How reflexive catastrophizing inhibits policy imagination in African states

On the need for a grounded understanding of contemporary challenges and progress in African states

This is the fourth post on the impacts of aid cuts on African states; and the urgent need to grow out of aid dependency in the region. The first three posts are available here, here, and here. See also the excellent posts from Gyude Moore and Grieve Chelwa on the same topic.

This post should be read as a pep talk for these difficult times.

I: On the coming anarchy in West Africa that wasn’t

Whenever I want to gain some perspective on African states’ contemporary challenges and prospects, I read Robert Kaplan’s wildly alarmist doomsday piece about West Africa published in February, 1994:

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real “strategic” danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are …