Sources and causes of conflict; a brief description
Abstract
Every war is part of a unique moment and space in history, thus becoming unrepeatable. Nevertheless there are a series of variables that might help us to better understand the general sources of armed conflict. In this paper I will argue that such variables are mainly cultural, political, economical and scarce resources related. Thus the paper tries to explain the problem form a macro and theoretical analysis, but one should keep in mind that micro and macro variables interact in different ways and countries generating thus different outcomes.
Roberto Gerhard Tuma
Mexico
Describe the sources and causes of conflict
“Capitalism bares the seed of its own destruction”
The Communist Manifest
I. What is the Collapse of Nation States?
One of the critics Marx launched against capitalism was it’s self destructive logic. Simply put, capitalism tried to get the most profit out of the proletariat not realizing that a poor proletariat class would not be able to consume whatever they produced. An excess of market supply would thus generate a crisis in the social structure, generating it’s own collapse. Capitalism managed to adapt this critic and has proven to be a very flexible system.
It’s possible to make a similar critic to the current state of affairs. The actual global processes weaken and limit the Nation State authority and capacity to act. Whether it is the UN, World Bank, International Monetary Fund or some other institution (e.g. NATO), the fact is that they undermine the Nation State authority and capacity to enforce its policies (be its macroeconomic policies or the way it should handle Human Rights, for example). The paradox, and the conflict of this process, is that, as it erodes its main units capacities, the system needs them to operate properly to sustain itself. So they try to rebuild the previous state but with a standard set of values and practices (agreed upon by western countries), many times alien to the receiving culture, which will probably generate future conflicts. Thus, the process destroys and rebuilds Nation States imposing a common set of practices and values, as if they were “just another brick in the wall” of the international community. As Roland Paris says:
“[I]nternational peacebuilding agencies are not merely the products of previous exercises in global governance, but rather, in working to rehabilitate war-shattered states, these agencies perform international governance functions themselves. The agencies act on the behalf of the international system to reconstruct the constituent units of that system in accordance with a widely shared conception of how political authority should be exercised –namely, by territorial units called states. Instead of allowing ‘failed states’ to evolve new forms of domestic governance or disappear into the dustbin of history, peacebuilders work toward re-establishing these states as effective sovereign entities.”
But in spite that all countries face the same international scenario, each responds differently. So the question that we address in this essay is: why will Nation Sates collapse? What onsets the beginning of an armed conflict, that many times ends with the Nation State? We could say that every armed conflict has, and deserves, a unique explanation of why did it happen. But then social sciences would never progress and would loose themselves in the particulars of each case. There are another fields of study in which every subject of analysis is unique and unrepeatable: medicine and biology. Yet they have managed to draw some solid arguments and generalizations about the human body and its functions.
Bluntly put, the collapse of a Nation State is when no one holds the proper monopoly of violence over a certain territory, as Max Weber defines a State. The collapse is usually brought about when we face a situation in which society divides it self between friends and enemies, and as Carl Schmitt says, each side looks for the existential elimination of the other. This creates a state of anarchy, as Thomas Hobbes would have it in which every one lives under constant uncertainty and fear. As we can see violence has been ever present throughout human history and political thought, and much has been written about it.
It’s important to state that this paper won’t attempt to identify one of the presented variables as more important than the rest. It would be very ambitious and simplistic to identify one variable as the only root of conflicts all over the world. Probably, the best explanation for current intrastate conflicts are a combination of variables, such as poverty, poor State capacity and design, horizontal inequality, political exclusion of particular groups, political culture, ethnic cleavages and environmental scarcity. These factors converge when insurgent groups do a cost-benefit analysis about their gains from risking an open armed conflict or to keep the status quo, being it peace under the current Nation State. The logic result from this analysis is that when the State capacity is and its capabilities to eliminate the insurgency are low the probability of an armed conflict is more likely. As Doyle and Sambanis say:
“Civil Wars arise when individuals, groups, and factions discover that a policeman, judge, soldier, or politician no longer speaks and acts for them. The local cop becomes the Croatian, Serb, or Muslim cop. When the disaffected mobilize, acquire the resources needed to risk an armed conflict contest, meet resistance, and judge that they can win, civil war follows.”
The purpose of this essay is to point out the most common causes of conflict identified in the literature and explain why they are viewed like that. The proper identification of the variables which explain the onset of conflicts has major policy implications, as Frances Stewart said “the international community has yet to develop effective policy responses to prevent such crises from erupting”. Identifying the causes of conflicts is the first step in preventing them. The essay is structured as follows: the present section which is introductory, a second one which discusses what variables should be taken into consideration and why, and finally the conclusions of this paper.
II. Why and how groups are mobilized?
The variables that will be presented can be divided in four broad categories: natural resources, economic, political and cultural. Each of these groups is linked with each other. Most often political power endows its holder with economic benefits and riches. Other times economic riches endow political power. Problems particularly arise when one sector of the population manages to systematically exclude other sectors from the decision taking process and any rent coming from the State. This chapter will address first the cultural variables, then the political and finally the economic ones.
II.A Cultural Variables
In this section we will analyze the impact of political culture, ethnic and religious diversity and propensity to the use of violence. All of these variables are at the same time related with each other. The worst combination would be found in an intolerant and hierarchical society, with deep ethnic cleavages and a long history of violence. From a cultural point of view that would be a recipe to a complete and total armed conflict. We would expect the opposite outcome in a tolerant and horizontal society, without ethnic diversity nor a long history of violence.
When we talk about political culture we refer to the attachment to the rule of law, the perception on corruption, the level of engagement in social activities and in social institutions, which would be a measure of social capital, like Robert Putnam defines it. The hypothesis would be that places rich with social capital should be less prone to violence. For example, in India, Ashutosh, Varshney found out that the violent conflict between Hindus and Muslims was less in those cities that had strong formal interethnic relationships. The main problem with these variables is that most of the time you get this information from surveys. In the case of States which are about to collapse it’ll be almost impossible to realize one.
It would be easier to measure the other two cultural variables: ethnic diversity in a region and previous history of violence. Ethnic, as Varshney uses it, means a group of people identified by their religion, race, language or sect. As James Fearon and David Latin point out, there are two schools of thought to explain why ethnic cleavages increase the probability of conflict: perennialist and modernist. The first school of thought, in a nutshell, argues that “plural societies face a host of pathologies that render them especially prone to conflict and, at the extreme, violence”. The second school of thought suggests that:
“Economic modernization and the development of the modern state make upward social mobility possible, but contingent on sharing the culture of the group that dominates state or society. When the state or society poses ascriptive barriers to upward mobility for minority groups, they may develop separatist nationalist movements: All the more so, the greater the pre-existing cultural differences between minority group and the dominant group.”
So, we could rely on population census to know the number of ethnic groups in a given society, the number of factions should have a positive relationship with the probability of an armed conflict. Finally, to account to the last cultural variable we could rely in history and measure the number of armed conflicts registered in the region. This is important if we take into consideration the Path Dependence theory, by Douglas North. Briefly put, the theory suggests that what you do today is similar and depends on what you did yesterday. So, metaphorically speaking once you chosen a road, or direction, your next step will probably be in the same road or direction. As we can see this is a very broad concept that helps us explain a lot, for example the reiteration of human activity. The theory would predict that we will repeat an action even though it might not be the best among a set of options, just because we did it yesterday, and forms a part of the collective subconscious.
Many authors recognize the importance of culture, but as we have stated is very hard to point out it’s responsibility in the conflict. It’s an idea that is present and yet is hard to grasp. There is another debate about culture and institutions, mainly: weather culture determines the institutions of a country or if the institutions determine the culture of the people. But, the institutions will be addressed in the next section.
II.B Political variables
This section of the essay we will address the impact of political variables to explain the emergence of armed conflict in a society. The main variables that will be addressed here are: State capacity, Charismatic leaders and Institutions and electoral laws. We should also bare in mind that these variables interact with each other and produce different outcomes. For example; a majority system in which the winner takes all, like the Westminster model, might not be the best institutional arrangement for a highly divided society. Such a system might be effective in implementing policies, or for State Capacity (since it has less opposition within the government), but rather ineffective if we are talking about social representation.
According to Fearon and Latin, Sate Capacity is one of the main variables to explain the conflict because if it has a low capacity, the costs of insurgency are lower:
“The fundamental fact about insurgency is that insurgents are weak relative to the governments they are fighting, at least at the start of operations… Most important for the prospects of a nascent insurgency, however, are the government’s police and military capabilities and the reach of government institutions into rural areas. Insurgents are better able to survive and prosper if government and military they oppose are relatively weak – badly finances, organizationally inept, corrupt, politically divided, and poorly informed about goings-on at the local level”
Basically by state capacity we mean its ability to eliminate possible threats be it by intelligence, resources or brute force. The methodological question this rises is: how to measure something so abstract? What different social scientists have done is to approximate this by the GNP or the percapita income. As Fearon and Latin say, this is a proxy of State’s capacity because it shows its overall financial, administrative, police and military capabilities. The authors argue that this variable is also useful because in countries with low income percapita, young men might seriously consider the economic benefits of joining the insurgency. But when we are talking about the state’s capacity to deliver violence upon it’s citizens, another topic comes into mind: the protection of human rights. This is a hypothesis that could go either way: a) the less they respect human rights the more it will exacerbate violence, because it will feed the resentment of the people. Or b) the less they respect human rights the less it will exacerbate violence; because it will induce fear into the population.
Another factor that can be taken into consideration, but is very difficult to measure is the existence of charismatic leaders. As Max Weber said, charisma is one of the sources that legitimate the leadership. The problem with this approach is that you need to explain the behaviour of one individual, who often doesn’t express his real intentions to create conflict. This factor could also go either way, it depends on the values of the leader; if it’s someone who believes in the institutions and wants to avoid conflict, it might prevent it. But if that person, of his group of advisors feel that the institutional way is closed for them; the only solution will be an armed conflict, originating many times an ethnic cleavage. “In many cases, it has been shown that political leaders set out to create group consciousness in order to achieve a basis for power”. This leads us to the importance of the institutions.
As we said previously a proper institutional design might avoid an armed conflict. Basically it means an electoral system fit to its society and inclusive political institutions. There is a long withstanding debate in political science weather presidential systems are more prone to end in conflict than parliamentary systems. The hypothesis defended by Juan Linz is that a type of government with division of powers between the executive and legislative will produce legislative deadlock and eventually armed conflict. But recent analysis has demonstrated that it is also likely to find divided governments in parliamentary systems. It’s also important to bare in mind the electoral system and remember that a majority system like the American often produces a two party system while a proportional representation system produces a multiparty. So, it depends; if it is a divided society a proportional representation system would make everybody feel represented. While a majority system would make a lot of people feel excluded from the government, thus alien to it. There are another group of institutions that could be taken into consideration, and that relate to the social capital. These would be social institutions like schools, parents associations, sports clubs and unions; in which interethincal coexistence would be promoted. They would help reduce the social cleavages within a society. Another very important cleavage is the economic one. But this issue will be addressed in the next section.
II.C Economic variables:
Some people would say that being a country rich with natural resources can be a blessing; others, like Pink Floyd might argue otherwise: “Money; is the root of all evil today”. Why is there this discussion? Because “natural resource dependence further implies undiversified economy, which is more vulnerable to commodity prices shocks and lacks significant manufacturing services sectors that develop human capital and facilitate economic growth”. Adding to that explanation would also be the induction to a poor fiscal capacity. When a State can get must of it’s revenue thanks to one natural resource it doesn’t need to develop a serious fiscal capacity, thus giving less attention to an important State faculty and responsibility. The hypothesis would be that this type of single product based economies (reliable in diamonds, silver, gold, oil, drugs production, etc) would create higher incentives to gain control of the resourceful territory, increasing the probability of violence in the region.
“corrupt governments engage in rent seeking and predation in order to enrich themselves, repay the support of allies, and pay-off potential adversaries. In the process they weaken the legitimacy of the State by degrading its capacity to fulfil public service requirements, and alienate groups, which are not reciving the fruits of the government’s corruption. As a result, groups on the periphery – and sometimes the general citizenry- mobilize in violent opposition to the government and war occurs.”
Two other economic variables are important. The first is the income gap between the richest and the poorest tenths of the population. And the second is the amount of poor people living in the country. These variables together form an explosive combination: when the gap between the richest and the poorest is too big, and there are a lot of poor people. Classic authors like Machiavelli and Aristotle pointed out to this characteristic of a society as a potential source of conflict. Actually, Frances Stewart argues that the most important difference is the horizontal inequalities, which means income gaps between different groups of the population, where groups are defined by region, ethnicity, class or religion. When a group perceives itself as systematicaly deprived from the social and economic benefits may very well produce an armed conflict. In underdeveloped societies where the main economical activity is agriculture land and water become important issues that may induce conflict, but this topic will be addressed in the next section.
II.D Scarce Natural Resources
These set of variables are very similar to the economic ones. Both refer to valuable goods highly regarded by society. I set this category apart because I address the hypothesis, also defended by authors like Homer Dixon, that scarce natural resources might be an important source of conflict in the years to come. By this I mean clean water and good agricultural land; the scarcity of this two factors combined will reduce the food supply, and this in the presence an increased world population will generate several intra and inter state conflicts. Scarcity will produce an increase social demands on the State, and the inability to fulfil these demands will bring about migration and thus group identity conflicts might occur. There is little empirical evidence that environmental scarcity causes conflicts within states (more over, from a list of twelve conflicts regarding natural resources during the 20th century, access to oil or minerals was an issue in ten of these conflicts, only five conflicts included renewable resources and only two concerned neither oil nor minerals, the main factor was croplands).
“Environmental scarcity has insidious and cumulative social impacts, such as population movement, economic decline, and the weakening of states. These can contribute to diffuse and presistent sub-national violence. The rate and extent of such conflicts will increase as scarcities worsen”
Homer Dixon’s analysis suggests that the most likely renewable resource to stimulate interstate conflict is river water. Since it’s a source for personal and national survival, and since it flows from one state to the other, one country’s access might be affected by another’s actions. So geographical location is also important, not only for the sharing of natural resources. If it is close to a country experiencing an armed conflict, it might surpass inter state borders and transmit the conflict. But, as it has been often stated, none of these variables by itself brings about armed conflict. This issue will be addressed in the final section of the paper.
III. Conclusions
After such a long list of variables one might end up with the filling that we haven’t really explained anything. What this list shows is that almost everything can start a conflict. The range of variables is wide and includes micro uncontrollable elements like a leader’s personality; to macro elements like the scarcity of natural resources due to climate change and population increase. And, “even when common variables exist in different conflicts, it doesn’t mean that the nature of the interaction amongst these factors is the same… two countries may share the same ‘causal’ variables but only one experiences armed conflict.” . Still, there are some theoretical conclusions that can be drawn.
In every society there will always be an asymmetric power relation. This means inequality will always be present to some degree. The problem arises when this asymmetric power relation no longer corresponds with the real distribution of power within a given society. Thus, in the end there is always a power struggle within the different groups of a society, some times more civilized than others (for example democracy). The problem is when this power struggle exceedes the institutional capacities of a certain country. In that sense, an important question is: where will we find the tipping point for the dominated to rebel against the current state of affairs? This has to do with the cost benefit analysis made by the actors involved and their level of risk aversion. At this moment is when the variables mentioned in the paper come into consideration by the decision takers whenever these analysis are done, it all depends in the importance that is given to each of them. Thus trying to understand the relevance of each variable is crucial if one looks to explain the sources of armed conflict.
IV. Bibliography:
Ashutosh, Varshney, 2001, Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond in
World Politics Vol. 53, No. 3, (Apr. 2001), pp. 362-398.
Douglas C. North, Nobel Prize Lecture, December 9, 1993, Economic Performance through Time. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/north-lecture.html
Douglass C. North, 1991, “Insitutions” in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 97-112.
Edward Newman, 2004, “The ‘New Wars’ Debate: A Historical Perspective is Needed”, in Security Dialogue (vol. 35, no. 2, June 2004), pp. 173-189.
Edward Newman, 2007 A, “Civil war, state failure and pacebuilding” in E. Newman, A crisis of Global Institutions? Multilateralism and International Security, Routledge, pp. 63-115
Edward Newman, 2007 B, “Conflict Research: The Implications for Peacebuilding”, in UN Research (The Japan Association for UN studies) (no. 8, 2007) [forthcoming]
Frances Stewart, 2000, “The Root Causes of Humanitarian Emergencies”, in E. Wayne Nafziger, Frances Stewart and Raimo Vayrnynen (eds), War, Hunger, and Displacement: The Origins of Humanitarian Emergencies, Oxford University Press: pp. 1-41
James Fearon and David Latin, 2003, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War” in The American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1. (Feb., 2003), pp. 75-90.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1998, The Communist Manifest, Signic Classic, New York.
Mary Kaldor, 2006, New & Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 2nd edition Polity Press: pp. 1-14, 72-94.
Michael Hechter, 2000, Containing Nationalism, Oxford University Press.
Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, 2000, “International Peacebuilding: A theoretical and Quantitative Analysis” in The American Political Science Review, Vol. 94, No. 4. (Dec, 2000), pp. 779-801.
Robert Putnam, Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, 1993, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton New Jersey.
Roland Paris, 2000, “Broadening the Study of Peace Operations” in International Studies Review, Vol. 2, No.3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 27-44.
Tanja Home, 2004, ‘Delivering Feudal Democracy in East Timor’ in Edward Newman and R. Rich eds. The UN Role in Promoting Democracy between Ideals and Reality. UNU Press pp. 302-319
Thomas Homer Dixon, 1994, “Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases” in International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 5-40.
Thomas Homer Dixon, 1995, “Environmental Scarcities, State Capacity, and Civil Violence” in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 48, No. 7. (Apr; 1995), pp. 26-33
Every war is part of a unique moment and space in history, thus becoming unrepeatable. Nevertheless there are a series of variables that might help us to better understand the general sources of armed conflict. In this paper I will argue that such variables are mainly cultural, political, economical and scarce resources related. Thus the paper tries to explain the problem form a macro and theoretical analysis, but one should keep in mind that micro and macro variables interact in different ways and countries generating thus different outcomes.
Roberto Gerhard Tuma
Mexico
Describe the sources and causes of conflict
“Capitalism bares the seed of its own destruction”
The Communist Manifest
I. What is the Collapse of Nation States?
One of the critics Marx launched against capitalism was it’s self destructive logic. Simply put, capitalism tried to get the most profit out of the proletariat not realizing that a poor proletariat class would not be able to consume whatever they produced. An excess of market supply would thus generate a crisis in the social structure, generating it’s own collapse. Capitalism managed to adapt this critic and has proven to be a very flexible system.
It’s possible to make a similar critic to the current state of affairs. The actual global processes weaken and limit the Nation State authority and capacity to act. Whether it is the UN, World Bank, International Monetary Fund or some other institution (e.g. NATO), the fact is that they undermine the Nation State authority and capacity to enforce its policies (be its macroeconomic policies or the way it should handle Human Rights, for example). The paradox, and the conflict of this process, is that, as it erodes its main units capacities, the system needs them to operate properly to sustain itself. So they try to rebuild the previous state but with a standard set of values and practices (agreed upon by western countries), many times alien to the receiving culture, which will probably generate future conflicts. Thus, the process destroys and rebuilds Nation States imposing a common set of practices and values, as if they were “just another brick in the wall” of the international community. As Roland Paris says:
“[I]nternational peacebuilding agencies are not merely the products of previous exercises in global governance, but rather, in working to rehabilitate war-shattered states, these agencies perform international governance functions themselves. The agencies act on the behalf of the international system to reconstruct the constituent units of that system in accordance with a widely shared conception of how political authority should be exercised –namely, by territorial units called states. Instead of allowing ‘failed states’ to evolve new forms of domestic governance or disappear into the dustbin of history, peacebuilders work toward re-establishing these states as effective sovereign entities.”
But in spite that all countries face the same international scenario, each responds differently. So the question that we address in this essay is: why will Nation Sates collapse? What onsets the beginning of an armed conflict, that many times ends with the Nation State? We could say that every armed conflict has, and deserves, a unique explanation of why did it happen. But then social sciences would never progress and would loose themselves in the particulars of each case. There are another fields of study in which every subject of analysis is unique and unrepeatable: medicine and biology. Yet they have managed to draw some solid arguments and generalizations about the human body and its functions.
Bluntly put, the collapse of a Nation State is when no one holds the proper monopoly of violence over a certain territory, as Max Weber defines a State. The collapse is usually brought about when we face a situation in which society divides it self between friends and enemies, and as Carl Schmitt says, each side looks for the existential elimination of the other. This creates a state of anarchy, as Thomas Hobbes would have it in which every one lives under constant uncertainty and fear. As we can see violence has been ever present throughout human history and political thought, and much has been written about it.
It’s important to state that this paper won’t attempt to identify one of the presented variables as more important than the rest. It would be very ambitious and simplistic to identify one variable as the only root of conflicts all over the world. Probably, the best explanation for current intrastate conflicts are a combination of variables, such as poverty, poor State capacity and design, horizontal inequality, political exclusion of particular groups, political culture, ethnic cleavages and environmental scarcity. These factors converge when insurgent groups do a cost-benefit analysis about their gains from risking an open armed conflict or to keep the status quo, being it peace under the current Nation State. The logic result from this analysis is that when the State capacity is and its capabilities to eliminate the insurgency are low the probability of an armed conflict is more likely. As Doyle and Sambanis say:
“Civil Wars arise when individuals, groups, and factions discover that a policeman, judge, soldier, or politician no longer speaks and acts for them. The local cop becomes the Croatian, Serb, or Muslim cop. When the disaffected mobilize, acquire the resources needed to risk an armed conflict contest, meet resistance, and judge that they can win, civil war follows.”
The purpose of this essay is to point out the most common causes of conflict identified in the literature and explain why they are viewed like that. The proper identification of the variables which explain the onset of conflicts has major policy implications, as Frances Stewart said “the international community has yet to develop effective policy responses to prevent such crises from erupting”. Identifying the causes of conflicts is the first step in preventing them. The essay is structured as follows: the present section which is introductory, a second one which discusses what variables should be taken into consideration and why, and finally the conclusions of this paper.
II. Why and how groups are mobilized?
The variables that will be presented can be divided in four broad categories: natural resources, economic, political and cultural. Each of these groups is linked with each other. Most often political power endows its holder with economic benefits and riches. Other times economic riches endow political power. Problems particularly arise when one sector of the population manages to systematically exclude other sectors from the decision taking process and any rent coming from the State. This chapter will address first the cultural variables, then the political and finally the economic ones.
II.A Cultural Variables
In this section we will analyze the impact of political culture, ethnic and religious diversity and propensity to the use of violence. All of these variables are at the same time related with each other. The worst combination would be found in an intolerant and hierarchical society, with deep ethnic cleavages and a long history of violence. From a cultural point of view that would be a recipe to a complete and total armed conflict. We would expect the opposite outcome in a tolerant and horizontal society, without ethnic diversity nor a long history of violence.
When we talk about political culture we refer to the attachment to the rule of law, the perception on corruption, the level of engagement in social activities and in social institutions, which would be a measure of social capital, like Robert Putnam defines it. The hypothesis would be that places rich with social capital should be less prone to violence. For example, in India, Ashutosh, Varshney found out that the violent conflict between Hindus and Muslims was less in those cities that had strong formal interethnic relationships. The main problem with these variables is that most of the time you get this information from surveys. In the case of States which are about to collapse it’ll be almost impossible to realize one.
It would be easier to measure the other two cultural variables: ethnic diversity in a region and previous history of violence. Ethnic, as Varshney uses it, means a group of people identified by their religion, race, language or sect. As James Fearon and David Latin point out, there are two schools of thought to explain why ethnic cleavages increase the probability of conflict: perennialist and modernist. The first school of thought, in a nutshell, argues that “plural societies face a host of pathologies that render them especially prone to conflict and, at the extreme, violence”. The second school of thought suggests that:
“Economic modernization and the development of the modern state make upward social mobility possible, but contingent on sharing the culture of the group that dominates state or society. When the state or society poses ascriptive barriers to upward mobility for minority groups, they may develop separatist nationalist movements: All the more so, the greater the pre-existing cultural differences between minority group and the dominant group.”
So, we could rely on population census to know the number of ethnic groups in a given society, the number of factions should have a positive relationship with the probability of an armed conflict. Finally, to account to the last cultural variable we could rely in history and measure the number of armed conflicts registered in the region. This is important if we take into consideration the Path Dependence theory, by Douglas North. Briefly put, the theory suggests that what you do today is similar and depends on what you did yesterday. So, metaphorically speaking once you chosen a road, or direction, your next step will probably be in the same road or direction. As we can see this is a very broad concept that helps us explain a lot, for example the reiteration of human activity. The theory would predict that we will repeat an action even though it might not be the best among a set of options, just because we did it yesterday, and forms a part of the collective subconscious.
Many authors recognize the importance of culture, but as we have stated is very hard to point out it’s responsibility in the conflict. It’s an idea that is present and yet is hard to grasp. There is another debate about culture and institutions, mainly: weather culture determines the institutions of a country or if the institutions determine the culture of the people. But, the institutions will be addressed in the next section.
II.B Political variables
This section of the essay we will address the impact of political variables to explain the emergence of armed conflict in a society. The main variables that will be addressed here are: State capacity, Charismatic leaders and Institutions and electoral laws. We should also bare in mind that these variables interact with each other and produce different outcomes. For example; a majority system in which the winner takes all, like the Westminster model, might not be the best institutional arrangement for a highly divided society. Such a system might be effective in implementing policies, or for State Capacity (since it has less opposition within the government), but rather ineffective if we are talking about social representation.
According to Fearon and Latin, Sate Capacity is one of the main variables to explain the conflict because if it has a low capacity, the costs of insurgency are lower:
“The fundamental fact about insurgency is that insurgents are weak relative to the governments they are fighting, at least at the start of operations… Most important for the prospects of a nascent insurgency, however, are the government’s police and military capabilities and the reach of government institutions into rural areas. Insurgents are better able to survive and prosper if government and military they oppose are relatively weak – badly finances, organizationally inept, corrupt, politically divided, and poorly informed about goings-on at the local level”
Basically by state capacity we mean its ability to eliminate possible threats be it by intelligence, resources or brute force. The methodological question this rises is: how to measure something so abstract? What different social scientists have done is to approximate this by the GNP or the percapita income. As Fearon and Latin say, this is a proxy of State’s capacity because it shows its overall financial, administrative, police and military capabilities. The authors argue that this variable is also useful because in countries with low income percapita, young men might seriously consider the economic benefits of joining the insurgency. But when we are talking about the state’s capacity to deliver violence upon it’s citizens, another topic comes into mind: the protection of human rights. This is a hypothesis that could go either way: a) the less they respect human rights the more it will exacerbate violence, because it will feed the resentment of the people. Or b) the less they respect human rights the less it will exacerbate violence; because it will induce fear into the population.
Another factor that can be taken into consideration, but is very difficult to measure is the existence of charismatic leaders. As Max Weber said, charisma is one of the sources that legitimate the leadership. The problem with this approach is that you need to explain the behaviour of one individual, who often doesn’t express his real intentions to create conflict. This factor could also go either way, it depends on the values of the leader; if it’s someone who believes in the institutions and wants to avoid conflict, it might prevent it. But if that person, of his group of advisors feel that the institutional way is closed for them; the only solution will be an armed conflict, originating many times an ethnic cleavage. “In many cases, it has been shown that political leaders set out to create group consciousness in order to achieve a basis for power”. This leads us to the importance of the institutions.
As we said previously a proper institutional design might avoid an armed conflict. Basically it means an electoral system fit to its society and inclusive political institutions. There is a long withstanding debate in political science weather presidential systems are more prone to end in conflict than parliamentary systems. The hypothesis defended by Juan Linz is that a type of government with division of powers between the executive and legislative will produce legislative deadlock and eventually armed conflict. But recent analysis has demonstrated that it is also likely to find divided governments in parliamentary systems. It’s also important to bare in mind the electoral system and remember that a majority system like the American often produces a two party system while a proportional representation system produces a multiparty. So, it depends; if it is a divided society a proportional representation system would make everybody feel represented. While a majority system would make a lot of people feel excluded from the government, thus alien to it. There are another group of institutions that could be taken into consideration, and that relate to the social capital. These would be social institutions like schools, parents associations, sports clubs and unions; in which interethincal coexistence would be promoted. They would help reduce the social cleavages within a society. Another very important cleavage is the economic one. But this issue will be addressed in the next section.
II.C Economic variables:
Some people would say that being a country rich with natural resources can be a blessing; others, like Pink Floyd might argue otherwise: “Money; is the root of all evil today”. Why is there this discussion? Because “natural resource dependence further implies undiversified economy, which is more vulnerable to commodity prices shocks and lacks significant manufacturing services sectors that develop human capital and facilitate economic growth”. Adding to that explanation would also be the induction to a poor fiscal capacity. When a State can get must of it’s revenue thanks to one natural resource it doesn’t need to develop a serious fiscal capacity, thus giving less attention to an important State faculty and responsibility. The hypothesis would be that this type of single product based economies (reliable in diamonds, silver, gold, oil, drugs production, etc) would create higher incentives to gain control of the resourceful territory, increasing the probability of violence in the region.
“corrupt governments engage in rent seeking and predation in order to enrich themselves, repay the support of allies, and pay-off potential adversaries. In the process they weaken the legitimacy of the State by degrading its capacity to fulfil public service requirements, and alienate groups, which are not reciving the fruits of the government’s corruption. As a result, groups on the periphery – and sometimes the general citizenry- mobilize in violent opposition to the government and war occurs.”
Two other economic variables are important. The first is the income gap between the richest and the poorest tenths of the population. And the second is the amount of poor people living in the country. These variables together form an explosive combination: when the gap between the richest and the poorest is too big, and there are a lot of poor people. Classic authors like Machiavelli and Aristotle pointed out to this characteristic of a society as a potential source of conflict. Actually, Frances Stewart argues that the most important difference is the horizontal inequalities, which means income gaps between different groups of the population, where groups are defined by region, ethnicity, class or religion. When a group perceives itself as systematicaly deprived from the social and economic benefits may very well produce an armed conflict. In underdeveloped societies where the main economical activity is agriculture land and water become important issues that may induce conflict, but this topic will be addressed in the next section.
II.D Scarce Natural Resources
These set of variables are very similar to the economic ones. Both refer to valuable goods highly regarded by society. I set this category apart because I address the hypothesis, also defended by authors like Homer Dixon, that scarce natural resources might be an important source of conflict in the years to come. By this I mean clean water and good agricultural land; the scarcity of this two factors combined will reduce the food supply, and this in the presence an increased world population will generate several intra and inter state conflicts. Scarcity will produce an increase social demands on the State, and the inability to fulfil these demands will bring about migration and thus group identity conflicts might occur. There is little empirical evidence that environmental scarcity causes conflicts within states (more over, from a list of twelve conflicts regarding natural resources during the 20th century, access to oil or minerals was an issue in ten of these conflicts, only five conflicts included renewable resources and only two concerned neither oil nor minerals, the main factor was croplands).
“Environmental scarcity has insidious and cumulative social impacts, such as population movement, economic decline, and the weakening of states. These can contribute to diffuse and presistent sub-national violence. The rate and extent of such conflicts will increase as scarcities worsen”
Homer Dixon’s analysis suggests that the most likely renewable resource to stimulate interstate conflict is river water. Since it’s a source for personal and national survival, and since it flows from one state to the other, one country’s access might be affected by another’s actions. So geographical location is also important, not only for the sharing of natural resources. If it is close to a country experiencing an armed conflict, it might surpass inter state borders and transmit the conflict. But, as it has been often stated, none of these variables by itself brings about armed conflict. This issue will be addressed in the final section of the paper.
III. Conclusions
After such a long list of variables one might end up with the filling that we haven’t really explained anything. What this list shows is that almost everything can start a conflict. The range of variables is wide and includes micro uncontrollable elements like a leader’s personality; to macro elements like the scarcity of natural resources due to climate change and population increase. And, “even when common variables exist in different conflicts, it doesn’t mean that the nature of the interaction amongst these factors is the same… two countries may share the same ‘causal’ variables but only one experiences armed conflict.” . Still, there are some theoretical conclusions that can be drawn.
In every society there will always be an asymmetric power relation. This means inequality will always be present to some degree. The problem arises when this asymmetric power relation no longer corresponds with the real distribution of power within a given society. Thus, in the end there is always a power struggle within the different groups of a society, some times more civilized than others (for example democracy). The problem is when this power struggle exceedes the institutional capacities of a certain country. In that sense, an important question is: where will we find the tipping point for the dominated to rebel against the current state of affairs? This has to do with the cost benefit analysis made by the actors involved and their level of risk aversion. At this moment is when the variables mentioned in the paper come into consideration by the decision takers whenever these analysis are done, it all depends in the importance that is given to each of them. Thus trying to understand the relevance of each variable is crucial if one looks to explain the sources of armed conflict.
IV. Bibliography:
Ashutosh, Varshney, 2001, Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond in
World Politics Vol. 53, No. 3, (Apr. 2001), pp. 362-398.
Douglas C. North, Nobel Prize Lecture, December 9, 1993, Economic Performance through Time. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/north-lecture.html
Douglass C. North, 1991, “Insitutions” in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 97-112.
Edward Newman, 2004, “The ‘New Wars’ Debate: A Historical Perspective is Needed”, in Security Dialogue (vol. 35, no. 2, June 2004), pp. 173-189.
Edward Newman, 2007 A, “Civil war, state failure and pacebuilding” in E. Newman, A crisis of Global Institutions? Multilateralism and International Security, Routledge, pp. 63-115
Edward Newman, 2007 B, “Conflict Research: The Implications for Peacebuilding”, in UN Research (The Japan Association for UN studies) (no. 8, 2007) [forthcoming]
Frances Stewart, 2000, “The Root Causes of Humanitarian Emergencies”, in E. Wayne Nafziger, Frances Stewart and Raimo Vayrnynen (eds), War, Hunger, and Displacement: The Origins of Humanitarian Emergencies, Oxford University Press: pp. 1-41
James Fearon and David Latin, 2003, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War” in The American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1. (Feb., 2003), pp. 75-90.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1998, The Communist Manifest, Signic Classic, New York.
Mary Kaldor, 2006, New & Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 2nd edition Polity Press: pp. 1-14, 72-94.
Michael Hechter, 2000, Containing Nationalism, Oxford University Press.
Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, 2000, “International Peacebuilding: A theoretical and Quantitative Analysis” in The American Political Science Review, Vol. 94, No. 4. (Dec, 2000), pp. 779-801.
Robert Putnam, Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, 1993, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton New Jersey.
Roland Paris, 2000, “Broadening the Study of Peace Operations” in International Studies Review, Vol. 2, No.3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 27-44.
Tanja Home, 2004, ‘Delivering Feudal Democracy in East Timor’ in Edward Newman and R. Rich eds. The UN Role in Promoting Democracy between Ideals and Reality. UNU Press pp. 302-319
Thomas Homer Dixon, 1994, “Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases” in International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 5-40.
Thomas Homer Dixon, 1995, “Environmental Scarcities, State Capacity, and Civil Violence” in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 48, No. 7. (Apr; 1995), pp. 26-33
