New directions in conflict research from an economics perspective - Conflicts Over Natural Resources in the Global South - page 38

terms, for example, the reduction of absolute poverty, connected with the millennium
development goals (MDGs), yields a double dividend by simultaneously addressing
security and developmental concerns.
In the past three decades, and particularly since the end of the cold war, there
appears to be a greater incidence of developmental failure and, in the extreme form,
state failure, which sometimes leads to violent conflict. Related to these phenomena
are the functions of the state. Is the state benevolent or predatory? A great deal has
been written on this, but what is salient is that we are increasingly regarding the innate
nature of the state in developing countries as factional or predatory. We seem to have
left behind the idea that the state should be a functionary agent of society. Even within
the predatory category, there are shades of grey associated with good, moderate or
bad governance. In many ways, these distinctions among states mirror Olson's (1996)
stationary and roving bandit dichotomy. A stationary bandit (state) nurtures the tax
base (society) so that more can be extracted in the future, while a roving bandit is only
bent on what can be extorted here and now.
3.2.1 Causes of conflict risk
One robust result in the empirical cross-country civil war literature is that per-capita
income and conflict risk are significantly and negatively correlated. Although this
finding may disguise the mechanisms that truly underlie the statistical association,
conflict risk is heavily associated with developmental and state failure. My contention
is that both development failure and rapid development (or growth) enhance conflict
risk. Additionally, factors external to the nation state can also enhance conflict risk.
Within the rational choice literature on conflict, two broad factors, greed and
grievance, have been closely linked to the recent (post-cold war) onset of civil war (see
Chapters 3 and 5 in Murshed 2010 for a lengthier elaboration of the arguments that
follow in this sub-section). If we were to summarise the greed argument in Collier and
Hoeffler (2004), conflict reflects elite competition over valuable natural resource rents,
often concealed under the fig leaf of collective grievance. Economic, political and social
inequalities play an insignificant role in this process, as these types of grievances are
omnipresent in any society. Rather, it is the opportunity afforded by natural resource
rents as a ready source of finance for war that is crucial to these forms of violent dispu-
tation. There is also a poverty trap in this connection: poverty makes soldiering a less
unattractive livelihood strategy, lowering the opportunity cost of war in poor nations.
In turn, conflict serves to perpetuate poverty, because of war's destructiveness and
a vicious cycle of poverty-conflict-poverty ensues (see, for example, Paul Collier and
associates for the World Bank 2003). Fearon and Laitin (2003) assert that civil war risk
is mainly associated with diminished state capacity to either deter violent challenges to
the state or assuage underlying grievances through transfers and government expen-
diture. This finding, taken together with Paul Collier's work, has a simple intuitive
appeal: civil wars occur in poverty stricken, failed states characterised by venal, cor-
rupt and inept regimes, where the dynamics of war are sustained by a motivation akin
to banditry. It also provides the intellectual basis for direct, colonial style intervention
in collapsed or failing states.
Against this is a long-standing view that relative deprivation (Gurr 1970) and the
grievance that it produces fuels internal violence, although the original argument of