States and Peoples in Conflict

Transformations of Conflict Studies

Michael Stohl, Mark I. Lichbach, Peter Grabosky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317226598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This volume evaluates the state of the art in conflict studies. Original chapters by leading scholars survey theoretical and empirical research on the origins, processes, patterns, and consequences of most forms and contexts of political conflict, protest, repression, and rebellion. Contributors examine key pillars of conflict studies, including civil war, religious conflict, ethnic conflict, transnational conflict, terrorism, revolution, genocide, climate change, and several investigations into the role of the state. The research questions guiding the text include inquiries into the interactions between the rulers and the ruled, authorities and challengers, cooperation and conflict, accommodation and resistance, and the changing context of conflict from the local to the global.

PART I

Pillars of Conflict

2
GRIEVANCE

The Nexus Between Grievances and Conflict¹

Victor Asal and Kathleen Deloughery

Rebels have always claimed that grievance plays a key role in why they take up arms. The Declaration of Independence promulgated in 1776 by the Continental Congress of the United States is fairly clear on this point when it states that “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations” (Jefferson 1776) and then goes on to elucidate a laundry list of grievances against King George III. A century later and a continent away, the premier theorists of revolution, driving many of the revolutions of the twentieth century, wrote that:

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

(Marx and Engels 1848)

Both rebels and theorist/rebels claim in their literature that oppression and injury is a key motivator for turning to violence and the right to “levy War” (Jefferson 1776). We should note that this connection is not one that is simply a product of the Age of Enlightenment and its aftermath. Speaking of the rebellion against the Romans, Josephus identifies not only religious grievances but also unfair taxation as one of the key factors leading to the revolt (Josephus 2009). Josephus argued that sedition was increased by the behavior of procurators such as Festus, who “did not only, in his political capacity, steal and plunder every one’s substance, nor did he only burden the whole nation with taxes … and nobody remained in the prisons as a malefactor but he who gave him nothing” (Josephus 2009, 748).

Political scientists, sociologists, and other social scientists look for more than the word of rebels (who have their own motivations that may be less than pure) or at only one case as evidence that grievance plays a key role in the outbreak of rebellions, ethnic conflict, or other forms of sub-state political violence. Even a consummate opportunist such as the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)’s Jonas Savimbi, who was at times a Marxist and anti-Marxist, a Portuguese collaborator and anti-Portuguese revolutionary, and often a killer and exploiter of his own people, argued that he was fighting against oppression (Heywood 2000; Vines 2006). More importantly, as Marx and Engels argue, oppression is omnipresent (Marx and Engels 1848). If this is the case, it is very possible that structure and opportunity may play a much more important role in determining when groups decide to use violence than do the grievances that are present. As Marx argues:

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

(Marx 1852)

Grievance and discrimination intuitively appeal as root causes of civil conflict. As suggested by the historical statements of revolutionaries above, the literature on conflict has been divided on the importance of how people and groups are treated and their propensity to use political violence. Much of the disagreement revolves around the degree to which discrimination and grievance is seen as being ubiquitous. As Collier and Sambanis (2002, 4) point out, “Understanding the causes of observed conflict is not necessarily synonymous with understanding its motivation. Motive may or may not be more decisive than opportunity for action.” If everyone has a grievance then the utility of grievance as a potential explanation for violence is negligible. If that is the case, then opportunity and resources are keys to explaining violence, and discrimination is simply not that important as a cause of violence. On the other hand, it is also possible that not all types of grievance and discrimination are created equally and thus certain kinds of grievance play a crucial role in a triangle of contention that it makes up along with political opportunity and resource mobilization. Fundamentally, the authors of this chapter believe this to be true. Everyone may carry grievances with them, ranging from the fact that their salary is too low to an inconvenient slight at the hands of a bigot, or even that they feel they are not receiving the respect they deserve.

Ted Gurr’s work, from his groundbreaking book Why Men Rebel (2010) to his work in People versus States (2000), has been posited on the idea that grievance matters and that certain types of grievance are much more combustible than others. For example, a grievance that could be generated by the following communiqué may be one of a theoretically different order:

The Corps Commander shall carry out sporadic bombardments … In order to kill the largest number of people … all persons captured … shall be detained and interrogated … and those between the ages of 15 and 70 shall be executed after any useful information has been obtained …

(Gurr 2000, 127)

This message comes from orders that were delivered to an Iraqi officer in June 1987. The key question about the nexus between grievance and conflict is not what we or others intuitively feel about how such discrimination may contribute to civilians taking up arms against their oppressors, but on what research has been able to affirm.

Gurr’s work (1970; 1993a; 1993b) stands in sharp contrast to other scholars’ arguments about the key causes of conflict. Indeed, one might argue that much of the literature on contentious politics over the last forty years is a response to the relative deprivation gauntlet that Gurr laid down. Tilly’s (1978) work From Mobilization to Revolution pushed back against Gurr’s argument by arguing for the dominance of organization and resources as explanations for outbreaks of political violence.

Indeed, McAdam et al.’s Dynamics of Contention (2001), Tilly’s Politics of Collective Violence (2003), and much of the other contentious politics literature is an extension of this ongoing dialectic between the importance of grievances and the importance of resources (McAdam 2010) and opportunity structures (Tarrow 1998). Skocpol (1979) challenged the grievance model as well, with a focus on deeper levels of structure, and argued that the key to social revolutions was the confluence of international challenges and domestic disunity among elites. From a rational actor perspective, Lichbach also challenged the grievance perspective with The Rebel’s Dilemma (1995), and argued that the key challenges that required explanation were how actors were mobilized into rebellion and how the cooperation necessary to bring about a successful revolt was achieved. For Lichbach, the key issue is to identify the key strategies that allow for the dilemma of cooperation to be overcome.

Gurr, in his work People versus States (2000), responds to most (although not all) of these critiques. He concedes the importance of resources and opportunity structure but argues that grievance caused by state action is a key component of ethnic conflict. Drawing on the Minorities at Risk (MAR) database (1993b), he argues that discrimination creates grievances that are a key ingredient that should not be overlooked. The current scientific literature on how grievance and discrimination affect violence is still contentious, however, and in the following pages we will examine some of the key works in this area and the reasons for this ongoing contention.² In some of the recent empirical literature, motive³—at least as far as grievance is concerned—has not done very well as an explanation for the onset of civil war. Indeed, many have found that grievance is not a significant factor in the onset of conflict.⁴ This finding is particularly surprising in the case of ethnic wars, which would seem to be inherently related to some sense of group grievance. While conceding that motivation—“greed or grievance”—must have some place in explaining civil war, Collier et al. (2003, 89) go on to argue that, for the most part, grievance is not a useful tool for explaining civil wars, for even “Extreme cases of ethnic abuses of power have often failed to trigger civil war …”

On the other hand, others have found significant evidence supporting Gurr’s (2000) argument that grievance is integrally tied to the use of political violence by ethnic groups (Regan and Norton 2005; Cederman et al. 2010; Wimmer et al. 2009). This chapter first outlines some of the research that focuses on grievance and discrimination as causal factors in explaining the outbreak of civil conflict as well as the critiques of this approach. Next, we examine recent research that lends new support to the connection between grievance and violent conflict and spend significant time examining the recent work of Cederman, Wimmer, and Min (Cederman et al. 2010; Wimmer et al. 2009), who use a new dataset that addresses many of the methodological concerns raised about previous findings and whose findings appear to lend strong support to the argument that—at least when it comes to ethnic conflict—grievance matters a great deal.

Critics of the work by Gurr and others, while correct in pointing out potential selection biases, have been flawed because they employed proxies for grievance and discrimination that simply do not capture grievance in any meaningful way (Fearon and Laitin 2003). Recent work by Cederman and others address the selection bias and use direct measures of discrimination. They find strong support for the basic argument that groups that are aggrieved are more likely to use violence (Cederman and Girardin 2007; Wimmer et al. 2009).

Why Rebel?

Given the intuitive nature of grievance as a cause it is no surprise that, in challenging grievance, Collier and Hoeffler (2004, 2) contend that “The political science literature explains conflict in terms of motive: the circumstances in which people want to rebel are viewed as sufficiently rare to constitute the explanation.” Until recently, much of the literature has argued that this is indeed the case. While Gurr’s Why Men Rebel (1970) is not the first formulation of the grievance argument, it is a touchstone for much of the literature and a useful starting point for this discussion. Gurr (1970) argued that people are motivated by relative deprivation and that, given the right conditions and sufficient provocation, people will rebel. Relative deprivation as defined by Gurr is:

a perceived discrepancy between men’s value expectations and their value capabilities. Value expectations are the goods and conditions of life to which people believe they are rightfully entitled. Value capabilities are the goods and conditions they think they are capable of attaining or maintaining given the social means available to them.

(Gurr 1970, 13)

When people experience the frustration brought on by relative deprivation they will be more likely to turn to violence; the greater the intensity of the frustration, the greater the likelihood of the use of violence (Gurr 1970). The relative deprivation argument has received a number of criticisms, in part because the measures being used in the analyses were not really capturing frustration and certainly not the intensity of frustration (Aya 1990). Gurney and Tierney (1982) argued that relative deprivation could result in very different psychological constructs that would not lead to challenges to authority.

A focus on grievance that was not tied to psychological factors but directly to discrimination, inequality, and oppression was theoretically robust to this challenge and the literature that operationalized grievance in this way continued to grow. Others have also argued that exclusionary or repressive regimes are more prone to revolution (Hibbs 1973; Reynal-Querol 2002; Goodwin 2001a; Elbadawi and Sambanis 2002). Others focusing specifically on economic inequality as a cause of grievance have provided evidence that grievance caused by economic inequality leads to civil war (Muller 1985b; Seligson and Muller 1987; Muller 1988). Much of the work focusing on ethnic conflict specifically has made use of the MAR database, created by Gurr (2000), which identified the coding of discrimination as a more concrete way to examine grievance as a possible motivator for rebellion. Gurr argues that discrimination creates grievance by keeping ethnic groups out of the opportunity structure of the state because “Political discrimination means, by definition, that minorities encounter restrictions on political participation and access to decision making” (Gurr 2000, 123). The MAR database was created to test empirically the impact of this and other kinds of discrimination (as well as other variables) on the likelihood of political violence; it has information on over 300 minority groups, primarily from the 1990s but with some information going back to the 1980s and earlier:

MAR focuses specifically on ethnopolitical groups, non-state communal groups that have “political significance” in the contemporary world because of their status and political actions. Political significance is determined by the following two criteria: The group collectively suffers, or benefits from, systematic discriminatory treatment vis-à-vis other groups in a society; and, the group is the basis for political mobilization and collective action in defense or promotion of its self-defined interests.

(MAR Project 2004)

In the MAR datebase Gurr coded discrimination at four different levels, from no discrimination to exclusive/repressive policies. Examining the likelihood that a group will rebel, Gurr, working both alone and with others, has found that political discrimination is a significant cause of ethnic conflict, especially when it is combined in a causal explanation with resource mobilization (Gurr 1993a; Gurr 1993b; Gurr and Moore 1997; Gurr 2000). Perhaps the most advanced work using MAR to look at ethnic grievance is the work of Norton and Reagan (Regan and Norton 2005). Using the MAR group as the unit of analysis, Regan and Norton explored what factors led groups to rebel. They found that states that do not discriminate experience much less rebellion, and that repression “is one of our strongest predictors of protest, rebellion, and civil war, but that relationship displays a different directional impact depending on the outcome. Repression will tend to decrease protest but increase rebellion and civil war” (Regan and Norton 2005, 335). In addition to empirical research driven by yearly datasets collected at the group or country level, work has also been done that looks at the nexus between grievance and mobilization (if not violence) from an experimental perspective. One example is the work of Grant and Brown (1995), who found, through experimental manipulation, support for the relative deprivation argument and a relationship with ethnocentrism.

Against Grievance

Much of the work discussed above has been challenged because the unit of analysis is the group and one of the factors for choosing the group was the level of discrimination. In essence, challengers argue that the findings based on MAR are not accurate because the researcher is selecting on the dependent variable (Fearon and Laitin 1996). Based on this and other issues, the finding that grievance is a factor in civil war has been rejected (Laitin 2002). Collier and Hoeffler (2001), among others (for example, see McCarthy and Zald 1977), see grievance as being so prevalent that it is of secondary importance, if any. As Collier et al. (2003, 56) point out, “Political gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on the contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Pillars of Conflict
• PART II Forms of Conflict
• Conclusion
• Index