What Role Do Greed and Grievance Play in Civil War - Essay Example

message from dear client, this is just the part I have fully organized. i’m revising the ‘grievance’ portion part and refining the remaining8 pages. the in-text citations are also not yet visible here but I will fix them completely, so don’t worry. kindly give me 3-4 hours more to fully finalise the paper. I will inform you once the paper is ready for submission. thank you very much =) sincerely, writer What role do greed and grievance play in civil war? Much of the theoretical and policy discourse about civil wars has placed emphasis, not irrationally, on the cost or economic aspect of conflict. A helpful theoretical differentiation in identifying the root causes of or the underlying motives in civil wars describes the division between greed and grievance. On the one hand revolts could develop because the insurgents desire riches by seizing control over resources; on the other hand they could emerge because insurgents want to cleanse the society from corruption, injustice, and abuse perpetrated by the incumbent regime. Current evidence and theories demonstrate that civil wars are based on motivations that reveal an interaction between greed and grievance. The more broadly recognised arguments largely stress the grievance thesis, which speculates some kind of political or resource scarcity or dispossession. In contrast, the greed theory explains that dissidents rise up in quest of self-centred economic gain. Valuable and major resources such as timber, diamonds, and oil constitute the base of the disputable commodities over which dissidents contest their governments. Furthermore, the concept of ‘greed’ works as a suitable name to define self-centred motives and the assets obtainable to fulfil certain benefits. Basically, a solid resource support works as a device for mobilisation. Numerous academics studying civil strife since the Cold War have a tendency to place emphasis on the costs or material aspects of civil war and to view this kind of conflict as a disturbance of ‘normal’ political, economic, and social dynamics in a society. However, participants in such conflict usually have a rooted motive in prolonging it—wars usually fulfil an array of economic and political interests, particularly within unstable, fragmented, or weak states. The weakness of economic performance in the long-run is directly and strongly associated with defective, dysfunctional systems that generate conflicts and dilemmas of their own, as well as an oppressive society and extensive rent seeking, which could be promoted by the existence of particular kinds of resource rents. The bases for civil wars are found in poor performing national economies where the lack of progress and economic expansion is distinguished by the inability of the processes for peaceful conflict resolution, wide income gap, and rampant poverty. It is important to mention here that as argued by the rational choice framework, conflict is an outcome of choice. Recently, two paradigms have been drawn upon to make sense of civil war among rational choice proponents—greed and grievance. The ‘greed’ paradigm originates from Paul Collier’s seminal work. As argued by the ‘greed’ theory, civil wars are characterised by elite rivalry over highly profitable rents, masked with the façade of mass grievance. Moreover, revolts have to be economically sustainable—conflicts sustained by natural resource rents such as those of oil or diamonds, or when supportive migrations furnish an accessible source of funding, are more probable to take place. The ‘greed’ theory is founded originally on a research project subsidised by the World Bank. The initial work of Collier and Hoeffler underscores that the occurrence of civil war escalates with the state’s reliance on ‘natural resource exports,’ which comprises all kinds of goods or assets that can be exported and rented—mineral and agricultural commodities. Collier (2000) explains the facilitating circumstances for the economy of conflict: “a country with large natural resources, many young women and little education is very much more at risk of conflict than one with opposite characteristics” (p. 97). Hence he claims that economic motivations comprise an important contributory aspect in almost all contemporary civil wars. Collier (2000) further claims that the nature of conflicts in resource-abundant societies is determined mostly by ‘greed’ instead of ‘grievance’. He specifically argued that the “true cause of much civil war is not the loud discourse of grievance but the silent force of greed” (Colliers, 2000, p. 101). Primarily, there was the claim that inequality does not contribute to the threat of civil conflict. In recent years, Collier and his colleagues (2003) highlighted the poverty ploy—poverty lessens the appeal of soldiering, more largely reducing the conflict’s opportunity cost in economically weak countries. Consequently, civil wars contribute to the perpetuation of poverty due to the harmfulness of conflict; a persistent progression of poverty-conflict-poverty arises. Similarly, Fearon and Laitin (2003) claim that religious or ethnic differences do not contribute much to the threat of conflict, which is primarily brought about by weakened state capability within the environment of poverty. Such argument, combined with Collier’s ideas has a straightforward natural appeal—conflict arises in poor, weak states typified by incompetent, corrupt, and unprincipled governments, with the underlying forces of war supported by a motive similar to lawlessness and violence. Collier more clearly explains: “[e]thnic tensions and ancient political feuds are not starting civil wars around the world… economic forces such as entrenched poverty and the trade in natural resources are the true culprits. The solution? Curb rebel financing, jump-start economic growth in vulnerable regions, and provide a robust military presence in nations emerging from conflict.” Insurgent groups and guerrilla leaders are motivated by the prospects of highly profitable resource rent as a way to survive and carry out the ‘war economy’, which is defined as ‘economics of subversion’ (Omeje, 2013, p. 41). Collier and his associates rely greatly on econometric information in creating their arguments, a model currently identified as “statistics in command” in identifying the roots of civil wars. In a more recent study, for example, they discovered that although states that are greatly reliant on mineral and oil exports confront a threat of civil conflict, states devoid of raw material exports have considerably lower vulnerability to civil conflicts; specifically “in otherwise similar economies (controlling for income per capital, ethnic fragmentation, income inequality, etc.), dependence on oil and/or minerals increases the risk of civil war by 46 times” (Omeje, 2013, p. 41). Therefore, the occurrence of civil war is not clarified by motive or interest, but by the unusual factors that create moneymaking prospects. Political scientists concentrate on grievance or the need for insurgence whilst economists highlight another driving force—greed—and attribute civil war to unusual prospects. Walter (2004) also demonstrated how rational choice and economic concerns greatly contribute to the initiation and perpetuation of civil war. Individuals who are in extreme poverty and granted little or no further participation in major decision-making must be much more probable to sign up in a dissident group than individuals whose quality of life has advanced, or who have the capacity to take part in an important political practice. The empirical studies examined by Walter (2004) substantiate the assumption that living circumstances that encourage individual mobilisation in rebellious groups—specifically hindrances to political involvement and poverty—can guide identification of countries that will keep on experiencing civil war. The probability of relapsing to conflict was both an impact of the fundamental quality of life of the country’s citizens and the openness of the political decision-making process to the ordinary people. The issue of change is vital in identifying the bases for another systematic model for examining present-day civil wars. Neoclassical paradigm of conflict usually highlights the socially uneconomical outcomes of civil wars. The other major domain upon which change is important is the domain of primitive accumulation, class relations, and class formation. The underlying forces of a successful shift to capitalism in Yugoslavia and the programmes that influenced capitalists, peasants, and workers tossed the nation into an escalating catastrophe wherein primitive accumulators and political freebooters were given the chance to control the assets of the masses. The mechanisms of ‘asset transfer’ in Southern Sudan are also an example of primitive accumulation, wherein a bourgeoisie or entrepreneurial class forcibly seizes properties like cattle and land from their former tenants or landlords and, in due course, takes these citizens away from their sources of subsistence, generating soldiers, slaves, migrant workers, and expatriates (Cramer, 2002, p. 1858). Angolan civil wars since pre-independence assumed rifts and tendencies that were motivated to a considerable extent by how collective consciousness were influenced by changing material motives due to the differences and distinctiveness of the expansion of capitalism in pre-independent Angola. The restrictions enforced by the Somoza government on labourers and peasants and on the capitalists of Nicaragua were crucial to the development of an evolving interplay between political motives and class interests that resulted in the Sandinista rebellion that influenced the characteristic of the local opposition to that rebellion (Cramer, 2002). The outcomes from the Collier-Hoeffler (CH) framework are suggestive of the notion that civil wars could be driven mostly by economic interests and that the occurrence of conflict is intensified when revolts are economically viable. Due to the belief that highly lucrative raw materials like narcotics, timber, and diamonds have served a major part in the recent civil wars in Colombia, Cambodia, and Angola, numerous of the current policy recommendations and executions have been focused on weakening the profitable prospects of rebellions, an exact case being the trade restriction in ‘conflict goods’ (Ballentine et al., 2003, p. 41). The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola funded its war mostly through the promotion and taxation of the illegal diamond trade from the 1990s until the finale of the conflict in 2002. Likewise, Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) financially supported itself by engaging in illegal diamond trade. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), power over the timber, coltan, and diamond trade has been a strong motivation to extend or lengthen the violent civil war in the country. Furthermore, Collier categorised the kidnapping and illicit drug trade for money, mostly by insurgent organisations in Colombia, as a piece of this phenomenon. It is certain that non-state entities have funded conflict by means of natural resource trading. Read More