Africa

Now that I have given a little bit of background on social enterprise and impact investing, I can better describe my work this summer. For those of you who don’t know already, I am spending the summer in Nairobi, Kenya as a part of the Frontier Market Scouts program, run out of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. The program began with a week of classes in Monterey at the beginning of June and follows with placements around the world with various partners.

In my case, I was placed in Nairobi to work with two groups. First, there is Village Capital, a US-based non-profit impact investing group. Village Capital focuses on enterprises that are post-income (i.e., they have already sold at least one item/service), aiming to improve funding for enterprises in the so-called “missing middle.” As seen in the charts below, in high-income countries, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are common, but in low-income countries, there are relatively few SMEs. This is significant because in developed countries, SMEs provide about half of GDP and more than half of all employment. The resulting gap of SMEs in developing countries is referred to as the missing middle.[1]

Source: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/programs/entrepreneurial-finance-lab-research-initiative/the-missing-middle

One of the reasons why this gap exists is because financing can be very hard for SMEs to find. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) abound in developing countries, and even where there are no MFIs, microenterprises may be able to raise enough money from friends, family, or, if necessary, the local moneylender, to start a microenterprise. But to move beyond this stage, more significant capital is required, roughly $50-250K. While this amount of funding can be more easily acquired in the US, through banks, venture capital, and other means, for entrepreneurs in developing countries, there are significantly fewer options. For potential investors, the cost of vetting businesses of this size, in markets unfamiliar to most larger investors, often makes loans of this size unprofitable. So something else is needed.

Village Capital has an innovative solution to the problem. It forms groups of 12-15 entrepreneurs to go through a program together which provides mentoring, practical business skills/knowledge, and networking. But most importantly, at the end of the program, the entrepreneurs evaluate one another, and the two best entrepreneurs receive an investment of $50K (they also evaluate each other throughout the program). Essentially, the program democratizes entrepreneurial capital. The entrepreneurs evaluate each other along the same lines that investors would, so the program also does the vetting for the investor at a much lower cost.

In order to effectively carry out such programs around the world, Village Capital always partners with a local impact investor. This is where Growth Africa comes in. Growth Africa is a business consultancy and impact investor here in Nairobi with extensive experience and networks. At the end of this summer, the program will begin, facilitated by Growth Africa. In all cases, half of the investment capital is provided by Village Capital and the other half by the local partner.

So this summer I am working for both Village Capital and Growth Africa. I arrived in the thick of recruiting season, shortly before applications for the program are due. Currently we are still focusing on finding the best entrepreneurs possible for the program, mostly leveraging Growth Africa’s extensive network to do so. Once the applications are all in, we will begin the process of reviewing them, interviewing entrepreneurs, evaluating their businesses’ potential – including social impact, profitability, and ability to scale – and selecting semi-finalists. Then these semi-finalists will make a last pitch, after which the finalists will be selected.

The program will begin in early August, though unfortunately I will not be here for the conclusion of the program, as it is spread out over several months. So while I am here I will be helping get the program started, continuously looking for more entrepreneurs for future programs, working with entrepreneurs in the program, and, I’m sure, learning a ton about what makes a good social enterprise, both from the business side and the investor side. Hopefully that gives you a better idea of what I’m doing here, and for those of you interested in this topic specifically, I will plan to talk about things I learn as I go along.

[1] Entrepreneurial Finance Lab Research Initiative, Center for International Development at Harvard University, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/programs/entrepreneurial-finance-lab-research-initiative/the-missing-middle

“So, what exactly are you doing again?”

This has been the refrain of the last month of my life. I am interning this summer in a field known as social enterprise or impact investing, and most people haven’t got a clue what that means. But I understand the confusion; I wasn’t very familiar with the field myself until fairly recently. Fortunately, this line of work is not all that confusing when properly explained. So for those of you who are interested, I thought I would take a post to explain in more detail what social enterprise and impact investing are and why they matter.

Social enterprises/businesses are businesses that provide goods or services that improve the lives of the poor, and impact investors are investors who provide funding for such enterprises, hoping to make both a financial profit and a positive social impact. (Though I should note that some definitions of “social enterprise” simply stress the importance of environmental and social impacts on top of profit, with less of an explicit focus on serving the poor, while “social businesses” focus on the poor.) This is not the over-simplified justification for business-cum-development that is often heard on Wall Street (businesses create jobs globally, improving the lives of the poor). Indeed, it is clear that large corporations have both positive and negative effects on the poor around the world, and it is not always clear which effect is greater. But social enterprises are businesses that incorporate a social impact into their business models in such a way that without the benefit to the poor, the businesses would collapse (because the poor form the customer base). Such businesses provide cheap health services, clean water, low-cost communications technology, affordable education, and many other goods and services to those at the Base of the Pyramid (BOP), the world’s enormous untapped market of the very poor, particularly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

So why does this matter? It matters because so many efforts to improve the lives of the poor in developing countries over the last 50 years have failed miserably. There are numerous reasons for the failure of development projects, but the biggest problem is often the lack of proper incentives. Improper incentives flow into every element of a development project. In particular, there is no incentive for most donors to make sure projects are maintained, and until recently, when monitoring has become more popular, there has been no real incentive to ensure that projects actually make a positive difference. Wells are drilled but no one is around to maintain them. Large initial funds are spent but after the headline has been flashed on the evening news, no one has a stake in actually making the program work. The deliverable is dollars spent, not impact made. And much of the time, the person receiving aid never has any say as to what aid is given, when, or how.

This is not to say that all aid is bad. Some groups do tremendous work, and humanitarian aid in general seems to be largely beneficial. In addition, as I mentioned, monitoring and evaluation are becoming much more common, improving the quality of aid given. But in most cases, donors who do good work do so in spite of bad incentives, not because of them.

Social enterprise and impact investing offer a unique answer to the problem of sustainability. No business survives unless the customer actually purchases something, thereby voting that the product is valuable and desired. Thus, for a social enterprise that serves the BOP, the benefit of the poor is essential for the business to survive. Unlike in traditional aid, the incentives of the business and the customer are completely aligned; the good of one is tied to the good of the other. Thus, if a business provides a socially needed good or service that the very poor will purchase, the incentives to make a lasting impact are built into the system. Social enterprises cannot fix all problems, especially those that involve public goods, but they provide a promising method for improving many of the services most urgently needed by the poor.

That covers the basics of the enterprise side of things, but there is also an investor side, from whence “impact investing.” The main difference between impact investing and normal investing is that social benefits and environmental sustainability are considered alongside financial profit as criteria for investment. Each impact investor will have slightly different priorities, but as the field grows, standards are likely to develop that define the importance of each factor more precisely. Additionally, impact investors generally have a much longer time frame, willing to wait five or ten years or more for a payoff. For this reason, the funds provided by impact investors are often called “patient capital.”

So that is a brief overview of the field I am working in this summer in Nairobi. In my next post I will discuss my specific job and the organizations I’m working for in more detail. Later posts will discuss various topics related to both life and work in Nairobi this summer – I’m sure there will be plenty to write about. Those of you who have followed my blog for some time will know how sporadic I can be, but rest assured that I will post at least once every two weeks this summer – my job requires it. I hope to post more frequently though, so check back soon or subscribe for updates!

“Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” – President Obama, 4/2/2012

Judicial activism is the idea that judges are “legislating from the bench,” essentially crafting new laws that run contrary to the will of the people, as represented by Congress and the President. Arthur Schlesinger coined the term in 1947, but the idea of judicial activism has been present from the beginning of US history. Arguments over the role of the courts stretch back to John Marshall greatly expanding the role of the federal government shortly after the founding of our nation, through Roger Taney  concluding that African-Americans could not be citizens in the Dred Scott Decision, and into the modern era with FDR battling the Court over initiatives in the New Deal. Today, we see its fruits in the ongoing conservative fight to roll back the Roe v. Wade decision and, of course, the current attacks from the Obama administration against possible judicial activism concerning the healthcare act. The idea is not new and both sides of the aisle have used it in their political arsenal.

Edward Lazarus, in his 1998 book Closed Chambers concerning the modern Supreme Court, makes the point well:

Partisans on both sides wage a destructively misguided war against what they deride reflexively as judicial activism. For liberals, this judicial overstepping takes the form of every recent decision that has cut back or overturned a Warrenesque ruling of the past. Meanwhile, conservatives cry foul at every decision in which a federal judge finds the police or prosecutors to have violated constitutional rights or those that impinge on favorite political causes such as school prayer. (516-517)

These “convenient charges” clearly reveal that “activism is in the eye of the beholder.” But Lazarus continues: “judicial ‘activism’—of the right or of the left—is no sin unto itself….The sin is not judicial activism, which may be warranted and healthy, but judicial activism bereft of persuasion and its crucial ingredients: reason, consistency, and principle.” (517)

I agree that judicial activism is not a sin unto itself. However, I would go further and argue that these sins are bound to occur, there is little we can do to stop them, and they are simply the symptoms of schismatic political philosophies. The system of appointing judges in the US is extraordinarily partisan. Especially when it comes to the Supreme Court, presidents tend to pick appointees who are as far to their side of the aisle as possible who will still be able to win Senate approval. The vast majority of these appointees have demonstrable records as judges in lower courts, or at least significant evidence revealing their political predilections. Why would anyone assume that once the appointees attain the bench that they will drop all of these prior beliefs at the door?

Like many people, especially those who work in government, these judges hold fundamental political beliefs deeply. While some justices have changed political beliefs during their time on the court, this is not the norm, which is why it is often fairly easy to predict the votes of many justices on politically polarizing issues. Once someone has come to believe strongly in certain fundamentals, they are unlikely to be swayed without repeated, strong undermining of their positions. And these justices are much too intelligent to be logically undercut on a regular basis. Justices tend to stick to their existing political beliefs because they think they are true, not because they have a malevolent plan to rule by decree from the bench. Conservative justices are likely to strike down laws that expand the federal government because they legitimately believe the federal government largely gets in the way of liberty. In contrast, liberal justices are more likely to uphold laws expanding the federal government if they believe such expansion expands the freedom of less-privileged groups.

These views stem from more fundamental understandings of freedom. Conservatives tend to view freedom as “formal,” that is, a lack of limitations on doing something. Liberals on the other hand tend to view freedom as “effective,” that is, the provision of a feasible means for doing something that is desired. So in the case of healthcare, conservatives view our current system as free – anyone can buy health insurance and no one is stopping them. Liberals, though, do not see the system as free because many people cannot feasibly pay for coverage due to its high cost. These are fundamentally different understandings of freedom, and justices who hold one or the other view are not likely to suddenly become enchanted with the other.

Thus, what many label judicial activism I would simply label as sticking to your guns. People have different opinions; disagreement is bound to occur. A vote against the healthcare act is not a sign of ignorance; neither was a vote against Citizens United. Both examples merely showcase the justices’ varying political philosophies. Deciding whose political philosophy is best is in fact the ongoing experiment of any democracy, an experiment that will never end.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/18557594

Last year The Economist ran an interestingly article that discussed how parole boards were much more likely to grant prisoners parole immediately after breaks for food (see chart on right). Clearly objectivity is an illusion. Not even science can be purely objective, as the act of observation affects the observed (as we know from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) and greater precision is always possible.

Human psychology is extraordinarily fickle. We are pulled to and fro by forces beyond our recognition. As the overly objective Ebenezer Scrooge suggested, even a tiny bit of bad potato can have an outsized effect on the mind. Of course accusations of judicial activism will continue, but they are seldom warranted. The bulk of Supreme Court votes seem to align with logically thought out philosophical positions, even if we don’t always agree with them. And in the end, while judicial decisions can delay or speed the application of what most of us consider to be just, it seems that, at least in the US, justice has the upper hand in the long run anyway.

Maybe agreement was too much to ask.

The vitriol has just kept coming. From the start I thought it was clear that some of the critiques of the viral Kony 2012 video were valid, but never did I expect them to continue with such unabated intensity and even personal hatefulness (to the point of driving Jason Russell, the maker of the video, to an apparent mental breakdown). Today, another critique has been making the rounds. The article in The Atlantic by Teju Cole, “White Savior Industrial Complex,” is an exposition on a series of tweets he posted as the Kony video was gaining momentum. The tweets, reprinted in the article, critique the apparent neocolonialism and hypocrisy in the video and are reproduced below:

1. From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
2. The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
3. The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
4. This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.
5. The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
6. Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.
7. I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.

-Teju Cole, in The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/1/

These are all standard claims that others have made, and there is some merit to them. Aid efforts from the West to the developing world have done considerable harm in the past and will certainly continue to do harm in the future, but that doesn’t mean they only do harm. After some thinking, I believe the critiques have quite simply gone too far and overlook several positive elements.

Earlier this week, my international development class met for the first time since the Kony 2012 video was posted. The topics for that class did not specifically deal with anything related to Kony, but it’s not every day that a development issue goes viral, so we took some time to discuss the matter. To kick off the discussion, my professor asked a prescient question, and one I would not have thought of myself: “How many of you had heard of Joseph Kony and the LRA before this video?” To my surprise, several classmates, maybe a third of the class, raised their hands. This is among aspiring development practitioners! These are people who want to go to Africa and help the poor, people who have already done Peace Corps, people who keep track of things like the LRA. Or so I thought.

But upon further reflection, I realized that the only reason I personally knew about the issue is because of exactly the same group that had just informed my classmates: Invisible Children. As I mentioned in my earlier post summarizing some of the arguments from the Kony 2012 debate, Invisible Children came to UGA when I was an undergrad, and they showed a video with some of the same footage as that used in the most recent incarnation to inform us all about the LRA and Joseph Kony. But if they had not come to UGA or if I had not attended the viewing, it is perfectly plausible that I would never have heard about Kony and the LRA until this recent video did the rounds. This realization, more than anything, woke me up to the reality of the discourse on development, or, more accurately, the general lack of any discourse on development among the US public. This leads to my first point on why the video has done more good than harm.

1) It’s not every day a development issue goes viral.

• I already stated this, but I think it deserves repeating. The Kony 2012 video was unbelievably successful in spreading the news about a problem that does matter. And it was an issue that few people would have ever heard about otherwise. For all its critics, the video does a tremendous job of raising awareness. True, as I myself pointed out, it does not identify the root problems, it does not propose a plausible path for remedying those problems, and it does present a simplified version of reality. But as my professor pointed out, every NGO has its niche. Invisible Children has one too – the LRA and Joseph Kony – and it has clearly shown it has one particularly strong skill as well – raising awareness using social media. This explains why so much of IC’s money goes to awareness rather than on-the-ground efforts, which, in my opinion is fine. At least they are honest. And more importantly, their funds clearly effected results, which is more than can be said for many agencies who spend 90% or more of their money on the ground. Awareness is in important piece of the puzzle and should not be attacked just because it occurs in the US.
• More than anything, Kony 2012 has shown to the world just how much attention can be brought to an issue – any issue – if social media are properly harnessed. Even if you disagree with IC’s goals or methods, you have to acknowledge that this is probably the first time any issue related to development has been so high up on the minds of so many people at once. Such efforts do not solve the problem, but knowledge must come before action. And when something is so successful in spreading the news about an issue, critiques are quick to point out possible factual issues (as is extremely evident), hopefully leading to a net gain of important information on a worthy topic. Unfortunately, in this case the critiques seem to have gone so far as to possibly reverse any gains of knowledge achieved by the video, leaving instead a sense that those who want to do good in the world might as well just stop trying. Somehow I don’t think that will help.

2) Norms governing US foreign policy will only change one step at a time.

• Cole and others claim that it is hypocritical to call for interventions like this one when US foreign policy in general does so much harm: “If Americans want to care about Africa, maybe they should consider evaluating American foreign policy, which they already play a direct role in through elections, before they impose themselves on Africa itself.” Unless I’m mistaken, what the video called for is for Americans to evaluate American foreign policy, trying to push it toward an issue that has received little attention in the US – and by the same means that Cole suggests, namely, by putting pressure on our elected officials.
• But disregarding the slight confusion in Cole’s statement, I presume his intention was to promote reevaluation of the general principles of US foreign policy, but such a goal is simply not pragmatic. The norms of US foreign policy will not change overnight just because we want them to. The way we interact with the world has been built up over centuries and strongly reinforced by the ever-present desire to view the world in the anarchic, self-help way that realists have always done. If we are ever to break free of this mindset, it will only happen with slow, small steps, and this video calls for one such step.  It calls for the US to redirect effort towards something that is based quite heavily on moral obligations (even if the depiction was slightly naïve), obligations which have been recognized by the rest of the world (the ICC’s number one most-wanted person is Joseph Kony). Most foreign policy experts will tell you that from a strategic perspective, sending troops to help catch Kony was not in the US’s interests as generally conceived – something else was operating here. Could it be the beginning of a new norm in foreign policy? Could the US actually make decisions based on what it can do to help others, legitimately, not to help itself?

Many will be skeptical that such an outcome is ever possible, saying instead that the world would be better off if the US did nothing abroad at all, but I’m optimistic. I think it is possible for major powers to do good in the world, though it is very difficult. Perhaps Libya was a good example? As I’ve argued in the past, I think the US should have acted in the cases of genocide in the 20^th century, but it did not. If the norms changed such that acting on behalf of others became both normal and accepted, maybe the US (and other major powers) could actually become an undisputed force for good in the world. And maybe this video is a small step in that direction. Maybe.

In Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (which is a fantastic book, but I won’t even attempt to summarize it – you can check out its Wikipedia page if you are interested), there are a variety of secular monastic orders, and one group, called the Lorites, believes that every possible idea has already been thought. Thus, they dedicate themselves to knowing history and constantly revealing as “old” any “new” idea that others propose. This is an issue that is surprisingly close to reality. In a recent post I discussed the importance of “knowing the literature” as a means to establishing our arguments (especially critiques) in a developed stream of thought. This helps us avoid the pitfalls that commonly occur when we try to base arguments on experience alone, ignoring the vast troves of wisdom already available which have tackled similar issues in a systematic way. However, a recognition of the wisdom that has come before also reveals that very few ideas today are truly “new.” That is not to say that we are not generating new information. Particularly in the sciences, new information is discovered all the time. But questions that get at the most basic elements of existence—Why are we here? What is the fundamental nature of reality? What is truth?—all seem to have been answered and re-answered in the same ways down through the ages. In many ways, there is nothing new under the sun, which, of course, was known in the 3^rd or 4^th century BC – how much more so today.

I recently stumbled upon a great example of this phenomenon. Postmodernism is assumed by most to be one of the most current philosophies, given its name (though there is also now Post-postmodernism). Postmodern thought (and offshoots like constructivism) centers around a rejection of objectivity, instead suggesting that reality is socially constructed, and thus, subjective. Reality is dependent on context, and no one “reality” can ever be said to be truly real. In fact, the most radical postmodernists would say we cannot be sure anything exists, and no scientific enquiry will ever fix that. Coming as a refutation of positivism (which has also dictated the entire educational process in the West for centuries), postmodernism does indeed seem radically new. But its ideas have actually been proposed by philosophers since at least the 4^th century BC.

Hume do you seek?

Let’s work our way backwards.

David Hume (1711-1776), a Scottish philosopher, is the first step back into history. In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (section XII), Hume thinks through whether or not we can actually be sure that, for instance, the table in front of us is real or if we only perceive it to be real:

It is a question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: how shall this question be determined? By experience surely; as all other questions of a like nature. But here experience is, and must be entirely silent. The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connexion with objects. The supposition of such a connexion is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.

In other words, we cannot be sure that what we perceive is at all connected to reality. We assume that an object we perceive with our senses does in fact have some physical reality, apart from our sensation (would the table still exist if no one was there to see it?), but there is no way to really know.

But Hume built upon ideas already propounded by George Berkeley (1685-1753) thirty years earlier in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. In this case, a summary of Berkeley’s thoughts captures what we are after:

If, says Berkeley, our knowledge of the material world consists in the ideas of it we have in our heads, what reason is there for supposing that anything other than the ideas exist?…Berkeley abolishes matter and declares the world to be a creation of the mind. Everything is ‘really’ mind.

- From the Introduction to Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms, p. 16

Berkeley, like the most radical of postmodernists today, didn’t think matter was really there.

Now let’s jump way back to ancient Greece. Pyrrho (c. 360-270 BC), whose views were recorded by his student Timon (c. 320-230 BC), was the source of the ideas later leading to Skepticism (the general philosophy we are discussing here). Eusebius (c. 263-339 AD) explains Pyrrho’s main thesis:

…[Pyrrho] reveals that things are equally indifferent and unstable and indeterminate…for this reason, neither our perceptions nor our beliefs tell the truth or lie….For this reason, then, we should not trust them, but should be without opinions and without inclinations and without wavering, saying about each single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not.

- Accessible at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/#EarFigPyrTim

There is no truth, just perception. Nothing can be said to be in existence any more than it can be said to not exist.

In some ways, these ideas all go back to Plato and his theory of forms, which suggested that true reality existed outside of the world we perceive (as shadows in a cave, illuminated by the light from the “true” reality). What we see is not as “real” as what we do not see on the higher plane. The same ideas are also present outside of the Western tradition. In India, Jainism also promotes the stance that all truth/reality is subjective, depending on the point of view, and no viewpoint can be said to be completely true. In Islam, al-Ghazali (1058-1111 AD) embraced a form of skepticism which led him to conclude that nothing in this world is causal, and all causation comes from God instead (i.e., even though we perceive that fire is burning something, in reality that is not happening – God is burning it, and thus reality is disconnected from perception). This thought is not all that different from the Christian view explained by the Apostle Paul in Colossians that in Christ “all things hold together,” which suggests that what we understand as cause and effect is illusory – without God, no cause or effect would occur. And of course Platonic dualism (mind/body, good/evil, this lower world/pure forms) had a huge influence on the Christian understanding of the current world we inhabit versus the higher world to come. While many Christians would like to disconnect Christian theology from Platonism, still most Christians conceptualize this world as something to be escaped, at least in part because it is less real than the world to come (though I do not think Jesus actually taught this form of escapism whatsoever).

So there you have it. Postmodernism, so modern that it is beyond modern, is actually anything but. It is merely a restatement of questions that philosophers have been asking for millennia. But there is nothing wrong with bringing up the same questions over and over again. Every generation needs its own thinkers to frame a debate in modern terms, to re-expose good ideas to contemporary society so that the ideas are not forgotten (or expose “new” arguments as old ones that were refuted long ago). There is no shame in repetition. There is nothing new under the sun, but many things are not directly exposed to the light because of the impeding detritus that builds up over time. Removing these impediments is one duty of thinkers and readers in every generation.

A little over a year ago Gabrielle Giffords was shot by a deranged man in Tucson, Arizona, kicking off a firestorm of debate about political rhetoric and, that perennial favorite, guns. At the time, I wrote a blog about how the right to bear arms, which was intended as a check against tyranny, can actually promote tyranny at a personal level (as exercised by gunman Jared Loughner over Giffords and the other victims last year). But I wrote that article before the Arab Spring, and I think with that history as a lesson, revisiting the topic is worthwhile.

Let me rehash my main point from the other blog:

When passed, the 2^nd Amendment was intended to guarantee the freedom of each state through the maintenance of a militia, and…to protect the ability of a citizenry to rise up and overthrow a tyrannical government….But gun rights advocates tend to ignore one very important difference between then and now.  War is no longer fought the way our Revolution was fought.  In the late 18^th Century, wars were still predominantly fought by men on foot, the primary weapon being the rifle.  Without men and rifles, wars simply could not be won.  And when rebellions were squashed, the government required men and rifles too.  So as long as you could overwhelm an armory here or there and get some cannons, a group of citizens trying to overthrow a tyrannical government would be fairly evenly matched with the government in terms of weaponry.

Today, the same is not true.  The primary weapons of war are no longer guns – they are missiles, jets, bombs, tanks, helicopters, etc.  Sure, guns are still important, but when it comes to overthrowing tyranny, guns are not going to do much against nuclear weapons.  Military technology has come so far since the Revolution that the 2^nd Amendment provides much less protection from tyranny today than it once did.  And since we are not about to let people start buying jets, nukes, and other weapons of war, we need to recognize that the argument that more guns help protect against tyranny may not be tenable today.

I would like to first point out that the comparison with nuclear weapons was probably unnecessary, since there is no precedent (or expectation) of a government using a nuclear weapon to put down internal rebellion. However, my main point still stands, and I believe it has been strongly reinforced by the events in the Arab world over the last year.

Evidence from the Arab Spring:

1) Overthrowing tyrants today often depends on undermining the tyrant’s legitimacy.

• The forces that toppled autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt came down to protest by the masses undermining the rulers’ legitimacy, forcing them to make concessions and eventually step down. In both of these cases, weapons were of practically no value in comparison to the force of public pressure. In fact, the largely peaceful protests probably helped the movements bring about change as quickly as they did because the government was unable to justify military crackdowns in the face of overtly non-military threats.

• Rebellion has always been about political grievances, but today, ideas and information have an amplified power thanks to modern technology which can spread the grievances far and wide, infecting huge numbers of people internally and around the world. A government cannot rule effectively, even through force of arms, when such grievances infiltrate their own militaries (as happened in Egypt). The ability of regimes to contain information and control discourse is waning rapidly, and it has changed the way rebellion occurs in much of the world.

2) Small arms cannot topple a murderous regime on their own.

• In Libya, military pressure was necessary to overthrow Col. Qaddafi. However, even in this case, the force of arms needed to end Qaddafi’s rule went well beyond small arms. A no-fly zone and NATO attacks involving thousands of bombs were essential to ending the Qaddafi regime. Even if every rebel soldier had an AK-47, Qaddafi would have retained power without the intervention from an outside force bringing substantial firepower to the conflict. And why exactly did NATO get involved? Again it comes back to public pressure and Qaddafi’s eroded legitimacy. Outside intervention is only possible (because, again, of legitimacy issues on the world stage) when a local majority calls for it. But today, outside intervention is probably the only way by which governments willing to kill thousands of their own citizens can be overthrown – a right to bear arms will have little impact.

• In Syria, we are seeing exactly the same situation. Assad and his army have too much firepower for the local rebels to effectively challenge him. This is why some are now calling for outside intervention. Of course, world politics and other factors (like the size of Syria and the distribution of population within it, as well as the lack of unity among the rebels) call into question how effective even outside intervention would be in this case. But the point is, small arms are not good enough for overthrowing tyranny. In Syria, the presence of small arms will only have the desired effect if they allow the rebels to hold out long enough to either turn the military against Assad or bring outside military intervention. In both of these scenarios, however, small arms only act as a means to achieve the more important goal of undermining Assad’s legitimacy and bringing international pressure to bear on the regime.

Living in the country with the most powerful military ever known, Americans should not deceive themselves into thinking that if everyone owns a pistol or shotgun that we could stand against a murderous regime. So I don’t buy this argument, which I hear so frequently. There are other reasons to think the guns may be beneficial. Many claim that guns in the home provide protection against thieves, and at the very least, the evidence I have seen suggests that increases in gun ownership in the US does not increase violence. However, there is reason to question US gun policy because of the flow of weapons abroad, particularly automatic weapons which end up in the hands of drug cartels and other violent groups. Actions taken in the US inevitably have an impact abroad, and we ought to consider these effects more than we do currently (as a nation). But this issue is too lengthy to get into right now. So in summary, I believe the evidence shows that the right to bear arms is of little importance today when it comes to protection against tyranny. This was a valid concern when our country was founded, but technology has changed the face of rebellion. Small arms cannot defeat a military, but public opinion can.