Conflict and Development

Andrew J. Williams, Roger Macginty

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317499848
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Relations internationales

In the five years since the first edition of Conflict and Development was published the awareness of the relationship between conflicts and development has grown exponentially. Developmental factors can act as a trigger for violence, as well as for ending violence and for triggering post-conflict reconstruction. The book explores the complexity of the links between violent conflict (usually civil wars) and development, under-development and uneven development. The second edition incorporates significant changes in the field including the G7+ initiative, the New Deal on Fragile States, World Trade talks, major policy documents from the UNDP and World Bank and updates on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

1
Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

Introduction

Among many others, there are two basic views on the economics of violent conflict. In the first view, economic development offers a ladder out of conflict. This ladder operates at the international and individual levels. States that trade together have an interest in stability and continued prosperity and so have no interest in the disruptions that come with war. Similarly, this thinking goes, individuals have an interest in peace. Individuals are likely to behave rationally and so would personally avoid conflict and encourage their political leaders, by voting for moderate parties, to avoid conflict. Rational individuals would see economic development as a route out of conflict. In short, ‘free markets made free men’ and free men would not be foolish enough to become involved in war (Mandelbaum 2002).

The second view on the economics of conflict points towards the predatory nature of capitalism and how the deep inequalities it causes can fan the flames of conflict. This view of economics as a cause of violent conflict also points towards the profiteering of warriors. Whether arms manufacturers, roadside bandits levying a war ‘tax’, or those running blood diamond or oil-smuggling operations in war zones, there are hefty profits to be made from war. In such cases, peace is a threat to livelihoods.

So, opinion is polarized on the role of economics (saviour or villain?) in the outbreak of civil war. This chapter will examine the often contradictory literature on conflict and development, using examples to illustrate the linkages between conflict, poverty and profit. The chapter is divided into five sections. The first section examines the various economic and development-related arguments on the causation and escalation of violent conflict. The second section delves more deeply into the complex relationship between economics and civil war. Section three examines the factors behind conflict maintenance and the peculiar economic dynamics that sustain war. An anthropological lens is particularly useful in illustrating the ways in which individuals, communities, armed groups, businesses and states variously prosper, starve or ‘get by’ during war. The fourth section focuses on corruption and considers how the term is often used selectively and is unhelpful as an analytical category. The fifth section concentrates on the resource environments often found in the sites of violent conflict and considers the extent to which the presence, absence and distribution of resources such as diamonds or water can fuel or calm violent conflict.

Conflict causation and escalation

There is no universal theory of conflict causation. The sheer variety of conflict actors, environments and dynamics makes impossible a general theory of conflict or, indeed, of conflict management. Each conflict has a peculiar ‘conflict DNA’. This may be a partial match with other conflicts, but will contain factors specific only to that conflict. Conflicts have multiple causes that interact in highly specific ways according to the context. They can have primary causes that take precedence over secondary causes, but the variegated nature of human polities, economies and societies means that a single factor cannot spark a conflict. Different factors will have different weight at different stages of a conflict trajectory. For example, a single atrocity or grievance may prove inflammatory at the outbreak of a civil war, but it becomes overtaken by other factors that sustain the conflict in the longer term. The task for the conflict analyst is first to identify conflict causes (plural) and then establish the connections between them. This is rarely an easy task, since the public rhetoric used by protagonists may mask truer motives, or because protagonists (such as the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda or state-sponsored militias in Darfur) may be secretive and offer few public clues as to their motivations.

Complicating matters even further is that antagonists operating in the same conflict may have very different motivations. This applies within and between groups. Consider the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. At the group level, recruits may be motivated to join Palestinian militant organizations for any number of reasons: spiritual fulfilment, to avenge a grievance, peer pressure, family tradition, belief in their political and strategic aims, to boost personal esteem or to earn an income. Israelis may join the Israeli Defence Force because of a desire to defend their state and community, to gain new skills and further their career, to continue family tradition and fulfil conscription obligations or to avoid being branded deviant or cowardly by not joining up. So there is a cacophony of motivations swirling around the conflict area. Some of these may be economic but many are not. Trying to construct an intelligible narrative thread out of all of these motivations is a difficult task, but one that is necessary for the conflict analyst. Although Palestinian militants and the Israeli Defence Force share the same ‘battlefield’ and pledge themselves to the destruction of the other, their conflicts have very different aims. For Israel, the conflict is largely justified in terms of defence and security. For Palestinian militants, it is about righting grievances and promoting a religiously inspired worldview. The conflict analyst is faced with a bewildering array of ‘evidence’ and, ultimately, must make a judgement call on which factors they believe to be most significant in the escalation and maintenance of a conflict. Box 1.1 illustrates, with reference to Colombia, how multiple factors compete for the attention of the analyst. Rather than a science, conflict analysis is an art and involves human – and therefore potentially frail – judgement.

Given that the focus of this book is on conflict and development, the bulk of this section will dwell on development and economic-related explanations for conflict causation and maintenance. Yet there are entire subfields of literature on conflict causation that make little reference to development, economics, profit or poverty. Non-economic or non-development-related explanations for the outbreak of violent conflict include the often overlapping categories of biological disposition (Simmel 1955), psychology (Tajfel 1978), religion (Appleby 2000), identity (Sen 2006), ethnicity (Connor 1994; Young 2003), nationalism, ideology, history and ancient hatreds, bad neighbours, manipulative leaders (Brown 1997), the security dilemma (Posen 1993), cultural dysfunction (Kaplan 1994), the nature of the state (Tilly 1985) and incompatible worldviews (Huntington 1998). Many of these explanations regard economic factors as contingent, or providing a context in which the primary factor operates. Thus, for example, an ethnic group may develop an elaborate self-narrative of grievance, how its rights are denied, and how it is distinct from other identity groups in the context of declining economic conditions. These conditions may provide the backdrop or even tipping point for a slide into violent conflict. A group may become convinced of its own ‘relative deprivation’, especially if inequality is visible along religious, ethnic or racial lines (Jacoby 2008: 103–13). But, in such explanations, economic and development-related factors are secondary and only come into play when stimulated by other factors or if a prior existing condition (entrenched ethnic or religious difference) is in place.

Box 1.1

Colombia: a confusing conflict stratum

A single-word explanation is often given for the long-running war in Colombia: drugs. Drug money fuels both the legal and illegal economies with anti-state guerrillas, pro-state paramilitaries and elements of the state all implicated in the drugs trade. In 2014, Colombia was responsible for 43 per cent of world coca production, an industry that was worth $10 billion annually (Kaplan 2014). But scratch the surface and a more complex conflict stratum is revealed. Certainly the drugs trade is important, but its primary significance has been in maintaining the conflict once it had already begun and in creating a political economy of war. It was not until late 2012 that serious peace negotiations between the government and the main rebel group began in Cuba. At the heart of the conflict has been the contested legitimacy of the weak Colombian state. From the nineteenth century it has been attempting to assert control over all of its territory and has faced a series of failed peasant revolutions for the past 150 years (Richani 2002: 23). At each stage of its development, the state has attempted to reform itself so as to protect the interests of an expanding and increasingly urban middle class. Right-wing paramilitaries (often linked with large landowners) provided the state with a private (but poorly controlled) security force while left-wing guerrilla groups sought to exploit the grievances of the dispossessed. In 2013, Oxfam reported that 80 percent of land in Colombia was held by 14 per cent of owners: an inequality that had a particular impact on women (Oxfam 2013). The weak state has been prone to regional influences from leftist ideologies, interventions from the United States and a ready supply of arms through porous borders. So, are drugs the cause of the Colombian conflict? No, but drugs money has become a fuel for a pre-existing conflict with long-term roots.

Sources: Richani (2002), Guáqueta (2007).

The important point to bear in mind is that conflicts are caused by a combination of factors. Those who promote economic or development-related explanations for the outbreak of violent conflicts, need to take account of non-development-related explanations and how these interact with development-related factors. The philosopher and economist Amartya Sen makes the point that poverty on its own is not enough to cause conflict. He recalls his own childhood memories from Calcutta during the 1943 Bengal famine and ‘the sight of starving people dying in front of sweetshop windows with various layers of luscious food displayed behind glass windows, without a single glass being broken, or law and order being disrupted’ (Sen 2006: 143). Other factors, especially ‘the illusion of singular identity … in a world so obviously full of plural affiliations’, were required to transform inequality and destitution into violent conflict (Sen 2006: 175).

Conflicts do not just happen. Just because a society is ethnically, racially or religiously fissured does not mean that conflict will follow. Seattle (a diverse multicultural city) is a more common model than Sarajevo (one with a history of ethnonational conflict). Indeed, given the multiplicity of identity groups that claim to be distinct from others, there is remarkably little violent conflict on the planet, and there is some evidence that it has declined over time (Brubaker and Laitin 1998; Pinker 2012). This suggests two points. The first is that many human societies have developed everyday peace systems that manage or suppress difference, often in non-violent ways (Mac Ginty 2014). The second is that violent conflict requires active instigation agents, particularly if latent tensions are to be escalated into overt violence. These instigation agents may take the form of political or community leaders who purposively inflame and mobilize their supporters, or circumstances – such as an assassination or shock election result – that agitate already tense group sensibilities (Zartman 2005: 268–73). Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Lebanon and many other societies have experienced extended periods of calm (though not peace in a holistic sense) only for civil war to develop. This required active steps and reactions by political, military and community leaders.

Economics and civil war

Unsurprisingly, economists have been at the forefront of arguments that conflict causation can be explained by economics. Paul Collier and a number of collaborators have produced a corpus of studies that link the onset of civil war to economic factors (Collier and Hoeffler 2002; Collier et al. 2003). Many of these studies are based on econometric modelling and are attractive because they allow analysts to avoid considering nebulous and difficult-to-define factors such as identity or historical grievances. Two main arguments have been advanced under what has been termed the ‘greed thesis’ or economic explanations of violent conflict:

• That economic factors can act as predictors of violent conflict (or help identify civil war-prone societies)
• That combatants are motivated by economic predation.

Plate 3 A Muslim cemetery in Bosnia: just because a society is ethnically fissured does not mean that conflict will follow.

The first argument identified economic factors – usually at the national level – that make a society prone to civil war. In particular, the level of per capita income, its rate of growth and the structure of the economy (especially its dependence on commodity exports) were identified as the key risk factors for the onset of civil war (on a dataset of 52 civil wars in the 1960–99 period). Collier and colleagues found that a doubling of per capita income halved the risk of civil war, and that when commodity exports account for 25 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the risk of civil war is 33 per cent, as opposed to an 11 per cent risk of civil war if commodity exports are at 10 per cent (Bannon and Collier 2003: 2–3). Findings such as these have encouraged governments and policymakers to promote poverty reduction and economic diversification programmes – often based on free market remedies – as part of conflict prevention strategies (Brauer and Dunne 2012).

The second argument identified the profit motive – or ‘greed’ – as the primary motor behind civil war. Collier noted that ‘conflicts are far more likely to be caused by economic opportunities than by grievance’, but that rebel organizations will engage in a public discourse of grievance ‘since they are unlikely to be so naive so as to admit to greed as a motive’ (Collier 2000a: 91–2). Thus, ‘civil wars occur where rebel organizations are financially viable’, with the ability of antagonists to generate revenue being the principal reason why civil wars break out in some locations and not in others (Collier 2000b: 2). Münkler (2005) reinforces the view that civil war is economic rationalism taken to the extreme: the availability of weapons and untrained young men makes contemporary civil war ‘downright cheap’ and ‘highly lucrative’. ‘In the short term the force used in them yields more than it costs and the long-term costs are borne by others’ (Münkler 2005: 74, 77). In this view, civil war conforms to a straightforward business model that seeks to maximize resource extraction through banditry, ‘taxation’ or the trafficking of diamonds, timber or people. It also aims to reduce costs by overlooking social responsibilities to citizens and cutting the costs of running a regular army. By boosting income and cutting costs, profit will be maximized. ‘The entrepreneurs of the new wars’ often emerged from ...