Throughout this work, the greed versus grievance framework will be stressed as the majority of conflict cases in the Global South can be reflected in this theory in the shape of civil wars; however, there exist major armed conflicts around the contemporary Global South where the descriptive conditions could contradict the model by Collier (2001).
This essay will focus in its first section in understanding what the framework is on its basis and how interacts between the two concepts, followed by a brief analysis of two study cases in the Global South, showing how international intervention and national peace processes are taking the framework as a useful tool, demonstrating that the application of complementary methods to address conflicts in the Global South are needed to positively address conflicts, concluding this paper with a direct answer to the question.
Section 1. The framework: Matter of perspectives
In order to start analysing how the greed-grievance framework can be useful in the analysis of conflicts in countries in the Global South, it is important to summarize some of the key discourses that underpin the framework.
As suggested by Eleanor O´Gorman (2011), societies’ grievances and their responses to them changed after the Cold War, allowing societies to adopt new ‘conflict attitudes’. These attitudes led policymakers and theorists to look towards new perspectives of study and political agendas. The most relevant contribution to the topic is indeed the ‘greed theory’ of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler. In their paper, Greed and Grievance in Civil Wars (2002), greed trumps grievance as a motivator of conflict in decolonised countries- most of them in the Global South. The war economies literature discourse discusses reshaped/contemporary complexities of conflict; “mapping and brings into analysis new actors (arm dealers, border guards, armed groups), organisations (private small and large companies, criminal organisations), and levels of operation (cross-border, sub-regional, global, South-South, North-South)” (O´Gorman, 2011, page 37). However, later in their later work under the same name (2004), they started treating the justice-seeking and the loot-seeking separately; “Here we propose a more general theory which juxtaposes the opportunities for rebellion against the constraints. Our previous empirical analysis conflated the initiation and the duration of rebellion. We now treat this separately.” (Collier and Hoeffler, 2004, page 564).
One of the theoretical basis of greed versus grievance dichotomy can be found in the document called Beyond Greed and Grievance: Feasibility and Civil War (Collier, Hoeffler, Rohner, 2008), where it suggests some trends that conflicts in the contemporary global south commonly have, especially when analysing their causes focusing on the exploitation of resources and economies of looting. The first trend is their economies; an economy based on primary commodities exports in natural resources like oil and timber, to mention some examples. The limited economic growth and consequently the low average income in the country exacerbate the second and third trend, the latter exposing a reasonable motivation for people to have a justified sense of fight, and try to seek justice by their own hand. Moreover, they argue that pointing out people´s grievances and addressing them are not a good motive to end conflict; leading conflict into what is called a conflict trap in the contemporary Global South (Collier et al. 2008).
On the other hand, many other academics challenge the greed model and remark that pointing at grievances of a society play an important but unsteady factor in order to find the ‘why’ of armed conflict. In the Global South, the lack of control in their roots’ image and identity could be seen as a captive grievance that saw its re-emergence after the decolonisation process. Grievance theory is supported by the relative deprivation of Ted Gurr (1970), and the horizontal inequalities by Frances Stewart (2008).
The horizontal inequalities refer to the “inequality of economic, social or political dimensions or cultural status between culturally defined groups” (Stewart, 2008, page 3) as the main driver of conflict. Also, it remarks the ethnic differences and class displacement to “discourage outright rebellion” (Keen, 2012, page 761). Complementing the grievance ideology, as analysed in the book Why Men Rebel (Gurr, 1970), the ‘theory of relative deprivation’ shows how people’s grievances are represented by unmet expectations and their way to proceed against them are unsuccessful -this means that whether the authority or the non-state actors are unhelpful to respond to their needs, their frustration will be reflected in violent reactions (O’Gorman, 2011, page 29). Elite groups controlling economic and political accesses is a way to benefit certain groups and, therefore, creating a feeling of despair, showing many inequalities that reinforce the motivation of violent acts through seeking justice by their own hand.
Complementary to the concepts of greed and grievance, proxy measures of armed conflicts in the Global South can demonstrate the relevance of the framework. Moreover, many grievance proxies can also be found in greed motivations of war. This dynamic raises its hand as the key element to understand the whole process of civil wars and armed conflicts. Greed proxy measures, according to the greed theory creators, are the “population size and the primary commodity exports” (Collier et al. 2008, page 26). Grievances, on the other hand, consider as a good motivation of conflict the lack of education, the low economic growth, inequality, and ethnic grievances, not between ethnic groups but in the inter-state relationship, among others. If we analyse the concept of education, it plays as a double-face proxy factor. According to the ‘greed theory’ creators, they consider indicators of opportunity for self-financing rebellion like dependence and theft of natural resources, diaspora donations, subsidy from hostile governments, proportion of young males in the society and the average years of schooling, among others (Collier and Hoeffler, 2001, pages 3-6). Based on this premise, the economic factors along with the degree of dependency of natural resources will show the relevance of greed among the grievance in security analysis. It is worth to remark that people’s grievances are likely to be tangible but never strong enough to stand by their own against lucrative opportunities when presented (Beswick and Jackson, 2015).
Following very closely with proxy measures, the dynamics between greed and grievance can be an arguable mix as, for instance, the presence of lootable resources like diamonds, drugs, timber, etc. can be seen as a complementary incentive for grievances. “In reality the competing greed versus grievance hypotheses may, after all, be complementary explanations for conflict. Insofar as they do provide alternative views, a fair test for their relative explanatory powers is best conducted at the level of a quantitative country-case study, because cross-country comparisons of horizontal inequality are still at very early stages of development due to the lack of data” (Murshed and Tadjoeddin, 2007, page 33).
Nevertheless, debates in these processes commonly arise when the subjectivity of conflicts are put aside. Statistical measures cannot define the particularities of certain violent actions, and indeed avoids the surrounding factors. Besides, criteria taken for evaluation and assignment of conflicts through this method might be controversial. Clear examples of these methods are found at the Uppsala Conflict Database Project and the Correlates of War, where statistical procedures dictate the risk of conflict to turn into larger-scale war, the number of deaths is accountable, the death typology can be classified in many ways (civil casualties, for instance), and can mislead the whole concept of study (Beswick and Jackson, 2015, pages 50-52).
Section 2. Argument and study cases; the framework as a tool for policy agendas
Conflicts in the Global South carried out through different actors and procedures; from the post-colonial Sub-Sahara and North Africa, to South-East Asia and Latin America. After understanding the basis of framework´s dichotomy and its interaction between each position, dynamics of conflict in the Global South can reflect different outcomes from the framework and how its function cannot be used to address a conflict, but can be seen as a useful tool to detect ‘who’ and ‘how’ is intervening in conflicts in the Global South . Cross-border violence and illegal groups’ activities, presence and empowerment of lootable and unlootable resources (Ballentine and Nitzschke, 2004); contrary to what was appointed in previous analysis of how stakeholders can benefit from resources (Le Billon, 2001), feeds the dichotomy of the greed versus grievances as a whole and not as individual theories. The emerge of these illegal activities in deserted areas had led criminal organisations to corrupt the system and deliver ‘negative peace’ which means the “absence of violence, absence of war” (Galtung, 1964, page 2), to small communities, unchaining an endless crossfire with the state, civil-resistance groups and other criminal organisations looking after the control of territory.
Although the framework has considerably supported the understanding of new actors in geopolitics in the Global South, the essence of greed versus grievance is not routed to address a conflict but to facilitate the recognition of interests in new wars. Below, two study cases will be shortly reviewed and how the greed and grievance can be detected either in one of any perspectives of the framework, but should not be considered as the main driver in the creation of action plans from policy makers. The argument of this essay states that geopolitics will prove that conflicts can´t be seen as a double-headed dragon, or simply basing them through an isolated theory.
There are two main phrases from the well-known 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza that can refer to this context:
“Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, and justice.” (Spinoza, n.d.)
This reflex leads to his second phrase, suggesting that aid should come from a collaborative effort, and not from personal addressing:
“To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.” (Spinoza, n.d.)
2.1 Sierra Leone
The known case of the ‘Conflict Diamonds’ in Sierra Leone demonstrates how a ‘greed’ perspective can be projected. This long war had many actors involved in it, including the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force (RSLMF), various splinter groups and civil defence forces and private companies. (Richards, 2003, page 9). Sierra Leone experienced true violence in the 1990s, when grievances clashed local authorities, and rebel groups took control of these grievances and use them for the illegal exploitation of diamonds in order to reach personal interests. “Both the composition of the initial force that crossed into Sierra Leone and Taylor’s motivations for supporting the RUF highlight the regional dynamics that underpinned Sierra Leone’s conflict” (Pugh, Cooper, Goodhand, 2004). The civil war started on March 23, 1991, when a group of 100 fighters from Sierra Leone and Liberia invaded east Sierra Leone. Foday Sankoh, an ex-army sergeant, leaded the RUF- with the argument that he represented the urban dispossessed and promised impoverished peasants a greater share in the mineral wealth misused by the government. The grievance was being used as a driver to alter the sense of the fight, and allow the greedy to take control of the situation and turning it into a 9-year war, concentrating it in the diamond districts. In 1999, Sankoh and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, president of Sierra Leone at the time, signed the Lome Peace Accord (UNSC, 1999) under pressure of the United Nations and the US Government. As a concession to RUF, Sankoh was released from death sentence for his war crimes and was appointed as chairman of the Strategic Mineral Resources Commission, a position that controlled most of Sierra Leone’s diamond exports.
Corruption, impunity and a lack of fulfilment of civil grievances led to international agencies to intervene in the form of peacekeeping operations. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), worked as the international response to conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia and DRC. This strategy was focused on commodity sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and aims to establish transparency in the whole process of the diamond industry. The effectiveness of the Kimberley Process is also very debatable; however, what is has been proved is that the framework has inspired to move forward in order to comprehend more the complexities of this conflict (and others in the Global South) that consequently, motivated the creation of the KPCS. (Ballentine and Nitzschke, 2004).
“Sierra Leone’s descent into conflict cannot be adequately understood as a manifestation of a nihilistic ‘new barbarism’. Nor should it be seen solely as a function of a greed-based warlordism that stands outside the ‘normal’ political economy of the state, the region, or indeed the globalized world” (Pugh et al. 2004, page 132).
2.2 Indonesia
Differently from the clear greed projection in the study case mentioned before, Indonesia experienced a drastic turndown of their main commodities’ regions and the life quality of their inhabitants. From 1968 with the rise of Suharto into the power to the late 1990s, the new era called New Order boosted Indonesia’s macroeconomics, all these based on natural resources like oil, gas, mining and timber (Indonesia-Investment, 2013). “During this period, oil was the country’s main export commodity and a major source of government revenue. In the 1980s, the role of oil as a source of revenue declined while that of other natural resource commodities, such as liquid natural gas (LNG), timber and minerals, increased. By the mid-1990s, Indonesia had become the world’s largest exporter of LNG and plywood, the second largest producer of tin (after China), the third largest exporter of thermal coal (after Australia and South Africa), and the third largest exporter of copper (after the US and Chile)” (Tadjoeddin, 2007, page 12). Regional dynamics, along with East Timor’s independence and the radical increase of private investments in primary resources in the country, left locals without any opportunity to obtain wealth.
Corruption materialised in preferential treatment in exchange of political support became a key grievance of Indonesian society that was always faced to tolerate government’s actions thanks to their impressive industrial results. Unequal resource distribution drove the four main Indonesian regions (Aceh, Papua, Riau and East Kalimantan) to rise and start seeking justice by their own hand. “In other resource-rich regions, indigenous people have experienced relative deprivation in relation to the richness of their land (Tadjoeddin et al. 2001) and the living standards of the increasing number of migrant groups (Brown, 2005)” (Tadjoeddin, 2007, page 16). The sentiment of ‘aspiration to inequality’ (Tadjoeddin, Widjajanti, Satish, 2001, pages 283-304) functioned as the main driver of people’s grievances in the resource-rich regions. Even though the internal dynamics between government, private companies and communities (even community versus community violent acts driven by religious differences and also by violent insurgent groups like Free Aceh Movement, better known as GAM) caused a large-scale armed conflict, it may be interpreted that the goals of each party was the feasibility of resources but this was wrongly read, as the secessionist feeling was always conducted by alleviating society’s grievances. Unlike many other cases in the Global South, the GAM rebel group was driven at first by ideological and ethnical reasons, and natural resources were used from time to time to contribute to its revenue, as criminal acts where potentially more effective for its finance. Control of natural resources was not the first complaint of Indonesian society, but the distribution of the resources was the main driver of this conflict.
After the detection of the people’s grievances as Stewart remarks, the government started to address the conflict by using other tools that referenced to the greed-grievance framework. Decentralisation laws passed in 1999 and applied in 2001, the special autonomy laws for Aceh and Papua (first approved in 2001 and revised in 2004) and the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in the Helsinki Peace Agreement between GAM and representatives of the Indonesian government led to more effective peace building in Indonesia, after the failed attempts of peace accords in 2000 and 2002, respectively (Aspinall, 2005). There are major risks that the MoU will not create peacekeeping in the region, however it is clearly seen that the ‘grievance side’ of the framework can also be applied in order to detect some specifics of armed conflicts.
As observed in the previous study cases, the greed or grievance perspective can be positioned according to the context of the conflicts in the Global South, as policy makers use the framework as a powerful tool to point at the major actors and the way they operate and interact.
As previously stated in this essay, greed-grievance framework is positively useful for local and international organisations for suggesting, planning and executing programmes that can contribute to the peace process of the regarding conflicts. The greed framework has been accurate in order to point at key elements of new civil wars; following up with Collier’s conditions regarding natural resources dependency, there are many cases in different regions of the Global South where the violence trends exposed by the framework can be seen; especially in the North-West African region. Libya has the largest oil reserves in the world, focusing their economy in the hydrocarbon since 1961 when the country became an oil exporter and moved rapidly from a poor to a rich country in the subsequent years (Business Insider, 2013). Sierra Leone has historically focused in unsustainable resources or assets that cannot be reused. In 1990, titanium represented USD $75 million, but after the rebels took control of mines the resource was halted temporarily, constituting a key factor for the considerable decrease in its economic growth in the previous years on the civil war in 1991 (Economy Watch, 2010).
Even though the framework as a ‘whole’ is clearly useful to combine it with other researches and theoretical basis, the statistical methodology of Collier and Hoeffler (2001) can be debated as there are countries in the Global South that are facing large-scale violence with the number of deaths that should appoint a civil war according to the greed theory. A great example of this disruption is Mexico, where the war on drugs have seen over 80,000 deaths due to organised crime related incidents since 2006 and 2,837 people were killed only in the first whole year of war (CNN Library, 2016).
Conclusion
It can be observed that the greed versus grievance framework is found in many cases of the Global South; however, conflicts and actors have turned into more complex structures and objectives, as well understanding the complexity itself of the new goals of states and institutions. After analysing the study cases, the greed versus grievance, the Collier and Hoeffler (2001; 2004) perspective where grievance model is less powerful as a motivation of civil wars, the Indonesian armed conflict allowed the existence of debate when justifying that feasibility overpasses the justice-seeking motivations as the grievances were the main driver in the four regions of the country. Linked to the greed concept, the grievance hypothesis supported by Frances Stewart (2008) was contradicted by the case in Sierra Leone where the contrasting new actors and the continuous natural-resource-control war ended up exemplifying a clear case of the greed perspective. Many other cases can prove that even though any of the theories of the framework could be seen, that does not mean they will function as a primary source to describe what is happening in large-scale armed conflicts, like mentioned in the case of Mexico. As the framework, or any of the factors by their own, can be very useful to understand the main drivers of new wars and their roles, it does not offer precision at the moment of analysing wars as many of the conflicts in the Global South should be studied in a specific context case, rather than fitting it in numbers and/or a theory.
To finalise; is the greed-grievance framework ultimately helpful or unhelpful when addressing conflict in the contemporary global South? In any of the cases that greed or grievance could prove that conflicts in the Global South are either motivated by wealth-seeking or social justice, the framework is not ultimately helpful to address conflicts and be the solid grounds of a whole political agenda in order to solve them, but it stands out as a participative asset, suggesting it as a complementary framework and linking it to other areas of the International Relations studies.
“The weakness of ‘greed, not grievance’ (and the political economy approach to war in general) is that it risks over-emphasis on tools. War is also ritual action. It is a ritual action that forces the solidarities apart. Restoration of peace also has to engage a ritual re-balancing of the solidarities” (Richards, 2003, page 38).