Conflict, Peace and Development

Dr, L. N. Bhattarai
PNC
 Introduction
• “Conflict is an expressed struggle between at least two
interdependent parties who perceive incompatible goals,
scare resources, and interference from others in achieving
their goals.”
• Since the ending of the Cold War, the scale and devastation
of violent intrastate and regional conflicts have become far
more visible, and the demands have become more insistent
for the international community to do a better job of
helping the people and societies affected.
• Preventive diplomacy and peacemaking measures have
been called upon much more frequently (as have sanctions
of many kinds) and peacekeeping demands and responses
have multiplied, together with their costs and dangers.
The Scope of Violent Conflict and Conflict Risks
• Physical security is the foundation for human capability; assurance of
security may be the most fundamental of all institutions for development.
• Violent conflict has held back progress in many of the poorest countries.
• In addition to the horrors of the conflicts and their aftermaths themselves,
economic harm can also be caused by expectations of likely future conflicts
and doubts about how they could be resolved or how high growth could be
resumed in this environment.
• This uncertainty could, for example, discourage investment and
entrepreneurship and accelerate a brain drain.
• Thus, work on the consequences, causes, and potential curative and
preventive remedies for violent conflict and improvement of conditions that
may lead to such conflict has become an important part of the field of
economic development.
• The number and intensity of violent conflicts grew for nearly half a century
following the end of World War II but reached a peak by the early 1990s.
Since then, such conflicts have decreased substantially, as seen in Figure.
• But the intensity and consequences of societal warfare, particularly ethnic
war, remains at unacceptably high levels, comparable to the 1960s.
Global Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946–2008
 The Consequences of Armed Conflict
• Violent conflict harms health in ways both obvious and
unexpected.
• People not involved in violence can be affected almost
immediately as parents lose their livelihood or become
refugees and children are forced to work.
• Recovery from the consequences can take many years.
Conflict can cause children to miss out on schooling in
their most formative years, harming their well-being
over a lifetime.
• And it can take years to mend a torn social fabric that
might help cushion the fall.
 Cont….
• Health: The immediate effect of war is the most visible.
– At first, more men die than women, primarily as a result of the fighting itself.
– Over time, more women die, as they suffer the lingering consequences much more.
– Maternal mortality can be shockingly high—an estimated 3% in conflict areas such as the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
– Scholars have found that the longterm effects of conflict fall most heavily on women,
diminishing their access to health, social welfare services, and education.
– Long-term negative consequences of conflict for child nutrition have been found in
studies.
• Destruction of Wealth:
– Violent conflict destroys capital, and some of what is not destroyed is diverted
to destructive activities.
– Additional wealth is often shipped abroad.
– One study found that on average, a tenth of a country’s wealth is transferred abroad
between the beginning and the end of a conflict, largely as capital flight, as better-off
residents seek to protect their wealth.
– An IMF study found that “the total economic cost of the conflict in Sri Lanka between
1983 and 1996 amounted to about $4.2 billion, twice the country’s 1996 GDP.”
– Per capita income in Nicaragua was $4,276 when civil war began—already very low. But
by its end, per capita income had fallen to just $1,913.
 Cont….
• Worsening Hunger and Poverty:
• It is not surprising that in many conflict countries, food production drops;
one survey found this had happened in 13 out of 18 conflict countries
studied.
• The International Food Policy Research Institute found that in conflict and
post-conflict countries, more than 20% of the population usually lacks
access to adequate food (and, in some cases, the percentage is far higher).
• Far more people were food insecure than the numbers that had been
considered in need of humanitarian assistance.
• In sub-Saharan Africa, food losses in the 1980s and 1990s due to conflict
were equivalent to more than half of all aid received in that period.
• Hunger is also a weapon of war. Fighters have cut off food supplies and
attempted to starve opposing populations into submission; they also steal
food aid.
• Poverty increases through declines in opportunities to earn incomes but
also through direct outcomes of fighting.
 Cont…
• Loss of Education:
• In eight countries in conflict for which data were available, the IMF found that
during the conflict, education spending fell at a rate of −4.3% per person per
year.
• Moreover, sometimes children cannot risk the walk to school because of the
danger of violence.
• And both government soldiers and rebels have destroyed schools that
symbolize the hopes of a village.
• Instead of getting an education, many children work long hours to survive.
• And under conditions of lawlessness and impunity, trafficking and kidnapping
into sex slavery, child soldiering, and other abhorrent conditions have been
documented.
• A study of children abducted into child soldiering in Uganda found that they
lose nearly a year of schooling, on average. Combined with a greater incidence
of injuries, later loss of income is substantial.
• But after a conflict ends, enrollment and attendance at school increases, often
dramatically.
 Cont..
• A Torn Social Fabric:
• Violent conflict or its imminent threat creates refugees— one estimate
is an additional 64 refugees per 1,000 people on average from a civil
war, 45 per 1,000 from coups, and 30 per 1,000 from guerrilla warfare.
• According to the United Nations, by the end of 2008, there were about
26 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) due to “conflict,
generalized violence or human rights violations.”
• In Colombia and many other countries, civil war has provided an
opportunity for drug gangs to carve out territory with impunity and
often to form unholy alliances with either rebel or government forces.
• This leads to further unraveling of the social fabric, from collapse of
rule of law to ruined lives of addicts.
• As concluded in the 2010 Millennium Development Goals Report,
“armed conflict remains a major threat to human security and to hard-
won MDG gains.”
 The Causes of Armed Conflict and Risk
Factors for Conflict
• Both econometric analysis and case study evidence suggest that
conflict is more common in countries with lower incomes, slow
growth, medium to large populations, significant oil production,
poor institutions, a large percentage of excluded ethnic
minorities, ethnic divisions more generally, severe stress on
basic resources, and opportunities to profit from high-value
commodities for export.
• most places that are diverse (ethnically or in other ways) do not
have violent conflict, and places with high inequalities across
individuals usually do not have violent conflict.
• So it is not just economic and not just cultural: The problem
seems to be worse when there are high inequalities across
groups that people identify with.
 Horizontal Inequalities
• Frances Stewart proposes that the presence of major “horizontal
inequalities” (HIs) or inequalities among culturally defined groups
significantly raises the risk of conflict.
• She argues that “when cultural differences coincide with economic and
political differences between groups, this can cause deep resentment that
may lead to violent struggles.”
• In her framework, it is “a combination of cultural differences and political
and economic inequalities running along cultural lines that, in part at least,
explain contemporary violent conflict.”
• She notes that group inequalities have been a significant factor in conflict
among other regions and countries in Côte d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Chiapas, and
Sudan.
• Conversely, where one group has political power and another is
economically privileged (as in Malaysia and for much of the time Nigeria), or
governments are broadly inclusive, conflict seems to be less likely.”
 Natural Resources for Basic Needs
• Basic-needs resource scarcity—especially shortages of food, fertile land,
and water—may contribute to conflict or ongoing risks of conflict;
• for example, the UN concluded that the crisis in Darfur had water and
other natural resource scarcity at its root.
• Clashes among pastoralist groups in northern Kenya are often
attributed to drought and to water scarcity more generally.
• Colin Kahl argues that scarcity can increase the risk of violent conflict
and cites quantitative studies that suggest that population size and
density are significant conflict risk factors; countries that are highly
dependent on natural resources, as well as those experiencing high
rates of deforestation and soil degradation or low per capita availability
of arable land and fresh water, have higher risks of conflict.
• Climate change may exacerbate existing problems. A 2009 study found
that historically in Africa, a 1°C rise in temperature leads to a 4.5%
increase in civil war in the same year;
 Struggle to Control Exportable Natural
Resources
• The presence of high value exportable resources such as
diamonds, oil, and hardwood, without accepted or
enforceable rules for how their benefits will be distributed,
also appears to be an underlying factor in violent conflict.
• Paul Collier argues that what he terms the conflict trap
“shows how certain economic conditions make a country
prone to civil war, and how, once conflict has started, the
cycle of violence becomes a trap from which it is difficult to
escape.”
• He finds that countries are prone to civil war when faced
with low income, slow growth, and dependence on primary
commodity exports.
 Military expenditures
• military expenditures are possibly a cause of conflict,
not merely an effect of conflict.
• The share of low- and middle-income country military
expenditures in world spending has been rising—for
example, from 14% in 1990 to 24% in 2009.
• The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
concluded that “the distribution of global spending in
2012 shows what may be the beginnings of a shift
from the West to other parts of the world, in
particular Eastern Europe and the developing world.”
 The Resolution and Prevention of Armed
Conflict
• Importance of Institutions : To appreciate the challenges of resolution
and prevention, the critical importance of institutional quality and the
deep difficulties of improving them.
• Legal rules and informal norms define and reinforce the ways that
interests of different groups, even when strongly opposing, can be
resolved, at least to the point where development can proceed. Good
institutions provide a foundation of basic security and rights, to
successfully prevent or at least strongly mitigate risks of armed conflict
that is likely to retard and set back progress.
• A good institution in this context facilitates conflict resolution, avoiding
violence and doing so in a way that allows capabilities to grow.
• Without improvements in underlying institutions, purely political
agreements come with the danger of relapse or can fail to create
conditions for balanced economic development.
• Two important institutions are checks and balances on executive
authority and contract enforcement.
 Global Actors
• In post conflict development, engagement by global, regional, national,
and community-level actors is critical. National security—again, a
foundational institution—cannot be taken for granted when violence
crosses borders and remnant violent and criminal forces are still active in
cross-border enclaves, as the Lords Resistance Army was until recently in
Uganda.
• Multinational organized crime has plagued other countries. The UN may
potentially play a more active coordinating role. Other international
organizations and agencies provide funds and capacity building.
• New international rules and agreements are helping to reduce the
problem of incentives for conflict by creating controls on exports and
imports of high-value resources.
• Moreover, business, government, and civil society are partnering to
foster international voluntary arrangements to reduce financial
incentives for war or to ensure that resources do not fund conflict.
 Regional Actors:
• Post conflict reconstruction is also a problem for multination regional
cooperation.
• The African Union has played an increasing role in addressing violent
conflict and its aftermath, particularly through peacekeeping operations.
• Once a peace agreement is signed and a functioning transition or
permanent government is in place, support for post conflict economic
development becomes central.
• Here the African Development Bank (AfDB) plays an active role; its Fragile
States Unit positions fragile states it works with along a continuum
spanning two stages.
• In stage 1, governments have to show a commitment to consolidate
peace and security and have unmet social and economic needs.
• In stage 2, governments must demonstrate that they are improving
macroeconomic conditions and pursuing sound debt policy, have sound
financial management policy, and exhibit transparency of public accounts.
 National Actors
• The state must be strong enough to reliably protect its citizens from violence and to
carry out other important roles that only government can play.
• State fragility is a big part of the problem. But there must also be effective checks
and balances.
• A harsh regime that suppresses violence and rebellion but keeps resources and
power in the hands of a small elite is likely to produce only a temporary solution to
preventing violence; there is little reason to anticipate that such a state will
promote other aspects of development.
• Even if state monopoly on violence suppresses overt conflict, the result may
reinforce inequalities.
• Multilateral outside assistance may be needed to establish basic peace and
security; then it is crucial to ensure broad opportunities and to make the gains from
cooperation more apparent.
• Addressing corruption may help prevent conflict before it breaks out. And
corruption is generally viewed as particularly destabilizing in post conflict
situations.
• It is important to find the means for inclusive economic development, and political
participation—for example, federalism or proportional representation.
 Focus on Education
• UNESCO’s Education for All (EFA) points up the mutually reinforcing
relationship between low education and violent conflict.
• EFA notes that education also affects conflict, as conflict may originate
in an ideology that may be widely disseminated through education.
• The EFA framework thus calls for “conflict-sensitive” education and
policy initiatives, termed “reconstruction education.” Broadly
applicable lessons are stressed; for example, learning how to deal
with educating displaced families in conflict areas is not region-
specific, and lessons learned, say, from the Swat Valley of Pakistan
may help in the DRC, even though the conflicts themselves are very
different.
• EFA argues that education can contribute to peace, stability, and
nation building.
 Local, “Community-Driven” Economic
Development
• Economic participation at the local level is very important, and
some research has found that community-driven development
(CDD) can play an important role.
• Patrick Barron notes that “effective CDD projects can distribute
resources quickly and to remote, rural areas. In devolving
decision-making they can help ensure [that] resource
distribution is fair and popularly accepted.”
• He also argues that such programs can provide incentives for
“collective action that can work across conflict divides.”
• Finally, “CDD tries to prevent the erosion of the social and
institutional bases necessary for the management of
development in nonviolent ways.”
• In summary, peace-building and conflict
prevention needs a course which includes:
1. Economic vitality and the reduction of poverty and
disparities;
2. The breadth of participation and inclusion (economic
as well as political);
3. The rule of law, justice systems and the respect of
individual and group rights;
4. Environmental sustainability;
5. Equity and opportunity;
6. Healthy respect for culture and identity; and
7. Maintaining peaceable regional and international
relations.