Political Economy of Tehrik-i-Taliban Swat

… Center for Constructive Conflict …, 2005

2007

Two phenomena have been recently utilised to explain conflict onset among rational choice analysts: greed and grievance. The former reflects elite competition over valuable natural resource rents. The latter argues that relative deprivation and the grievance it produces fuels conflict. Central to grievance are concepts of inter-ethnic or horizontal inequality. Identity formation is also crucial to intra-state conflict, as it overcomes the collective action problem. Conflict can rarely be explained by greed alone, yet, the greed versus grievance hypotheses may be complementary explanations for conflict. The greed explanation for conflict duration and secessionist wars works best in cross-country studies, but has to make way for grievance-based arguments in quantitative country-case studies. Grievances and horizontal inequalities may be better at explaining why conflicts begin, but not necessarily why they persist. Neither the presence of greed or grievance is sufficient for the outbreak of violent conflict, something which requires institutional breakdown which we describe as the failure of the social contract. The degradation of the social contract is more likely in the context of poverty and growth failure. The paper provides a synthesis of the greed and grievance hypotheses, ending with comments on post-conflict reconstruction. JEL Codes: D72, D74, O10, O40

Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 2001

The Ford Foundation and the governments of Sweden and Norway generously funded Oxford's significant contribution to the success of the conference. We would also like to extend our thanks to Michael Small for his successful efforts to coordinate the sponsorship for this event and his contribution to shaping the agenda, and to Ben Rowswell for his dedication to making the logistics a success. We are deeply grateful to the International Development Research Centre for its financial support for the dissemination of this volume. We would also like to acknowledge the excellence, professionalism, and enthusiasm of our authors. It has been a most agreeable and enriching education for us to work with them in shaping the chapters that follow. Lucy Mair and Charlie Cater provided superb research and editorial assistance at the International Peace Academy. To them, warmest thanks. We are also grateful to our publisher, Lynne Rienner, and to her dedicated, efficient, and friendly team.

2018

Journal of International Development, 2009

Two phenomena have been recently utilised to explain conflict onset among rational choice analysts: greed and grievance. The former reflects elite competition over valuable natural resource rents. The latter argues that relative deprivation and the grievance it produces fuels conflict. Neither the presence of greed or grievance is sufficient for the outbreak of violent conflict, something which requires institutional breakdown, which we describe as the failure of the social contract. The degradation of the social contract is more likely in the context of poverty and growth failure. We provide a synthesis of the greed and grievance hypotheses.

Security and Development, 2013

, the EACW program follows from a conference held in London in 1999, which produced the seminal volume, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, Mats Berdal and David M. Malone (eds.) (Lynne Rienner, 2000). The program addresses the critical issue of how the economic agendas of armed factions sustain violent conflict and inhibit durable peace, while also assessing the role of globalization in creating new opportunities for combatants to finance their military operations. This hitherto underdeveloped field of research holds particular promise of policy relevance for those international and national actors seeking more effective strategies for both conflict prevention and conflict termination. Beginning with an overall commitment to durable conflict resolution, the broad aims of the program are: • to improve understanding of the political economy of civil wars through a focused analysis of the economic behaviors of competing factions, their followers, and external economic actors in conflict zones; • to examine how globalization shapes the economic interests of belligerents as well as creates new opportunities for competing factions to pursue their economic agendas through trade, investment and migration ties, both legal and illegal, to neighboring states and to more distant, industrialized economies; and • to evaluate the effectiveness of existing and emerging policy responses used by external actors, including governments, international organizations, private sector actors, and NGOs, to shift the economic agendas of belligerents from war towards peace and to promote greater economic accountability in conflict zones. Policy research and development proceed along two tracks: four expert working groups (Advisory Group, Working Group on Economic Behavior of Actors in Conflict Zones, Private Sector Working Group, and Policies and Practices Working Group) and commissioned research.

Journal of Development Economics, 2018

In our brief review, we take stock of the emergence, in the last decade, of the "microeconomics of violent conflict" as a new subfield of empirical development economics. We start by de-bunking common misperceptions about the microeconomics of conflict and identify several contributions to economic theory and, in particular, to empirics, methods and data. We also show how the subfield is enriched through cooperation with scholars working in related disciplines. We expect future work to contribute inter alia to the evidence base on peacebuilding interventions, the development of post-conflict institutions, the behavior of firms in conflict areas and the role of emotions in decision-making. We note a disconnect between the rapidly evolving academic subfield on the one hand and the relatively limited use of knowledge thus generated by humanitarian and development organisations and policy makers working in and on conflict-affected areas. We conclude by suggesting that teaching in economics and the discipline-specific JEL codes have not yet kept pace with this recent intellectual development.

Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 2000

The immediate aftermath of an armed conflict is a key window of opportunity to build sustainable peace and security. Whether and how violence arises during that time has profound effects on a country's political and economic development. Yet, defining and conceptualizing post-conflict violence has remained elusive. This paper contributes to a more comprehensive theory of postconflict violence with a theory-grounded typology, which classifies different postwar violent scenarios and shows that specific logics drive different types of violence in different settings. The axes, on which I build this typology, are: strategic aims (predatory, constructive) and organization (directed, coordinated, spontaneous). This classification is the first step toward a more rigorous understanding of post-conflict violence. Post-conflict violence emerges as a combination of new political incentives and opportunities from the war legacy. The premise of this theoretical effort is that with a more solid grasp of the mechanisms driving post-conflict violence and its variation we can design more suitable policies to lower its incidence. Ultimately, this analytical framework can illuminate the growing practice of international interventions in post-conflict settings.

Collier’s analysis of civil conflict is actually a combination of the greed and the grievance explanations of the causes of intrastate wars. It is a common misconception that he, and other advocates of the economic string of conflict justification speak in absolute terms, when this is not the case. They allude to the idea that economic motives trump grievance based reasoning but by no means completely dismiss the importance of the latter, especially in the early stages of an uprising. Although the two are comprehended in parallel for Collier, in this essay I will look at the merits and limitations of the greed side, using the arguments for grievance as an analytical tool to do so. I will do this by utilizing the most current case study of Syria to demonstrate the complexity of the two facets and how their collusion creates the most compelling explanation for the outbreak of intrastate war. I will argue that greed and grievance are most useful when applied together as in a political economy approach, not as separate entities but as mutually dependent on one another.