Paul Collier has been on my mind recently. He’s written tons about coups and how they can sometimes provide useful checks on unrestrained power of emerging democracies. Of course, Honduras isn’t exactly and emerging democracy. It’s been there for years. Still, Collier, who wrote The Bottom Billion and, more recently, Wars Guns and Votes, is a wealth of knowledge about conflict in the developing world.
Here is Collier giving a Ted@State lecture at the State Department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters earlier this month on how the international community can do post-conflict recovery better.