The thousands of migrants risking their lives to escape from the chaos, poverty and state failure that seems endemic in much of sub-Saharan Africa in a desperate to reach Europe would be likely to agree with their analysis – if they ever had the luxury of reading it. Looking around the world at the moment, though, one might be forgiven for thinking that Singer and Wildavsky had a point – whatever their original intentions for writing may have been.
Some also took exception to the privileging of an effective state as a prerequisite for social order. That such countries were generally found in places like Europe and North America, and that the whole agenda smacked of a rather unfashionable form of so-called “modernization” theory, meant that some critics dismissed the book as yet another Eurocentric apologia for American/Western dominance. The secret to escaping from the chaos and mayhem of the non-democratic world was to adopt the culture and institutions of the successful democracies. One of the reasons it was relegated to the occasional footnote was that it offended some readers with its troubling central thesis: the world was essentially divided between democratic zones of peace and what they called zones of turmoil and development. As is the way with such things, after making a bit of an initial splash it rather disappeared beneath the waves of subsequent scholarship, never to be seen again. More than 20 years ago, two American academics, Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, wrote about what they described as The Real World Order: Zones of Peace/Zones of Turmoil.
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