Benedikt Korf

Rethinking the Greed–Grievance Nexus: Property Rights and the Political Economy of War in Sri Lanka

The literature on civil wars tends to understand greed and grievances in antagonistic terms of ‘either–or’. This article suggests that in the political economy of conflict, greed and grievances may be causally linked and reinforce each other: war (or shadow) economies of combatants and the survival economies of civilians are intertwined. Gains made by conflict entrepreneurs and war profiteers feed grievances about identity, economic inequality, and lack of political power. Once civil war is onset (for whatever reason), the political economy of war produces a self-sustaining logic of clientelism along the lines of perceived ‘friends’ and ‘foes’. These dividing lines get reinforced in everyday political networks of survival. This everyday clientelism, in turn, nourishes grievance discourses along the same lines. These grievances contribute to heighten the motivation for people to fight for ‘justice’. In this way, greed produces grievances, which in turn stabilize the war economy and offer economic opportunities for greedy entrepreneurs of violence. Case studies from Sri Lanka on local resource conflicts in the context of civil war support this proposition. They indicate that because of the civil war and the breakdown of state and civic institutions, ethnicity becomes a mechanism for civilian actors to access resources available largely through arbitrary power. Civilians thus become part of the ‘game’. In effect, this leads to ‘ethnicized entitlements’, where the ethnic groups are asymmetrically endowed with bargaining power to access resources, depending upon their affiliation with militant actors and their respective initial power resources. These ethnicized entitlements satisfy greed for some war winners and feed grievances among those at the losing end.

To Share or Not to Share? (Non-) Violence, Scarcity and Resource Access in Somali Region, Ethiopia

Abstract Scholars in the environmental security tradition have sought to explicate the links between environmental scarcity (or degradation) and the onset of different forms of political violence and how these are mediated by institutional mechanisms. The Malthusian trap here is not a direct deterministic relationship, but rather a possibility, where environmental scarcity when it coincides with socio-economic processes of rent-seeking and exclusion triggers political conditions ripe for violent struggles. This a priori attention to scarcity as causal mechanism blurs our understanding why violence occurs in some and does not in other places. Our research strategy is therefore different: we study a case of non-violent relations between resource users under conditions of environmental scarcity (due to drought) and political instability and look into the crucial role of local institutions in governing competing resource claims. Our case from the violence-prone Somali Region, Ethiopia analyses how agro-pastoralist communities develop sharing arrangements on pasture resources with intruding pastoralist communities in drought years, even though this places additional pressure on their grazing resource. A household survey investigates the determinants for different households in the agro-pastoralist community, asset-poor and wealthy ones, to enter into different types of sharing arrangements. Our findings suggest that resource sharing offers asset-poor households opportunities to stabilise and enhance their asset-base in drought years, providing incentives for cooperative rather than conflicting relations with intruding pastoralists.

Ethiopia: Reforming Land Tenure

Land policy in Ethiopia has been controversial since the fall of the military socialist derg regime in 1991. While the current Ethiopian government has implemented a land policy that is based on state ownership of land (where only usufruct rights are given to land holders), many agricultural economists and international donor agencies have propagated some form of privatized land ownership. This article traces the antagonistic arguments of the two schools of thought in the land reform debate and how their antagonistic principles ‐ fairness vs. efficiency ‐ are played out. It then goes on to explore how these different arguments have trickled down in the formulation of the federal and regional land policies with a particular view on the new Oromia regional land policy as it is considered the most progressive (with regards to tenure security). We provide some empirical material on ongoing practices of implementing the Rural Land Use and Administration Proclamation of Oromia Region. Our analysis suggests that while the laws are conceptual hybrids that accommodate both fairness and efficiency considerations, regional bureaucrats have selectively implemented those elements of the proclamation that are considered to strengthen the regime’s political support in the countryside.

The geography of participation

Abstract Revisiting the critique of participatory development and one of its core political technologies, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), this paper suggests that participation in the form of PRA creates ‘provided spaces’ that dislocate ‘development’ from politics and from political institutions of the postcolonial state. PRA thereby becomes what Chantal Mouffe calls a post-political aspiration through its celebration of deliberative democracy (although this is largely implicit rather than explicit in the PRA literature). What makes this post-political aspiration dangerous is that its provided spaces create a time–space container of a state of exception (the ‘workshop’) wherein a new sovereign is created. In combination with other developmental techniques, PRA has become a place where a new order is being constituted—the state of exception becomes permanent and nurtures the ‘will to improve’ that undergirds ‘development’.

Cargo cult science, armchair empiricism and the idea of violent conflict

Abstract In this paper I develop a philosophical and methodological critique of ‘rationalist’—or ‘social scientific’—approaches to the study of civil war and violent conflict, especially the work of Paul Collier and David Laitin. Rationalist scholars purport to develop universal explanations for the outbreak and the protracted duration of violent conflict using econometric techniques and rational choice reasoning. My critique of their ‘scientific method’ can be summarised in two propositions: first, the scientific approach is considered to be a ‘cargo cult’ science—the cult being universal law-like causalities underpinning social phenomena. Second, most empirical research in this tradition is based on doubtful statistics enriched with anecdotal evidence rather than by empirical field work. Hence, rationalist scholars largely conduct an ‘armchair empiricism’ instead of immersing themselves in the complex nature of social mechanisms in a specific space-time context. I briefly sketch out an alternative approach based on critical realism and how such a research programme could work in practice for studying the political economy of violent conflicts.

The Role of Development Aid in Conflict Transformation: Facilitating Empowerment Processes and Community Building

This chapter will look into both the theoretical assumptions and expectations, as well as the practical experiences, of empowerment approaches within the field of development aid, with special regard to their potential for conflict transformation. The authors build upon the recent discourse in development policy that discusses the extent to which development cooperation can effectively contribute towards crisis prevention and conflict transformation.

Re-spacing African drylands: territorialization, sedentarization and indigenous commodification in the Ethiopian pastoral frontier

This paper traces the re-spacing of pastoral drylands in Africa. We argue that rendering pastoral resources legible and profitable occurs both within and beyond the state. Through a multi-sited case study from Ethiopias Somali region, we excavate different mechanisms of sedentarization, whereby processes of state territorialization and indigenous commodification become mutually entangled. Sedentarization is not imposed by the state or corporate capital, but by indigenous merchants who capture the frontiers potential resource dividend. Land appropriation in the drylands is co-produced by political claims to territory, capital investment and new technopolitics through which indigenous (pastoral, Somali) merchants and politicians become complicit with the states project of territorialization and sedentarization in a self-governing fashion. The irony of this situation is that the (Ethiopian) state has failed to consolidate sedentarization through planned interventions. Instead, capital investment by local and transnational Somali merchants has opened up a neoliberal frontier that re-spaces drylands towards increasing sedentarization.

Functions of violence revisited: greed, pride and grievance in Sri Lanka’s civil war:

This paper revisits the rationalist conceptions of warlordism in civil wars, which has amounted into the greed hypothesis as opposed to grievance. This argument states that rebels are not motivated to generate public goods - the betterment of society - but seek private gain. Violence becomes a function to generate wealth. While initial studies focused on explaining why civil war breaks out in the first instance, there is now increasing interest in modelling violence and warlordism in ongoing civil war. In this paper, I sketch out and critically discuss the rationalist approaches in this so-called greed-grievance debate and will then concentrate on one particular aspect in the broader greed-grievance literature: the modelling of warlordism in ongoing civil warfare. A contextual model is suggested to explain the dynamics of violence in the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, which distinguishes extrinsic (‘greed’) and intrinsic (‘pride’) motivations.

Dining with Devils? Ethnographic Enquiries into the Conflict–Development Nexus in Sri Lanka

This paper traces the ethnographies of conflict and development in Sri Lanka on two levels of analysis. First, it examines two related discourses in the policy arena of Sri Lanka, one looking at the peace–development nexus, the other at the paradox of welfarism and clientelism in Sri Lankas polity. Second, it analyses the political field of relief and development practice—its order and disjuncture—as it presented itself during times of ongoing warfare. The empirical studies build on ethnographies of a bilateral German–Sri Lankan development project operating in the war-affected areas of Sri Lanka. Four trajectories of politics and practices in aid and conflict are discussed to illustrate the ambiguities and complexities of multiple perceptions, rules and discourses, which influence the work of aid agencies operating in spaces of military contestation. The analyses suggest that clientelism as a deeply embedded system of ordering and meaning production can be found in both the peaceful areas and the war zones, though in different manifestations. Aid agencies operating in the context of clientelism and ethnicism may need to engage with combatant parties—to “dine with the devils” as it has been named—to build space for bringing aid to needy people in war-affected areas.

Introduction: Border, Frontier and the Geography of Rule at the Margins of the State

Imagine standing somewhere on the Khyber Pass: a rough mountain route harboring the bustling borderline between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). In Karkhana bazaar, which straddles the borderline between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Khyber Agency, tourists and UN agents haggle for cheap alcohol and cannabis resin in the market stalls. Bicycle transporters are carrying boxes of smuggled car parts and electric appliances into Peshawar, meeting their counterparts who are carrying drugs and weapons into the Pakistani FATA. Once in a while a U.S. helicopter hovers overhead, determined to seek and destroy fighting Taliban units, which are constantly crossing the border.1 Imagine now standing on the border in Goma, the Congolese twin town of Rwandan Gisenyi. On the Petite Barriere (“small checkpoint”), a long line of pedestrians crosses this merged city center, like ants on a sugar hill. Women carrying bags of foodstuffs are joined by smugglers transporting minerals from the Congolese mines of North and South Kivu. Their Rwandan counterparts bring petroleum and cement into Congo, along with construction materials and consumer goods from Mombasa and the Far East. Differences in the taxation laws of the two countries lead to widespread smuggling. Some goods are even unofficially reexported into Rwanda to avoid consumer taxes. The military on both sides watches these operations with a lazy eye, taking bribes and occasionally stopping traffic.2