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And you will be held as responsible for exploiting the country if you do actually manage to end the conflict and bring about positive economic change. People d

• throwaway27448 7mo ago
  You can develop a country without extracting its wealth.
  • Drakim 7mo ago
    Can you? When our economic system's only driver is "extracting wealth", can we actually develop a country without it? The extraction of wealth isn't some unfortunate byproduct, it's a central cog in the machine of what makes it operate. Money is invested for returns.
    • ahhhhnoooo 7mo ago
      You two are using different definitions for "can". You are using it in the "is it probable or realistic to expect it" sense and the parent poster is using it in the "is it mechanically possible" sense. I think it's possible to imagine a way in which a country could be delivered money and expertise to develop with no expectation of return on investment. (One needs only read conquest of bread to see I'm not alone in believing such a thing is mechanically possible.) But I also agree it's vanishingly unlikely.
    • watwut 7mo ago
      What you described is not "developing the country". It is "colonization and extraction of wealth".
    • throwaway27448 7mo ago
      Yes. It's misanthropic to expect returns and has driven decades of unnecessary war and violence.
  • cucumber3732842 7mo ago
    So work for free? Who would invest in facilities, develop workforces, etc, without a payoff?
    • cess11 7mo ago
      How does China approach this?
      • achierius 7mo ago
        Clearly they don't. They don't tend to occupy other countries, not outside of immediate territorial claims like Tibet (if you think that constitutes an "other" country)
      • cucumber3732842 7mo ago
        They finance projects with terms that drive business to Chinese companies. The Congo gets a highway. A Chinese construction company makes a buck. The financiers make a buck. Business relationships are created and the people who get the highway use that highway to import Chinese goods. That's how it's supposed to work, when it works. I'm sure it's gotten better with time. https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/486/992/0f8.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/486/992/0f8...
        • throwaway27448 7mo ago
          The congo is basically the worst possible example you could have found for this—china notoriously doesn't invest in local infrastructure. There are literally hundreds of better examples across africa and south and central america and central asia and southeast asia.
    • ahhhhnoooo 7mo ago
      I would. I regularly do. One of the underpinning core beliefs of anarchist theory is "wellbeing for all". Every human deserves the best conditions we can collectively give each other, and we should all be working not for our individual enrichment, but for the enrichment of us all. Some people genuinely believe that helping others get bigger quality of life is more important than helping themselves get rich. It's not impossible to believe that such a community, if it grew large enough, would extend that belief to spaces like factories and workforces.
  • WarmWash 7mo ago
    No, not really. Developing the country is effectively a service being performed, and a wildly expensive one at that. Never mind the high instability greatly increasing the risk of investment. And the ROI is likely decades in the future, during which time any tyrant can come to power and seize all your stuff for their state. So if the people of Sudan wanted to buy "country rebuilding service", the only way they could finance the loan to pay for that would be by offering their resources to skilled foreign enterprises to convert to usable resources. Then run the risk numbers and you get a crazy interest rate, that will last decades. If all goes well, Sudan gets a functioning society with a skilled workforce, the foreign players get a nice ROI and made whole for the service they performed, and everyone comes away happy. The problem is, that places like this are so chronically unstable, and the people so in tune with living in unstable, that it is practically guaranteed to go sideways.
• kmeisthax 7mo ago
  "25 years of colonization" is doing some pretty heavy lifting. The reason why there are no competent Sudanese to run the country is specifically because colonizers went in and destroyed all of the home-grown institutions Sudan had and replaced them with ones locals didn't trust, but were more legible to the colonizers. This is why decolonization has been a failure in some countries: removing the boot doesn't help after you've smashed someone's face in. The countries that did benefit from decolonization had a unique pattern to them: they all had lacking or inadequate institutions before they were colonized. But colonizers don't build infrastructure for free, and the people being colonized know that. Colonial infrastructure tends to only be good for the needs of the colonizers' resource extraction industries. That's what puts distrust into the heart of the people in those countries in the first place, and why the success stories are rare. You are correct that some sort of political force needs to be put in place to serve as a functioning institution in Sudan. However, colonial powers are very bad at doing that, because it's easier and cheaper to just smash and grab.
  • therobots927 7mo ago
    I’m surprised you’re being so polite. The parent just called for colonization of a region that has been colonized by proxy for some time now. In fact current events are a direct result of said colonization.
  • dntrshnthngjxct 7mo ago
    This is just a lazy argument: polities build their infrastructure also based on resource extraction, but from that economic opportunities follow, so people and communities gather around them making infrastructure also useful for them. It's like saying roman roads were bad because built by the empire, when even after centuries it fell, they were used by the locals. The problem is that there was no know-how passage, not that said infrastructures exist, and if anything they are still useful to them.
• sosomoxie 7mo ago
  Colonizing only helps the colonizers, not the indigenous population. > So you end up with 25 years of being held responsible (by the world and by the local population) As they should.
  • achenet 7mo ago
    > Colonizing only helps the colonizers, not the indigenous population. I am not sure that this statement is completely true in all cases. Take for example the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean. Romans tended to win their wars because they had superior organization - they could field more armies, and equip those armies, better than their adversaries, even if their adversaries had better commanders (eg Hannibal). Once conquered by the Romans, the indigenous population got access to all the benefits of being part of Rome's 'empire' - access to what was then one of the largest trade network, the roads, the aqueducts, the Roman legal system... I do believe, although, not being a professional historian I have the humility to admit my belief could be wrong, than overall being conquered by the Romans led to an overall increase in living standards for the local population. Or consider the brutal conquest of what is now Mexico by the Spanish. We rightly remember the conquistadors as being incredibly violent and oppressive, but if large swaths of the local population chose to join them in their assault on the Aztec empire, it may have been because the Aztecs were even more violent - indeed, if my understanding of Aztec culture is correct, the Aztec religion required a human sacrifice every day to ensure that the sun would rise. Compared to that, arguably even the Spanish Inquisition is a step up. Finally, consider that the practice of slavery in what is now Algeria ended only in 1830, when the French colonized it. Now you can accuse the French colonizers of being vicious brutes (and you'd have a lot of evidence to support that claim), but... at least they weren't enslaving anyone. Of course, this last point makes a value judgement that basically boils down to "slavery is always bad", if you have a value system where "some things, including colonization/colonial/imperialist violence are worse than slavery, then you can safely discount it ^_^
• tovej 7mo ago
  Are you under the impression that Sudan was not under British colonial rule for ~50-60 years? This completely wrecked their economy and political structures, with the British intentionally causing divides between ethnic groups in Sudan and Egypt. And are you seriously claiming that this was a good thing? Is this some crazy new neo-conservative take about the West being the only block that can be "civilized"?
  • jimberlage 7mo ago
    I don't think this was the British. (Not to apologize for them - they certainly made things worse, not better.) Sudan sits on a historical chattel slavery route that stretches back to Roman times. It's hallmarked by the Northern population raiding the south, along racial lines. Scholarly article for reference if you want to learn more: https://www.jstor.org/stable/827888 https://www.jstor.org/stable/827888
    • tovej 7mo ago
      I'm not arguing saying the British are solely responsible (I'm not sure who is most responsible). But the point is that the parent's claim that colonization would solve political issues in Sudan is ridiculous.
  • cameldrv 7mo ago
    A typical British colonial strategy was to ally with a minority ethnic group. The formerly downtrodden minority group now got to be the leaders, but, being the minority, they would stay dependent on the British, else the majority would rise up and kill them. In the post colonial world unfortunately that is what happened in a number of cases.
  • nradov 7mo ago
    Let's say that all of the problems in Sudan are the fault of British colonialism. (I don't think that's completely correct but just for the sake of argument.) The British are gone and not coming back in any significant numbers. Now what? What is the solution?
  • anovikov 7mo ago
• notabotiswear 7mo ago
  Ok, I HAD to create an account to respond to this one. Like 99.99% of this continent, Sudan was under colonial rule. And it lasted nearly sixty years if you only count the British one (The Ottomans had a sting earlier). Now I do fancy myself anti-imperialist, but even I cannot deny that the Brits did all that. They established systems, trained generations of locals, and left a decent seed for a competent state and economy. But still, here we are! One could argue that this “intervention” was itself a cause of this civil war. Stitching a country out of completely different -and perhaps even incompatible- racial and ethnic elements a great deal of which don’t even recognise any political borders, leave one dictated by an outsider, wasn’t exactly going to end any other way. Personally, while I do believe the Brits share the blame, I don’t assign them much of it. This hellhole had been ruled by its people for 68 years now, during which we’ve repeated the same weak democracy-junta cycle three times (four if you count the last transitional gov). The ability to notice patterns is like entry-level human skill…