Long shots: the complex nature of civil wars

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Ore Ogunbi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. As much of the world seeks to move from fuel powered to electric cars, there's an innovation race underway despite decades of auto industry dominance. It's a race that Japanese carmakers are clearly losing. And once the most popular entertainer in America, bar none, Harry Belafonte risked his career to campaign for civil rights. We pay tribute to the King of Calypso. But first, The bloodiest war in the world last year was not fought in Ukraine, but in Ethiopia. Hundreds of thousands have died in the country throughout a brutal conflict waged on several fronts. Meanwhile, in Sudan, violence between factions of the military government has triggered an exodus of foreign nationals and the beginnings of a humanitarian crisis. Fighting continues too, in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar. The list goes on. Great power rivalries between America, Russia and China tend to grab headlines. But the world's forgotten conflicts, particularly the ones that happen within the borders of a single nation, have steadily gotten worse.

Civil wars are becoming more complex. There are more belligerent groups in them, which makes it harder to resolve them.

Robert Guest is the Economist's deputy editor.

You also think international norms are eroding. I mean, just look at the way Russia so blatantly broke them to Invade Ukraine and you're seeing criminality driving conflict. It's not just that a lot of countries where they take place are places where you can get rich if you have power. It's also that you get to get rich by the act of war itself, by looting. And among all the factors perpetuating civil wars, perhaps the most worrying, because it's getting worse all the time, is climate change.

How does that affect civil wars?

Well, people's water dries up or the pasture is no longer supporting their cows, and so they move to a neighbouring place, possibly land that's traditionally been owned by an ethnic group that is not very friendly towards them. And then you have clashes over diminishing amounts of farmland and pasture land. In the Sahel, which is an arid vastness below the Sahara Desert, climate change has so disrupted livelihoods that jihadist groups are finding it easy to recruit there. In just one drought afflicted region of one country, Mali, an NGO looked and found 70 conflicts, mostly over things like land and grazing.

And you mentioned criminality as well. How is this making wars harder to stop?

Criminality is driving conflict in two ways. Firstly, almost all the civil wars in the world are taking place in countries with very weak institutions, very high levels of corruption, where power is a way to get rich quickly and that gives people a motive to kill for it. At the same time, a lot of the rebel groups, even if they don't think they have a chance of winning central power, find that they can make pretty good money just by being men with guns. They can loot diamond mines and gold mines and logging, and they can extort money from people. And it's getting easier because of the internationalization of organized crime. It's just much easier to launder the profits from this than it was a decade ago.

And you also said that Russia's actions are one reason why wars are getting longer. How so?

Russia's doing several things. One, it's contributing to the erosion of global norms. You have a permanent member of the Security Council of the United nations that blatantly violated the most basic principle of the United nations by invading another country and trying to steal its territory. So when you watch the news out of Ukraine and you see that Russian forces have beheaded civilians and kidnapped children with apparent impunity, that sends a message to the rest of the world that, at least as far as some of the world's great powers are concerned, might makes right. You've also got the direct way. The Wagner mercenary group are going into a number of countries, particularly in Africa and Propping up some of the nastiest regimes there in their civil wars and carrying out atrocities.

So you also said that civil wars are becoming more complex. But haven't they always been fought over a number of competing issues?

Yes, but what you're seeing is an increase in the number of different belligerent groups. So somewhere like Myanmar, there's possibly 200. In Congo, there are dozens. This means that it's much harder to find peace because any peace deal that doesn't satisfy all those different groups, well, one of them might go back to fighting again. And we've seen that happen. Well, look at Ethiopia. It has more than 90 ethnic groups, many of whose leaders attempted to stir up hatred to win control of one of the country's 11 ethnically based regions. It's also got hundreds of thousands of refugees from four turbulent neighbours, Eritrea, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. And, and even after a peace deal with one conflict was signed last year, you're seeing a big resurgence with a different conflict with the Oromo ethnic group, who are the largest one in the country. And with so many fighters lurking in the bush in some parts of the country kidnapping shopkeepers and murdering officials, you find that businesses flee the conflict zones and public services get worse. And that means people get poorer and more angry with their government and more likely to rebel.

Okay, so you mentioned this Ethiopian example and the challenges that you have when you're fighting a civil war. But your neighbors are also going through conflicts of their own. Is it that civil wars are spilling into the borders of neighboring countries?

There's a lot of cross border contagion going on here. The jihadist movement that spilled out of Iraq originally has spread right across parts of North Africa and Sahel and the Middle East. And you're also seeing within Iraq each individual civil war. There's a much greater chance now that there are foreign forces involved. This is partly because America's retreated from its role as sort of global security guarantor and you've got mid sized powers jumping into the vacuum.

Okay, so let's talk a bit more about this international involvement. On the one hand, you have America retreating from its global policing role, but on the other hand, you have other countries getting more involved in other conflicts, making these wars even harder to end. What do you think is the solution?

Well, the world's not short of ideas for how to end wars. You need to find a respected mediator. You need to start unofficial talks long before the belligerents are prepared to meet publicly. That worked in Northern Ireland and South Africa. It helps to include more women and civil society groups in the peace process. There's lots of studies showing that if you do that, it's likely that peace will lock. But all these things do require the men with the guns to be at least a little bit exhausted. They have to feel that they're not going to gain from continuing fighting or that the risks are that they will lose if they keep fighting. And it really helps to have benign outside pressure to try to persuade them to stop. And that's what we're not really seeing at the moment.

Why not?

Efforts to promote peace are really hobbled by the fact that the UN is hogtied. The two vetoes wielding members of the UN Security Council are serial human rights abusers that object to interference in the internal affairs of blood spattered regimes. Russia's used its UN Security Council veto 23 times in the past decade. China's issued about nine. The most important things that need to happen to promote peace are things like building trusted institutions in fragile states and, of course, dealing with climate change. But the problem with both those things is that they're very long term. They take decades to accomplish. But the alternative to tackling them is that in hot poor countries, life will be short and wars will be long.

Robert, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks very much. Orey.

The race to electrify the car market is quietly, speedily underway. But for one country with a strong record in the auto industry, keeping up is proving difficult. This is a Toyota hybrid, a CHR hybrid, to be precise. Japan is steeped in automotive history and is home to huge global brands like Toyota, Honda and Nissan. But when it comes to the latest trend, these legacy giants are finding it hard to switch gear. Now. They're in danger of being left on the starting grid.

So Japan is a huge player in the global auto industry.

Noah Snyder is the Economist, Tokyo Bureau chief.

Toyota, which is Japan's largest carmaker, is in fact the largest carmaker by volume in the whole world. Car manufacturing makes up about a fifth of Japanese exports and about 8% of jobs across the country. But as the world shifts to EVs, Japan is not keeping up as expected.

How so? How much is Japan lagging?

So when you look at trends across the globe, EVs, I mean, specifically battery EVs, are the fastest growing product in car manufacturing. They account for for about 13% of all cars sold globally last year, and that's up from just 2.6% in 2019. And in some markets, including China, the share is over 20%. But in Japan, just 2% of all cars sold in 2022 were battery EVs or plug in hybrids, PHEVs as they're called. And when you look at Toyota, which sold more than 10 million cars around the world in 2022, just 24,000 of them were EVs. So even though Japanese companies again were ahead of the curve on a lot of technological advances in the car industry, from just in time manufacturing to hybrid cars, and even some of the first EVs ever released, they are running really far behind in this race.

And why is this happening?

So there's a number of reasons, but I think the best way to understand it is to go to the factory.

Floo.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, Nihong Mamo. And that's what I did. I went down to visit a car parts maker called Jatco, which specializes in transmission systems and transmission systems for the internal combustion engine. And as I saw on this factory floor, impeccably, well run, impeccably organized, clean production process. One that the engineers there and the factory workers clearly took a great amount of pride in. And that's really, I think, kind of a microcosm of the whole Japanese car industry. They've spent decades perfecting these products, in particular hybrid cars, traditional hybrids that they've come to be dominant in, they've come to see new product categories as a threat to their dominance. They also assumed that switching from hybrids to EVs would be simple once they decided to do it. And then finally Japan took kind of a wrong turn with another technology that they saw as having the potential to power clean cars, namely hydrogen fuel cells.

So the Japanese government went big on hydrogen, but didn't really push for EVs in the same way.

Exactly. There was a big push from the government for what they called a hydrogen society, a big effort to stimulate the purchases of hydrogen fuel cell cars and to build infrastructure for refueling these hydrogen fuel cell cars. And not quite the same amount of effort when it came to BEVs and plug in hybrids. And so Japan's subsidies are still much larger for buying hydrogen powered cars than for EVs. And the EV charging infrastructure across the country has been really slow to be built. And that's of course a huge barrier for consumers who are thinking about buying these cars.

Okay, so you've established that the Japanese are basically losing in this EV race. How are they planning on catching up?

So Japanese carmakers are belatedly coming to see that they need to speed up in this EV race. Toyota, again, the biggest carmaker in Japan has a new CEO, Sato Koji, and he's been tapped in part to lead the company's push for electrification. At his first press conference on April 7, which I went to here in Tokyo, he made a point of announcing a plan to release 10 new EV models and to boost annual EV sales to 1.5 million per year by 2026. We've heard similar things from other large Japanese car companies, including Honda, Nissan. So there is a sense that they're running behind and they do need to catch up.

And is that going to be enough to keep Japan's car industry in the top leaders globally?

It's really an open question. Some critics think it may amount to too little, too late, that Japan's car industry will go the way of its consumer electronics or its semiconductors. And it's possible that a similar thing ends up happening with cars. Japanese carmakers are finding that making EVs requires a different skill set than making the internal combustion engine based and hybrid cars that they've perfected. There's a lot more emphasis, for example, on software in EVs, whereas Japanese companies have tended to focus on the hardware aspects of cars. They do of course, have a huge advantage in terms of their global networks of distribution and sales and fairly strong brands, even though they are at risk of losing their environmentalist bonafides. So it's not all lost. But in order to catch up, the Japanese car companies are going to have to speed up and speed up fast.

Now, final question. You said you live in Tokyo. Do you drive an electric car?

No, I live in Tokyo and I don't own a car at all because Tokyo is a city with terrific public transport. Thankfully, I don't feel I even need to own a car here.

Well, I can't even drive, so I'm not going to join you in that discussion. But Noah, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thank you very much for having me.

Harry Belafonte was a unique presence in 20th century popular culture. He was simultaneously obviously an outspoken left wing firebrand, a key figure in the civil rights movement and a beloved mainstream entertainer.

David Bennon writes about music for the Economist.

If you listen to Dayo, the Banana Boat song, it sounds like a quite quaint update of Caribbean music. But there was also a lot going on beneath the surface. At one point, Harry Belafonte was not just the most popular black performer in America, but the most popular performer in America full stop, with an audience that was predominantly white.

Down the way where the nights are gay.

His third studio album, Calypso in 1956 made him the first solo artist to sell a million copies of an lp, even beating Elvis Presley. It was songs like Jamaica Farewell, which is a light and agreeable piece of music, but also has resonances that lie beneath the surface. He became a singer almost by accident. Theatre was his first passion and he performed with jazz bands to fund the acting classes that he took with classmates that included Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis and Sidney Platyhead. Then he became interested in Caribbean music and he produced a kind of smooth cocktail of it that sounded traditional to the ears of the uninitiated, but was actually his own novel fusion, as you can hear on a song like Will His Love Be Like His Rum? Which refers to the intoxication of both love and the Caribbean dark spirit. Henry Belafonte was born Harold Belanfante in Harlem, New York to Jamaican immigrant parents. He did spend four years of his childhood living with a grandmother in Kingston. But his interest in calypso only really developed later and in fact it post dated his first recording contract. And he deepened his appreciation of West Indian music by exploring the archives of global folk music at the US Library of Congress, where he would likely have found traditional calypso songs such as I Don't Want no Calendar. You can hear in a song like Brown Skin Girl, things that went on beneath the surface of Harold Belafonte's music. When you listen to the lyrics, they're actually quite a scathing social portrait of the aftermath of an American military presence in the Caribbean. But in an episode that prefigures present day arguments over so called cultural appropriation, he was censured as an interloper in Trinidad, which is the birthplace of calypso. Mr. Belafonte always resisted the idea that he was intruding on a tradition and he argued for the freedom of musical evolution. But Harry Belafonte never chose the easier path and he never bit his tongue. He risked both his career and his safety to promote civil rights. He appeared at the March on Washington in 1963. He was a close friend and financial backer of Martin Luther King. Harry Belafonte endorsed John F. Kennedy's presidential run in 1960 with an advert in which he likened Kennedy to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

My name is Harry Belafonte. I'm an artist and I'm not a politician. As a Negro and as an American, I have many questions, and I'm sure everyone does, about civil rights.

There had been major black celebrities before, but none of them had the star power that Harry Belafonte did. None of them were able to break down color barriers and challenge racial attitudes the way he could. He appeared at venues that had excluded his predecessors, and he face down television sponsors who wanted to bar multiracial ensembles.

Vote for a leader like Roosevelt. Vote for John F. Kennedy for president.

It's extraordinary to think that as late as 1968 it could cause a national furore. When Petud Clark, a white singer, simply touched his arm during a televised performance of the anti war folk song on the Path of Glory, You might at some point have been in a nightclub and heard them play Jump in the Line Shake Senior Air. It's an absolutely irresistible song that still gets played to this day. It appeared in the classic supernatural comedy Beetlejuiced that made it an improbable favorite of goth subculture. It even went viral on TikTok in 2020.

My Lord, what a Morning.

He saw activism as a duty, a necessary evil, rather than, say, as a source of identity. If you listen, for example, to My Lord, what a Morning, it's hard not to be deeply moved by it. It's an example of how he could pour a great deal of feeling into whatever he did over a long life, richly lived. Harry Belafonte was proof that people contain.

Multitude David Bennon on Harry Belafonte, who has died aged 96. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show by dropping us a line@podcastseconomist.com and if you're not a subscriber to the Economist, what are you waiting for? Dive in. Get a free 30 day digital subscription by going to economist.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show Notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Sam.