Environmental Engineering Reference
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encourage predatory behaviour in the form of private violence by the less fortunate,
or group violence if the collective action problem is resolved. Once growth progresses
further, violence must decline to sustain the security of investment, and the state has
to perform regulatory and security provisioning functions. Increasing violence may
be symptomatic of the return of privatised social violence, precipitated by frustration
spawned by greater awareness in the midst of the lack of commensurate
individual
(rather than national) progress. Gurr's (1970) notion of relative deprivation argues
that when people perceive that they have less than their just deserts, they will revolt.
This is more likely to occur when the general or average level of prosperity is increasing,
but some groups are left behind, as is often the case following globalisation led growth.
Another issue that may produce violence in developing countries, but has received
scant attention, is the growing inequality between the richer and poorer nations of
the world. Milanovic (2011) demonstrates that the growth effort required for poor
countries to catch up, including that for fast growing emerging economies like India,
is much greater than expected. Secondly, individual positions in a global income dis-
tribution are much more determined by domicile (the country where you work) rather
than socioeconomic class or occupation. For example, the income inequality between
two similarly qualified doctors working in Britain and Zimbabwe may be greater than
the measured inequalities that exist within a single nation state. In an era of widespread
informational dissemination about more affluent life styles, disparities between nations
may encourage people disaffected by this global inequality of opportunity to revolt
against their government's failure to deliver a higher and fairer standard of living. The
draconian restrictions on international migration do not help to resolve these tensions.
3.3 NATURAL RESOURCE ENDOWMENTS AND CIVILWAR
The scarcity of resources such as land or water for agriculture or pastoralism may
produce conflict. During the last decade, however, the fact that economic dependence
on primary goods exports enhances conflict risk became an oft-cited finding in the
rational choice literature in conflict studies. Collier and Hoeffler (2004) thus argue
that the abundance of natural resource rents is said to lead to the greed motivation
for conflict, the idea being that it is easier to purloin profits or rents associated with
the production of natural resource based commodities. This result has been subjected
to a great deal of scrutiny, and as a consequence has not emerged unscathed. The fact
that this simple assertion, based on a non-robust statistical association, needs to be
nuanced is now widely accepted; see Murshed, 2010, chapter 3 for a detailed review.
A major concern with the Collier and Hoeffler (2004) econometric work was that
it conflated all primary goods exports (the independent variable was primary goods
exports as a share of national income) with key lootable or obstructable resources, and
excluded illegal substances. To be a source of conflict a natural resource based product
needs to be contestable (Ross 2003); prime examples of these are oil, gas, alluvial
diamonds and narcotics bases (coca and poppy). Furthermore, there is a measurement
issue: do we take into account the total stock of resources in our measurement of
conflict risk rather than flows (indicated by production or exports). Additionally, when
we differentiate between on-shore and off-shore oil, alluvial and deep mine diamonds,
the conflict risks are greater with both on-shore oil and alluvial diamonds (both are
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