DR. ASH ANI AM ARASI NGHE
SCH O O L O F ECO NO M ICS
UNI VERSITY O F SY DNEY
ECOS3997: Stream 3
Conflict and Economic Development
Week 3 - Why do people fight?
Recap
▪Week 1 – Introduction to the Course and Stream
▪Week 2 – Understanding the concepts of conflict and economic development
The plan for today
In today's lecture, we will discuss a BIG question related to conflict.
"Why do people fight?"
This question is the root of everything we are studying in this Stream.
Why do you think people fight?
➢Poverty
➢Greed
➢Misallocation of resources
➢The need to conquer a resource
➢Income inequality
➢Dissatisfaction with rulers
➢Animosity with another ethnic/religious/social group
With the increasing number of conflicts in the world, understanding why
people fight is very important.
This is why this question has intrigued many social scientists over centuries.
Over the years, economists, sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists etc. have
examined this question in various contexts and using various
methodologies/estimation methods.
As a result, the academic literature provides us with many potential theoretical
and empirical explanations on what drives the human urge to fight.
Theoretical vs empirical (?)
One of the most comprehensives reviews of the academic literature on conflict is the 2010
article on the Journal of Economic Literature by Chris Blattman and Edward Miguel.
Blattman, C. and E. Miguel (2010), “Civil war,” Journal of Economic Literature 48, 3-57.
I have uploaded this article to the reading list on Canvas.
Reading through this will help you understand the concept of conflict as well as the what
academic researchers have been working on in relation to conflict.
Greed vs Grievance in conflict
One of the most prominent ideas on the drivers of conflict in the academic literature is the
"Greed vs Grievance" theory of conflict by Collier and Hoeffler (2004)
Collier, P. and A. Hoeffler (2004), “Greed and grievance in civil war,” Oxford
Economic Papers 56, 563-595.
Professor Paul Collier Professor Anke Hoeffler
These two researchers have
done lots of academic research
related to conflict.
Don't forget to check out their
websites/Google Scholar pages.
Paul Collier Webpage
Anke Hoeffler Webpage
Collier and Hoeffler (2004)
According to Collier and Hoeffler (2004), the reasons driving people to fight
can be broadly categorized under two headings.
A. Greed
B. Grievances
Note: While this is not the only theoretical explanation on why people fight, within the context of this
Stream, we will first focus on this idea, and build our knowledge thereon.
In the next slides we will discuss their ideas and methods in more detail.
Greed
What do we understand by "Greed"?
In laymen's terms, this means that people "want" things and will fight to get
what they want.
More formally, the idea of "greed" looks at a rebellion as an industry that
generates profits from looting.
Rebels consider the costs and benefits of fighting.
If,
Benefits of fighting>Costs of fighting
Then
FIGHT
Takes into consideration the opportunity cost of fighting.
In essence, the concept of "greed" provides an "economic rationale for conflict"
Consider the case of Africa:
Many conflicts in Africa are targeted at
taking control over mines.
Conflicts become more likely when the
value of minerals are higher in the
commodity market.
For example, a conflict targeted at a copper
mine is more likely to occur when the value
of copper is higher in the market.
This is because the rents/benefits
that rebels can extract from the mine are
higher in such periods.
Source: Berman et al (2017)
Grievance
What do we understand by "Grievance"?
The word brings to mind images of unhappiness, sadness, weeping, tears...
Collier and Hoeffler propose that people fight when they are very unhappy.
More formally, the idea is that rebellion occurs when "grievances" are
sufficiently acute that people want to engage in violent protest.
This proposition goes beyond a pure economic rationale for conflict.
For example,
Consider the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.
It was the result of one ethnic group being
continuously marginalized by the larger, more
powerful ethnic group.
This marginalization limited
the opportunities available to the minority
ethnic group, leading them to rebel.
Similar explanations can also be attributed
to many ethnic and religious conflicts across the
world.
Source: Aida (2020)
However,
Disentangling the greed vs grievance components underlying the causes of conflict
is often very tricky!
Conflict is such a complex phenomenon that you can almost never fully label a
single conflict as being caused by "greed" only or "grievance" only.
Usually there is a significant degree of overlap between greed and grievance as
drivers of conflict.
Given the fluid, ie. continually evolving nature of human behaviour, a conflict that
starts due to grievances can, overtime, evolve to incorporate greed - and vice
versa.
TL;DR
Collier and Hoeffler (2004) propose that people can fight either because they
want to benefit financially, or because they are unhappy.
But which story (assumption) is true in general?
Collier and Hoeffler (2004) conduct a quantitative analysis to find out.
What does this mean?
Quantitative vs qualitative analyses
Throughout history, social scientists have examined the causes of conflict
using various research methodologies.
They collect data from various sources – can be primary or secondary data.
➢Primary data (?)
➢Secondary data (?)
Once the data is collected, they are used to conduct either quantitative or
qualitative studies on the topic of interest.
➢ Qualitative studies – Examine reasons for conflict using qualitative research
methods such as case studies, surveys, interviews etc. These can provide
us with a descriptive idea of what underlies a particular conflict.
➢ Quantitative studies – Examine reasons for conflict
using quantitative research methodologies – using primary/secondary data
along with quantitative analytical tools (think: statistics, econometrics) to
examine the causes and effects of conflict.
Both types of studies are important in understanding the dynamics of conflict.
Back to Collier and Hoeffler (2004)
Use data on 79 large civil conflicts that occurred in the world between 1960
and 1999.
Unit of measurement – "country" and "year"
The unit of measurement typically involves a spatial and temporal dimension.
Conduct a "regression analysis" using an "econometric specification".
BIG words!
Simply, this means that they consider the effect of a series of
variables (ie, independent variables) on one key variable (ie, the dependent
variable).
The idea is to examine: "how do the independent variables
affect the dependent variable?"
Recall that they want to examine how greed and grievance affect conflict.
Their dependent variable is an indicator measuring the occurrence of conflict
in a given country in a given year.
They define the dependent variable as "civil war start" - that is, a variable
which takes a value of one if a civil war started during a five-year episode"
For the independent variables, they collect two categories of data to represent
➢Greed
➢Grievance
In the next few slides, we discuss the kind of variables Collier and Hoeffler
(2004) use to represent "greed" and "grievance"
Can we discuss the suitability of each of these variables as a motivator for
conflict?
Indicators for greed
1. How resource-rich is the economy?
➢A measure of how heavily dependent the economy is on natural
commodities.
➢By fighting, rebels can access these resources, which increases their
gains/returns from fighting.
➢Represented by the ratio of primary commodity exports to GDP.
Indicators for greed
2. Donations from diasporas
➢A larger diaspora can send more funding for fighting.
➢Represented by the emigrant population in the US as a proportion of
the population in the country of origin.
Indicators for greed
3. Finance from hostile governments
➢ During the Cold War, each great power supported rebellions in countries
allied to the opposing power.
➢ Only eleven of the 79 wars broke out during the 1990s (that is, following
the cold war).
➢ Use a variable to indicate if the conflict happened during or after
the Cold war to capture this behaviour.
Indicators for greed
4. Income foregone (opportunity cost)
➢ For a recruit to engage in war, payments received as a rebel must
be higher than the income forgone by enlisting as a rebel.
➢ Rebellions may occur when foregone income is unusually low (nothing to lose!)
➢ Example: Russian civil war – The desertion rate for both rebel armies was
ten times higher in summer than in winter - the recruits being
peasants, income foregone were much higher at harvest time!
➢ Represented by
(a) mean income per capita,
(b) male secondary schooling
(c) growth rate of the economy
Indicators for greed
5. Cost of conflict capital
➢ The opportunity for rebellion may be that conflict-specific capital is
unusually cheap.
➢ What is conflict-specific capital?
➢ Longer the time, the lower is value of conflict capital, and conflict then
becomes more costly.
➢ Represented by "time since most recent previous conflict".
Indicators for greed
6. Government military capacity
➢ Mountainous landscapes are more favourable to rebels and weaken the
government military capacity.
➢ Represented by the proportion of a country’s terrain that is forested.
Indicators for greed
7. Geographic dispersion of the population
➢ Low population density and low urbanization may inhibit government
capability.
➢ Example: Herbst (2000) suggests that Zaire is prone to rebellion because
its population lives around the edges of the country.
➢ Represented using a Gini coefficient of population dispersion.
Indicators for greed
8. Social cohesion
➢Ethnic and religious diversity reduce rebel groups' ability to function.
➢A newly formed rebel army may be in particular need of social cohesion -
A diverse society might reduce the opportunity for rebellion by limiting the
recruitment pool.
➢Represented using the index of ethno-linguistic/religious fractionalization.
➢This measures the probability that two randomly drawn people will
be from different ethnic/ religious groups.
Indicators for grievances
1. Ethnic or religious hatred
➢ Hard to quantify
➢ Mostly occur in societies with high levels of ethnic/religious diversity
➢ Fractionalization vs polarization
➢ Represented by a measure of ethnic/religious polarization
Indicators for grievances
2. Political repression
➢Measure of political rights, ranging 0–10 on an ascending ordinal scale.
(based on the Polity III dataset)
➢Measure of autocracy (based on the Polity III dataset)
➢Measure of political openness (based on the Freedom House Index)
Indicators for grievances
3. Political exclusion
➢ Even in democracies a small group may fear permanent exclusion.
➢ A potentially important instance is if political allegiance is based on
ethnicity and one ethnic group has a majority.
➢ The incentive to exploit the minority increases when the minority group is
larger, since there is more to extract.
➢ The minority may be most vulnerable if the largest ethnic group
constitutes a small majority.
➢ Measured based on ethnic dominance – a variable to identify
if the largest ethnic group constitutes 45–90% of the population.
Indicators for grievances
4. Economic inequality
➢ Sen (1973) asserts that ‘the relation between inequality and
rebellion is indeed a close one’.
➢ The poor may rebel to induce redistribution, and rich regions may
mount secessionist rebellions to pre-empt redistribution.
➢ Measured using (a) Gini coefficient and (b) Ratio of the top-to-bottom
quintiles of income.
➢ Also use Gini coefficient of land ownership to represent asset inequality.