Sameer Dossani is director of "50 Years is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice", a coalition of over 200 U.S. grassroots, women's, solidarity, faith-based, policy, social- and economic-justice, youth, labor, and development organizations dedicated to the transformation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Dossani has been campaigning against the World Bank and IMF since the early 1990s, when he was a student activist at McGill University, Canada. Most recently, he was the executive director of the NGO Forum on the Asian Development Bank, based in Manila, Philippines, where he had the opportunity to work closely with Asian NGOs and peoples movements working for economic justice.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and Stanford Humanities Center.

This talk will discuss the study of a new factor that makes civil war more likely: the inability of political actors to make credible promises to broad segments of society. Lacking this ability, both elected and unelected governments pursue public policies that leave citizens less well-off and more prone to revolt. At the same time, these actors have a reduced ability to build an anti-insurgency capacity in the first place, since they are less able to prevent anti-insurgents from themselves mounting coups. However, while reducing the risk of conflict overall, increasing credibility can, over some range, worsen the effects of natural resources and ethnic fragmentation on civil war. Empirical tests using various measures of political credibility support these conclusions.

About the speaker:

Philip Keeferis a Lead Research Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Since receiving his PhD in Economics from Washington University at St. Louis in 1991, he has worked continuously on the interaction of institutions, political economy and economic development on issues ranging from the impact of insecure property rights on economic growth to the effect of political credibility on the fiscal and monetary policy choices of governments. His work has appeared in journals ranging from the Quarterly Journal of Economics to the American Review of Political Science.