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Both The Divide and Confessions of an Economic Hitman exhaustively document the fact that destabilization, power vacuums and strongmen are the preferred, carefully -cultivated environments of the modern world. Wallerstein and Anderson go one further and say "whattaya mean, 'modern'?"

One advantage of modernity is that the faster your communications and commerce networks operate, the less inequality you can afford between the dominant and the dominated. One disadvantage of modernity is that the more stable your inequality, the harder it is to overthrow.