Emma Hersh Q4 BM - Government and Collapse

For my fourth quarter benchmark, I decided to research the government in some of the places Jared Diamond analyzes in Collapse. He looks at them through the lens of his five point framework which includes environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and societies response to environmental problems. Nowhere does he mention the involvement of government in these places. This bothered me, so I researched the history of the government, as well as the current government in China, Rwanda, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. 
Some challenges that I faced while doing the research for this project were finding credible sources and understanding the interworking of each government. Because the way government works is very controversial, finding sources that had no bias was more difficult than I initially thought. I learned about how different each country is, but that still they are tied together by similar governments. The countries that I researched were all different and in different parts of the world, but were still united by poor government decision making and that also added to the collapse of their societies. 
Here is the link to my fourth quarter benchmark website.