Major economic roots of civil conflicts and possible ways of mitigating these

There is no single explanation or model for civil conflicts across the globe rather; multiple competing and modified models exist. Civil wars have gained increasing attention from academics and policymakers alike in recent years. This concern is understandable since civil conflict is the source of immense human suffering.It is estimated that civil wars have resulted in three times as many deaths as wars between states since World War II. A major locus for civil wars in recent years has been Sub-Saharan Africa, where twenty-nine of forty-three countries suffered from civil conflict during the 1980s and 1990s. In the median Sub-Saharan African country, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes as a consequence of civil war during this period. There is a growing body of research that highlights the association between economic conditions and civil conflict. Some of the major economic roots of civil conflicts include unequal distribution of resources, land disputes, poverty, corruption, greed  and unemployment among a host of other causes.

Precarious economic welfare ignites civil conflict; causing insecurity and growing dissatisfaction among the people against existing governments. Political instability and the risk of conflict increase. This encourages emigration of highly skilled and educated labour and the flight of capital making it even more difficult to reverse the process of economic decline. The vicious circle of poverty and stagnation continues and with it the likelihood of conflict.

According Collier (2003) a civil war is classified as an internal conflict with at least one thousand battle-related deaths. Fortna (2008) cited that a civil war should represent a challenge to the sovereignty of internationally recognized state, occur within recognize boundary of the state, recognize the state as one of the principal combatants and lastly the rebel were should be able to mount an organized military opposition were to inflict significant casualties to the state.

The risk of civil war will be particularly high if there is a sudden sharp fall in output, employment and income, and no clear sign that the country will be able to reverse it in the foreseeable future. The costs of economic stagnation have “a dramatic causal impact on the likelihood of civil war.” Moreover, this is not confined to low-income countries though they are, of course, particularly vulnerable because “the impact of growth shocks on conflict is not significantly different in richer more democratic or more ethnically diverse countries”. For instance, sharp falls in income and large increases in unemployment preceded civil wars in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Indonesia. The same happened in Yugoslavia following the liberal reforms in 1989. The economy declined by 15-20 per cent and the rate of unemployment in some regions reached 40 per cent of the adult population “fuelling social unrest.” The difference between these four states was that in Yugoslavia income per capita was two or three times the average for civil war countries and it had high levels of education as well as a public health service that was unusually comprehensive for the country’s level of industrialization. Two years later the first of the Yugoslav civil wars broke out.

Impoverishment and inequality has increased over the last thirty years worldwide to the extent that governments have become either unable or unwilling to compensate for this through income transfers thus causing civil war. The danger is that nothing is done to reverse this situation; these trends will create exactly the conditions in which people, especially inhabitants of the poorest countries, can easily become caught in the vicious circle of relative or absolute impoverishment, despair and hate.  The low level of development limits the capacity of a country to produce the volume of output required to satisfy the needs and aspirations of its population.Consequently, employment opportunities are also limited so that unemployment is invariably high and it increases the inequality.

Corruption plays an important role in igniting civil wars. Corrupt governments are usually incapable of delivering public services to the people. Closely linked to corruption are nepotism, ethnicism and tribalism resulting into unequal participation in the socio-economic and political space of a country. These factors can be perfect ingredients to ignite civil wars. According to the Sierra Leone Human Rights Commission(2008), bad governance, endemic corruption and the denial of human rights together with their attendant consequences made the Sierra Leone civil conflict inevitable‖. According to a Monograph article (2001) Kabila failed to reverse corruption, mismanagement and self-enrichment that had characterised Mobutu’s government hence this led to the DRC conflict of 1997. Campell (1999) cited that Congolese Democratic Movement (CDM) Kabila’s mass killings, arbitrary violence, tribalism, nepotism and corruption. Recently Mubarak and Morsi were removed by coups in Egypt because of a corrupt system that failed to provide ‘Bread, Freedom and Social equality’ as symbolised in the slogans that were chanted at Tahir Square (Brown 2013).

According Mwanika (2010) natural resources can also be connected to the acquisition, use, and proliferation of small arms and light weapons, a situation that has exploited the negative opportunities provided by globalisation. In this case, natural resources have provided a parallel political economy for fuelling wars and conflicts. Mineral Resources such as diamonds has been known to have sustained wars in various African countries like Sierra Leone and Angola. Rebels or the governments have been accused to plunder minerals to fund civil wars through exchanging the precious minerals for military weapons. Roberts (2003) noted that United Nation's Fowler Report cited that The United Nations estimated Angolans made between three and four billion dollars through the diamond trade between 1992 and 1998 despite sanctions and trade restriction and diamond firms like  De Beers have openly acknowledges spending $500 million on legal and illegal Angolan diamonds in 1992 alone while people like Joe De Deker, a former stockholder in De Beers, worked with the government of Zaire to supply military equipment to UNITA from 1993 to 1997. The Diplomatic handbook (2007) cited that it will be simplistic to attribute the Sierra civil war of  March 1991 to January 2002 to diamonds however diamonds played an important role in funding the war as well as creating allies like Muammar Gaddafi who had interests in diamonds who supplied weapons and training bases. Similarly Horovitz (2009) observed By late 1992, the Revolutionary United Front RUF (the rebels fighting against the All People‘s Congress (APC) occupied diamond-rich areas and began sending gems to their foreign patrons, in exchange for weapons and logistical support. Gudza (2007) observed that countries like Zimbabwe were motivated by diamonds to enter the Democratic Republic of Congo war on the side of Laurent Kabila an illegitimate leader. In Somalia Al Shaabab finance its war through selling ivory and it has been accused of killing more than ten thousand elephants each year. wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shaabad (militia-group)

Some scholars like Collier subscribe to the greed and grievance discourse. This theory highlight that civil wars can be caused pure greed while grievances are used to a facade. According Collier (2006) argues that the financial vibility of rebel organization is a determinant factor in civil wars. He argues that factors inequality, a lack of democracy, and ethnic and religious divisions, had little systematic effect on causing conflicts. His argument uses groups that led Civil conflicts in Colombia like FARC which was able to employ 12,000 people through kidnapping and drugs. In contrast the Michigan Militia in USA failed to make an impact because it had no money to finance the war. The motivation of groups like FARC is greed than grievances.  The rebels usually target primary commodity exports, examples can be drawn from secceions thus the Katangan secession movement in Zaire targeted the

copper mining region; the Biafran secession movement targeted Nigerian oil producing region ; the Aceh secession movement in Indonesia took the oil-producing region with per capita GDP three times the national average; the successful Eritrean secession was a region with double the per capita income of the rest of Ethiopia (Collier 2003).

Possible ways of mitigating these stems from using an effective criterion for anticipating the likelihood of civil war is to consider whether the country has already suffered from a civil conflict. Indeed, half of the civil wars since World War II, and every civil war that began after 2003 have taken place in countries that had a previous civil war (Collier and Hoeffler, 2007; World Development Report, 2011). The recent report from the World Bank argues that international assistance focuses on recovery rather than prevention (World Development Report, 2011). The predominance of civil wars during the 80s and the 90s in the South has led international support to be targeted to ending civil conflicts. The aid received in post-conflict countries greatly exceeds the aid received in fragile states to prevent an escalation of violence. An illustration is West Africa during the 2000s. The World Bank reports that the aid to two post-conflict countries, Liberia in 2008 and Sierra Leone over the 2000-2003 period, was around US$415 per capita and US$186 per capita (each year) respectively. By contrast, aid for preventing conflict in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Togo was only US$42 per capita. However, understanding the precise causes of civil war may help to apply adequate instruments to prevent them. There are some inexpensive interventions, such as state-society consultations even if financial assistance is often necessary to stop the rising of violence (World Development Report, 2011).

Economic Development

The main empirical result of the literature suggests that the best long-run conflict prevention strategy is economic development. A direct instrument for development is giving aid to poor countries. Aid has some positive effects in conflict prevention, in addition to the desired reduction of poverty. Collier and Hoeffler (2002) argue that aid has no systematic direct effect on the risk of conflict, but that it is beneficial nonetheless through its effect on growth.  However, Collier et al. (2004) show that the gain is modest relative to the cost of the aid and they argue in consequence that conflict reduction should not be the core rationale for aid to low-income countries. An essential factor of long-run development is the quality of institutions (Acemoglu et al. 2001). The World Bank report argues that institutions for security, justice and jobs should first be consolidated to prevent repeated cycles of violence. To have any chance of success, post-conflict strategies must, therefore, concentrate from the start on institutional changes and policies that promote reconciliation, reconstruction and reduction in absolute poverty and income insecurity.

Reconciliation

The effort to achieve reconciliation of the warring factions is therefore of critical importance, and its success will depend on how the authorities deal with four major problems, each of them more serious after the conflict than before. First, as all internal conflicts result in atrocities against civilian populations as well as the combatants, the old grievances, resentments and animosities are likely to be felt even more intensely. The war may also change the ethnic balance of the population in a region or country, as large numbers of people are forced to flee their homes. The minority will now feel even more insecure than before, a fact that the majority may exploit in order to ‘cleanse’ the ethnic or religious character of their region or country by making the minority’s life intolerable and forcing it to emigrate. Anticipating this, a Government genuinely determined to promote reconciliation will act promptly after the conflict to outlaw discrimination and threats against any group and will use – and be seen to use – the law enforcing agencies to implement the new laws. This is essential to demonstrate the determination of the authorities to break with the past by giving all those living on their territory a stake in the new order.

Reconstruction

“The reconstruction of physical infrastructure and the provision of social services are critical for the revival of economic activity and giving people a stake in the peace process”.ll

Although the scale of destruction inflicted by civil wars will vary from country to country, the effect can be devastating even in conflicts of relatively short duration. In addition to the costs (human, social and economic) mentioned earlier, shortage of food is a common problem. As a result, nutritional standards, which are inadequate in low-income countries even at the best of times, can fall to dangerously low levels. With many residential buildings badly damaged or destroyed, serious shortage of housing is another common problem. Much of the infrastructure and productive assets in agriculture and industry will also be destroyed, damaged or made obsolete during the conflict. The combined human and economic cost of the devastation can be staggering. For example, as a result of the genocide in 1994, GDP per capita in Rwanda is 25-30 per cent lower than it would have been without the conflict. During the conflict, 10 per cent of the population died and almost four times as many people fled to neighbouring countries. As a result of such heavy casualties, children have been left with the responsibility of looking after 85,000 of the country’s households. The level of poverty increased significantly, with 60 per cent of the population regarded in 2001 as poor and 42 per cent unable to meet basic food needs.Food, shelter, clothing and medical services must, therefore, be given priority in postconflict countries in order to provide people with the basic needs necessary for survival.

Create employment

The first goal is to achieve high levels of employment and job security in order to give

everyone a stake in their country’s future so that people do not feel useless, not wanted or live in fear of the future. This was judged in the 1940s to be so important that it was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The second goal aims at sustaining the rate of growth required to maintain high levels of employment and job security in the long run. The third goal is to keep prices stable so that the rate of inflation does not make it impossible to achieve the other objectives. The fourth goal is to ensure that the gains from economic progress are distributed in a way that is widely regarded as fair and, also, makes sure that nobody is allowed to exist below a socially acceptable standard of living. The fifth goal is a sustainable external balance (on the current and long-term capital accounts) to enable the country to preserve its economic sovereignty, thus allowing it to pursue the other four goals thereby mitigating civil war.

Fighting Corruption

Self aggrandisement and greed erodes the moral fibre of nations and it destroys the economies of the nations. It creates inequality and intolerable poverty that causes the discontent to take arms against governments. To ensure peace governments needs to adopt systems that promote accountability and transparency. Highly punitive legislation needs to be adopted to punish offenders this will deter potential offenders.

Promotion of democracy will create equitable economic growth that will attract foreign direct investments that will lead to employment and improve livelihoods. Democracy and inclusive political systems needs to be embraced. According Tobbala (2013) democratic governance is known as a combination of both the values of democracy through a process of governance that involves interaction among actors representing the State, civil society and the private sector. The process of governance is therefore based on universally accepted principles ensuring the balance of power, checks and balances. The principles mainly include: participation, accountability, and transparency, rule of law, separation of powers, access to justice, subsidiarity, equality and freedom of the press. These principles are needed to ensure that democratic governance takes root. Militarism and repressive laws needs to be curtailed. Civil societies should work hand in glove with governments to help in coming up with democratic systems that ensures that citizens has full and active participation in the government.

International and Regional bodies like UN and AU should promote and enforce good governance among member states to ensure that there is no abuse of power. The bodies can then take to task leaders who are defiant to its dictates. Bad governance in most cases results in inequalities when sharing resources.

References

Roberts, Janine (2003). Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Empire. , New York ,The Disinformation Company Ltd pp.223–224

Horovitz, S. (2009) ‘Sierra Leone: interaction between international and national responses to the mass atrocities’ in Domac, vol 3, December.

The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone, ‗First Annual Report on the State of Human Rights in Sierra Leone 2007‘ (March 2008)

Campbell H. (1999), “Democratisation, Citizenship and peace in Congo”, in M. Baregu, Crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Harare, Sapes books,

Tobbala, S. (2012). Local Governance and Democratization: The Roadmap for a Responsive Accountable Egypt, Cairo University, Faculty of Economics and Political Science – FEPS.

Gudza, T. (2007). Zimbabwe’s print media coverage of the country’s military involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1998-2002: The case of The Herald, The Sunday Mail, The Financial Gazette and The Zimbabwe Independent, Honours Dissertation, University of Zimbabwe, 2007.

Fortna. V, (2008), Peacekeeping and the peacekept: Data on peacekeeping in civil wars 1989-2004 ,New York, Columbia University.

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shaabad (militia-group)  accessed 14/4/2014