The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

by Gary A. Haugen

What was so clear to me was the way these very impoverished Rwandans at their point of most desperate need,

huddled against those advancing machetes in that church, did not need someone to bring them a sermon, or food, or a doctor, or a teacher, or a micro-loan. They needed someone to restrain the hand with the machete—and nothing else would do.

In the lives of the poor, violence has the power to destroy everything—and is unstopped by our other responses to their poverty.

But, the world overwhelmingly does not know that endemic to being poor is a vulnerability to violence, or the way violence is, right now, catastrophically crushing the global poor.

When we think of global poverty we readily think of hunger,

disease, homelessness, illiteracy, dirty water, and a lack of education, but very few of us immediately think of the global poor’s chronic vulnerability to violence—the massive epidemic of sexual violence, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, assault, police abuse, and oppression that lies hidden underneath the more visible deprivations of the poor.

It turns out that you can provide all manner of goods and services to the poor, as good people have been doing for decades, but if you are not restraining the bullies in the community from violence and theft—as we have been failing to do for decades—then we are going to find the outcomes of our efforts quite disappointing.

No one will find in this volume any argument for reducing our traditional efforts to fight poverty. On the contrary, the billions still mired in fierce poverty cry out for us to redouble our best efforts. But one will find in these pages an urgent call to make sure that we are safeguarding the fruits of those efforts from being laid waste by the locusts of predatory violence.

Indeed, the justice systems in the developing world make the poor poorer and less secure.

the failure to respond to such a basic need—to prioritize criminal justice systems that can protect poor people from common violence—has had a devastating impact on two great struggles that made heroic progress in the last century but have stalled

out for the poorest in the twenty-first century: namely, the struggle to end severe poverty and the fight to secure the most basic human rights.

Because as anyone who has tasted it knows, if you are not safe, nothing else matters.

The Locust Effect then is the surprising story of how a plague of lawless violence is destroying two dreams that the world deeply cherishes: the dream to end global poverty and to secure the most fundamental human rights for the poor.

It turns out that when the colonial powers left the developing world a half a century ago, many of the laws changed but the law enforcement systems did not—systems that were never designed to protect the common people from violence but to protect the regime from the common people. These systems, it turns out, were never re-engineered.

Secondly, given the brokenness of the public justice system, forces of wealth and power in the developing world have carried out one of the most fundamental and unremarked social revolutions of the modern era in building a completely parallel system of private justice, with private security forces and alternative dispute resolution systems that leave the poor stuck with useless public systems that are only getting worse.

Finally, for surprising historical reasons (and to tragic effect), the great agencies of poverty alleviation, economic development, and human rights have purposely avoided participating in the strengthen...

most poor people do not live under the shelter of the law, but far from the law’s protection.

There are more slaves in the world today (best estimate—27 million) than were extracted from Africa during 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. And there are more slaves in India today than in any other country in the world.

In the absence of effective law enforcement, schools will not protect girls from violence.

Violence in the developing world is like grief in the developed world—it’s everywhere, but we just don’t see it.

First, violence has behind it an intelligent, willful perpetrator who is working hard—frequently very hard—to hide it.

Second, violence is an aspect of life that poor people—like all people—find exceptionally hard to talk about because it is uniquely traumatic.

Finally, for many poor people, the threat of violence has become such a part of the air they breathe that they rarely speak of it as a distinct phenomenon. They simply absorb it.

Like germs in the air, harsh weather, and invisible contaminants—violence is endemic to the human social condition, and if you do not have the resources (public or private) to secure protection against forces of violence, you are not safe, and your well-being is not secure. In fact, your ill-being is quite assured.

One can see why the World Bank has estimated that the epidemic of gender violence kills and disables more women and girls between the ages of 15 and 44 than cancer, traffic accidents, malaria, and war combined.

As the epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control tell us, sexual violence “is a global human rights injustice of vast proportions with severe health and social consequences.

“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery,” Lincoln said, “I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

I recall the way an old history professor of mine defined poverty: He said the poor are the ones who can never afford to have any bad luck. They can’t get an infection because they don’t have access to any medicine. They can’t get sick or miss their bus or get injured because they will lose their menial labor job if they don’t show up for work. They can’t misplace their pocket change because it’s actually the only money they have left for food. They can’t have their goats get sick because it’s the only source of milk they have. On and on it goes.

Eventually, when it comes to violence against the poor, communities need access to the unique services of a criminal justice system to enforce the laws that prohibit acts of predatory violence.

A criminal justice system that is empowered, highly trained, well-resourced, and efficient can be used to repress the common people with violence as well as protect them from violence. Moreover, such systems are the coercive arm of the state (controlled by a ruling regime); while governments may be very happy to have outsiders come and tinker with their hospitals, schools, and farming techniques, they are much more reluctant to have outsiders mess around with their systems of justice, policing, and legal accountability.

In fact, at the end of his term as World Bank president, Robert Zoellick concluded that “the most fundamental prerequisite for sustainable development is an effective rule of law.”

Likewise, there is no doubt that the most fundamental prerequisite for effective rule of law is the most basic restraint, by effective law enforcement, of violence in the community.

“In terms of social and economic development, high levels of crime and violence threaten to undermine the best-laid plans to reduce poverty, impro...

Again, fighting international crime is a perfectly legitimate basis for funding rule of law and law enforcement efforts in the developing world, but to be clear, the purpose (and outcome) is not to protect the poor in the developing world from violence.

By its own admission, although the World Bank has engaged in justice reform for two decades, “its justice reform portfolio remains relatively small.”

One of the Bank’s significant lending sectors is called “Law and Justice and Public Administration,” but despite the name, almost none of that sum actually goes to projects the Bank categorizes under “Law and Justice.”

the provision of coercive and logistical manpower for the political party machine.

“the police had only minimal commitment to the enforcement of the law. As political operatives, they were more interested in furthering the interests of their political sponsors.”

One of the primary jobs of the police force was to carry out the labor-intensive tasks of voter fraud, ballot box ...

In New York City, there was an officer on patrol for about every 1,300 residents—fewer police per citizen than in India today and about what the Philippines provides.24 In the 1880s, a police officer in Chicago was responsible for patrolling four and a half miles of city streets by himself—on foot.

“The ratio of police to population suggests that there could have been only minimum contact at best.”26 In Minneapolis, the police were so understaffed that three quarters of the city streets had no police patrol at all.

In the chronicles of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, historians find that the crisis of “lawlessness” in the cities was not just about levels of crime, but more about “the failure of the police to enforce existing law.”29

Even when the police did attempt to enforce the law, their efforts were frustrated by the lower courts.30 For the coercive enforcement of social norms and behaviors, the power of private vigilante action (organized and provisioned by private elites or spontaneously generated by community mobs) played a much more significant role in nineteenth-century America than the criminal justice system.31 When things got out of control, “order” was “restored” by communal mob action or private vigilante forces organized by elites that took the law into their own hands.

With all this in mind, the long view of history seems to offer a powerful lesson: namely, that reasonably functioning justice systems are possible even in circumstances in which they do not currently exist or seem unlikely to emerge. Historically, criminal justice systems that protected the poor and the weak did not exist anywhere and, to contemporaries, always seemed highly

unlikely. Now they do exist, in lots of places, for billions of people. But in each case, a pitched battle was fought to rescue the public justice system from abuse for private gain, from misuse for political power, from the dysfunction of neglect, and from slavish bondage to outdated, unprofessional, and ineffectual practices.

Each of these grim appraisals can feel devastatingly true when you are standing amidst the violence, squalor, and rank injustice of the poorest communities in the developing world today, but I think that is largely because we are unable to be transported back with equal vividness to the realities of the “developed world” a century or more ago, where bloodthirsty mobs summarily executed suspects in acts of grotesque vigilante justice and abused, oppressed, and looted their ethnic minority neighbors, with no accountability from—and often with the endorsement of—the criminal justice “system;” where police were little more than untrained, un-resourced street thugs in the pocket of the ruling political faction; and where absurd and brutal farces played out every day in the courtrooms of corrupt and ludicrously incompetent judges. Those who led reform in these historical settings would readily appreciate the challenges reformers face in the developing world today—but I think they would have very little sympathy for arguments that change is impossible or unworthy of extreme and sacrificial efforts.

By the end of the 1850s, most American citizens—especially business leaders and property owners—were tired of paying the property damage bills and had had enough. The business leaders of St. Louis were the first to take the initiative and raised up a volunteer vigilante force in 1854 to try to prevent election-day rioting. The next year, they made the force permanent and created the first modern-style, standing police force in a major American city—and then Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Cincinnati, and other cities followed suit across the country, with 57 of America’s largest cities developing police departments between 1850 and 1880.34

In France, for instance, the foundations of policing were actually laid by the monarchy when Louis XIV created the office of Lieutenant-General of Police in 1667 with a broad portfolio of duties for addressing just about anything that was a source of disorder in Paris—lighting for dark streets, aid to beggars, food supplies, public health, and responding to crime in a growing city.37 On the one hand, the establishment of a centralized government office for addressing urban crime (nearly two hundred years before the Americans or British) produced pioneering innovations in policing (e.g., deterrent patrols, the police station, surveillance methods and tools).38 But it also became associated with the heavy-handed rule of the ancien régime and was substantially dismantled by the forces of liberty that blew through Paris with the French Revolution of 1789.39 Famously, Napoleon the Emperor would reassert the mandate and machinery of centralized “high policing” in Paris and throughout France, which would lead to a form of policing in the late nineteenth century that was very useful for regime survival and protecting the “respectable classes” but not much use (and frequently the source of much harm) for

the teeming masses of urban poor.40

As we saw earlier, a completely different story e...