I had set up a new blog, thinking that BlogSome was gone for good. However, I only got around to one post, which is reprinted below:

Having left the region of Nukehavistan (another new ’stan after Ethniklashistan!), it is good to be in Mongolia, where although there is a great deal of self-censorship people can criticize the government without the official threat of any prosecution/persecution. The context for development plays a huge role in determining the activities, their course (working with govterment, civil society and/or implementing the projects independently) and their level of success. Sometimes, environmental factors can be overcome, but it seems to require a magical combination of pre-project insight, strong leadership, and the will of the local partners (public, NGO, government) to make it succeed. This is a rare combination, but there are many additional factors that can influence this positively or negatively (way money is disbursed, focus on anticorruption or sustainability). Is there a single formula? Probably not, but there seems to be better strategies than others. More to come soon…

Sorry for the delay, BlogSome was mysteriously down for the month of August, and I’ve been caught in a whirlwind of activity since.

I’m back in the United States, having returned to the Ivory Tower. Interestingly, my Central Asia travels have given me a powerful new perspective on political theory. I have seen that things which are ipso facto true are false in Central Asia. For example, Adam Smith uses a pin factory to illustrate how the division of labor makes the pin-making process more efficient, thus lowering the cost of a pin: rather than each worker doing every step, each person simply repeats one task over and over again, maximizing his skill and allowing for greater standardization among pins. However, upon reflection, I realized that this lofty ideal would never work in Central Asia: someone would show up late, swipe a necessary piece of machinery, bribe his way out of work (this happens with the Uzbek cotton harvest, which university students are ‘required’ to participate in), or simply try to take some of the pins to sell on his own. Now, I’m not trying to be racist or anything - this scenario likely plays itself out all over the world, and probably external factors made it work in eighteenth-century England, such as the high opportunity cost (i.e. once you had a job you wanted to keep it because there was nothing else to do). Nevertheless, I never realized until now how many assumptions Smith really makes; his workers must understand a range of concepts (social contract, rule of law) entirely foreign to the people I met this summer. Does this mean that democracy promotion will inherently fail? It seems so, but I’m not sure. Stay tuned…