The Core and the Gap
How you prevent any game from collapsing into a chaos is to play that game with an appropriate set of rules. To enforce those rules the game needs a referee or an umpire. For the states, their constitutions are their rules and the institutions are the referees and umpires that enforce the implementation of the rules. But what if the leaders of the state are corrupt, and the institutions compromised? Not playing the game with a given set of rules will ultimately lead to statelessness — a state of chaos. Thomas PM Barnett is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Pentagon’s New Map — War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. He divides the world into the core and the gap. Obviously, the core is the developed world and the gap is the world still developing. The core’s good life attracts the people of the gap who are fed up and frustrated when they compare their sorry existence with the good life being lived in the core. This frustration and resentment lead to public anger and d...