Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The first point refers to the resource sharing agreements. In a well ordered society,
some understanding usually exists about sharing revenues and/or expenditure between
those in power and others not in power; the breakdown of these arrangements or
the undermining of the credibility of existing commitments to resource sharing can
produce greed and/or grievance. There are many examples of conflicts that emerge out
of fiscal disputes, something that can be exacerbated in the context of economic decline.
Disputes over the apportionment of revenues from natural resources are especially
common and, as in Nigeria and Indonesia, these often take on ethnic and regional
dimensions. Additionally, the social contract is less likely to hold when ruling regimes
prefer repression to making transfers that assuage rebellion.
Secondly, there is the political system. Hegre et al. (2001) point out that the risk of
conflict is lower in both well-established democracies and autocracies. This suggests
that conflict risk is at its greatest during transitions to and away from democracy, when
state capacity is weak, and also in fledgling and imperfect democracies (anocracies).
State capacity (its ability to both police citizens and provide public goods) is greater
in established autocratic or democratic societies, rather than in those somewhere in
the middle. Thus, there may be an inverted u-shaped relation between democracy
and internal conflict: increased democracy is first associated with rising violence, after
a critical point in democratic achievement, conflict and violence diminish. In other
words, democratic transitions may induce a greater risk of violence, unless managed
well via systems of power sharing and constraints on the executive.
The activities of the state are important in maintaining the cohesiveness of society,
which relates to a functioning social contract. In addition to aWeberian monopoly over
violence, a functioning state must be able to enforce laws, secure property rights and
enforce contracts, as well as possess the fiscal capacity to raise revenues and provide
public goods. If it does not, a contradiction emerges between the de jure and de facto
functions of the state, which Ghani and Lockhart (2008) label the sovereignty gap. A
modern state must also be able to provide a wider range of public goods (health and
education for example), in addition to a capacity to regulate and manage markets. The
list grows longer with economic progress - more affluent nations tend to have bigger
governments (measured by the share of government consumption in national income),
as well as greater capacity to tax (see data in World Bank 2010). Economic decline
in failing states severely undermines the state's fiscal capacity, something that makes
the state heavily development assistance dependent, which further diminishes state
capacity. Furthermore, a 'failing' state's ability to guarantee personal security, prop-
erty rights and laws is often limited, leading to the privatisation of violence between
predatory and defensive elements within society. All these factors combine to produce
a degenerating social contract, where individuals rely on kinship based groups and
local warlords for security and the provision public goods, heightening civil war risk
as society descends towards an anarchical, Hobbesian state of nature.
3.2.3 Globalisation and conflict
In developing countries deemed to be successes in terms of achieving economic growth
and their participation in the globalised economy, economic progress can bring about
its own conflictive tendencies even when the state is not fundamentally threatened by
outright civil war. Some of these conflicts take the form of highly localised revolts in
Search WWH ::




Custom Search