Beyond greed and grievance - and not too soon …

Review of International Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 687-698

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EID: 34248036923     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0260210505006698     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Paul Collier, ‘Doing Well out of War’, in Mats Berdal and David Malone (eds.), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), p. 91.
2. Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, p. 96.
3. Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, p. 92.
4. See also Paul Collier, ‘The Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy’, in Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflict (Washington, DC: USIP, 2001), in which he argued that ‘grievance is to a rebel organisation what image is to business’, pp. 145-147.
5. Collier, ‘Doing Well out of War’, p. 110.
6. Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman (eds.), The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003). The book (henceforth Beyond Greed and Grievance) is the concluding volume in a three-year research programme on Economic Agendas in Civil Wars organised by the International Peace Academy and directed by Karen Ballentine. For details of the programme and associated research reports see www.ipacademy.org.
7. Karen Ballentine and Heiko Nitzschke, ‘Policy Lessons from Studies in the Political Economy of Armed Conflict’, IPA Policy Report (October 2003), p. 4.
8. See UN Security Council Resolutions 1173 (Angola), 1306 (Sierra Leone) and 1343 (Liberia). For an excellent assessment of the impact of commodity sanctions see Charlie Cater, ‘Rethinking the Critical Cases of Africa’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds.), Beyond Greed and Grievance, pp. 19-47.
9. Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper with Jonathan Goodhand, War Economies in a Regional Context (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), p. 97.
10. An oft-cited example of this kind of writing is Robert Kaplan's article for The Atlantic Monthly in February 1994, evocatively entitled ‘The Coming Anarchy’. Another variant has been the idea of a ‘new barbarism’ at work in many of today's war-zones. For a discussion of these see Pugh and Cooper, War Economies in a Regional Context, pp. 18-19 and pp. 96--7.
11. Ballentine and Nitzschke, ‘Policy Lessons’, p. 14.
12. For an excellent overview of that debate, see David M. Malone and Heiko Nitzschke, ‘Economic Agendas in Civil Wars: What We Know, What We Need to Know’, Discussion Paper no. 2005/07 (WIDER: United Nations University. April 2005).
13. Ballentine and Nitzschke, ‘Policy Lessons’, p. 4. Pugh and Cooper also draw attention to the shift in Collier's work towards an emphasis on the increased scope for violent conflict in the contemporary era. See Pugh and Cooper, War Economies in a Regional Context, p. 22.
14. Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy, A World Bank Report (Washington, DC: World Bank/Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 4.
15. Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy, A World Bank Report, p. 64.
16. In truth, greed-based explanations were recognised at the outset as being deeply problematic and several of the articles that appeared alongside Collier's aforementioned piece (fn. 1 above) in Greed and Grievance stressed the interaction of political and economic agendas in armed conflict. See, in particular, David Keen, ‘Incentives and Disincentives for Violence’, in Berdal and Malone (eds.), Greed and Grievance, pp. 31-5.
17. Ballentine and Sherman, ‘Introduction’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds.), Beyond Greed and Grievance, p. 5.
18. For a more detailed critique of rational-choice theories of conflict, emphasising how they ‘violate the complexity of individual motivation, razing the individual (and key groups) down to monolithic maximising agents’, see Chris Cramer, ‘Homo Economicus Goes to War: Methodological Individualism, Rational Choice and the Political Economy of War’, World Development, 30:11, p. 1846.
19. One difficulty, highlighted by the case studies, is that statistical analysis necessarily involves choices about empirical data that might leave out what, on the face of it, looks highly relevant. For example, as Alexandra Guáqueta notes, Collier and Hoeffler ‘arrived at their conclusion on natural resources and conflict without ever incorporating illegal commodities into their statistics’. Such commodities, most obviously narcotics, have been central to the political economy of armed conflict in Afghanistan, Colombia, Lebanon, Burma and Peru. See Alexandra Guáqueta, ‘The Colombian Conflict: Political and Economic Dimensions’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds.), Beyond Greed and Grievance, p. 90.
20. Breaking the Conflict Trap, p. 83.
21. Ballentine and Sherman, ‘Introduction’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds.), Beyond Greed and Grievance, p. 5.
22. It should be added here that questions have also been raised about the data sets on which some of the conclusions in Breaking the Conflict Trap rest. See in particular Astri Suhrke, Espen Villanger and Susan Woodward, ‘Economic Aid to Post-Conflict Countries: A Methodological Critique of Collier and Hoeffler’, CMI Working Paper 4 (Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute, 2005), also available at ?www.cmi.no/publications?.
23. See also James Fearon, ‘Primary Commodity Exports and Civil War’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49 (August 2005), pp. 483-507.
24. Karen Ballentine, ‘Reconsidering the Economic Dynamics of Armed Conflict’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds.), Beyond Greed and Grievance, p. 260.
25. See Anthony J. Regan, ‘The Bougainville Conflict: Political and Economic Agendas’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds.), Beyond Greed and Grievance, pp. 133-167.
26. Cater, ‘Rethinking the Critical Cases of Africa’, p. 29.
27. ‘Rethinking the Critical Cases of Africa’
28. For an example of this in the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina, see Pugh and Cooper, War Economies in a Regional Context, especially pp. 170–6. Roy Godson uses the term ‘political-criminal nexus (PCN)’ to describe this phenomenon of semi-institutionalised collaboration between the criminal fraternities and political elites. Roy Godson, ‘Transnational Crime, Corruption, and Security’, in Michael Brown (ed.), Grave New World (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003), pp. 259-278.
29. Guáqueta, ‘The Colombian Conflict’, p. 73.
30. ‘The Colombian Conflict’
31. Breaking the Conflict Trap, pp. 76-7.
32. Guáqueta, ‘The Colombian Conflict’, p. 90. The AUC emerged in the early 1980s as a kind of umbrella organisation for right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia.
33. Mats Berdal, ‘How “New” are “New Wars”? -- Global Economic Change and the Study of Civil Wars’, Global Governance, 9:4 (2003).
34. Guáqueta, ‘The Colombian Conflict’, p. 74. Supporting this conclusion, see also Francisco Gutiérrez SanAin, ‘Criminal Rebels? A Discussion of War and Criminality from the Colombian Experience’, Working Paper no. 27 (DESTIN: Crisis States Research Centre, London School of Economics, April 2003), ?http://www.crisisstates.com/Publications/wp/wp27.htm?.
35. ‘The Colombian Conflict’, p. 73.
36. Pugh and Cooper, War Economies in a Regional Context, pp. 24-40.
37. Jonathan Goodhand, ‘Afghanistan in Central Asia’, in Pugh and Cooper, War Economies in a Regional Context, p. 45.
38. Pugh and Cooper, War Economies in a Regional Context, p. 2.
39. War Economies in a Regional Context, p. 3.
40. Collier, ‘The Economic Causes of Civil Conflict’, p. 155.
41. ‘The Economic Causes of Civil Conflict’, p. 161.
42. On assistance provided by diaspora communities as an aspect of ‘new wars’, see Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 7 and pp. 103--5.
43. Breaking the Conflict Trap, p. 85.
44. For a discussion of the positive role that diaspora communities can play in the transformation of conflict, see Wolfram Zunzer, ‘Diaspora Communities and Civil Conflict Transformation’, Berghof Occasional Paper no. 26 (September 2004), ?www.berghof-center.org?. See also Patricia Weiss Fagen, ‘Diaspora Power: Network Contributions to Peacebuilding and the Transformation of War Economies’, Paper presented at Conference on the Transformation of War Economies, University of Plymouth, 16--17 June 2005.
45. Rohan Gunaratna, ‘Sri Lanka: Feeding the Tamil Tigers’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds.), Beyond Greed and Grievance, p. 209.
46. It should be noted in this context that the role of the Tamil diaspora in support of the LTTE has few, if any, parallels. According to a study by RAND the ‘LTTE's experience is not typical, but rather represents the apex of how an insurgent organisation can exploit a diaspora for its own ends’. Daniel Byman, Peter Chalk et al., Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), p. 42.
47. Ballentine and Nitzschke, ‘Policy Lessons from Studies in the Political Economy of Armed Conflict’, p. 9 and.
48. Alexandros Yannis, ‘Kosovo: The Political Economy of Conflict and Peace Building’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds.), Beyond Greed and Grievance, p. 175.
49. Ken Menkhaus, ‘Vicious Circles and the Security-Development Nexus in Somalia’, Journal of Conflict, Security and Development, 4:2 (2004), p. 41.
50. Along with diaspora income, humanitarian aid has also been identified by writers on ‘new wars’ as ‘an important source of income for warring parties’ (Kaldor, New and Old Wars, p. 10). Again, a closer look at the evidence, suggests that this is also far too sweeping a generalisation. See David Shearer, ‘Aiding or Abetting? Humanitarian Aid and its Role in Civil War’, in Berdal and Malone (eds.), Greed and Grievance, pp. 189-205.
51. See also findings of Jane Hoverd, ‘Humanitarian Action in Bosnia: A Study of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, 1991--1999’, Ph.D. thesis, Oxford University, 2001.
52. It should be added that Sherman is careful to stress that the resulting peace is, to use conflict-studies terminology, a ‘negative’ one. Still, it remains the case that the economic motives of the parties to the conflict lead them see a major advantage in a reduction and not the continuation of violence. Jake Sherman, ‘Burma: Lessons from the Cease-Fires’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds.), Beyond Greed and Grievance, p. 225.
53. Ken Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, Adelphi Paper 364 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
54. Breaking the Conflict Trap, p. 1.
55. Ken Menkhaus, ‘Vicious Circles’, p. 150.
56. Breaking the Conflict Trap, p. 1.
57. For political-economy perspectives challenging this view of war as no more than a breakdown of ‘normal’ peacetime conditions, see the writings of David Keen, especially The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper 320 (Oxford: Oxford University Press/IISS, 1998).
58. Mats Berdal and David Keen, ‘Violence and Economic Agendas in War: Some Policy Implications’, Millennium, 26:3 (1997), p. 797.
59. Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse, p. 11.
60. Somalia: State Collapse, pp. 19-20.
61. Menkhaus, ‘Vicious Circles’, p. 163.
62. ‘Vicious Circles’, p. 153.
63. Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse, pp. 82-3.
64. Somalia: State Collapse, p. 64.