Until families are safe and democratic, society will not be. You have to address one before you can the other.
—Pamela Shifman
Although the Syndrome has obvious and direct effects on conventional measures of governance and national security, including violence, instability, regime type, and certain aspects of economic performance (delineated in chapters 4 and 5), a wide variety of other effects of the Syndrome also, perhaps less directly but no less profoundly, affect the security and stability of the nation-state. These might be grouped under the concepts of human, economic, and environmental security, and speak more to the health, demography, social progress, food security, economic welfare, and environmental quality of human life within the nation-state. Although perhaps not traditional security-related variables, the national security establishment of the United States often uses these types of variables to forecast political instability.1 figure 6.1 attempts to show how the Syndrome affects societal outcomes other than conflict and governance.
FIGURE 6.1 Ancillary Effects of the Syndrome
Let us begin at a natural beginning: fertility. Ceteris paribus, the more a nation-state is enmeshed in the Syndrome, the higher its birth rate will be. This is due to several interlocking reasons. First, in a kin-based power system, kin are power, or as Edward Schatz puts it “if a Kazakh gets rich, he accumulates wives…Progeny was a preferred resource, since it produced a web of kin-related supporters who could consolidate authority and provide labor. Material wealth, by contrast, was ephemeral.”2 This worldview emphasizes having a sufficient number of sons for the father to hold a valued place in the patriline and in the larger polity. As Abdul Al Lily explains about Saudi Arabia, “Men are known for liking to have many children. This is because, when one has many children, he becomes powerful. When a stranger attacks a father, all his many sons will protect him.”3
A second reason explaining the tendency toward higher birth rates is that in societies encoding the Syndrome, the age of marriage for women is depressed, and therefore women have little voice in the affairs of the household, including those concerning family planning. The health effects of a high birth rate for the mother are, if considered at all, of secondary consequence.
Consider the story of Guljan from Afghanistan, a woman interviewed in 2014:
I am 21 and I have three children…. Personally I don’t want any more children, but my husband wants one after another. I don’t know what he is going to do with all these children. I grew up in a large family and I married into a large family. I don’t know about condoms or birth control or other stuff. I just keep delivering children. It seems in our neighborhood families usually have 12 to 13 children. They don’t care about other things, they just want their dinner table to be filled with children and that’s all. In families where the husband has more wives they’ll have even more. If they expect 13 from one wife then more from other wives, the number will be more than 25. If the baby is a boy or girl, for myself it does not matter, but for men, they keep saying it should be boy. Unfortunately, my children are all girls. It absolutely matters to my in-laws. They only want a boy and that’s all.4
Zarghona, twenty-eight years old and with six children, tells a similar tale:
Here in Afghanistan having children is not something a woman decides. Whatever men want is what happens. If my husband wants it, I will surely have more children. Most men usually want more than six children, but it will be whatever the man wishes. If in a family where there is only one wife and the man desires to have six children, then you can just imagine if there is more than one wife, then for sure there will be more children—maybe twelve, but sometimes up to twenty children. In Afghanistan men don’t think about the future, they just want as many children as possible. They don’t worry about how the children live or whether they are healthy or not. I don’t know why this is.5
Besides the obvious effects on women’s health of continual childbearing, it has also been found that, “Household size and the number of births that the woman had are positively correlated with [domestic] violence, probably due to the stress of supporting large families.”6 High fertility rates are not conducive to the national welfare; in the words of Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, “political instability and violence often follow hard on the heels of high birthrates,” noting that in 2008, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency asserted that “rapid population growth [was] the number one problem in national security.”7 For example, high birth rates are associated with youth bulges, which, in turn, are associated with higher levels of instability,8 such as was seen in the Arab revolutions of 2011 and 2012.9 Economists Noah Bricker and Mark Foley conclude that “historical evidence shows some of the most violent periods of unrest in human history are linked to the presence of large youth cohorts.”10
It is also true that although virtually all high-fertility societies encode the Syndrome, not all high-Syndrome-encoding societies have high fertility. As Farzaneh Roudi of the Population Reference Bureau notes about the Middle East and North Africa region, “In Bahrain, Lebanon, Iran, Tunisia, and Turkey, fertility rates are now around 2 births per woman. In Yemen, where the risk of maternal death is highest, fertility has declined from an average of 6.5 children to 4.4 children per woman over the past 20 years.”11 But fertility decline has also stalled and even reversed in other nations in the region, such as in Egypt, where the fertility rate has rebounded to the same level as it was twenty years ago.
High birth rates and young age of marriage for girls (not to mention the devaluation of women’s lives) are a recipe for high maternal mortality and morbidity rates and high infant mortality rates. Again, it is the case that nearly all high-maternal-mortality-rate countries are also Syndrome countries, although several high-Syndrome-encoding states have relatively low maternal mortality, such as Saudi Arabia. Maternal morbidity is an important issue, with, for example, high rates of fistula reported, especially in child brides who are much more likely to be found in Syndrome-encoding countries.12 Part of this linkage involves differential feeding practices for male and female members of the household in societies where female life is devalued, which disproportionately increases levels of malnutrition and anemia for women, putting them at risk during pregnancy and childbirth. Another element involves the sheer physical harm caused by childbearing on the bodies of young girls, as Rachel Vogelstein notes:
Child brides are frequently unable to negotiate sexual relationships with their husbands and lack access to contraception…. Girls aged fifteen to nineteen are twice as likely to die from causes related to pregnancy or childbirth than women in their twenties, and girls under the age of fifteen are five times more likely to die. Complications from pregnancy and childbearing are the leading cause of death for girls aged fifteen to nineteen in the developing world. Prolonged or obstructed labor is common for adolescent mothers and can lead to debilitating conditions, such as obstetric fistula…and stillbirths and infant mortality are 50 percent more likely when mothers are under the age of twenty, and the risks of prematurity, low birth weight, and childhood malnutrition increase as well.13
Undervaluation of female lives may lead to a higher infectious disease burden and lower life expectancy for both men and women in such societies.14 Vogelstein notes that child marriage puts girls at special risk of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, particularly in polygynous cultures where they would usually be married to older husbands.15 And, of course, HIV can be transmitted to any resulting children. The typically large difference in age between a girl bride and her husband means that “an insurmountable power differential precludes autonomous decision-making” in the home.16 With little female voice in household affairs in Syndrome societies, men may also demonstrate little constraint on the consumption of masculine-coded commodities, such as alcohol and cigarettes. Furthermore, women may be less educated in Syndrome societies, meaning their ability to properly care for the health needs of their family members—a gendered role typically assigned to women globally—is compromised. As a result, the issues of infant and child mortality are also influenced by women’s subordination in Syndrome countries.
The gendered role of caretaking may carry its own risks for women. For example, in the Ebola crisis of 2014 in West Africa, approximately 75 percent of the victims were women, because women were those tasked with caring for ill family members.17 In the 2005 Asian tsunami, estimates are that four times as many women died compared with men, because they were carrying young children and also, by and large, had not been taught either to swim or to climb trees, as had the men. These disproportionate deaths of women also negatively affect the chance for survival of surviving children as well as cause significant sex ratio imbalances.18
Health, sustainable population, and well-being are not the only societal values compromised by the subordinate status of women. Food security in Syndrome countries, where women do the lion’s share of agricultural labor (such as in sub-Saharan Africa), is also undermined.19 As the former president of Ghana John Dramani Mahama stated at a recent agricultural summit, “Africa must achieve food security for its people by increasing agricultural productivity…. This cannot be done without the active participation of the African woman.”20
Many obstacles impede female participation in the agricultural sector. The first is the intense time poverty of most women, especially in the developing world. Women may be responsible for laboring on cash crops, and their income then goes to the male head of household, leaving them less time to cultivate the subsistence crops on which the women and children must depend. Furthermore, assistance and training provided to women farmers may be inferior to that provided to male farmers. Indeed, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations estimates that if women were given the same agricultural inputs as men, malnutrition would drop by 17 percent globally.21
The lack of land rights for women in Syndrome countries also plays a major role in food insecurity. Consider Morocco: as explained by sociologist Zakia Salime, 50.6 percent of agricultural labor comes from women, and 92 percent of those women laborers work in farming. And yet only 4 percent of agricultural land holders are women. Salime notes that “the marginal status of women with regard to land tenure does not reflect the importance of their labor force and knowledge in farming…. Women’s lack of access to land is certainly the most challenging facet of rural poverty, and the biggest obstacle to sustainable development in the countryside.”22
As with all things related to the Syndrome, the interlocking effects are multidimensional. Thus, in addition to these links to food insecurity, lack of women’s property rights, especially the right to land, has also been linked to higher child morbidity and malnutrition, lower household savings, and lower expenditures on children’s education.23 As agricultural economist Stanley Sharaunga and colleagues observe, gender-sensitive programming can make a real difference in agricultural development outcomes: “women can be empowered through crop management skills, farm financial management skills, improved level of water use security, animal husbandry skills and weed and pest management skills. In the economic arenas, women can be empowered in economic agency, financial capital, human capital, vocational skills and physical capital forms of empowerment.”24
Ironically, then, even though the Syndrome is designed to maximize resource access by men relative to women, overall prosperity, general speaking, is typically lower in Syndrome countries (as touched on in chapters 4 and 5). It is almost as if gendered relative gains are much more important (if the gains are for men)—or threatening (if the gains are for women)—than absolute gains for everyone in society. The subordination of women and their exclusion from the labor force as well as from the marketplace of ideas profoundly undermines economic growth. A recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. demonstrates the point well: “A ‘full potential’ scenario in which women participate in the economy identically to men would add up to $28 trillion, or 26 percent, to annual global GDP by 2025 compared with a business-as-usual scenario. This impact is roughly equivalent to the size of the combined Chinese and U.S. economies today.” McKinsey also explored an “alternative ‘best in region’ scenario in which all countries match the progress toward gender parity of the fastest-improving country in their region,” finding that this added as much as “$12 trillion in annual 2025 GDP, equivalent in size to the current GDP of Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom combined.”25 Absolute gains are sacrificed to maintain greater resource access by men in Syndrome-encoding societies; otherwise, the incentive structure supporting the security provision mechanism of the fraternal alliance would be subverted.
The World Bank corroborated these findings with its own report in 2018, appropriately entitled “Unrealized Potential.”26 The report finds:
• Globally, women account for only 38 percent of human capital wealth versus 62 percent for men. In low- and lower-middle income countries, women account for a third or less of human capital wealth.
• On a per capita basis, gender inequality in earnings could lead to losses in wealth of $23,620 per person globally. These losses differ between regions and countries because levels of human capital wealth, and thereby losses in wealth due to gender inequality, tend to increase in absolute values with economic development. For these reasons, in absolute terms the losses are largest in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
• Globally, for the 141 countries included in the analysis, the loss in human capital wealth resulting from gender inequality is estimated at $160.2 trillion if we simply assume that women would earn as much as men. This is about twice the value of GDP globally. Said differently, human capital wealth could increase by 21.7 percent globally, and total wealth by 14.0 percent with gender equality in earnings.27
Think of the implications: apparently, discriminatory laws and practices concerning women’s property rights, land rights, inheritance rights, and access to capital must all be maintained even if greater prosperity for all is sacrificed as a result. This is found across all regions, or as the World Bank asserts, “Countries whose laws discriminate against women and do not promote gender equality suffer economically. Previous research tells us that gender gaps in women’s entrepreneurship and labor force participation account for estimated income losses of 27 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, 19 percent in South Asia, 14 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean and 10 percent in Europe.”28 The United Nations Population Fund also tallies the economic cost of child marriage, and finds trillions of dollars in loss worldwide. Measuring a mother’s foregone annual income over her lifetime, nations such as Guinea have lost 30 percent of annual potential GDP.29
Furthermore, this analysis does not consider the economic losses to the state from higher mortality and morbidity, especially of women and their children. We already examined many of the causes of such higher rates of mortality and morbidity, but we cannot overlook domestic violence as a major cause: “Violence perpetrated by men against their female partners is widespread around the world. It is a fundamental violation of women’s human rights, and is also a significant public health problem, with significant economic and social costs.”30 Furthermore, higher morbidity rates due to domestic violence may sap budgetary resources from already thinly stretched government coffers. So, for example, CARE International estimated the cost of domestic violence to the nation of Bangladesh as $2.3 billion in 2010, equivalent to 2.1 percent of GDP, and equal to the health and nutrition budget for the entire nation.31
In addition to enumeration of losses when women are subordinated, a large body of evidence enumerates benefits when they are not. To offer but one example, when women earn income, a greater proportion is devoted to food and health care for their children.32 All too often, however, lower female labor force participation, child marriage, lack of women’s property rights, lack of educational opportunity for girls, and other constraints imposed in Syndrome countries preclude this greater investment in the next generation, with grave consequences for the future of the nation.
These interrelationships are arguably noticeable in historical analysis as well. For example, Goody suggests that delayed marriage for women in European history was associated with the rise of industrialization on the continent. In other words, he implies that the first anomaly was necessary for the second to occur (a topic we return to in chapter 8):
The intriguing connection has been made that the late marriage age of European women, combined with the necessity of accumulating property for their marriage, may have been a significant factor in both the supply and the demand for goods in the early stages of industrialization in western Europe. The balancing out has an interesting link with the age of marriage. It has been argued that dowry delays marriage. When the daughter takes her portion, the familial enterprise has to be partly dismembered, whereas the marriage of men affects the fund in a similar way only if the property has to be handed on to the next generation at the time of the marriage.33
In a recent article, economic historians James Foreman-Peck and Peng Zhou echo Goody’s analysis.34 They assert that later marriage for girls in historical northwestern Europe with its resulting neolocal marriages was absolutely critical for the type of human capital accumulation that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Such later marriage and neolocality not only allowed for greater female human capital, especially in terms of literacy and education, but also ensured that these women were capable of greater human capital investment in and transmission to their own children, leading to a virtuous cycle of human capital accumulation across the generations. They note that several of the greatest inventors of the Industrial Revolution were taught at home and received no other formal education. Statistically, they find that increased age of marriage was associated with a significantly higher chance of becoming literate for both boys and girls, and with each passing generation, human capital would have accumulated thereby.
In contrast, Syndrome societies may experience gendered educational deficits, which also have far-reaching effects for the nation.35 For example, child marriage may prevent a girl bride from continuing her education, as many societies do not allow married girls to attend school. Given the emphasis in recent years on the cross-cutting effects of girls’ education on many economic development and health outcomes for the society, this is lamentable. Vogelstein states, “Even one year of extra schooling beyond the average can increase women’s wages by 10 to 20 percent, and a World Bank study suggests that a one-percentage-point increase in the share of women with secondary education increases a country’s annual per capita income growth rate by 0.3 percent. Child survival and immunization rates are also higher for the offspring of educated mothers.”36 Furthermore, education rates for daughters of educated mothers are much higher than that of uneducated mothers, holding the father’s education constant.37 Some Syndrome societies do boast high levels of female education, for example, the United Arab Emirates. Education alone, however, may not be sufficient to see the salutary effects of women’s empowerment on the broader society, but it may serve rather effectively to delay age at first marriage for women.38
All of this strongly suggests, and is confirmed by empirical analysis, that human security and human development, not to mention economic development, is stunted in Syndrome countries. The Human Development Index (HDI), for example, is strongly and negatively associated with measures of Syndrome dimensions. This is not surprising, because key components of the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP’s) HDI include
achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living…. The health dimension is assessed by life expectancy at birth, the education dimension is measured by mean of years of schooling for adults aged 25 years and more and expected years of schooling for children of school entering age. The standard of living dimension is measured by gross national income per capita.39
We have already seen that the Syndrome depresses all of these indicators. It is not surprising that lower HDI correlates with worse outcomes on measures of security and stability.40
Similarly, we have noted that Syndrome-encoding countries typically manifest a parasitical rent-based governance structure (see chapter 4). Political elites may be so busy “eating” resources (and stowing them in overseas accounts) that they are not able to invest and conserve them for the long-term benefit of the society. They will be less interested in diversifying their economy, and more vulnerable to global price shocks for the resources from which they create the rents needed to keep peace within the society.41 Certainly, public goods, such as clean air and water, may well be much lower on the policy agenda of Syndrome countries, and so we would expect to see a higher level of environmental degradation in those countries. Such reckless “eating” of nature’s rents also does not augur well for collective stability and security.
The Syndrome produces obvious effects for women (we detailed many of these in chapter 3). Secondary aspects of the Syndrome’s effects are also pertinent when examining the negative effects of women’s subordination on state-level outcomes. We find that these also interlock, reinforcing one another. For example, women have far less mobility in Syndrome cultures. Women’s freedom of movement is significantly more curtailed in these societies, especially for reasons of safety, but also for issues of honor. This impacts include, for example, women’s labor force participation in the formal sector as well as women’s access to educational opportunities.
Another dimension of critical importance is the muting of female voice. We know the female voice is distinctly lacking in household decision-making in Syndrome-encoding countries, but such lack of voice at home extends outward to lack of voice in the community and national affairs as well. The political participation of women may be sharply limited or even irrelevant when not limited. This perfect storm of disenfranchisement of women from decision-making at all levels and in all areas, including economic, political, and social, means that women’s values, priorities, and concerns will fade from societal discourse. Nowhere is this more tragic than in the inability of mothers to safeguard their children, especially their female children. For example, research shows significantly less investment in children’s needs and education in societies with a high prevalence of polygyny.42 Lack of political power at both the household level and the societal level hamstrings mothers from emphasizing the need for appropriate investment in children—the very future of the collective.
Clare Castillejo contributes a valuable insight by noting the link between group outcomes and women’s situation in family and personal status law:
While women’s status within the family is often presented as pertaining entirely to the personal sphere, it has profound implications for broader development and fragility dynamics. Such disempowerment at household level limits women’s ability to access services, economic opportunities, or resources such as land; to participate in public life; or to escape abuse. Discriminatory family laws therefore prevent women from contributing effectively to political and socio-economic development and stability, and contribute to…population pressures.43
Other ancillary effects attend the Syndrome. For example, Syndrome-afflicted societies with substantial marriage market obstruction will see comparatively high levels of trafficking of women and children—a terrible practice that may nevertheless appear economically rational in the context of these obstructed markets. Another example is that suicide rates of women tend to be higher in Syndrome societies. Suicide may often be the last means of resistance available to women caught in the straitjacket of the Syndrome’s components, and their stories are heart-breaking.44
To summarize, we might consider how each component of the Syndrome relates to outcome variables at the level of the nation-state. figure 6.2 attempts to do just that, with the Syndrome depicted as the lighter inner circles, and the various effects on the nation-state seen as the darker outer circles:
FIGURE 6.2 The Relationship between the Components of the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome and Nation-State-Level Outcomes
To take but one example from this diagram, consider all the many stability-related linkages stemming from just one Syndrome component—child marriage. Vogelstein avers,
Child marriage perpetuates poverty over generations and is linked to poor health, curtailed education, violence, instability, and disregard for the rule of law. Its effects are harmful not only to girls, but also to families, communities, and economies…. The evidence establishing a link between child marriage and ill health, illiteracy, poverty, violence, and instability cannot be ignored. U.S. foreign policy interests in stability and prosperity and U.S. investments in a range of areas—including global health, education, economic growth, and governance—are compromised wherever child marriage endures.45
Each component of the Syndrome can be analyzed in a similar fashion. Putting together all that we have learned from chapters 4, 5, and 6, we can now plainly see the causal pathways between the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome and national security and stability outcomes in terms of type of governance, rule of law, corruption, conflict, violence, ill health, economic stagnation and decline, rentierism, youth bulges, abnormal sex ratios, environmental degradation, and a host of national outcomes of significance to both society and the world. With such abundant process-tracing evidence in hand, it is time to ask whether these linkages are also borne out by large-N statistical analysis.