The Economic Roots of Conflict and Cooperation in Africa

W. Ascher, N. Mirovitskaya, W. Ascher, N. Mirovitskaya

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137356796
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book combines overviews of the nature and causes of inter-group violence in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa with a collection of country case studies. Both the overview chapter and the case studies trace how economic policy initiatives, and consequent changes in the roles and statuses of various groups, shape conflict or cooperation.

CHAPTER 1

Development Strategies and the Evolution of Violence in Africa

William Ascher and Natalia Mirovitskaya

Introduction

For many people outside of Africa, the continent conjures up images of perpetual violence seemingly revolving around ethnic or religious identity. Atrocities in Darfur, genocide in Rwanda, clan warfare in Somalia, and long history of the Tuareg rebellions in Mali support habitual understandings of Africa as the “dark continent.” Two decades ago, African officials criticized the Western media for their “unbalanced” accounts “motivated only by the pursuit of the sensational—coups, corruption, chaotic economics, crocodile attacks, and quaint tribal rites” (Ebo 1992, 17). This representation of Africa has hardly changed: well-screened reports of telegenic Nigerian rebels pointing their AK-47s at the adventurous CNN anchor, gangs of soldier-thugs rampaging through the Congo, and Somali’s children with stomachs bloated from hunger. These images, reinforced by those of investors at the Haradhere stock exchange trading shares in upcoming Somali pirate attacks, continue to emphasize “the Four Horsemen of Africa’s Apocalypse: Poverty, Famine, War and Corruption.”¹ Popular images of that kind, exaggerated for general audience by political war thrillers, like Die Another Day (2002) and Blood Diamond (2006), have surprisingly extensive backing in academic literature. To some of the analysts looking from afar, African violence is seen as the sad legacy of colonialism; to others as manifestations of corruption, greed, ancient tribal hatreds, or simply the feasibility of engaging in insurrection. For North Africa, the stereotype is uncompromising religious conflict, among Muslim groups or between Muslims and secularists.

In his comprehensive assessment of armed violence in contemporary Africa, Paul D. Williams points out that these stark images distort the realities of African conflict. The degree of ethnic diversity does not account for the degree of violence, nor can colonial history or “poor governance” explain all the variation in its levels. He also notes that the over-cited Collier–Hoeffler dichotomy of “greed vs. grievance” suffered from too many discrepancies, and was eventually abandoned even by its authors. Williams concludes that in light of the failure of the broad single-factor explanations for African warfare, “it would be better to discard these ‘big ideas’ about the principal cause of Africa’s wars and instead think about the many different recipes for making wars and the multiple ingredients which go into them” (Williams 2011, 8). This volume explores one such “multiple ingredients”: the suite of development strategies and specific policies that governments in Africa have pursued thus far or may consider launching.

We certainly are not arguing that the reception to economic policies and their longer-term impacts are the sole or even primary drivers of intergroup conflict or cooperation. However, there is a strong association between armed violence and development: Homicide rates are significantly and negatively linked to most human development indicators, while the correlation between lethal violence and income inequality is also robust (Geneva Declaration Secretariat 2012). The causal relationship between violence and development progress is remarkably complex. In this volume, we attempt to disentangle at least some threads of this connection in African countries, focusing on the many links between the choices that governments make—broad development strategies, policies to pursue these strategies, and institutional changes to promote and implement them—and the likelihood of violence or nonviolent interactions. Understanding these pathways, whether constructive or destructive, is crucial for designing conflict-sensitive development approaches.

We can illustrate the complexity of the links between Africa’s economic and sociopolitical development and the incidence of violence by pointing to several current patterns that may come as a surprise to many who are not immersed in the context of the region.

• With the exception of Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan, the striking overall change in the nature of violence in Sub-Saharan Africa has been the decline in large-scale violence (secessionist, political, communal) and the rise of social (seemingly apolitical) violence, local competition over resources and other forms of low-level instability and conflict. This is not to say that social violence has lacked out-group antagonism, as exemplified by the dramatic rise of attacks on foreigners in South Africa; yet civil wars and interstate wars have declined (Marshall 2012). Straus (2012, 184) concludes that “data indicate that starting in the early 2000s there were on average eight to ten wars in any given year, which is about half the number of wars in Sub-Saharan Africa in the early-to-mid 1990s.” However, while civil wars are less prevalent, the incidence of homicides in Africa as a whole according to data reported in 2008–2009 was 17.4 per 100,000 compared to the next highest region (the Americas) at 15.5 and a world average of 6.9 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2011, 20).² And the southern Africa region,³ without civil or interstate wars, has the world’s highest regional homicide rate (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2011, 22): South Africa and Lesotho had double the rate of Africa as a whole.

• There is considerable variation in levels, regularity, and forms of intergroup violence across the African continent. While some of the most gruesome civil conflicts of recent decades (Burundi, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra-Leone) subsided, the Arab Spring set several countries (notably Libya and Egypt) on a path of turbulent transition. The fallout from the Arab Spring also galvanized intergroup conflict in many countries of the drought-stricken Sahel region, including Mali, Kenya, and Senegal, previously considered to be relatively stable. While by the start of the twenty-first century, more people were killed in Africa’s wars than in the rest of the world combined (Human Security Report 2005, cited in Williams 2011, 4), even in years when violence was at its highest, more than half⁴ of the region was quite peaceful. These differences are replicated at the subnational level: Some generally peaceful countries still have pockets of instability while countries mired in violence (Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo) also have places of relative peace and security.⁵

• In many Sub-Saharan countries, ethnic, religious, or regional divisions have little relevance in defining the basis for intergroup violence, although they may be mobilized if conflict arises for other reasons. Surprisingly, deeply rooted poverty is not a predictor of large-scale violence either, as many African countries at very low levels of development remained peaceful for decades. Despite conditions of poverty, stalled development, and extreme ethnic diversity, at least a half of Sub-Saharan Africa avoided civil war and large-scale violence. For each case of conflict-torn, ethnically divided African country, one can present several examples of equally ethnically diverse and impoverished countries that are peaceful.

• Since the start of the millennium, Africa has made impressive progress in addressing other developmental challenges. There is also substantial diversity in development trajectories and socioeconomic performance across countries and subregions. Over the first decade of the 2000s, Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest economic growth rate of any world region, while the business environment and investment climate have improved substantially. Of the world’s 15 fastest-growing economies in 2010, ten were African (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa 2012, 4). Surprisingly, African countries in or emerging from fragility, such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, featured among the top economic performers (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2012, 16).

• Africa has the youngest population among the global regions and its labor force is rapidly expanding; however, its youth unemployment is growing as well (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa 2012, 15), creating a formidable challenge for policy makers of transforming the “youth bulge” into a “demographic dividend” rather than a harbinger of conflict and volatility.

• Although the situation is definitely far from being stable on the continent and 28 African countries are officially listed as fragile and conflict-affected countries (OECD 2012, 17), the conditions for Africa’s sustained growth and development are considered much more favorable now than ever before (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa 2012, 3). Africa has been projected to continue as the fastest growing region and in the long-term, a major player in the world economy (Radelet 2010; United Nations Economic Commission for Africa 2012). At this crucial “take-off” time, potential changes in economic roles, opportunities, and vulnerabilities present a major challenge for societal stability. This creates a compelling demand for designing conflict-sensitive development strategies.

Development and Conflict in Africa: Existing Theoretical Explanations and Their Limits

The challenge of conflict-sensitive development requires good understanding of the nature and dynamics of violence and its relationship with development. The range of ideas on the causes and drivers of contemporary violence in Africa is extremely diverse. The “greed versus grievance” debate has been particularly influential in shaping development discourses on conflict. One of the most prominent efforts in this realm was the work undertaken by the World Bank in the late 1990s under the direction of Paul Collier. Collier and Anke Hoeffler’s original paper on “Greed and Grievance in Civil Wars” (2000) posed the question whether economists are correct that rebellion is motivated by the incentive to capture resources (“greed”), or political scientists are right in explaining rebellion by citing grievances. This peculiar either–or framing permitted Collier and Hoeffler (2000, 2002, 2004) to assert, on the basis of data from 125 countries, that proxies for “grievance” are not statistically significant in accounting for the onset of civil wars, but proxies for “greed” are. The authors subsequently claimed that international responses needed to be reframed. Coming from the World Bank, with its large, built-in audience, Collier’s conclusions that “greed” rather than “grievances” caused civil wars were embraced by the development community (Jones and Elgin-Cossart 2011, 5). Meanwhile, his use of quantitative methods encouraged many political scientists studying civil wars to isolate whichever factor seems to account for more of the variation in the probability or magnitude of conflict across a large set of countries. In a devastating critique of this work, Nathan (2008) demonstrates that the proxies for the opportunities to capture resources (i.e., greed) are not only of questionable validity as indicators of such opportunities, but also some of these proxies could just as well be considered measures of grievance. She also notes the unwarranted presumption of the directions of causality, and the masking of regional grievances through the overreliance on national data.⁶ Moreover, the approach of eliminating some measures as statistically insignificant is also problematic, in that Collier and Hoeffler either have the relevant universe of cases, in which case statistical significance is irrelevant,⁷ or they have a highly nonrandom sample.

Eventually, Collier and Hoeffler abandoned their own conclusion; in a 2009 article, joined by Dominic Rohner, they declared that “where a rebellion is financially and militarily feasible it will occur” (Collier, Hoeffler, and Rohner 2009, 1). If this was meant to be taken literally, it is yet another astonishing oversimplification. It is one thing to assert that motives of economic gain are stronger than revenge, even if that flies in the face of the interconnection between the two, but it is going much further to baldly assert that rebellion is the deterministic outcome of the fact that an insurrection could succeed. What does this model say about the scenario of a group with the financial and physical power to launch a successful insurrection, but its members lack the desire to revolt? If military feasibility requires mobilizing the group, and therefore the willingness of the group to undertake the insurrection, then the model is a sterile truism: If a group is willing and able to undertake a successful insurrection, it will do so. If feasibility is truly limited to financial and military capability, this model—taken on its face—predicts that simply having the capability to engage in a civil war will prompt any group to launch a rebellion. Clearly, this is not what Collier and Hoeffler meant to imply;⁸ there is a presumption that sufficient motivation to seek some goals through civil war must be present. Yet, this is a black-box approach: Some combination of grievance and greed must be present, but its nature is largely unspecified. Economic resources that can be captured through violence are an obvious potential objective, both for the direct goal of enrichment and as a means of supporting the insurrection. Beyond that, however, even the combination of greed, grievance, and feasibility leaves unanswered how government strategies and policies exacerbate grievances, create opportunities for resource capture, or influence the feasibility of the success of aggression. In their recent work, Collier and his collaborators have opened up two categories—motives and opportunity, though both narrowly conceived. There is more to motives than addressing grievance or capturing resources; there is more to opportunities that set one group against another than the availability of resources deployable for aggression.

Second, these findings provide very little guidance on how development strategies could be more conflict sensitive. After all of the statistical analyses, interpretations, and reversals, Hoeffler (2012, 180) concludes that the only robust patterns emerging from the cross-national research are that “[c]ountries are more likely to experience a civil war when they have had a war in the past, their income is low, they have poor growth, and they have a large population.” If these are the only robust findings, even in the judgment of one of the two most prominent champions of the cross-national quantitative approach, the practical utility of this methodology is questionable. Hoeffler (2012, 199) concluded that

There is a gap between the theoretical and statistical models. The theory suggests a number of causes of civil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Development Strategies and the Evolution of Violence in Africa
• Chapter 2 Whither Egypt: Regime Change or a Return to the Status Quo?
• Chapter 3 Development Strategies in North Africa
• Chapter 4 Ethiopia: Averting Violence through Its Quest for Growth
• Chapter 5 The Roots of Civic Peace in Tanzania
• Chapter 6 Economic Development Strategy and Conflict: A Comparison of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana 50 Years after Independence
• Chapter 7 Development Strategies and Conflict in Nigeria
• Chapter 8 The Absence of Intergroup Violence in Botswana: An Assessment of the Role of Development Strategies
• Chapter 9 Intergroup Peace and Interpersonal Violence in South Africa
• Chapter 10 The Conflict–Development Nexus in Africa: Insights from the Case Studies
• Index