Why States Recover: Changing Walking Societies into Winning Nations - from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe - Softcover

Mills, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770103252 ISBN 13: 9781770103252

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 2014

Synopsis

State failure takes many forms. Somalia offers one extreme. A collapse of central authority as the outcome of a prolonged civil war, where authority descends into competing factions - warlords - around the spoils of local commerce, power and international aid. At the other end of the scale is Malawi under President Bingu. During his abbreviated second term in office, the country's economy collapsed as a result of poor policies and personalised politics. On the surface, save the petrol queues, it was stable; underneath the polity was fractured and the economy broken. Between these two extremes of state failure are all manner of examples. This book uses field-work based case-studies of more than 30 countries, incorporating interviews with a dozen leaders, to disaggregate various state failures and identify instances of recovery - from Latin America, Asia and Africa, and including Afghanistan, Congo, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Somalia and Somaliland, Venezuela and Zimbabwe - while focusing on a key question: How do countries recover and what roles are there for insiders and outsiders?

About this title

About the Author

Dr Greg Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, which was established in 2005 by the Oppenheimer family to strengthen African economic performance.

He holds degrees from the University of Cape Town and Lancaster University, and he was the national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs from 1996 to 2005. He has directed numerous reform projects in African presidencies (including in 2019 and 2020, for example, with the governments in Ghana, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Somaliland and South Africa); he has sat on the Danish Africa Commission and on the African Development Bank’s High-Level Panel on Fragile States. He has also served on four assignments to Afghanistan with NATO as the adviser to the commander.

A member of the advisory board of the Royal United Services Institute, he is the author of the best-selling books Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans Can Do about It, Africa’s Third Liberation: The New Search for Prosperity and Jobs (with Jeffrey Herbst) and Making Africa Work: A Handbook (with Jeffrey Herbst, Olusegun Obasanjo and Dickie Davis). In 2018, he completed a second stint as a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, completing a book on the state of African democracy, which was published in 2019 as Democracy Works: Rewriting Politics to Africa’s Advantage (with Olusegun Obasanjo, Jeffrey Herbst and Tendai Biti). The Asian Aspiration: Why and How Africa Should Emulate Asia (with Olusegun Obasanjo, Hailemariam Desalegn and Emily van der Merwe) followed in 2020, which identifies the relevant lessons from Asia’s development and growth story.

His leisure interests include cycling and motorsport. A grandson of the pre-war Grand Prix driver Billy Mills, Greg received his national colours for motorsport in 2016. In 2019, he headed the first South African team to participate at Le Mans, driving a Bentley GT3, and he was appointed as the president of the Western Province Motor Club in Cape Town in the same year. He has written eight books on southern African motorsport for various charities, the last being Saloons, Bars and Boykies: Legends of South African Motorsport.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1770103252
• ISBN 13: 9781770103252
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416