Choice of Rebels: Stormwright (XoR2 WIP)

Choice of Games games CoG Works In Progress
4154

Yes. But the hard reality for aspiring social engineers is that uprooting inequalities, especially as an outsider to the community, is almost always a generational project rather than an immediate revolutionary possibility.

Some boring examples from the international development industry

Most of the ingeniously-designed institutions a development worker tries to encourage communities to adopt will fail, because collective action is hard. Even if people have an obvious degree of material interest in e.g. keeping their new piped water system in good repair, your village water-users’ committee probably has no better than a 40% chance of lasting for five years. (It’s hard to offer confident numbers here because, as that SPARC study notes, so few development actors carry out retrospective success evaluations… but I reckon 40% is a generous extrapolation from the high visibility of failed water systems in rural areas with lots of development work.)

The more you’ve also been trying to tweak the design of that water-users’ committee to achieve social goals, like increasing the decision-making authority of women or marginalised ethnic/caste groups, the higher you’re nudging the odds of failure. If you require an institution to include voices that the village normally excludes, you’re increasing the likelihood that the village won’t listen to that institution, and (even more so) that they’ll stop giving their time to it as soon as your project ends and you stop paying them to participate [1] sending a salaried staff member to regularly corral them.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying! Sometimes it works. When I did a review of projects my old organization finished 5+ years ago, one of the great successes was in a village hit by the 2008 breach of the Koshi barrage embankment. Most of this village’s houses had been washed away; most of its agricultural land was suddenly under three feet of sand. In addition to helping people rebuild and introducing new sand-compatible livelihoods like melon-growing or cement-work, my predecessors encouraged villagers to meet regularly in “trauma circle” discussion groups. These groups were intentionally designed to bring women together across caste/religion lines, and (in different groups) to bring men and women together. They started as a place for people to share the stories of the trauma of the disaster, but were intentionally guided toward being a forum for talking about problem-solving as well.

Over a decade later, those circle groups were still regularly meeting – not to keep talking about disaster trauma, but as a village forum for discussion and decision-making that included people who would always have been excluded before 2008. It lastingly reduced the previous level of social inequity, in which all but a couple of the richest women had been largely unheard and public discussion had been reserved for higher-caste men.

Even in those villages, of course, inequities persist today. Involving women and lower castes in communal decision-making doesn’t mean giving them fully equal status; the latter is still a multi-generational project, and each step you try has a significant chance of failure. And this isn’t just true of the small-scale work I’m talking about here. It’s true for nation-level reforms, like expanding voting rights or affirmative action programs. The further you’re trying to leap from the status quo, the greater the likelihood that what you try will be coopted by the unjust system or fail outright.

When it comes to the deep-rooted social inequalities of caste in Nepal, I’ve seen them affected and ameliorated by strategies both violent (the Maoist war) and nonviolent (NGO projects, antidiscrimination laws)…but not undone. Those inequalities have persisted and perpetuated themselves against (so far) every attempt to root them out, both the modestly ambitious and the would-be revolutionary approaches.

Recognizing that societies have inertia and that some degree of “perpetuation” is the likeliest outcome doesn’t mean we have to despair, or even that we should limit ourselves entirely to “the adjacent possible.” But we shouldn’t be surprised when we experience limited success, or find that the success rate is higher for less ambitious reforms.

  1. NGOs know they shouldn’t be paying people to participate – that unsustainable extrinsic incentives are deadly to collective action – but because their incentive structure is almost entirely built around showing short-term progress to donors rather than long-term transformation, refraining from incentive payments is a “best practice” widely honored in the breach. ↩︎

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4155

That’s an interesting view, but at least not my own. I think that pouring aid without fundamental governance reform is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. It’s a bit of an old analogy, but it’s a mistake the U.S. made in South Vietnam, it was a mistake they made in Afghanistan, it was a mistake the Soviets made in Cuba. And I don’t need to go into the details of the cost of those three mistakes.

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Great excerpt. Can’t wait to see where this whole elopment will lead too… I am equally or even more interested in the path where we tell Auche’s mother about this whole affair, probably due to an ability to directly ask her to align with our rebellion.
I wonder what’s stored for Aguise endgame. She seems a bit overshadowed by other de Irde subplots, but I guess we need to wait and see for ourselves.

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4157

Both China and Turkey had far more transformative revolutions, unless you see Sultan Erdo as a reversion to the mean for Turkey. But, in any case, my mc will not settle for less than completely abolishing slavery and extirpating the caste system completely. The Karagond caste system itself is not native to most of the continent, heck it might not have been native to most of old Karagon itself either except for the brutal hellhole of a city state that once spawned Hera, and if Hera could forcibly introduce it my mc will damn well try to abolish it.

Poor Auche, if it comes to that my mc has few qualms about sacrificing him to protect someone as potentially valuable as Earith. Foolish boy.

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4158

I agree with this statement as it stands, though probably not with some of the underlying ideas.

First, I’d note that “pouring” implies amounts that are in my view almost never helpful. The governance conditions that allow effective “pouring” of aid, rather than careful “watering”(i.e. iterative cultivation of specific change opportunities) almost never happen, anywhere. Pretty much always, more is less, with big aid budgets spawning corruption and concentrations of rent-seeking wealth that undermine any moves you’re trying to make toward democracy or rule of law.

That includes big budgets spent on fundamental governance reform; and I think another point where we might disagree is the likelihood of achieving that goal. It was tried in Afghanistan, after all. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into military, police, justice system, legislative, and electoral reforms, based on the advice of global experts in their fields.

Those reforms’ failure wasn’t inevitable, but it was always likely…because there’s no recipe you can follow to reliably establish the rule of law in a patrimonial authoritarian system. You have to improvise a path, and you’ll be fighting every step not just against the institutions / individuals whose power relies on the old system, but against the average person’s commonsense intuitions of how power works.

One of the famous conundrums of democracy promotion is the chicken-and-egg question of the middle class. A country without a modern middle class, i.e. without a broad-based class whose prosperity depends on a stable and more-or-less egalitarian legal environment for doing business, is significantly less likely to become either democratic or law-based. But a country without some degree of democratic and legal accountability is less likely to develop the broad-based prosperity that generates a middle class – especially if you don’t have the wealth of some other continent to plunder.

Another way of describing the problem is to observe that patrimonial oligarchy is self-reinforcing, whether you try to attack it from the side of political power or economic opportunities – because it’s working to maintain a relatively small group’s control over both.

The pathway that’s arguably most often been successful in breaking that hold has started with economic development to build a broader middle class, rather than beginning with democratic governance reforms. Mercantile and (especially) industrial economies are harder than agrarian ones to keep locked in oligarchy, and it’s apparently easier to lure an elite into adopting one of those wealth engines than (as a first step) broadening the range of people who have access to political power.

The economy-first approach is decidedly not the same thing as “pouring aid,” an approach which, again, is far more likely to generate a rent-seeking elite than a broad-based middle class. It’s also not the only pathway that’s ever succeeded. There have been a number of countries that had a democracy before they had a middle class, and managed to keep it.

So the big picture is I think one where advocates for rights, freedoms, and participation shouldn’t hesitate to struggle for them at any stage – but we shouldn’t be surprised or unduly discouraged when those efforts fail, especially if we’re advocating in a country with no broad-based middle class, no experience to date with democracy, and/or recent devastation by war.

The implications for XoR are left as an exercise for the reader.

China’s “fundamental governance reform” was of course not the democratic type that @11110 aspires to, and its transformation included many of the 20th century’s worst atrocities. Famines that kill millions will be on the table in XoR too, and in the wake of that kind of traumatic mass devastation, significant social change becomes more possible. Is it worth the cost?

Turkey is not just a case of post-traumatic transformation but of post-imperial consolidation, with Kemal choosing to abandon the majority of Ottoman territory to pursue a radical reform agenda in a much smaller geographic area. As discussed extensively upthread, that approach will also be on the table.

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4159

But he still kept quite a large state, strong enough to still be a regional power (and the second largest military in NATO today). Not the kind of small, city state sometimes discussed further upthread and still being a regional power is the minimum of what my mc would need too because he has no intention whatsoever of even pretending to comply with demands like enforcing their possible fugitive slave laws from his new, post-hegemony neighbours.

Ask, Kala and potentially my mc and they might indeed conclude that, depending on what exact circumstances we might find ourselves in come the last book it very well might be, as unlike with our historical China this is not just destruction but a policy that might pay for itself and abolish one of the worst systems in the gameworld in the process, albeit in exchange for a lot of short-term pain.

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4160

First of all, please let me know if there are any mistakes in my summary below.
I don’t think the differences between you and me views are that great.
I think we both acknowledge that a balance between tradition and progress is important for true reform, that large amounts of aid can actually make the situation worse, and that systems that create social inequality have strong inertia.
However, we do differ, of course. You attribute the failure of reforms that seek to improve inertia to reforms that are too radical, while I attribute it to reforms that are too moderate and “politically coordinated.”
And to me, the example of Afghanistan is proof enough of the need for radical reform.
Because it is an example of how a politically coordinated project, combined with lukewarm “governance assistance” without sufficient on-site research or coordination between various sectors, made the situation worse.

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Hmm, and by the way, why do you think democracy was able to succeed in India, a vast former colony with no prior democratic experience, no middle class, and devastated by war? What made it possible for democracy to succeed, which would be a rare exception based on your theory?

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4162

There is also likely to be new issues that come from that approach, even if you’re just trying to defend food surplus areas like Shayard and are content with the moral cost of starvation in the rest of the Post-Hegemony.

We’re talking millions to tens of millions of people pouring in to try to get at what little food there is left without harrowing. Basically a combination of a refugee crisis on a worse scale then ever experienced in known history + external invasions of the now very unemployed phlaganites from other regions.

Unless the strategy is to hold food deficit areas as well and allow the starvation to happen under your purview, which would probably make keeping legitimacy difficult. People’s morals tend to go out the window, even for an institution as awful as harrowing, when they get hungry.

I’m interested to see how such a path will pan out.

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4163

That’s one of the most debated questions in the democratisation literature, precisely because India is a rare exception. Any graph of democratic success against GDP per capita will have India as a conspicuous outlier. Its closest neighbors in the poor-but-consistently-democratic club tend to be places like Costa Rica, which are signfiicantly richer than India on average.

I’m not going to venture an explanation here – I honestly don’t know, and suspect a lot has to do with contingent historical factors. Regardless, India exemplifies the picture I was painting above: that it’s possible but quite unlikely to have a democracy before you have a broad middle class. Seymour Martin Lipset discussed this extensively back in the '50s, and the evidence since then has continued to fit the pattern.

I think you’re misunderstanding what kept governance reform in Afghanistan from succeeding. To be more “radical” the NATO powers would have needed to be hard-core imperialists.

For example, NATO would have needed to take over the Afghan justice system and run it while rebuilding it from scratch; there wasn’t enough appetite for genuinely radical change among the existing judges and lawyers. But that degree of imperialism was never on the cards, and would probably also have failed. In a counter-insurgency context, the key success condition was to outperform the insurgents’ provision of justice…and a system of foreigners and their thousands of barely-trained proteges applying a new and unfamiliar legal system would probably not have done much better than the corrupt old order which ultimately failed at that task.[1]

NATO would have needed to find some way of excluding the warlord class from power, without crashing the legitimacy of the new system or handing the new government a toolkit it could use to exclude any challengers, warlord or not. I don’t think you can do that with a constitutional rule-set alone; you need to keep decision-making power in your hands. You’d have needed to be ready to overrule and possibly depose your elected Afghan president when he decides that including the warlords is a surer path to peace than excluding them. And that tactic, again, wouldn’t just have gone against the vision of a democratic Afghanistan – it would itself have had a high chance of failure.[2]

Successful “radical” governance reform in Afghanistan wouldn’t have primarily hinged on outsiders’ will, resources, or strategy. There could have been improvements in all of the above, for sure… but there was fundamentally also a need for Afghan leaders who had a strong vision for radical change and enough indigenous institutional and social support to succeed. (Cf. Kemal in post-WWI Turkey.)

The actual Afghan leaders who won power through elections turned out to have a vision for incremental reforms, big tents, and not rocking their own boat too hard. This aligned with the practice of NATO commanders on the ground, who were working (sometimes unwittingly) with local warlords and the warlords’ men in the police, court system, etc. to try and impose order. A radical reforming NATO would have been trying to rip all of that up by the roots. As sympathetic as I sometimes am to the idea, it would have been, to say the least, not a guaranteed strategy for success.

I’d still disagree with anyone who said democracy in Afghanistan was impossible. But the deck was stacked hard against it, which means that any approach we’d tried would have had a high chance of failure.

Not relative to that many democracies, since much of the “first wave” lost their democratic status during the Great Depression years, and India’s among the earliest “second wave” countries. A whole lot of new democracies fail a lot earlier, harder, and more lastingly than India has. You can never rule out democratic backsliding, but frankly, Trump shows that even more clearly than Modi. :frowning:

What we call a “success” does absolutely depend on our metric. Even recognizing that India (and the US, and Britain, and Sweden, and…) has further to go on the journey toward liberal participatory politics, though, what India’s already achieved is a really impressive success, because it’s a hard-to-reach outlier relative to the socioeconomic context. I think @11110 is totally justified in asking how it fits into the picture I’m painting.

  1. Strictly speaking, what failed was a combination of the unreformed old order and a bunch of undertrained Western proteges. There was enough justice reform to produce plenty of the latter…and as with police reform, they were then sent out into a system with deeply-entrenched expectations of patronage and corruption and (for the most part) eaten alive by that system. ↩︎

  2. Deposing your client president has plenty of precedent in Afghanistan. It didn’t ultimately solve the Soviets’ problems either. ↩︎

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4164

I’m not sure it has? Indian democracy is young relatively speaking, and has already been through one dictatorship and seems increasingly inclined towards a second. It is notionally a liberal democracy, but that’s a title that’s hard claimed and hard kept. That’s not even getting into the massive inequalities that persist despite India’s democracy, ones that have arguably left it worse off than some of its less-democratic neighbors. I think it’s worth asking what metrics we use to define democracy “succeeding”, beyond “has consistent free and fair elections and peaceful transitions of power” (a metric even the United States has struggled to meet for most, dare I say all of its history).

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Well, it’s precisely because this is an exceptional success that I’m interested in further discussion, and there are likely lessons to be learned that will help me make the venture I’m trying to undertake exceptionally successful.

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Well, let’s unpack “devastated by war.” I skimmed over this in my initial response, but I don’t think India in 1947 counts. Its participation in WWII left most of the country unaffected; the British Indian Army was huge in absolute terms but involved less than 1% of India’s population at the time. There were no large-scale battles on Indian territory, no major devastation of infrastructure. The country’s social and political institutions weren’t broken down by protracted violence.

That shattering of existing institutions is what gives wars their potential for social change – but also what steers that change in the direction of authoritarianism rather than liberal participatory institutions. Violence breaks down social trust and predisposes people to accept any alternative to its continuation. (As witness my anti-Taliban Afghan friends whose dismay at the state of their nation today is balanced by their immense relief that it’s once more possible to travel around without a high likelihood of being bombed or shot.) The institutions that are strongest at the end of a devastating war tend to be ones which have wielded violence most effectively against their fellow citizens/outside enemies – and those institutions are rarely a promising seedbed for peaceful democratic contestation over power.

The Hegemony after the collapse of Karagon is going to look more like China in the 1940s or Turkey in the 1920s than independence-era India. (Or like Japan in the 1940s, but without any democratic victor who can wield authoritarian powers to eventually set up participatory institutions in a forcibly demilitarized country.) It will have been wracked by extensive violence on its own territory and the widespread breakdown of social order. Whatever lessons we take from India’s success, they’re unlikely to apply to the challenge you’re trying to take on in XoR.

That’s most often been discussed in the context of ambitious democratic reforms that are pretty far from the “adjacent” possible. If like Mao or Mustafa Kemal you’re ready to abandon democracy and focus just on breaking a few of the old social hierarchies through brutal wielding of authoritarian control, you should have a higher chance of success on a larger scale.

Both China and Turkey have created new elite hierarchies and new oppressed underclasses, and in Turkey’s case the religious hierarchies Kemal tried hardest to uproot have adapted, regrouped, and taken power. Whether achieving scale justifies the tradeoffs and brutality will also be questionable in XoR’s case.

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In Japan’s case it benefited from having established notionally democratic institutions that were then forced by occupation authorities to legally adhere to their notions.

Not to turn this into the politics thread but this take is burning my fingers. LDP is currently running a minority government and outright lost to the DJP in 2009. The “deep state” didn’t prevent the current reversal and in 2011 DJP incompetence is what won back LDP control.

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Hmm, is that so? I thought it had been devastated by the Battle of Imphal, the Battle of the Indian Ocean, and the guerrilla warfare of the Indian National Army.

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That is true, however Stalin and Mao were able to pull off exactly this in areas under their control without their regimes crumbling even some ancien regimes like Ethiopia back when it was an empire regularly let quite a bit of its people starve in lean times, also without collapsing. Like I said, how feasible that strategy turns out to be in-game would depend on a lot of factors and the mc would need to end up with the strongest faction by far to have a chance to pull it off successfully but I am not discounting the possibility out of hand and anything is better than continuing to harrow a slave caste to feed a rentier elite.

Indeed, for my mc Indian democracy would not be a success because the caste system and many instances of (near) slavery have mostly survived and are even gaining strength again under Modi.

If, like in India, the merchant class/caste, is the only one to truly make meaningful gains in representation and wealth then he would consider himself to have failed because his goal is definitely not to slightly broaden who is in the elite or just to improve his country’s international standing.

Not achieving scale makes you far more likely to be the subject of the brutality of others, like having to comply with fugitive slave laws and granting highly unfavourable treaties however. So I still think that like, post-Ottoman Turkey whatever my mc holds still needs to be a regional power so he can outright refuse to enforce the fugitive slave laws of others.

Still Japan is a curious case too because it still has a “deep state“ bureaucracy and senior civil servants that pretty blatantly favour the LDP, which is of course the party led by the grandsons of some of the worst of its war criminals, and who will sabotage and slow walk any policies put out if and when the opposition briefly manages to gain political power and form a government.

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If we count those as “devastating,” we’ll need to come up with a completely different vocabulary to talk about the effects of war on e.g. China or Sudan or Afghanistan. They’re just not comparable.

Look at where Imphal is on the map of India, and consider that that was the utmost extent of the Japanese threat. The INA tried and failed to be more than an irritant; the Indian Congress leaders who spent the war in prison for their “Quit India” noncooperation posed more of a threat to the regime than the INA did.

How “regular” was that, really? I agree that letting your people starve isn’t an automatic regime collapse trigger, but it’s one of the moments of maximum risk. Even dictators fear bread riots. I’d bet that what Stalin and Mao accomplished at the high-water mark for the credibility of totalitarianism will look more and more exceptional as the years go by. (And thank God.)

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We’re using a lot of 20th century examples here and can’t that be a bit misleading when considering what the Hegemony’s successor states are likely to be able to do with their more 16-17th century non-magical tech baseline?

Non-magical communication is massively slower and even in the case of magical couriers, the bandwidth for communications is still going to be a lot less than 20th century communication methods. That’s going to impact how much coordination is possible and the viability of using representative state structures on a geographically extended scale won’t it?

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Yeah, the topic has been wobbling a little between current reality and the gameworld. :slight_smile: The principle of the “adjacent possible” applies to both, but what’s adjacent to Shayard and what’s adjacent to 1947 India will obviously be rather different.

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While this is a bit of a blind spot in my historical knowledge, India is a very big country. What would devastate most won’t always do so to India. While China has been cited as the opposite end of the spectrum, it has famously also endured such things more easily. The Taiping rebellion killed more people than WW1 but its effect on China was far less than WW1’s on most nations who saw heavy fighting. Russia lost only a fraction of the people in WW1 that China lost in the Taiping Rebellion but the whole government collapsed. Meanwhile the Taiping Rebellion isn’t even the most significant social upheaval of the era.

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