Is Mongolia a State at Risk? An Emory Scholar Investigates
Those shielded by America’s stability and freedom seldom understand the local and global forces that allow countries to be dominated by dictators or ripped apart by civil war. Bruce Knauft, a cultural anthropologist at Emory University, has spent the last few years trying to explain such issues and studying how conflicts that begin within a country affect its surrounding region. This new project has taken Dr. Knauft all over the world, most recenty to Mongolia. It is bankrolled by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.Since conflicts and crises don’t respect national boundaries – as evidenced by the current East African famine – Carnegie’s work on states at risk needed a more regional perspective. It provided Emory a grant for States at Regional Risk, or SARR.
The project holds yearly forums of scholars and students as well as leaders from government, business and civil society. Holding the events locally – in places like Burundi and Ecuador – helps engage stakeholders to find real solutions instead of encouraging scholars to pontificate on events happening half a world away, Dr. Knauft said.
Dr. Knauft has visited the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an interwoven mix of war, famine and disease has claimed an estimated 5 million lives in a humanitarian crisis that has spilled over into neighboring countries. SARR has also worked in the Andes region of South America and held a conference in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, to look at the affect of that country’s civil war on West Africa.
Dr. Knauft set off to Mongolia in June for a SARR conference in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city. The mission had been redefined. The nation of 3 million people wasn’t poised to collapse; in fact, its 20-year move to democracy from Soviet-style socialism had been relatively smooth.
So why study it? Though successful, transitional countries with vast potential need to evaluate the positive and negative aspects of their model to keep from falling backward.
“If you want to have a template for how to improve countries, you want to look at the best-case scenarios or the success stories and not simply the trouble spots,” Dr. Knauft said.
Visiting Mongolia on Aug. 22, Vice President Joe Biden stamped his approval on the country’s political process. He called its five presidential and parliamentary elections since decoupling from Soviet influence “truly remarkable.”
Still, the need for continued improvements in governance is one of the many challenges threatening to darken the Blue Sky Country’s day in the sun.
Mongolia, a $5 billion economy at the moment, is flush with huge untapped deposits of coal, gold, copper and other minerals. With resource-hungry China next door and major mines soon to come online, projections of gross domestic product growth in the coming years have run as high as 23 percent.
While this sounds enviable, the assembly of scholars, policy makers, businesspeople and civil society leaders – both Mongolian and foreign – brought to light some of the problems the country is already facing after seven decades of Soviet domination followed by a rapid shift to capitalism.
A few: desertification, pollution, confusion about history and cultural identity, an indelible shift from herding to urban life and perhaps the biggest of all: concern that Mongolia’s resources will enrich the elite while leaving the poor behind.
“The level of inequality between rich and poor has really skyrocketed,” Dr. Knauft said. “Now you have tremendously wealthy people, and going across Sukhbaatar Square you can see very fancy outfits and cars … but there also people that are very destitute as well. So also that sense of relative poverty even though income levels are increasing, in terms of social and governmental stability, is very strong.”
Dr. Knauft was impressed by the candid conversations among participants. One of them was Jonathan Addleton, the U.S. ambassador to the country, who presented a paper on the country’s need to balance environmental concerns with mining growth that will lead its rush to prosperity. Dr. Addleton has family roots in Middle Georgia. Read: Made for Mongolia: An Ambassador for the Times
SARR will likely march on to the Himalayas next year for a conference on Buddhist nations sandwiched between India and China.
Dr. Knauft, who spent two years living with a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea for doctoral research, clearly relishes his work. His only regret with SARR is that he didn’t have similar time to spend focusing on each country.
“I spent two years in the rainforest, so by academic background I would want to zero in for five or 10 years in one area, one country, one part of one country. It’s fascinating, but the challenge is how anthropology and how academics can be relevant to today’s world,” Dr. Knauft said.
When the project ends in 2013, he plans to host a workshop to “close the loop” on the implications of his work and how the regions studied relate to one another.
The project holds yearly forums of scholars and students as well as leaders from government, business and civil society. Holding the events locally – in places like Burundi and Ecuador – helps engage stakeholders to find real solutions instead of encouraging scholars to pontificate on events happening half a world away, Dr. Knauft said.
Dr. Knauft has visited the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an interwoven mix of war, famine and disease has claimed an estimated 5 million lives in a humanitarian crisis that has spilled over into neighboring countries. SARR has also worked in the Andes region of South America and held a conference in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, to look at the affect of that country’s civil war on West Africa.
Dr. Knauft set off to Mongolia in June for a SARR conference in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city. The mission had been redefined. The nation of 3 million people wasn’t poised to collapse; in fact, its 20-year move to democracy from Soviet-style socialism had been relatively smooth.
So why study it? Though successful, transitional countries with vast potential need to evaluate the positive and negative aspects of their model to keep from falling backward.
“If you want to have a template for how to improve countries, you want to look at the best-case scenarios or the success stories and not simply the trouble spots,” Dr. Knauft said.
Visiting Mongolia on Aug. 22, Vice President Joe Biden stamped his approval on the country’s political process. He called its five presidential and parliamentary elections since decoupling from Soviet influence “truly remarkable.”
Still, the need for continued improvements in governance is one of the many challenges threatening to darken the Blue Sky Country’s day in the sun.
Mongolia, a $5 billion economy at the moment, is flush with huge untapped deposits of coal, gold, copper and other minerals. With resource-hungry China next door and major mines soon to come online, projections of gross domestic product growth in the coming years have run as high as 23 percent.
While this sounds enviable, the assembly of scholars, policy makers, businesspeople and civil society leaders – both Mongolian and foreign – brought to light some of the problems the country is already facing after seven decades of Soviet domination followed by a rapid shift to capitalism.
A few: desertification, pollution, confusion about history and cultural identity, an indelible shift from herding to urban life and perhaps the biggest of all: concern that Mongolia’s resources will enrich the elite while leaving the poor behind.
“The level of inequality between rich and poor has really skyrocketed,” Dr. Knauft said. “Now you have tremendously wealthy people, and going across Sukhbaatar Square you can see very fancy outfits and cars … but there also people that are very destitute as well. So also that sense of relative poverty even though income levels are increasing, in terms of social and governmental stability, is very strong.”
Dr. Knauft was impressed by the candid conversations among participants. One of them was Jonathan Addleton, the U.S. ambassador to the country, who presented a paper on the country’s need to balance environmental concerns with mining growth that will lead its rush to prosperity. Dr. Addleton has family roots in Middle Georgia. Read: Made for Mongolia: An Ambassador for the Times
SARR will likely march on to the Himalayas next year for a conference on Buddhist nations sandwiched between India and China.
Dr. Knauft, who spent two years living with a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea for doctoral research, clearly relishes his work. His only regret with SARR is that he didn’t have similar time to spend focusing on each country.
“I spent two years in the rainforest, so by academic background I would want to zero in for five or 10 years in one area, one country, one part of one country. It’s fascinating, but the challenge is how anthropology and how academics can be relevant to today’s world,” Dr. Knauft said.
When the project ends in 2013, he plans to host a workshop to “close the loop” on the implications of his work and how the regions studied relate to one another.
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