Natalia Mirovitskaya

Development Strategies and the Evolution of Violence in Africa

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.

Economic development strategies and the evolution of violence in Latin America

Latin America is a region with a long history of intergroup violence. Consistent with Tolstoy’s famous observation that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Latin America stands out in several ways. No other world region has thus far seen such a variety of forms of violence. Through most of the twentieth century, the continent was plagued with civil wars and large-scale guerrilla warfare, social uprisings and violent revolutions; its inhabitants endured many coups d’etat and military interventions and brutal military dictatorships coupled with state and nonstate terrorism. Though at the turn of the millennium, many of these “traditional” forms of violent confrontation have ceased or have been greatly attenuated, they have been topped by the upsurge of urban crime (“slum wars”), proliferation of violent youth gangs, and intensification of domestic violence as well as “drug wars” and state-led “wars on drugs.” Latin America has a dubious distinction of leading the world in most global indices of violence.

Development strategies, identities, and conflict in Asia

1. War, Peace, and Many Shades in Between: Asia in the New Millennium William Ascher and Natalia S. Mirovitskaya 2. The Nexus of Economic Strategies and Intergroup Violence William Ascher and Natalia S. Mirovitskaya 3. Tribal Participation in Indias Maoist Insurgency: Examining the Role of Economic Development Policies Sumit Ganguly and Jennifer Oetken 4. Intra-State Conflicts and Development Strategies: The Baloch Insurgency in Pakistan G. Shabbir Cheema 5. Development Strategies, Religious Relations, and Communal Violence in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia: A Cautionary Tale Lorraine V. Aragon 6. Exploring the Relationship between Development and Conflict: The Malaysian Experience Ananthi Al Ramiah and Thillainathan Ramasamy 7. Official Development Assistance (ODA) and Conflict: A case study on Japanese ODA to Vietnam Edward M. Feasel 8. Socioeconomic Change, Intra-ethnic Competition and Political Salience of Ethnic Identities: The Cases of Turkey and Uzbekistan Ebru Erdem-Akcay 9. Local vs. Transcendent Insurgencies: Why Economic Aid Helps Lower Violence in Dagestan, but not in Kabardino-Balkaria Mikhail Alexseev 10. The Conflict-Development Nexus in Asia: Policy Approaches William Ascher and Natalia S. Mirovitskaya

Development Strategies and Violence

Can economic development initiatives promote and preserve peace within nations? The pessimists say no—development inevitably benefits some more than others, leading to resentment and perceptions of exploitation. Historically, development has been accompanied by violence among various groups with different collective identities (class, ethnicity, religion, or territorial origin). Property rights come to be contested. The subordinate groups try to wrest land and wealth away from the privileged groups, who often retaliate. The privileged struggle for more, and may collaborate in repression in order to protect their assets. The optimists say yes, of course—the economically developed countries, with few exceptions, clearly face less violence than the “bottom billion.” The pessimists respond that developed countries prospered over the bodies and fortunes of the losers and that they are still involved in conflicts all over the world. They also argue that some nations fail to develop, in part because of the violence triggered by development. Pro-growth advocates counter that economic stagnation triggers turmoil as well.

Development-Violence Pathways

To do a more comprehensive job of identifying the pathways connecting economic development to inter-group relations, it is helpful to view them according to the functions of the policy process and their immediate and long-term impact on groups’ economic roles, their resources and relative power, and their perceptions of threats and opportunities.

Grabbing Assets and Opportunities

This chapter focuses on overt, explicit policy initiatives to redistribute income and wealth. To be sure, almost all economic policies have some redistributive impacts. In the short run, at least, both regulation and spending policies have winners and losers: regulations limit the behavior of some at the expense of others; budget allocations require taxation or diversion of allocations from one set of actors to another. The promotion of one sector or region entails relative neglect of others. The fundamental economic parameters, such as exchange rates, tax rates, and interest rates, strongly influence the comparative prosperity of importers versus exporters, the urban sector versus the rural sector, and so on. Therefore, the examination of “redistributive policies” as a general category would not be useful. However, a much smaller subset of economic policies is explicitly and primarily redistributive. Because of the strong potential of these overtly redistributive policies to provoke conflict, it is worth focusing separately on them.

Pitfalls of Macroeconomic Decisions

The “three key tools” of macroeconomic policy are fiscal policy (revenue generation and spending), monetary policy, and exchange rate policy (Bird 2001, 37)1. The money supply and the volume of government spending together are the major instruments that governments use to manipulate the degree of overall economic activity; the volume of sustainable government spending in most countries depends crucially on taxation.2 Exchange-rate policy is a major determinant of the balance of imports and exports and the profitability of subsectors involved in import and export.

Decentralization: Shifting the Locus of Conflict

Since the 1990s, decentralization has been one of the most prominent development strategies all over the world. Therefore, this chapter deals with the potential and observed outcomes of the various forms of decentralization strategy with particular emphasis on its impact on inter-group violence. We start with identifying the main forms and characteristics of decentralization and exploring the rationales behind its variants. We explore the ways in which decentralization may serve as a conflict-deterring strategy or how it may exacerbate conflict. Finally, we suggest some insights on conflict-sensitive approaches to designing and implementing decentralization initiatives.

The Perils of Liberalization: Prices, Market Access, and privatization

Restructuring economic institutions spans a broad range of reforms, with myriad combinations favoring or disfavoring various groups, triggering divergent views of its fairness. Each variation may also give the impression that the government is favoring particular groups, and induce people to view themselves or others as unified entities because of what they assume is uniform treatment. This chapter focuses on the fundamental strategies of freeing prices, opening market access, and privatizing sectors previously reserved to the state. Chapter 4 will cover the remaining “macro” aspects of economic strategies—austerity measures, interest rates, tax rates, and exchange rates—that may involve less structural change but nonetheless can have profound impacts on the distribution of benefits and the bases for conflict.

Resettlement Strategies: For Better or for Worse

High human mobility is a major feature of twenty-first century development. Every year, millions of people leave their homes, whether voluntarily or under-duress. Some resettlements place people in economically or environmentally superior locations. However, in 2014, about 60 million people were forcibly displaced due to conflict, generalized violence and human rights violations (UNHCR 2015, 2). This figure included 38.2 million internally displaced persons—the highest number ever recorded (UNHCR 2015, 23). Conflict reportedly accounts for 60 percent of forced migration; the numbers of people displaced by natural and human-made disasters have been rising over the last two decades with fluctuations from 19.3 million (2014) to over 43 million (2010). Millions more are displaced every year by development initiatives (dam construction and other large-scale infrastructure projects, urban renewal, mining, deforestation, and conservation projects). Cernea and Mathur (2008) estimate that around 15 million people are displaced for “development” annually; others pose that development projects are the single-largest cause of forced migration (Oliver-Smith 2009; Pankhurst and Piquet 2009, 250; Stanley 2004).