Cornerstones
The "greed versus grievance" theory provides opposing arguments on the cause of civil war. Proponents of the greed argument posit that armed conflicts are caused by a combatant's desire for self-enrichment. These motivations are manifested in multiple ways, including economic gain through control of goods and resources or by increased power within a given state. Conflicts started through greed are often seen in states with negative economic growth and/or systemic poverty, as this implies limitedCollier-Hoeffler Model
The strong case for the "greed" argument was made byCriticism of the model
Probably one of the most coherent rebuttals of Collier's work on greed vs. grievance comes from the political economistCase study: Afghanistan
In south central Asia, along the lawless Afghani-Pakistani border a group called the Taliban have been engaging in what could best be described as a greed based insurgency since 2001. The Taliban's insurgency is in opposition to the NATO and United States supported Afghan transitional government of Hamid Karzai. This brief case study will provide concrete examples of the factors that compose the Greed Model. One of the primary characteristics of a Greed-based conflict as listed above is the ability to derive income or revenue from natural resource predation. This requires the presence of a "lootable" resource. In the case of the Taliban insurgency, this resource is the opium poppy. Afghanistan supplies the majority of the world's opium, the market share being as high as 90% in the years directly following the NATO invasion. The high volume, high revenue nature of the Afghan opium market allows the Taliban to "loot" the resource at every stage of development, from cultivation to heroin sale. Benefits from opium production begin for the Taliban with imposing a 10% tax on farmers growing opium (a protection fee), followed by control over heroin labs and heroin sales to smugglers. The Taliban, like FARC before them also blur the line between membership to the Taliban and membership to the transnational group of opium smugglers, therefore allowing the insurgency to reap financial rewards from the price bump that comes when the smuggler crosses an international border. In these ways the Taliban are able to fund their insurgency and begin to fall under the characterization of a group of actors in pursuit of greed based conflict. A second component of the Greed Model is the presence of a large diaspora funding the conflict. If we use the traditional definition of a diaspora, the Taliban do not have one. However, they have two extraterritorial means of support based on ethnic affiliation. One comes from funding from wealthy Arabs in the Middle East. This revenue source has been relatively under-researched as the funds are coming from individuals rather than an ethnic bloc. Contrasting the diffuse nature of the Arab funding, the Taliban receive considerable support from their Pakistani Pashtun brethren. Pashtun influence has a large impact on the Afghan insurgency. Pakistan's role encompasses a number of characteristics important to the greed model; ethnic homogeneity, a supply of unskilled labor, and lawless borderlands. Collier and Hoeffler discuss the idea that diversity makes conflict more difficult as it is harder to mobilize a heterogeneous ethnic base into rebellion. However, the Pashtun ethnic group that straddles the Afghani-Pakistani border is anything but diverse. This allows the Taliban to rapidly acquire recruits. In addition, many Pashtuns in the region are uneducated and poor. This provides the Taliban with another requirement for greed based rebellion; unskilled workers who can fill out security and infantry requirements. The insecurity and lack of formal state governance over the Afghan south-east and the Pakistani west also makes a significant contribution to the robustness of a greed based argument here. The mountainous region between the two states is an ideal hiding place for insurgents and also provides many circuitous avenues for smuggling heroin. Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan extends beyond the simple trans-border ethnic affiliation. Gretchen Peters cites a strained relationship with its Pakistani neighbors as a problem limiting the success of the Karzai government. Pakistan's government is hostile towards the Afghan transitional government because the transitional government is backed and heavily influenced by international entities. Therefore, the Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) of Pakistan has been known to directly support the Taliban with funding, tip offs, and the corruption of government officials. This constitutes the greed model factor of extraterritorial governmental support for an insurgency laid out by Collier. The final explanatory feature important to the Taliban's insurgency as a greed-based rebellion is the influence of a previous rebellion. With the support of the CIA and ISI the young Taliban in the 1990s were pitted against the Soviet Union in proxy war. This enabled the Taliban to do a number of things. They became involved in opium trade, were provided with weapons, and began to construct the organizational aptitude that allows for their continued success today. The previous involvement of the Taliban in an armed insurgency allows one of the issues with a greed-based insurgency to be dismissed. Collier and Hoeffler assert that the government has an innate advantage in greed-based conflicts as the government is more organized. However, in the case of the Afghan conflict this is not true. The transitional government is more fractionalized, less cooperative, and more ethnically divided than the Taliban. Therefore, using the greed-model we should actually expect the Taliban to defeat the transitional government after NATO's withdrawal, as the government possesses few advantages. This case shows the explanatory power of the greed model, enabling a better understanding of what the variables look like in the real world. In the Afghan case there haven't been many successes in peace building. As the following section will illustrate, the greed model is not without holes or needed additions, but the Taliban insurgency can definitively be characterized as an actor motivated primarily by the conditions that foster the greed model.Case study 2: Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is an island country in South Asia that suffered from a violent civil war for more than 25 years. The fighting took place between the majority of the Buddhist Sinhalese population and the minority Hindu Tamils. This brief case study will demonstrate how the civil war was caused by horizontal inequalities and how it therefore supports the 'grievance' argument. Injustices can be seen across different ethnic groups. When the people from a certain ethnic group perceive that they are being given less opportunities by the government simply because they belong to that ethnic group, in terms of education and economy for example, it creates grievances. These grievances, which are called horizontal inequalities, lead to violent conflict. The war that took place in Sri Lanka was due to the perceived grievances that the Tamil population experienced during Sinhalese rule. Sri Lanka–-then called Ceylon–was under British colonial rule from 1815 to 1948. Even though the majority of the population was Buddhist Sinhalese, with over three million people, the British favored the Hindu Tamils, who accounted for 300,000 people. The Tamil population therefore enjoyed privileged access to education and to government employment. They held around 40% of University places in science and engineering, medicine and agriculture and veterinary science. The appointment of Tamils to bureaucratic positions angered the Sinhalese population and when Great Britain granted Ceylon independence in 1948, the Sinhalese majority aimed at correcting these horizontal inequalities perceived as disadvantageous to them. They made Sinhalese the official language, which drove the Tamils out of the civil service and incorporated educational quotas. The result was an increase in Sinhalese incomes and a drop in those of the Tamil, which eliminated the previous differential between the two groups. However, by the end of the 1970s, the Sinhalese were gaining more places at universities and because civil service recruitment policies, such as the use of Sinhalese in examinations favored the Sinhalese, their recruitment in relation to population was four times more favorable than that of the Tamils. While the initial aim was to correct the horizontal inequalities perceived by the Sinhalese population, the result was that instead of just being corrected, the inequalities became in favor of the Sinhalese. This meant that the Tamil population now felt economically and politically excluded and threatened. As seen, these horizontal inequalities translated into grievances and it was these grievances that allowed extremist leaders to exploit the growing resentment to gain support and start a violent conflict. After years of ethnic tensions, the violence was initiated by an insurgent group called the Tamil Tigers, who declared the ‘First Eelam War (1983-87) with the aim of creating a separate Tamil state in northern Sri Lanka. The peacekeepers sent by India in 1987 did little to stop the violence and they were forced to retire in 1990. It was then that the Tamil Tigers initiated what they called the second Eelam War, which was even bloodier than the first. Horrible atrocities were committed by both sides, including the use of child suicide bombers and child soldiers and it was not until 2009 that the Sri Lankan government declared victory over the Tamil Tigers. It is estimated that at least 100,000 died during the conflict. In this situation, the Tamil Tigers did not start violent conflict due to greed. It was grievances such as a perceived disadvantage over education possibilities, work opportunities, language use and economic prospects that increased the ethnic tensions between the two groups and drove the Tamil Tigers to start a war. While there is no doubt that war causes poverty and that once war has broken out it feeds on economic deprivation and underdevelopment, one cannot declare the ‘greed’ argument as a sole explanation of violent conflict. Poverty does not cause war directly, so the greed argument is not strong enough. It is the grievances perceived by a group within a society that drives violent conflict. These grievances do include economic deprivation but also ethnic discrimination, age and gender. As seen with Sri Lanka, these factors are more likely to drive conflict since they also provide a specific environment where charismatic leaders can pick on the grievances and create a sense of group membership that facilitates the outbreak of war.Critiques
There are many works that rebut the idea of greed vs. grievance. Authors set up alternative ideas that need to be introduced and explored. Even the staunchest proponents of the Greed vs. Grievance theory believe that other outside forces (beyond the greed and/or grievance) can have an effect on conflict, which makes the critiques all the more vital in understanding the theory itself. One of the leading critics on the 'greed' argument is Frances Stewart. In her article 'Horizontal Inequalities: A neglected Dimension of Development,' she stresses the need to focus on the grievances of the populations, since too much focus on inequality between individuals is dangerous for successful development. By using nine case studies she proves how horizontal inequalities have led to violent conflict. David Keen, a professor at the Development Studies Institute at the"A multifaceted humanitarian crisis in a country, region or society where there is a total or considerable breakdown of authority resulting from internal or external conflict and which requires a multi-sectoral, international response that goes beyond the mandate or capacity of any single agency and/or the ongoing UN country program. Such emergencies have, in particular, a devastating effect on children and women and call for a complex range of responses."In his book, ''Complex Emergencies,'' Keen discusses how a conflict can never be simply a greed scenario. His definition of a "complex emergency" demonstrates this broader term and all of its various implications. He goes into several different conflict scenarios, such as 'war', 'famine', and 'information', and then sets up an argument against the idea of greed. He believes that although a conflict, whether it be the 'War on Terror' or the conflict in Sierra Leone, may be centered around some concept of greed or grievance, this can never solely explain a conflict. Although seemingly obvious, Keen looks to demonstrate that, "the aims in a war are complex".David Keen. "Complex Emergencies: David Keen Responds" African Arguments: Royal African Society. He does not believe that greed and grievance can be examined separately, but rather that they are partner terms that must be implemented in a complementary way. For example, when Keen discusses the conflict in Sudan, he says, " the grievances of northern pastoralists were useful for a government trying to get its hands on oil in areas that famine and militia attacks helped to depopulate; meanwhile, the 'greed' of the Arab militias themselves (for labour, cattle and land) was itself intimately linked to their grievances". He makes it clear that it is necessary to first spend ample time defining the type of conflict at hand because the differences between genocide and a civil war are substantial, so it is necessary to diagnose the incentives and solutions for the conflict with a mix of multiple theories. Keen specifically critiques Paul Collier, by claiming that Collier became too comfortable with "numbers", and needed to rely more on the actual opinions of people involved in conflicts. He spoke of Collier's work and said, "This is where econometrics tips over into arrogance and starts closing down the possibility of a genuine understanding of conflicts or, by extension, of a political settlement that addresses underlying grievances". He doesn't believe that it can be dismissed so easily. He was documented saying, "It also annoys me that a lot of the 'scientific air' of the Collier work is quite bogus as the selection of proxies is so arbitrary", which demonstrated a distinct attack on Collier's work, which emphasizes quantitative data. Keen argues the point that a conflict, although he cannot define it, cannot be pinpointed to simply one motive. He believes that conflicts are much more complex and thus should not be analyzed through simplified methods. He disagrees with the quantitative research methods of Collier and believes a stronger emphasis should be put on personal data and human perspective of the people in conflict. This isn't necessarily a complete dismissal of the greed vs. grievance theory, but rather a critique on its polarity and methods of data collection. Beyond Keen, several other authors have introduced works that either disprove greed vs. grievance theory with empirical data, or dismiss its ultimate conclusion. Cristina Bodea and Ibrahim Elbadawi, for example, co-wrote the entry, "Riots, coups and civil war: Revisiting the greed and grievance debate," and argue that empirical data can disprove many of the proponents of greed theory and make the idea "irrelevant". They examine a myriad of factors and conclude that too many factors come into play with conflict, which therefore cannot be confined to simply greed or grievance. Anthony Vinci makes a strong argument that, "fungible concept of power and the primary motivation of survival provide superior explanations of armed group motivation and, more broadly, the conduct of internal conflicts".Anthony Vinci. "Greed-Grievance Reconsidered: The Role of Power and Survival in the Motivation of Armed Groups." Civil Wars "8(1)" (2007): 35.
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Bibliography
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* Ganesan, Arvind and Alex Vines