Anarchy, Security, and Freedom

In the last blog post, we told some stories about the government and how it impacts our everyday lives.

What if there was no government? What is the absence of government called?

Let's talk about anarchy in this post.

Anarchy, which as we mentioned in class is the absence of hierarchy, is an ideal concept. We can never find pure anarchy in real life.



Conditions in contemporary Somalia, however, offer an approximation to anarchy. Government in any formal sense has little practical hold on life there. Instead of an overarching government (what we call a "federal" government or even "local" government), there are competing tribes, clans, warlords, religious factions, mercenary groups, pirates, and so on throughout the territory.

Somalia has been consistently ranked as the worst failed state on the Failed States Index published annually by Foreign Policy magazine.

Yet, Benjamin Powell says:

It is hard to call any country mired in poverty an economic success. Yet by most measures Somalia’s poverty is diminishing and Somalia has improved living standards faster than the average sub-Saharan African country since the early 1990s. In that sense Somalia is at least a relative success story. The most interesting part of Somalia’s success is that it has all been achieved while the country has lacked any effective central government.

For many, the “A” word—anarchy—conjures up notions of chaos. For others it simply means the absence of a single government ruling a geographic area. In this second sense, Somalia has been in a state of anarchy since the fall of Siad Barre’s dictatorship in 1991. The result has been, in general, economic development rather than chaos—although there certainly have been chaotic periods. The interesting questions are how has development been promoted and what has caused the chaos.

In the film Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, many people are heavily armed. No government means no police. In Somalia and post-Apocalyptic Australia alike, people must provide for their own security and they are free to make a living however they choose. Life, you might optimistically say, would be filled with surprise, action, and a level of risk beyond what most of us have ever experienced. Less optimistically, like Thomas Hobbes, we might say that life would be "solitary, nasty, brutish and short."

At the same time, the anarchy of Somalia and the anarchy of The Road Warrior is not chaotic. In post-Apocalyptic Australia, for instance, Lord Humongous as a following. He's clearly in charge and his band of marauders provide a level of collective security not available to most people living there. In Somalia, people are struggling in a more open and less structured fashion, but there is still a level of everyday order. Money is being made by some people and there is enough stability for some people to spend their money on goods (e.g. food, fuel, clothing) and services (e.g. pirating is a service that some people in Somalia provide).

What do you think? Does a place like the anarchical Somalia or post-Apocalyptic Australia have something to offer that a governed society lacks? Does less government and less publicly provided security mean more freedom? Would you rather be secured by police officers that sometimes take liberties with their jobs, or would you rather be secured by Somalian technicals like those shown in the pictures above? Is the freedom that Mad Max has to roam the landscape worth the risk of anarchy? Is it 'really' freedom at all?