The influence of sectarianism in politics is about as welcome a topic among policymakers as the drunken uncle or the drug addict son is at the family dinner table. Indeed, a strong case can be made that it is because policymakers in powerful countries, above all in the US and Western Europe, within the UN system, especially in the departments of political affairs and peacekeeping, and at the World Bank and the IMF, tend to craft their strategies and make their decisions as if sectarianism were a minor concern rather than the central one that it has always been in most parts of the world, that, like a sort of Philosopher's Stone in reverse, it has turned so many supposed geostrategic sure things into either disappointments or outright failures. By playing one group off against another, the British in West Africa, the Belgians in Rwanda and Burundi, and the French in some of their Maghrebi and Sahelian colonies, picked favorites among the peoples over whom they ruled.