The Political Economy of Conflict: Greed versus Grievance
Understanding the Motivations Behind Conflict
The political economy of conflict is a captivating area within security studies that aims to analyze the relationship between money and war. This field encompasses several aspects, including the fiscal foundations of war, mobilization for conflict, financing, and conflict motivations or goals.
“Greed versus grievance” refers to two arguments put forth by scholars to explain the causes of war. Greed suggests that combatants in conflicts are motivated by opportunistic reasons, such as cost-benefit calculations, alternative income, and risk. Conversely, grievance posits that people rebel over issues like inequality, discrimination, and authoritarianism. The Collier-Hoeffler Model (see below the TEDx talk) supports greed over grievance as an explanation for conflict.
However, one may question whether this assertion is accurate and if all conflicts primarily have a material basis.
There are two main issues with the “greed over grievance” perspective.
Methodological issues
The greed versus grievance debate fits more broadly into the rationalism versus constructivism discussion. As a result, the two discussions share similar problems.
Due to missing data and weak statistics, there is insufficient evidence to argue that conflicts predominantly have a material basis.
The proxies used in Collier and Hoeffler’s study are imprecise and inappropriate for measuring greed. Generally, they differentiate between methodological individualism and rational action vision for greed and social and ideational methods for grievance. However, this distinction is false, as greed and grievance likely influence each other. Grievances often involve material concerns and are not solely driven by idealistic factors. Critics of the Collier-Hoeffler Model, like David Keen, have demonstrated this repeatedly. For example, Keen argues that the conflict in Sudan exemplifies the interconnected nature of greed and grievance.
The Critical Realist Approach as a Solution
Since the grievance logic is based on ideational factors and interests, one can argue that an econometric model cannot assess its contribution to a conflict. This leads us to the critic Korf (2006) advanced towards Collier-Hoeffler Model. She says that their model has essentially three methodological and epistemological failures:
- the quantitative rational choice model
- the lack of empirical fieldwork
- & the pretension to establish universal laws to predict the outbreak of civil wars.
She proposes the critical realist approach to analyse conflicts with three essential features: the greed and grievance arguments are intertwined, the context is taken into account, and the method of participant observation is used. Some might deduce that this methodology can result in a different outcome in the “greed vs grievance” debate. Participant observation is better for assessing ideational motivations than econometric models.
Historical problems
“Greed and grievance” arguments do not consider the historical context of the war in general.
This point is clearly one of the most crucial weaknesses of their argument. One can assert that the Collier-Hoeffler model attempts to study the causes of war without studying actual conflicts. This criticism is present in Korf’s text which puts forward the role of time and space in analysing conflicts’ causes and results. For example, in respect of the Steps to War theory by Senese and Vasquez (2008), there is a different analysis logic. Prior to advancing their proximate causes of war — territorial dispute, etc. — they studied all armed conflicts between 1816 and 1945 with the Correlates of War project data. This way of working gave them a precise image of wars’ causal mechanisms’ evolution over history — and, most notably, the relative importance of their explanatory power’s evolution.
State policy and the context
The historical context is also relevant, given that state policy may play a role in shaping the trajectory of a conflict. For instance, in the Colombian case, we can suppose that the government’s attitude towards FARC guerrillas changed the motivations of combatants to pursue the conflict: sometimes greed was the primary basis, but grievance was also considered on different occasions. In addition to contextual thoughts, different conflicts throughout history should also be considered. In Complex emergencies, David Keen (2008) demonstrated how a conflict could never be seen as a “greed-based” fight. Conflict is such a complicated concept with several meanings. Therefore, scholars must first differentiate between distinct types of conflicts before starting their research: civil war, genocide, ethnic conflicts, war on terror, etc. Differences between a civil war and genocide — or war on terror — are obvious; no one can suppose that they emerged because of the same incentives and will have the same consequences. Put another way, emphasising that a civil war started because of material cost/benefit considerations can be justified and sounds reasonable. In contrast, assuming a primarily material basis for genocide is not rational. The text of Andreas (2004) is a good example in which the “greed over grievance” argument is valid because of a specific context — the Balkans in the 90s — and a specific type of conflict — ethnic. The conflict perpetuated by Milosevic in Serbia started in a situation favourable to smuggling practices and quasi-private criminal combatants. This kind of a particular time and space combination for “greed over grievance” is not always present. In fact, the paper of Staniland (2012) is precisely about this idea: material resources have fundamentally different effects depending on the social-organizational context into which they flow. In cohesive organisations, resources enhance fighting power, organisational capacity and internal discipline. On the contrary, in socially divided organisations, resources will lead to unrest and indiscipline within the group and the diffusion of power to local units (Staniland, 2012).
To sum up, it is not convincing to assume that all conflicts have a primarily material basis, ceteris paribus sic stantibus. Even if this factor is present in the majority of conflicts, the relative importance of its explanatory power depends on our perspective — rationalism or constructivism — and a given historical context. If we adopt a rationalist perspective and attached methodology, we can more easily justify the “greed over grievance” argument. Nonetheless, scholars need to be cautious about quantitative data analysis because if a person tortures the data enough, it will ultimately tell her/him what she/he wants to hear.
References:
Andreas, Peter. 2004. The Clandestine Political Economy of War and Peace in Bosnia.
Collier, Paul and Hoeffler Anke. 2004. Greed and grievance in civil war.
Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2003. The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil Wars.
Keen, David. 2008. Complex emergencies.
— — — . 2008b. Complex Emergencies: David Keen Responds.
Korf, Benedikt. 2006. Cargo Cult Science, Armchair Empiricism and the Idea of Violent Conflict.
Senese, Paul Domenic, and John A. Vasquez. 2008. The steps to war: an empirical study.
Staniland, Paul. 2012. Organizing Insurgency: Networks, Resources, and Rebellion in South Asia.
