that you can't be a real American if you're not white, if you're not Christian. Um, if you're an immigrant, you can't be a real American. You know, those are not common views in America, but they're the majority among his primary selectorate and the electorate. And s- so that's who he's campaigning to. That's his base, as you would say, and, uh, those people are not wanting to change the inequality. In fact, they wanna turn it back. So I wouldn't go to them. I would go to state level governments where, um, you know, in America, we have a federal system that's quite real, and there's a lot of states that have leaders who do wanna change things. And, um, if you wanted to fight inequality, there's a couple of things you need to do. I think the first thing to recognize is that political equality has to come before and kind of with economic equality. It's not enough just to give away money. You know, there's all this talk now about a minimum wage, a guaranteed minimum wage. Um, that's fine. It's, it's good to give poor people, uh, you know, some help. But what you see in places like Bihar, India, and Colombia is people need to really be able to vote. They need to believe those votes count. They need to be able to change power. When they have the ability to change power, politicians have to cater to them too in a democracy. And so ultimately, that allows them to get the economic help that they need, to get the jobs that they need even more than the handouts, you know, things like that. So the inequality has to start from that level of political power, and in America, that has a lot to do with lobbying power-

12. 38:19 – 39:32

    Campaign finance as a system problem: how money reshapes priorities and perception

    1. CWChris Williamson38:19

       Mm. Yes.

    2. RKRachel Kleinfeld38:20

       ... and, um, you know, who, who gets the right to get some time, and all of that has a lot to do with campaign finance in America. You know, the, the rules that say that, um, the floodgates of money can open make elections so expensive in America that people think it's just pure corruption, you know, just money for politics. It's not like that. I, I worked for a decade running a very political organization, and I didn't find almost anyone, there's a handful, but almost anyone who's just corrupt. What you find is that they have to campaign. To campaign, they need a lot of money. To make that money, they need to go speak at fundraisers with really, really rich people, and so they spend a huge amount of time with extremely rich people. Even if they're people who care a lot about equality and inequality, they're spending all their time with really rich people so they can get the money together to run in their election. So the really rich people's ideas rub off.

    3. CWChris Williamson39:13

       Yeah.

    4. RKRachel Kleinfeld39:13

       You know, they can't help but rub off. And so even if you start off wanting to help the poor, you're thinking about it through the eyes of a very rich person who has no idea what really would help the poor, and, uh, over time, it becomes hard to separate those things. So it's the system of money in itself. It's not the corruption per se.

13. 39:32 – 41:04

    Wrap-up: where to find the book and follow Rachel’s work

    1. CWChris Williamson39:32

       I totally get that. I, I'd be absolutely fascinated to have you back on so that we can discuss... I feel like we've got a really interesting conversation that you could, um, enlighten some of our listeners about the difference between the US and the, the UK, uh, political systems and why those are the case. I've always been, I've always been fascinated to work that out. So that, uh, that may have to happen another time, but I, I've, I've absolutely loved today, Rachel. Thank you very much for coming on. Uh, I will make sure that a link to A Savage Order, your new book, will be in the show notes below. Uh, where can the listeners find you online? And also, if there's any other resources, if, or videos or, um, websites, if people are interested, have you got anywhere that you could recommend that they could go?

    2. RKRachel Kleinfeld40:14

       Uh, sure. So they could go to my website, rachelkleinfeld.com, and then they'll find, you know, s- same name as on the book, and, uh, they'll find most things that I do and most videos and so on, and I can also send you some things to, to link to, um, that would, that would go directly to the heart of the matter.

    3. CWChris Williamson40:30

       Fantastic. That sounds awesome. Rachel, it's, uh, it's been a blast. If I can twist your arm and if the audience want you back so that we can talk about some UK versus US stuff, that would be cool. If that's the case, make sure that you comment below, drop me a message on Instagram or wherever else you are listening, but for now, thank you very much. (instrumental music)

Episode duration: 41:04