Paul Collier is like a prolific visual artist who is committed to a single compelling idea and will do anything to get his audience to engage with that idea. The idea, in his case, is the fate of what he calls the "bottom billion": the billion or so people living in failed states in the developing world, most of them in Africa, whose living standards are falling further and further behind those of the majority of the world's people. In his writing (most notably The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, reviewed here) and frequent appearances, Collier describes these societies in stark demographic terms: life expectancy, 50 years; infant mortality, 14 percent; malnourished children, 36 percent. And, as we know, conditions in certain countries and regions are even more horrific.

Collier, an economist and expert on Africa, and currently professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, has identified multiple causes, or "traps," that have gotten these countries into such a dire predicament. And he's critical of the development assumptions and strategies, many going back decades, that have contributed to the situation. But Collier is nothing if not optimistic.

"The problem of the bottom billion is serious, but...fixable," he writes. "Change is going to have to come from within the societies of the bottom billion, but our own policies could make these efforts more likely to succeed, and so more likely to be undertaken. We will need a range of policy instruments to encourage the countries of the bottom billion to take steps toward change. To date we have used these instruments badly, so there is considerable scope for improvement."

Collier's newest book, War, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, benefits from a retrospective approach to his work and is very much a companion piece to The Bottom Billion, though the more demanding of the two. Indeed, it is thick with questions leading to other questions.

In a TED conference talk last year, Collier, referring to The Bottom Billion, said: "I wrote an economics book that you could read on a beach." Clearly, he succeeded, earning praise from economists, development professionals, and concerned citizens alike for the soundness of his research methods and findings. Like a good sequel, War, Guns and Votes deftly summarizes the earlier book while presenting a new and compelling story line. But where the earlier offered a broad view and trenchant analysis of the causes of and remedies for endemic poverty, the new book focuses on just one: conflict.

Conflict, according to Collier, is one of the four "traps" that keep countries mired in poverty. (The others are a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources; limited trade opportunities caused by landlocked geography and uncooperative neighbors; and bad governance.) Current remedies used to address these traps include foreign aid; foreign military intervention in pursuit of greater internal security; democracy promotion and the application of international laws; foreign investment and greater budget transparency; and open-trade policies. While reasonable in theory, none of these approaches is working, says Collier.

Collier's solution to "breaking" the four poverty traps is to integrate and improve existing remedies. He argues, for instance, that foreign aid should be de-linked from foreign policy, refocused on the most dire situations, and complemented with other actions. These include longer in-country commitments by multinational security forces as a way to prevent recurrences of civil strife and directing more aid funds to development projects. At the same time, laws and charters should be tailored to the needs and capacity of the country in question and trade policies should prioritize growth (even if means subsidies and deficits).

Collier makes a compelling case for focusing on conflict prevention. His research on war in Africa, described in a taped lecture at the Royal Economic Society in 2006, found the risk of conflict breaking out in an African country to be an astonishing 34 percent in any five-year period over the last 40 years, compared to 4 percent in the rest of the world. Seventy-three percent of all bottom billion societies are currently embroiled in a civil war or have recently suffered one — a condition that significantly raises the chance for recurrence. And because countries wracked by civil war typically have three or more neighbors with larger economies, economic damage from the conflict is more likely to spread across a region. In a related paper on his Web site, Collier says each year of conflict lowers the growth rate of a country by more than 2 percent, and the chances are high that the conflict will resume within a decade after a cease fire.

Collier dismisses commonly held theories about the causes of conflict — political repression, the legacy of colonialism, ethnic strife. Rather, he argues that economic and demographic factors such as low income levels, slow or nonexistent economic growth, dependence on commodity exports, and the proportion of young men in the population are key factors. What's more, smaller nations are more vulnerable to conflict because they cannot achieve the economies of scale in security available to larger countries.

Unfortunately, mitigating the pernicious effect of these factors requires political change as well as better economic policies. In doing research, Collier discovered that "democracy" in bottom billion countries had a strong association with political violence — in part because it was "democracy" in name only (e.g., holding and manipulating elections to consolidate illegitimate power). Collier calls this "fake democracy protected by the sanctity of sovereignty," and, in his view, it is where the first step toward an integrated solution should be encouraged: "We need to dismiss the illusion that elections are the milestone and face the long haul of building the economy." Doing so will require a commitment by multilateral groups and developed countries to provide security for at least a decade following a civil war while democracy consolidates and infrastructure is rebuilt with donor assistance. Then, and only then, he says, will the conditions exist wherein democracy can be a transformative rather than destructive force.

Collier devotes several chapters to conflict-related issues. He deals insightfully, for example, with the issue of national identity, a positive "political construction" often forged from ethnic diversity. In one of the many stories in the book drawn from his personal experience, he describes how Tanzania did just that. He also offers a brief history of the formation of the European state — not as an admonition to bottom billion societies but rather as a reminder that achieving statehood requires an organic process that can neither be invented nor imposed.

Collier also addresses the issue of arms proliferation in Africa. He notes that bottom billion societies devote $9 billion annually to military expenditures nearly half of that financed by donors through leakage from development aid. For insurgents, the Kalashnikov is the weapon of choice: cheap, simple to operate, and virtually maintenance free, it's ideal for inexperienced, poorly educated recruits such as child soldiers. The guns are ubiquitous in Africa because governments also use them and because porous borders are no obstacle to a thriving black market. As with other peacekeeping issues, Collier's solution to the problem is collective action by African states to curtail arms spending and budget restrictions on military expenditures either imposed by the international community and/or by donors willing to link aid levels to reductions in military spending.

Throughout the book, Collier argues that the enforcement of international rules and regulations are key to improving the lot of bottom billion societies, and he would "like to see America more supportive" of them. Multilateral organizations can set standards for free and fair elections, enforce discipline in public spending, and supply security — a need, says Collier, that today outweighs the principle of sovereignty. "Nowadays a civil war generates externalities for neighbors that are too large and too adverse to be dismissed." Because civil war threatens the economic and political stability of bordering countries, Collier recommends that a regional body such as the African Union or United Nations step in to protect and share sovereignty with post-conflict governments as long as is necessary.

There is, says Collier, a precedent for precisely this kind of behavior on the part of the international community, and it occurred after World War II: "The zone of prosperity was America and the region of insecurity was Europe. America was motivated by both charitable concern and enlightened self-interest." Today, he adds, this model can and should be applied to bottom billion societies. Moreover, because the global "zone of prosperity" is so much larger than it was after WWII, the burden of doing so will be much lighter on individual countries.

For an administration disposed to a new approach to diplomacy and international cooperation, the timing of Collier's book couldn't be better. One can only hope that it isn't so busy saving the global financial system that it loses sight of the billion or so people who really need saving.