Ask Kodi and Conner: Zootopian Reserve "Nation Building"

 

Kodi: I like the quotes around 'Building nations", I feel like there's an implication there. *Laughs*

Conner: The Zootopian Reserve's idea of nation-building isn't the old Kittish Army and Navy's idea of nation-building, that is to say razing and pillaging a newly discovered nation before installing some sort of puppet government in place. It's what it says on the tin, sometimes literally.

Kodi: A majority of the time it's helping impoverished nations build housing, or set up agricultural systems, and of course, we also help establish and organize medical care deployment when a nation suffers from some sort of horrible disease outbreak. Although that's not to say all those situations are...well...one hundred percent clean operations.

Conner: Depending on exactly what kind of trouble is occurring, firearms might be required to help keep order and make sure everything runs smoothly. You don't want a mob of sick mammals rushing a medical station and destroying it accidentally in the stampede because they are desperate for medical aid. You also don't want guerrilla gangs and warlords looking to take advantage of the aid we're providing by shaking down the citizenry of everything we've provided for them. Sometimes the job needs more than just mammalitarian aide, sometimes it needs peacekeepers.

Kodi: Then there are the actual hostile warzones. Usually our primary focus there is to help refugees get out of horrible situations like that while minimizing casualties. Although sometimes that requires us pushing back some sort of extremist faction and taking out their wannabe dictator of a leader in order to protect those mammals who are simply trying to live their lives.

Conner: Of course that's all still considered small-scale operations. If such a crazed militant faction is too large, or some dictator has got a deep enough foothold in controlling a nation while the populace suffers and struggles to fight back and is pleading for outside help, that's somethin' that...well I mean that's full-scale war at that point. That requires agreement from multiple mammals at the top, and multiple nations going in to topple somethin' like that.

Kodi: Basically, when countries ask us to help, we do our best to fulfill that request. And if we aren't enough to help, then it enters a larger discussion as to what Animalia can do to help as a whole.