Causes Of Civil War In Developing Countries – Greed and grievances as two sides of the same coin, according to newly released publication
WASHINGTON, Nov. 8: Civil wars around the world since 1945 have killed approximately 20 million people and displaced at least 67 million according to a new World Bank report, “Understanding Civil War”, that explores how and under what conditions influence the probability of civil war.
“An understanding of the how and when,” said Paul Collier, co-editor of Understanding Civil War, “will improve our ability to identify countries at greater risk of an outbreak of civil war, and the more we understand the process of conflict escalation, the better we will become at designing time-sensitive policy interventions.”
Evolution of the conflict model
Until recently, the academic community had not concentrated much attention on the problem of civil war. Development experts saw conflict as an exogenous shock akin to a natural disaster or an adverse swing in the terms of trade – an unfavorable and unfortunate event that happened from time to time.
Paul Collier and Anke Hoefflers seminal research at the World Bank supported partly by the Banks Post Conflict Fund (PCF) was the basis for an economic model – the Collier-Hoeffler, or CH, Model – of civil war.
This model argued convincingly that it is not political and social grievance per se that leads to civil war, but rather, for given levels of grievance, it is the opportunity to organize and finance a rebellion that determines if a civil war will occur or not.
The determinant factors of such opportunity are mainly economic, according to the model. A rebellion must be financially viable they argued.
Expanding the theory of civil war
Understanding Civil War is a second phase of research on the subject, and presents sixteen case studies (eight in Africa and eight in other regions) to test the validity of the CH model, providing a more nuanced understanding of conflict moves beyond the “greed vs. grievance” caricature debate started after the initial presentation of the CH model.
“Through these case studies,” said Ian Bannon, Manager of the World Banks Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit, “we gain a more nuanced understanding of conflict and the conditions under which different variables influence the outbreak of violence.
– Greed and grievance are seen as different manifestations of the same problem. The research presented here makes it clear that greed and grievances should not be seen as competing explanations of conflict – they are often shades of the same problem, added he.
“Greed” vs. “grievance”, or are they one and the same?
The case studies in “Understanding Civil War” illustrate how “greed” and “grievance” are not competitive explanations of rebellion. Greed and grievance are often alternative interpretations of the same phenomenon; they are shades of the same problem.
There is often more political greed and economic grievance than the other way around. If political institutions can reduce grievances and if economics variables can influence the stability of political institutions, then economic variables will indirectly affect “grievance” factors in the CH model.
And if state failure or government illegitimacy turns domestic politics into a near-anarchic world, then what Collier and Hoeffler call “greed” is really synonymous to the pursuit of survival.
What do the case studies tell us?
The results of the case studies presented in this publication add to the understanding of conflict. In fact, there are some “natural” comparisons in the case studies across the two volumes.
– Indonesia and Nigeria are both oil-rich states with much violence throughout their history. Both cases illustrate complex pathways linking oil to violence.
– Burundi and the DR Congo put in perspective CHs arguments on the impact of resource-dependence and ethnic diversity. Both highlight the importance of the territorial concentration of resources and, in Burundi, the territorial concentration of political power.
– Bosnia and Indonesia also deal with the issue of regional inequality and ethnic differences across regions.
– Algeria and Kenya are two cases that concentrate on the concept of ethnic war. In both cases, the violence took an ethnic hue, but ethnic divisions may not have been the deciding factor underlying that violence. Several cases in both volumes highlight the role of external intervention in inciting and supporting civil war.
– Lebanon, Mozambique, and Sudan are cases in which external military or economic interventions played a central roles in the civil wars.
Not only are there important spatial effects (diffusion and contagion) that explain violence, but there is also a dynamic relationship between the organization of criminal networks and the pursuit of political agendas in civil wars (such as those in the Caucasus as well as Algeria). These cases illustrate the effects of state capacity.
– Russia and Colombia explore the links between political and criminal violence.
– In Northern Ireland, extreme violence was avoided largely as a result of substantial state capacity.
– In Kenya, war might have been avoided because of substantial state capacity to repress opposition (though not the case with intercommunal violence in Kenya). The mechanisms through which state capacity operates to reduce the risk of civil war are pivotal in the analysis, since those mechanisms differ in economically developed and underdeveloped states.
– In Macedonia, although state capacity was low, a war was averted largely as a result of substantial external assistance and a generally open regime.
“Civil war may be a response to either greed or grievance,” said Nicholas Sambanis, co-editor of “Understanding Civil War”, “but most often it is the result of both. We must now move beyond the greed-grievance distinction to explain why civil war occurs”.
– Moreover, if it is civil war that we want to explain, our theories must be able to explain not only which countries are more likely to experience violence in general, but more specifically why violence takes the form of a civil war as opposed to other forms, such as genocide, coups, riots, or organized crime, he concluded.
For more information on the World Banks Conflict Prevention & Reconstruction work, see the website: www.worldbank.org/conflict
