Worldview Magazine - Fall 2007 - (Page 7)

Lafayette Park Graphing the peaceful places Loret’s Peace Corps legacy PAX METRICS In an era when competition runs high, success is now carefully measured graph by graph. Metrics rule and global indexes that pit one country against another have become a way to clarify conditions in chaos and shift, to enable organizations to rank economies from poor to rich, communities from healthy to deadly, governments from transparent to corrupt. Nations are ranked by press freedom and their rate of human development. Foreign Policy magazine just published their annual Failed States index and gave Liberia, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo points for most improved, and ranked Lebanon least improved. e magazine’s editors went a little further in their judgment of governance to distinguish three heads of state for leading their nations to rack and ruin: Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Idriss Déby of Chad. Two have been in power for more than 17 years apiece, and Mugabe has been running things for 27 years. Mugabe was the only one ever elected to the job. e creation of some of these indexes leads to some subjective judgments because some of the factors are a little harder to quantify than the Dow Jones industrial averages, but every year the nations of the world get ranked. e Global Peace Index is the newest global ranking of 121 countries and when it was launched by its founder, Australian entrepreneur Steve Killelea, and the staﬀ of the Economist Intelligence Unit at the Washington, D.C. brieﬁng, there were a few people who didn’t like what they heard. e declaration that the United States came fairly low on the list surprised no one in the room. Since World War II, America has armed itself and the west so that just about no one else had to. But from the back of the room came one protest, “Why in heavens name do the U.S. and Iran end up in a virtual dead heat?” Actually, the United States was in 96th position, .003 ahead of Iran. Our own poor showing was not just over the invasion and military presence for four years in Iraq but our own high prison populations and the incidence of violent crime within our borders. e same protestant voiced frustration that Israel was bunched at the bottom of the heap with Russia, Sudan and Iraq. “It’s a mathematical exercise, not a value judgment,” said Leo Abruzzese of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s operations in North America. From the other side of the room an unidentiﬁed man wondered why Zimbabwe at No. 106 was so close to South Africa, only seven places above it. He sounded quite irritated by the company, and someone guessed aloud that he must be from South Africa. Again, Abruzzese could only plead impartiality but later acknowledged that the weights assigned to each of the 33 factors did allow for some qualitative judgments. eir ﬁrst-year results are on the Internet at www. visionofhumanity.com. eir eight-month-long look at the numbers reveals one overall bit of good news: e number of armed conﬂicts– international and civil wars–has decreased dramatically since 1990, but since 2002 intrastate warfare has picked up again. e creators of the Global Peace Index will expand the number of countries on the list–several in Africa and Asia were excluded for lack of good data–and ﬁne-tune the criteria. In their attempt to identify the drivers of peace the indexers came to the not-so-surprising conclusion that small politically stable democracies that are peaceful usually have a high level of prosperity: 15 of the 20 countries of western Europe and put the Scandinavians in three of the top 6 spots, Ireland was a surprising 4th because much of the IRA violence occurred in England–not Ireland–and prior to the ﬁve-year study period. e quality and reputation of global indexing seems to improve with age, so the Economist Intelligence Unit promises to return next summer with Killelea’s second annual national rankings of peacefulness. Time will tell if the Global Peace Index is valid, or the measurment of peace possible. Clarence Fox THE LORETS Soft-spoken Jim Leach was for 15 terms Iowa’s respected liberal Republican in Congress and now lectures on politics at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Aﬀairs. He came back to Washington in May to the Director’s Forum, a Peace Corps headquarters lecture series. Leach’s topic was the survival of the Peace Corps after the Nixon administration. While introducing Leach, Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter announced that the lecture series will be named for the agency’s longest-serving director, Loret Miller Ruppe. Ruppe was heir to the Miller brewing fortune and the wife of former Congressman Phil Ruppe. She was appointed by Ronald Reagan after running the Gipper’s successful Michigan campaign and was later named ambassador to Norway. She died 11 years ago of cancer. To the surprise of some–and with Leach’s help in Congress–Ruppe extricated the agency from Nixon’s attempt to bury it in a bureaucracy called ACTION. She championed Peace Corps on Capitol Hill and in foreign capitals and expanded the size of the volunteer corps and the countries where they serve. With a zeal for the mission, she gained the loyalty of volunteers the world over because she understood what they were trying to do. She championed gender and development issues with projects that WorldView 7 http://www.visionofhumanity.com http://www.visionofhumanity.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Worldview Magazine - Fall 2007

Worldview - Fall 2007 Contents Presiden'ts Note Lafayette Park Introduction Interview Commentary Editor's Note Letter from Rumbek, Sudan Listings Letter from Yekaterinburg, Russia Letter from Codaesti, Romania Letter from Catia La Mar, Venezuela Letter from Gumare, Botswana Letter from Ridder, Kazakhstan Letter from Rincon, Cape Verde Letter from Port Au Prince Another Country Community News Giving Back Opinion

Worldview Magazine - Fall 2007

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