See Part 1 for the introduction. The case studies are Part 2: Bougainville, Part 3: Sierra Leone, Part 4: The Niger Delta, and Part 5: Colombia.
Original conclusion
None of the four conflicts examined are as simple as Collier’s “greed and grievance†paradigm would suggest – as Karen Ballentine in Beyond Greed and Grievance concluded of resource conflicts, they are
a complex amalgam of economic, political, ethnic and security dynamics, in which contests over resources intersect with and often reinforce contests over identity and power.”
The conflicts all began or escalated in the period after 1989, when a new wave of globalization began, combining integration and fragmentation. What the two trends have in common is disruption to the existing order. Where primary resources are present, global connections and the opportunity for profit makes this disruption faster and more painful, often provoking violent conflict in a way that modern states cannot deal with.
The mobilization of the industrial capacity of a nation is irrelevant to such threats; the fielding of vast tank armies and fleets of airplanes is as clumsy as a bear trying to fend off bees. (Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles)
This is because states are adapted to fight interstate wars, which nuclear weapons and globalization have largely made obsolete. Efforts to resolve “new wars†must consider how best to strengthen state legitimacy and resist the destabilizing effects of extremist identity politics.
Some more conclusions
- I would have liked to discuss 4GW more in this essay, but I wasn’t sure which sources were academically acceptable. “New wars” is one of a few concepts in academia which seem to be influenced by 4GW.
- I didn’t make many recommendations. I did suggest legalising drugs, because of the uniquely destabilizing effects of illegal resources. Corporations and governments should try to interfere less in people’s lives. Generating grievances can have dangerous consequences.
- It is interesting how natural resources encourage state failure, particularly by corrupting officials and generating grievances among locals. Governments and corporations alike have more to fear from insurgent groups than they used to, and so they should rethink some fo their policies to avoid angering the locals.
- Corporations, though, usually rely on national governments and armed forces to do their dirty work – they don’t directly confiscate land, detain the opposition or kill villagers, but sometimes they bribe the government to do so.
- The causal link between resources and civil war runs both ways. In the situation of state failure, resource exports may simply be the only economic activity that survives.
- There is a link between globalization and state failure. Illicit criminal and corporate networks are quick to occupy and exploit stateless or ungoverned areas, extracting resources and plunder, extorting bribes and establishing bases for trafficking. It is difficult to restore government control from such networks, and they compound the difficulty of counter-insurgency.
References
- Ballentine, Karen. “Beyond Greed and Grievance: Reconsidering the Economic Dynamics of Armed Conflict,” in The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, ed., Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003.
- Bobbitt, Philip. The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, London: Penguin, 2002.
- Collier, Paul. “Doing Well out of War: An Economic Perspective,†in Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, ed., Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000.
- Kaldor, Mary. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
