Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (8): Modern Slave Redemption and Swords-to-Plowshares

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“Slave redemption” is an effort to buy the freedom of women trafficked into prostitution, coerced domestic servants and other modern slaves. In essence, you offer to pay the slave-holder (the pimp for example) a price for the slave that exceeds his or her present and future value.

It’s a very controversial policy. Any individual who acquires his or her freedom in this way is obviously better off, but the policy may set up a self-defeating process:

When you have people running around buying up slaves, you help create a market demand for more slaves… It’s like paying the burglar for the television set he just stole. … The slave traders end up with more money, buying more guns and hiring more thugs to go out and take more slaves. (source)

A very similar process may take hold of another, more recent initiative. Fonderie47 is an

organization that buys AK-47s at above-market-prices in conflict zones and turns them into extremely expensive accessories, all in the name of helping Africa. Apparently, the logic is that this will increase the price of AK-47s, thereby decreasing their pervasive presence in conflict zones. (source)

Of course, and again, the very opposite is likely to occur. Gun dealers will just take in larger stocks of AK-47s – like the traffickers enslave more people – because of demand expectations and higher prices. Then they’ll find out that the guns-to-jewelry initiative can’t follow suit – and perhaps turns out to be a hype – after which the excess guns are dumped in war zones. Furthermore, even if the initiative keeps going and succeeds in bringing down the numbers of AK-47s in war zones, the dealers will just buy other weapons with the extra funds they now have thanks to the initiative.

You can read such stories in two ways, according to your pre-existing biases: either the stories teach us that marketization doesn’t solve everything and that we should tackle such problems with the use of force; or they teach us that we shouldn’t intervene in the market. What I personally learned from them is that people are very creative and human rights advocates are no exception. That’s a good thing, of course, but it’s often no substitute for structural solutions that aim for the root causes of problems.

More posts in this series here.

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Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (7): Qaddafi and the ICC

capture of Gaddafi, video still

Another example of good intentions going wrong:

One of the many puzzles surrounding Muammar Qaddafi was his refusal to go into exile. Once NATO intervened on behalf of the rebels and Tripoli fell, Qaddafi must have known that he would eventually lose the war and that this would mean death. Instead of leaving the country, he decided to stay.

Why? One surprising answer has to do with the International Criminal Court. It used to be that exile was an attractive long-term option for dictators to take. Rather than stay and fight, they could live their lives in wealth and comfort in beautiful and stable places such as Paris or the Bahamas.

This changed as more and more countries ratified the Rome Statute of the ICC. Now seeking asylum is no longer easy or particularly attractive. Dictators can try to convince countries such as France, Britain, Venezuela, Mexico or Spain to let them settle in their capital cities or along their coastlines. But since all have ratified Rome, moving there is tantamount to turning oneself in to be prosecuted for war crimes. Qaddafi could seek refuge in countries that have not yet ratified Rome, such as the United States or Cuba or Zimbabwe or Sudan or Saudi Arabia. But those countries are either unwilling to accept him (the U.S. and Saudi Arabia) or unable to credibly commit to protecting him over time (Cuba, Zimbabwe, Sudan). How long could Qaddafi trust that the current regime in Cuba or Zimbabwe will remain in power to protect him? …

What Qaddafi’s behavior reveals is a potentially unexpected and unfortunate side-effect of an increasingly successful ICC. By limiting the options nasty dictators have to seek exile, it is increasingly forcing them to stay. And by forcing them to stay, it could, inadvertently, be encouraging war. (source)

More on the ICC here. More self-defeating human rights policies here.

Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (6): The Social Effects of Incarceration

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[T]he effects of [the] change in the imprisonment rate [in the U.S.] … have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little schooling. Imprisonment diminishes the earnings of adult men, compromises their health, reduces familial resources, and contributes to family breakup. It also adds to the deficits of poor children, thus ensuring that the effects of imprisonment on inequality are transferred intergenerationally. … Because having a parent go to prison is now so common for poor, minority children and so negatively affects them, the authors argue that mass imprisonment may increase future racial and class inequality — and may even lead to more crime in the long term, thereby undoing any benefits of the prison boom. U.S. crime policy has thus, in the name of public safety, produced more vulnerable families and reduced the life chances of their children. (source, source)

Timeline of total number of inmates in U.S. prisons and jails (click image to enlarge)

This is an example of a self-defeating human rights policy: in an attempt to improve the protection of security rights and property rights of a population, a policy of increased incarceration rates has an adverse effect on the rights of the incarcerated, their families and children, and possibly even society at large (as increased inequality resulting from high incarceration rates among society’s most vulnerable groups will perhaps lead to more crime – although we can’t assume that increasing poverty and inequality will automatically provoke those who are impoverished because of incarceration to resort to crime).

More on incarceration rates, the war on drugs and hereditary poverty. More human rights quotes.

Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (5): Land Reform

Farmers protesting for Land Reform in Indonesia

Intuitively, if poor people don’t have land of their own and are forced to work for a few major landowners who have monopolized all the fertile land in the country, there’s a bargaining problem: poor people have no other options and because they are so numerous they can be played out against each other by the landowners. Wages tend to remain low in such a scenario (supply and demand, remember). That’s a recipe for a very unequal society. So the intuitive case for land reform is strong, especially when you consider that equality in land ownership isn’t just a matter of fairness but is also good for economic growth:

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On the other hand, some notable attempts have gone horribly awry. I’ve mentioned before how land reform policies in Zimbabwe – supposedly implemented for the benefit of the poor but probably for other reasons – have made things even worse for the poor. Why? Cutting up large chunks of land and giving a lot of poor people a very small piece can undo economies of scale. Furthermore, expropriating large landowners forces them out of business, and a lot of know-how will be lost.

land reform cartoon by Rogelio Naranjo

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So, what’s the deal? I guess it all depends on how land reform is done. Things don’t have to turn ugly. Land reform doesn’t have to be counter-productive. Property rights in general, and more specifically property of land in poor agrarian countries, are very important for the poor, as I’ve argued previously.

It is sometimes implied that improving property rights primarily favors the rich, conjuring up the image of rich owners of capital securing greater rents. However, there is increasing evidence that secure land rights, in particular, are an important vehicle for the poor that may promote both equity and efficiency. Lin…, for example, showed that the move from collective to household farming in China starting in 1978 led to large productivity increases in agriculture. …

Obtaining property rights over land in urban areas can also help poor households to gain access to credit. (source)

More on counter-productive human rights policies here.

Related Articles

• Kenya votes in favour of reform (bbc.co.uk)
• Movie Review | ‘Mugabe and the White African’: Farmer Who Fought Zimbabwe Land Reforms (movies.nytimes.com)
• Beverly Bell: “For a Better Life for the Peasants”: Food Sovereignty and Land Reform in Haiti (Part II) (huffingtonpost.com)
• Farmer takes on despot in compelling documentary “Mugabe” (reuters.com)
• Bolivia court upholds seizure of US man’s ranch (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Hacienda Luisita farmers want ‘justice’ not ‘preferential treatment’ (newsinfo.inquirer.net)
• Zimbabwe: From breadbasket to basket case (thestar.com)

Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (4): Road Safety

I knew I could use this when I saw it:

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This is part of an innovative approach to road safety in West Vancouver, Canada. The local government has decided to paint an optical illusion of a girl playing on the road in order to slow down traffic.

It’s a well-intentioned policy that’s likely to go horribly wrong: initially, there’s a risk that the painting will make drivers brake and swerve and cause an accident, and later on drivers will perhaps mistake real children for the painted ones and just drive one.

Similar counterproductive efforts are quite common in the area of human rights. The most obvious one is the war on terror: while trying to protect the lives, physical safety and bodily integrity of their citizens, western governments have launched themselves into a war on terror and two territorial wars on/in other countries. Those wars not only produce massive violations of the rights of citizens of those two countries, but also of the rights of the citizens of the western countries that initiated the wars. Moreover, these wars tend to produce terrorists rather than eliminate them (see also here).

More self-defeating human rights policies are here.

Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (3): Land Seizure in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe, like many other developing countries with a history of minority white rule, also has a long history of land reform. Since 1979, the government has tried to redistribute land between the historically disenfranchised blacks and the minority-whites who ruled Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1979. A laudable and necessary initiative. During the last decades, however, white farmers have become a persecuted minority, losing their farms in an often violent manner. Most farmland has effectively been nationalized. The results have been disastrous for the economy of Zimbabwe.

Prior to land redistribution, land-owning farmers, mostly white, had large tracts of land and utilized economies of scale to raise capital, borrow money when necessary, and purchase modern mechanised farm equipment to increase productivity on their land. As the primary beneficiaries of the land reform were members of the Government and their families, despite the fact that most had no experience in running a farm, the drop in total farm output has been tremendous. … a country once so rich in agricultural produce that it was dubbed the “bread basket” of Southern Africa, is now struggling to feed its own population. A staggering 45 percent of the population is considered malnourished. (source)

Here are two satellite pictures from Google Earth that show the result:

(source, click images to enlarge)

Take a look at the Before picture. The communal land on the left is dry, dusty and unproductive compared to the private farmland on the right which is green and dotted with blue ponds and lakes. Why? There were two theories to explain this difference:

• The tragedy of the commons – the farmers on the communal lands did not have the incentives to invest in the land and thus the land eroded and turned to desert.
• The land on the right (which was owned mostly by whites) was better quality land.

Both theories could be true. Regarding the latter explanation, however, notice that the dry communal lands on the left are sharply delineated from the green private farms on the right–so sharply that soil quality and rainfall alone are unlikely to explain the difference. … After reform the land quality worsened everywhere. In particular, note that the blue lakes and ponds on the right became dry and empty… [T]he sharply delineated lines in the photos dividing communal and privately owned land is real … communal farmland is not as well managed as white-owned private land. (source)

All this with the caveat that satellite images aren’t always reliable (coloring, resolution etc. can vary, and are very important in this example).

Land reform in Zimbabwe is an example of a self-defeating human rights policy (to the extent that it was indeed a human rights policy and not plain nepotism): the government presumably tried to end poverty and inequality and has in fact made things worse. More on the importance of private property rights is here. More posts on satellite evidence of human rights violations are here. More on self-defeating human rights policies here.

Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (2): Child Soldiers

In this older post I gave a few examples of human rights policies that don’t work out the way we want them to. Almost any significant action has unintended consequences, and in some cases these consequences can turn out to be the exact opposite of what we intended. As Kierkegaard said, life can only be understood backwards, although it must be lived forwards. Some of the best intentioned human rights activism just perpetuates the rights violations it wants to combat, and perhaps even makes things worse.

Søren Kierkegaard

I now found another example in an interesting paper by Blattman and Beber. The paper is about child soldiering and looks at some of the things governments can do about it. Child soldiers are often recruited by insurgent groups. Governments can decide to increase counter-insurgency efforts in order to stop the insurgents from recruiting children. But this counter-insurgency increases the minimum force size requirement for the rebel group, hence also the rebel leaders’ incentives to abduct children.

Now suppose the government reaction is not to step up hostilities but to develop educational and economic opportunities for children so that children have larger outside choices which make it more likely that they escape from and less likely that they are lured by the rebels. However, according to Blattman and Beber, intermediate levels of development of such choices could push the optimal age of recruitment of child soldiers downwards. And if outside choices increase, the incentives for the rebel group to take over the country also increase. If rebel group incentives increase, the incentives to recruit children also increase.

More on child soldiers.

Self-Defeating Human Rights Policies (1)

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Things don’t always work out the way we want them to. Almost any significant action has unintended consequences, and in some cases these consequences can turn out to be the exact opposite of what we intended. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, not in the sense that we only start to think about doing good when we’re already on the way to hell, but in the sense that our good intentions result not in more good, but in more harm.

This is the classic distinction in moral theory between consequentialists and deontologists. For the former, an action is morally good if and only if it produces good results, whatever the intentions. For the latter, an action is good or bad depending on the nature or character of the action. A deontologist might argue that lying is always wrong, regardless of any good that might come from it. Immanuel Kant is perhaps the best-known deontologist.

Immanuel Kant

Communism comes to mind as an example of good intentions gone wrong. But human rights activism is no stranger to this either. Some of the best intentioned human rights activism does in fact result in harm being done. A few examples:

• Some western governments have introduced hate crime laws and hate speech laws. They wanted these laws to target Islamist extremists preaching hate in mosques and mobilizing and recruiting terrorists. It turns out, in fact, that these very laws are now used by Islamist extremists to target critics of Islam.
• In a previous post, I mentioned the negative effect of international development aid on democracy.
• If you agree that the U.S. “war on terror” is (or was) at least in part about “protecting our values” and “protecting a free society” then it seems somewhat tragic that this war has led a free society to engage in torture, rendition, arbitrary arrest etc.
• A hasty imposition of democracy (“dropping democracy from a plane“) can lead to ethnic unrest and even civil war. Elections become exercises in ethnic census, and when one group loses, the other rebels.
• In the case of Sudan and Darfur, we saw that the indictment of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court led to the expulsion of aid workers from Sudan, aggravating the plight of his victims. And, of course, making the indictment all the more justified.
• One can also question the need for the bombing campaign against Serbia following the atrocities in Kosovo.

So, I would say it never harms to think first before you act, although no amount of thinking can prevent all unintended consequences.