Civil wars Flashcards
Greed in terms of civil war
makes sense of civil war in terms of individuals’ desire to maximize their profits, primarily in a narrowly materialist sense. argument that combatants in armed conflicts are motivated by a desire to better their situation (more individual and material) and perform an informal cost-benefit analysis in examining if the rewards of joining a rebellion are greater than not joining.
Grievance argument for civil war
view internal conflict as a reaction to socioeconomic and/or political injustice. argument that people rebel over issues of identity, e.g ethnicity, religion, social class, etc., rather than over economics. In practice, even proponents of strong versions of these arguments admit that the opposing argument has some influence in the development of a conflict.
commonality of greed and grievance argument in civil war
the common factor is the perception of a certain deprivation
. If it is an economic deprivation, the inequality will be a vertical inequality and the cause of war will be ‘greed’. If the deprivation is caused by ethnicity, age, religion or gender, it will be a horizontal inequality and the cause of war will be due to the ‘grievances’.
vertical inequality
disparities or differences in socioeconomic outcomes that exist along a hierarchical or vertical dimension within society. It focuses on inequalities between individuals or groups that occupy different positions or levels within the social hierarchy. Vertical inequality typically involves differences in income, wealth, or social status between individuals or groups at the top, middle, and bottom of the socioeconomic ladder
horizontal inequality
disparities or differences among individuals or groups that share similar characteristics or attributes, such as race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or geographic location. It focuses on inequalities between groups that are seen as being on the same level or horizontal plane within society. eg access to education or healthcare
definition of civil war
Cederman and Vogt - Civil war can be defined as armed combat within a sovereign state between an incumbent government and a nonstate challenger that claims full or partial sovereignty over the territory of the state. In other words, civil war always concerns an incompatibility in terms of political control.
Kalyvvas role of local cleavages in civil war
individual and local actors take advantage of the war to settle local or private conflicts often bearing little or no relation to the causes of the war or the goals of the belligerents.
* local cleavages are typically articulated in the language of the war’s master cleavage, often instrumentally. To give a recent example, local factions in Afghanistan accused one another of being Taliban or al-Qaeda so as to have rivals bombed by the U.S. Air Force.
* War may generate new local cleavages because power shifts at the local level upset delicate arrangements.
o One of the most potent cleavages produced by civil wars is generational: rebels (but also incumbents) often recruit young people who then proceed to repress their village’s elders
example of local cleavages in civil war- China
o The Chinese Civil War was often fought by diverse and shifting coalitions of bandits and local militias;for a long time, the Communists were for the bandits “only one of several possible allies or temporary patrons.” In Manchuria, for instance, it was extremely difficult to differentiate between members of the Anti-Japanese Resistance and bandits because moving from one to another was very common: it is estimated that 140,000 of a total 300,000 resistance members had a bandit background.
example of local cleavages in civil war- Spain
o A study of a northern Spanish town found that the main cleavage in its central neighbourhood began in the early 1930s as a dispute between two doctors competing for the title of official town doctor, which entailed a lucrative state-guaranteed practice. Many families became engaged on the side of one doctor or the other: “Simultaneously, the political turmoil of the end of the Republic added a wider political dimension to what was in essence a dispute based on local issue
example of local cleavages in civil wars - Northern Ireland
The violence between the neighboring villages of Coagh and Ardboe, in Northern Ireland, which cost the lives of 30 men in the space of three years in the late 1980s and early 1990s (for a combined population of just over a thousand people), was not simply violence between the Catholic Irish Republican Army and the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force, but also a “bitter vendetta” and the “freshest cycle of a blood feud” that pitted these particular two villages against each other.
group conflict/ violence
- The concept of group conflict or group violence entails the total interchangeability of individuals, either as participants and perpetrators or as targets. “Group conflict” makes sense only if group members are fully substitutable for each other. & If targets of violence are selected along lines that go beyond group attributes, then the violence cannot be described as simply ethnic, class-based, etcetera.
the notion of local vendettas means it goes beyond group conflict
extreme local vendettas - Bonsia
In Omarska camp in Bosnia: One day, a Serb guard came in at night and insulted a prisoner who, as a judge, had fined him for a traffic offense in the late 1970s!
Kalyvvas- alliance
allows for multiple rather than unitary actors, agency located in both center and periphery rather than only in either one, and a variety of preferences and identities as opposed to a common and overarching one. Alliance entails a transaction between supralocal and local actors, whereby the former supply the latter with external muscle, thus allowing them to win decisive local advantage; in exchange the former rely on local conflicts to recruit and motivate supporters and obtain local control, resources, and information—even when their ideological agenda is opposed to localism
o Alliance is for local actors a means rather than a goal.
ethnic conflict
- The majority agree on defining a war as ethnic “if the contending actors or parties identify themselves or one another using ethnic criteria.”
rationalist explanation for ethnic conflict
Lake builds on James Fearon’s understanding of the security dilemma to assert that ethnic war occurs primarily because information failures and commitment problems prevent competing groups from reaching a negotiated bargain that all would prefer
weingast propose an alternative model that purports to explain not only ethnic war but also genocide. They argue that predatory elites are the key cause of ethnic war and genocide, because they provoke violence as a way of maintaining power and misleading their supporters into thinking the other side is to blame for the violence.
Kaufman - why rationalist explanations for war are incorrect
- Look at Sudan and Rwanda - Why did Sudanese President Jaafar al-Nimeiri, who had signed a peace agreement in 1972, abrogate that agreement in 1983 and restart Sudan’s north-south civil war? And why did hard-liners in Rwanda resort to war and genocide in 1994 in the aftermath of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s death
- uncertainty model is incorrect because uncertainties such as information failures and commitment problems were irrelevant in the Sudan case and are insufficient to explain the Rwanda case. The elite-predation model rightly assumes that both conflicts were the result of elite predation—not uncertainty— but it identifies the wrong mechanism. In neither case was the predatory strategy the best option for leaders seeking to maintain power; in fact, in both cases their violent strategies resulted, predictably, in their loss of power.
o Eg In the Sudan case, Nimeiri was forced to form a coalition with his strongest rivals—who soon replaced him—because their aggressive policy was more popular than his previous peaceful one
Kaufman - the right explanation for ethnic war
- the critical causes of extreme ethnic violence are group myths that justify hostility, fears of group extinction. The hostile myths, in this view, produce emotion-laden symbols that make mass hostility easy for chauvinist elites to provoke and make extremist policies popular.
ethnic identity according to Kaufman
- ethnic identity is more than a social category manipulated by elites…. each ethnic group is defined by a “myth-symbol complex” that identifies which elements of shared culture and what interpretation of history bind the group together and distinguish it from others. These definitions of identity are always subjective. For example, in some places (e.g., Ireland and Bosnia), myths divide groups by religious tradition into different nations, whereas in other cases (e.g., Germany), shared language and presumed common descent trump religious diversity.