Aid, Insurgencies and Conflict Transformation

When Greed is Good

Rob Kevlihan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136157394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the circumstances under which aid can contribute to the management and transformation of intra-state conflicts.

How and when do insurgents govern? How does the presence of aid and social services influence how insurgents govern? Under what circumstances can aid contribute to the management and transformation of civil wars? The established literature in this area argues that aid exacerbates civil wars where resources are scarce as greedy rebels steal resources for themselves. This book, however, argues that under certain conditions such greed can be good.

Drawing on primary research from three very different conflicts – Northern Ireland (1969–1998), southern Sudan (1983–2005) and Tajikistan (1992–1997) – and more than 10 years' experience working in and researching humanitarian crises, this study breaks new ground through its wide-ranging comparison of conflicts. The book argues that insurgent efforts to reap rewards from aid and social services have in turn facilitated organizational changes and that these changes, while they may have had conflict-enhancing effects in the short term, have also contributed to conflict transformation over the long term.

This book will be of much interest to students of insurgencies, civil wars, comparative politics, conflict management, humanitarian emergencies, public health and IR/Security Studies in general.

1 Introduction

Upper Nile, Sudan, October 2005

The body of the stillborn child lay on the bed in a darkened room of the clinic. I’m not really sure why the health worker brought me into the room to see him. After more than 10 years of humanitarian and development work, research, and teaching in Africa and Central Asia, I still don’t go out of my way to see dead or dying people. On this occasion I was not present as an aid worker; instead I was back in ‘the field’ as a researcher, and found myself in a small town in post-war South Sudan.¹ At the time the town was under the control of northern government forces, with insurgent troops deployed in adjacent areas. In the local provincial capital government and opposition forces maintained a fragile equilibrium pending implementation of new power-sharing arrangements.

I had been sitting down talking and eating fatur with staff at a small health clinic when four men arrived in a cloud of dust carrying a heavily pregnant young woman on a wood and string bed.² They said she had been in labor for four days, but her mother had only now allowed them to bring her for treatment. Moaning quietly and covered from head to toe with a toub, she appeared to be in a bad way. It is almost certain that she had lost her child before she arrived.³ The health workers did what they could for her, but recognized that she needed to be brought to the regional hospital, more than two hours away by boat, for more specialized care. Her family, however, lacked the immediate means to pay for the trip and related hospital stay. I did what I think any of us would do in the circumstances. I put my hand in my pocket and offered what I could, US$40 or so, while curtailing my research visit so that my boat, the only one available, could take us all back to the nearest large town with a hospital. Researchers are often encouraged to be objective, to adopt a God’s-eye view and to somehow stand apart from the crowd. For me, in that moment, remaining detached was not an option. Having settled the question of money, we evacuated her to the hospital; calling ahead to ensure a car would be ready at the dock. The young woman spent the two-and-a-half-hour boat ride lying prone in the bottom of the boat, covered by her toub, being comforted by another young relative. The last I saw of her was when she left for the hospital in the back of a four-wheel drive vehicle belonging to a non-governmental organization (NGO).⁴

This occurred in an area that had recently suffered from a civil war, but was relatively stable at the time of my visit. Had the war still raged, there would have been no clinic in that small town, and no way for the woman to get medical assistance. The suffering and deaths that arise from conflict are not confined to those who die or are injured on the battlefield. Often the secondary effects of war are greater in real terms – particularly deaths from hunger and infectious diseases. While the risk of death due to conflict, including civil conflict, has decreased in the course of the last 100 years, civilians continue to suffer disproportionately during intra-state wars (Human Security Report Project 2011; Lacina et al. 2006). Indeed, in recent civil wars the number of people killed by combat is significantly smaller than the total number of deaths than can be directly attributed to war. The difference is made up of so-called indirect deaths (i.e., non-combat-related deaths) caused by acute humanitarian crises, including mortality due to preventable health problems (Iqbal 2006; Slim 2008; Toole 1997). Levels of indirect deaths due to conflicts vary depending on the regime type engaged in conflict (Heger and Salehyan 2007), on pre-existing income and health levels, the degree of internal displacement, the extent to which infrastructure and public services are disrupted, and the access populations have to humanitarian assistance (Lacina and Weinstein 2007).⁵

In such contexts, humanitarian organizations and church groups, government workers and others, seek to provide social services (comprising healthcare, education, shelter, food relief, and other forms of income support) to assist people who are often in dire need. The services are financed by voluntary donations given to charities and by taxes either raised locally or allocated to aid budgets to be spent overseas. These services are provided despite the enormous difficulties and risks of working in war zones.

Providing such services is, in my view, the right thing to do. However, providing these services in war zones comes at a cost. The provision of services during conflicts injects additional resources into an environment where resources are scarse and combatants are greedy. As a consequence, service provision in war situations can result in the intensification and/or attenuation of conflict as a result of resource appropriation by combatants.⁶ Nonetheless, doing what we can to help alleviate the suffering of those affected by war is morally necessary. Remaining detached and unengaged in the face of widespread suffering is not an option.

Research questions

Given the moral imperative of providing needed assistance to civilians caught up in civil wars, and the political-economic reality that combatants will utilize scarce resources to their best advantage, are we condemned to a status quo of immediate life saving in tandem with long-term conflict enhancement? Can social-service provision during civil wars actually assist in ending those same wars? Although the conflict enhancing effects of access to or competition for resources by combatants, including appropriation of humanitarian assistance, are well understood, the potential of social services to contribute to peace remains under explored.

My argument

This book makes several strong claims in answer to these questions. I argue that there is an observable relationship between social-service provision and conflict management. Under certain conditions, the provision of social services can also have a positive impact on the transformation of conflicts from war to peace.⁷ This represents an important break with existing literature on aid in conflict and on insurgent governance. Not all resources have the same effects on insurgencies. How can social services facilitate both conflict management and transformation? This study highlights two principle observable effects. In the first case considered (Northern Ireland), we will see that in resource-rich environments social-service provision can address underlying grievances, effectively taking them off the table when it comes to future peace negotiations. Addressing grievances related to the provision of social services does not guarantee peace, but it does make it easier to negotiate and ‘clinch’ peace agreements.

However, autonomous social-service provision – understood as service provision that can operate with a significant degree of freedom from belligerents – can also shift the incentives confronting insurgent groups during civil wars, in both resource-rich and, to a lesser, but still significant extent (as will be clear from the second country case study of South Sudan) in resource-poor environments. Rent-seeking behavior of insurgent movements through their positions as brokers between social-service systems and local populations can in turn contribute to important changes within these same insurgent movements. Resource structures shape insurgent choices, changing the manner in which insurgents govern local populations and how they interact with international actors. These changes can in turn contribute indirectly to conflict transformation, by increasing the importance of political and/or civil wings of insurgencies relative to their military wings, while also making it easier for governments and potential mediators to talk to insurgents. This finding applies across systems and regions – as the deliberately diverse case studies highlight.⁸ As the third and final country case study (of Tajikistan) makes clear, these kinds of changes take time and may, as a consequence, be superseded by events on the battlefield.

Defining perspectives and concepts

In making this argument, I borrow heavily from a relational approach to social theory pioneered in the conflict-related literature by late political-sociologist Charles Tilly and his collaborators (McAdam et al. 2001; Tilly 1998). Drawing from their work, I focus in particular on two causal mechanisms in operation when social services are provided during civil wars – namely opportunity hoarding and exploitation. Opportunity hoarding involves acquiring and maintaining control of a resource and the exclusion of others from the benefits that can be derived from that resource (Tilly 2005). This process of exclusion strengthens the position of those who have access to the resource relative to those that do not through processes of exploitation. Exploitation is a related but analytically distinct process. It occurs when those who control a valuable resource harness the efforts of others in the extraction of returns from that resource, but exclude them from the full value added from their effort (Tilly 2005). For Tilly (1997), exploitation meant a process of extraction of surplus of a material kind. In my view, however, valuable resources are not necessarily only financial or material. Exploitation can also increase the prestige, standing, or social influence of a particular individual, group, or organization.

Opportunity hoarding draws the border between those with access and those who are excluded; exploitation extracts gains to the benefit of those who control the resource from others who have access, but not control. When operating in tandem, these two mechanisms operate to the benefit of those with the capacity to establish, maintain, and control key brokerage positions. For effective opportunity hoarding to occur on an on-going and stable basis, brokers work to create and maintain exclusive access to valuable resources. Exploitation requires brokers to maintain dominant positions that enable gains to be made by the exploiter. A high degree of coercion is necessarily involved in these processes during civil wars. While the focus of this work relates to one particular type of scarce resource – namely social services – this same causal mechanism approach can be useful in understanding dynamics associated with competing for and controlling any valuable resource during civil wars.

Greed during civil wars

These causal mechanisms operate, in my view, regardless of insurgency type or the nature and quantity of resources available to an insurgency. This has an important implication – greed, understood in terms of processes associated with opportunity hoarding and exploitation of scare resources, is all pervasive during civil wars, regardless of the structure of incentives confronting insurgencies. What differs is not insurgent greed, but the potential consequences for insurgencies of their greedy behavior under certain conditions. Specifically, this book argues that opportunity hoarding and exploitation by insurgency groups can contribute to the transformation of these same insurgencies. However, this can only take place under conditions of autonomy of social-service providers and the absence of the possibility of rentier behavior on the part of insurgents driven by natural/primary-commodity appropriation or significant external patrons. Under these circumstances, greed can be good.

Terminology explained

Before progressing into the detailed arguments set out in the rest of this book, it is necessary to discuss what I mean by four key terms – aid, social services, autonomy, and conflict transformation.

Aid refers to funds (and goods and services financed by those funds) that are provided to both relieve the immediate effects of a political crisis and/or natural disaster (humanitarian assistance) and to improve the lives of populations over the long term (development aid). When considering the impact of aid on conflicts, I include both humanitarian assistance and development aid within the broader umbrella of social services.

I define social services as including services provided by states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), whether provided as part of on-going social welfare and/or development programs or in response to humanitarian emergencies. This differs from the typical approach to the study of the effects of aid on conflict, which focuses almost exclusively on the work being done by humanitarian organizations. This new perspective reflects my view that the services provided through humanitarian organizations are similar in kind to those provided by other actors – including states, insurgencies, churches, and other civil society organizations.⁹ A vaccination is, after all, still a vaccination, regardless of whether it is given by a government-paid nurse in a state-run health facility in north Belfast or by a locally hired employee of an NGO in the shade of a tree in South Sudan. When we speak and think about social-service provision, the funding sources, or institutional delivery mechanisms for these services are almost irrelevant. Rather, the defining difference is the capacity of the respective social-service systems.¹⁰

To focus on humanitarian aid alone would provide only a partial analysis of social-service provision during conflicts, even in resource-poor contexts (Hilhorst and Serrano 2010). It is also of little or no use in analysing social-service provision in situations (such as Northern Ireland) where the state, rather than humanitarian agencies, takes a lead role in responding to needs arising from the conflict. Framing humanitarian aid together with state-provided social services builds on the work of both Duffield (1997, 1999, 2001) and Chandler (2002) in their characterization of NGO activities, while also addressing a perceived overemphasis within humanitarian aid and conflict literature on the role of civil society (Mahoney 2007).¹¹ This approach is consistent with global governance literature highlighting the manner in which NGOs perform important governmental tasks in international settings (Sending and Neumann 2006; Kassimir 2001), work focused on the importance of social-service provision in the developing world that is financed from the ‘north’ (Fowler 1995; Tvedt 1998) and writing in the social policy field that recognizes the importance of the third sector (i.e., civil society) and mixed economies of welfare in the provision of services (Clarke 2001; Deacon et al. 1997; Dixon 1987; Mwabu et al. 2001).^{12, 13}

What, then, do I mean by autonomy of social-service systems? The roots of the word ‘autonomy’ tie back to the idea of self-rule (Lindley 1986). Autonomy relates to the nature of relations between two or more objects of study; i.e., one needs to ask the question – self-rule from whom/what? For the purposes of this study, autonomy refers to the freedom of action of providers of social services as a whole from coercive actors embroiled in the conflict under consideration.

Autonomous service systems can be strongly distinguished from situations where insurgencies themselves provide social services, as is the case, for example, with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon (Magourik 2008). While Hamas and Hezbollah can be described as autonomous from governments that claim sovereignty/control over the zones they control, this is not the kind of autonomy that I consider for the purpose of this book. Services provided by the welfare arms of Hamas and Hezbollah are unlikely to be autonomous from the respective military wings of the same movements.¹⁴ As a consequence, Hamas and Hezbollah run social-service systems cannot be said to create and provide external incentives for internal transformation of these movements in the manner in which (as we shall see) social-service systems in South Sudan and Northern Ireland provided external incentives for the SPLA and IRA.¹⁵

Finally, conflict transformation is understood as changing the relationships between parties to a conflict (Kriesberg 1997) – a process that in many situations can only occur gradually (Miall 2003), in a manner that contributes towards the establishment and maintenance of peace. It is distinguishable from a conflict-management approach in that conflict transformation stresses the need to remove the roots of the conflict. Conflict management has more limited aims in that it seeks an abatement of violence or a cessation in fighting (Bures 2007).

Overview of this book

This book is divided into a number of distinct but related parts. In Chapter 2, entitled Aid and Insurgencies, The Common Wisdom Debated, I examine recent literature on civil w...