COLUMN: "Count Ethnic Divisions, Not Bombs, to Tell if a Nation Will Recover From War: "Long term, a squiggly border indicates less strife than a neatly drawn line," by Austan Goolsbee, New York Times, 20 July 2006, p. C3.

For months now, in my brief, I've been ad-libbing this bit about fake states, noting how America is all squiggly lined on the right and straight-lined on the left, and comparing that to how Europe is all squiggly, but it left behind a post-colonial Middle East and Africa full of straight lines.

This observation dovetails with my usual argument on the Balkans' break-up as real success and the assumption that Iraq must remain whole as naive, and it goes nicely with a long-term argument I've nursed in the brief that says that fake states will naturally trough-out in disintegration in response to globalization's disruptive integration and eventually the process of breaking up fake states will segue into the integration of newer, smaller, real ones (like that article on the Balkan states all wanting into the EU and NATO).

How long does such a process take? Well, it took the latter half of the 19th century for the United States (Civil War, settling of the West), and it took almost the entire 20th century for Europe (WWI, WWII, Cold War, now the EU), so yeah, it's gonna take a while in the Middle East and African portions of the Gap.

So I've been saying lately that our task in shrinking the Gap is mostly about managing the devolution of straight-line fake states into squiggly-line real ones. That devolution is likely to turn violent most of the time, so our task is managing that violence and pushing the situation as quickly as possible toward integration, reconstructuion, connectivity, and economic development (hence, Steve DeAngelis and I reach for Development-in-a-Box, quite naturally, as the next tool in the toolkit).

I've been thinking for a while that I just need some patina of academic research and I've got a new sequence of slides here, and voila! Easterly and Company come along with this great bit of work that says there are two key predictors for resiliency after civil strife: the more squiggly the lines the better, and the corollary (saying the same thing) that, the more ethnic groups are divided politically, the more security troubles you have and thus the less likely development will occur.

Great stuff.