Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2.2.2 Greed versus grievance
Reframing conflict as such led to an emphasis on non-traditional (i.e. non-military)
conflict factors, including poverty, resource scarcity, identity, religion and the role of
the environment. How those 'new wars' were funded and managed to perpetuate was
also questioned, in particular by looking into resource exploitation and control. This
brought into focus the role of non-state actors and the functioning of economies of
violence, where wars were fought for the enrichment of state and non-state elites. In
his early study of the 'benefits of war', David Keen (1998) argued that wars were not
'irrational', but instead pursued in a calculated attempt to derive economic benefits
from them. Wars were not to be seen as 'politics by other means', as once observed by
Clausewitz, but as 'economics by other means'. In the emerging greed-versus-grievance
debate, analysts disagreed on the relative importance of politico-ideological factors
(grievance) in comparison to economic factors (greed). Closely tied to the greed argu-
ment is Paul Collier (2000), the former Director of the Development Research Group
at the World Bank. Collier and his team contended that, apart from income and growth
levels, conflicts were related to proxies for greed (economies based on primary com-
modities and large numbers of poorly educated young men) rather than proxies for
grievance (inequality, lack of political rights etc.). He submitted that rebel groups only
adopted grievance discourses in an attempt to raise their legitimacy, but that grievances
per se were not driving the conflict. According to Collier (2000), the possibilities for
predation and for 'doing well out of war' were the real drivers of conflict. Political
and ethnographic work showed that many wars in the so-called (neo-) patrimonial
states in Africa and Asia were fought by elites in order to enrich themselves and their
immediate entourage (Allen 1999; Chabal and Daloz 1999). However, it has also been
suggested that greed often motivated elites rather than followers, or may only have
become dominant in a later stage of the war when resources became necessary for the
continuation of the war and replaced original ideological motives. The latter has often
been argued in the case of the Colombian guerrilla movement FARC.
2.2.3 Economies of violence
Whatever the reason for starting a rebellion, Bannon and Collier maintain that rebel
movements need to raise income to fund their wars. After all, without it they would
'wither away': “Where rural areas produce primary commodities with high economic
rents, generally for export, it is a relatively simple matter for rebel groups to run an
extortion racket, levying protection charges on producers or carrying out some of the
trade themselves'' (2003: 4). Recent fieldwork in the Ituri District in the DRC showed
that both remnant rebel movements as well as the Congolese army resorted to such
practices on a wide scale (Frerks and Douma 2007). Comparative case studies have also
highlighted the role of economies of violence in particular war-torn countries (Douma
2005; Cilliers and Dietrich 2000). In those countries, it is 'resource abundance' rather
than scarcity that creates the conflict. In effect, this notion conveys that concentrations
of easily loot-able resources tend to attract violence rather than resources that are
scarce. Examples mentioned include the resource wealth of countries like DRC, Sierra
Leone, Liberia and Angola, though it remains a fact that these locally and abundantly
available resources are obviously scarce at a global scale.
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