Word: civilizations
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...band of marauders, led by Carver (Liam Neeson), is expending such implacable efforts to wipe out Gideon (Pierce Brosnan). By the time the chase has descended to the desert's burning sands, we learn that the latter was a once-peaceful farmer whose family was wiped out by Civil War irregulars led by Neeson (shades of the much better outlaw Josie Wales). Gideon will have his vengeance if possible, Carver will defend himself by relentlessly attacking him. But the lone victim is a clever cuss, and succeeds in wiping out all of his pursuers save Carver. The fleeing and fighting...
...eventual ruling on Padilla's fitness could liberalize things further, and similar suits are sure to follow. Even so, no one thinks the supermax system is going away soon. For all the debate the prisons generate, it may not take much to make them more palatable to civil libertarians. TVs or radios, reading material and clocks, as well as a bit of natural lighting--which provides critical time-of-day orientation--would help stabilize inmates. So would human contact with guards or other prisoners...
This helps explain why so many of the world's civil wars today are taking place in Africa. It's not that Africans have some inherent weakness for internecine war. It's just that African populations are more likely to be poor, reliant on commodity exports, ethnically divided, young and so on. Think back to medieval and early modern times, when Europeans were not much better situated. The English had their Wars of the Roses, the French their Wars of Religion...
...anything be done by outsiders to stop civil wars? One key finding by Collier is that, until recently, former French colonies in Africa were less likely than comparably poor countries to experience civil war. That was because the French (unlike the British) effectively gave informal security guarantees to the new governments, promising to use French troops to quash rebellions. But in the absence of such postcolonial arrangements, is it possible for foreigners to stop a civil...
...answer is yes, but seldom because foreigners are able to impose a nice power-sharing agreement between the warring parties. More commonly, foreign intervention ends a civil war by helping one side defeat the other. That was essentially what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s, when NATO finally intervened against the Serbs. The British ended the civil war in Sierra Leone by beating the rebels. Something similar just happened in Somalia...