Count Ethnic Divisions, Not Bombs, to Tell if a Nation Will Recover From War

From a column in today’s New York Times:

The second measures how squiggly the borders of a country are. Straight lines are usually the sign of an arbitrary colonial mapmaker. Natural barriers like rivers and mountains seldom look tidy. Taking the measures of partitioning and neat borders, their study compares the performance of countries with natural borders to those with artificial ones and finds, overwhelmingly, that artificial nations suffer terribly — lower income, horribly ineffective and corrupt governments, less respect for the law, low literacy, limited access to clean water, poor health care, you name it.
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Iraq, especially, is a straight-edged, ethnically partitioned nation wracked with internal strife. And having oil wealth is unlikely to save the day. Fragmented countries with natural resources often do worse because civil war rages over who gets to keep the money.