Formula making for conflict resolution is a large business. It is promoted by mutually admiring intellectuals, writers, ex-politicians, human right activists, NGOs and mobile citizens. Mixed up with the human rights industry, it is also a respectable occupation. Globally linked, even funded and supported, such formula factories mushroom the world over. They are honoured as doves. Any one differing from them is, by definition, a hawk, opposed to peace.
These factories have a standard diagnosis for all kinds of terror. That it is poverty, deprivation and unemployment that force the desperate youth into militancy. This logic yields a standard prescription for eradicating terror. And that is: ``educate them, address their poverty, you can stamp out terrorism.'' At heart is the assumption that poverty and low education breed terror. Does this match with the anatomy of terror?
Robert Barro, a professor of economics in Harvard University and a senior fellow of Hoover Institution, says that the belief that poverty and low education cause terror may well be a myth. According to Barro ``it may be naive to think that increases in levels of income and education will by themselves lower international terrorism.'' This conclusion is based on a study of the profile of terror, terrorists and their societies made by scholars at Princeton University. Barro advises that ``to find a lasting answer for the terrorism problem we have to continue to look elsewhere'. (Business Week, Asian ed
