Fixing The Most Violent Countries On Earth - Rachel Kleinfeld - #068

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to Podcast Land. Today, my guest is Rachel Kleinfeld, and we're talking about the most violent societies on earth. Sounds like a existential crisis waiting to happen, but it's actually quite hopeful. So Rachel is an advisor to the UK and US government, among many other organizations, and the new book, A Savage Order, looks at all of the different ways that societies can organize themselves into disarray. So from gang violence to electoral violence, organized crime, and a whole bunch of other nasty situations you don't want to be involved in. Rachel's done a fantastic analysis of why those situations arise, but more importantly, she's looked at the strategies which can be implemented to stop corruption and to halt and reverse these issues and situations. It's the mark of policymakers to strategize, but not execute, I think, based on some of the things that she says today. And it does fill me with quite a bit of hope that we've got people like Rachel, who are not only grappling with the data, but also making plans to make the world a better place. So please welcome Rachel Kleinfeld.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Rachel Kleinfeld, Modern Wisdom, how are you today?

**Rachel Kleinfeld** (1:38)
Very well, great to be here, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (1:40)
I'm really excited to speak to you today. It's a turbulent time in politics and the 21st century for governments trying to make themselves work effectively. So I think it's gonna be a really interesting conversation. I'm reading your bio here. A senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, is that right? Those sounds like situations where there's lots of serious stuff happening all the time.

**Rachel Kleinfeld** (2:12)
Well, there's certainly a lot of attempts to have serious conversations about serious issues, yes. But the world of think tanks in Washington DC is one of advising. So we advise our government, we advise your government in Britain and all around the world trying to make a difference.

**Chris Williamson** (2:33)
Yeah. Something tells me that you don't get much time to just like crack jokes and kind of chill out. It's probably a lot of serious stuff.

**Rachel Kleinfeld** (2:42)
We have our fun, but I'm not present there very often. I spend an awful lot of time at 40,000 feet. So flying from place to place. So my fun is generally on the fly in different countries doing, eating street food in Afghanistan or riding lorries in Bangladesh, that kind of thing.

**Chris Williamson** (3:01)
That's pretty cool. So we're going to talk about A Savage Order, which is your new book. Can you tell us why you started writing this and what did you want to find out when you began?

**Rachel Kleinfeld** (3:15)
Absolutely. So when you work in a think tank, there's a lot of serious talk, as you've discussed, but there can also be a lot of talk that doesn't really go anywhere. And so I wanted to see, could we do anything about the problem of violence? I spent all my time reading about it, thinking about it. How do we end conflicts? What do we do about violence? And it turned out we knew very little about what actually worked. And so I pulled together a big conference. I brought together the experts on electoral violence, on organized crime, on gang violence. You know, you have it. We had them all in our room together. If a bomb had gone off in that room, the massive brain power on violence would have been ended. And I said, you know, what do we know? And we put together a literature review on, here's all that we knew, which was quite a lot.
We had a great deal of knowledge actually about how you fight gangs, how you get better policing, all sorts of things. And then I said, okay, well, how would you get a corrupt police force in X country to adopt these ideas? And, you know, the room just went silent. And I thought, okay, that's the problem I need to focus on for this book.

**Chris Williamson** (4:18)
Wow. So you must have had to include certain areas and exclude other ones. Were there certain geographic locations that you focused on?

**Rachel Kleinfeld** (4:28)
Yeah. So when I first wrote the book, I thought it would be a pretty typical think tank book of lots of little ideas, that, you know, lots of little different kinds of violence and different ways to fight it. And so I picked case studies on every continent on earth that was settled. So not Antarctica, but everywhere else.

**Chris Williamson** (4:42)