Conflict

IT IS WELL ESTABLISHED that conflict, including war, civil war, and occupation, is linked with poverty in a number of direct and indirect ways. The primary form of conflict in the present period occurs within, rather than between, states. Thus conflict is largely over access to or control of resources and opportunities by groups within the same society. In 2003, 30 of the 53 countries in Africa were experiencing some form of intrastate conflict.

Many would argue that the strongest common denominator, indeed the root cause, of civil conflict is poverty. A study by Paul Collier of the World Bank, which examines civil wars since 1960, has found that the best predictors of conflict are low average incomes, low growth, and a high dependence on exports of primary products such as oil or diamonds. The same study found that when income per person doubles, the risk of civil war drops by one-half.

Poverty, then, not only holds negative impacts for the lives of individuals but also threatens the stability and peaceful development of entire societies. Poverty and conflict have a two-way relationship, in that poverty is both a cause and an outcome of conflict. The poverty includes not only absolute poverty but also the unequal distribution of wealth in countries that are rich in natural resources, which are controlled by governments and withheld from populations.

Countries with plentiful natural resources face additional risks, including rebellions caused by outrage when governments deny people what is deemed to be a fair share of revenues from resources such as oil or diamonds that may be located beneath a community's ancestral lands. Such has been the case in Angola, to name only one example.

Marxist theorists have long linked the instance and experiences of poverty within specific groups as being important determinants of social revolution. In classic Marxist theory, revolutionary movements are strongly linked with social processes of impoverishment among broad sections of the population.

A quick illustration of the link between poverty and conflict comes if one looks at conditions in some of the world's lowest-income countries over the last decade. In 2002, of 63 countries identified as low income, 38 are situated in sub-Saharan Africa. Of these countries, 30 had experienced some form of conflict, ranging from political violence short of war, as in the case of Mauritania, which experienced a series of coups, to large-scale international conflicts, such as the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Thus there is a clear correlation between poverty and conflict in a variety of national contexts. At the same time, some analysts debate the strength of this association and have questions about the causal link between poverty and conflict. In the view of some skeptics, economic factors play a part, but not necessarily the predominant part, in the emergence of conflict.

It is sometimes argued that the link between economic concerns and ethnic conflict, for example, is quite variable and is shaped in large part by numerous noneconomic factors. Elsewhere skeptics argue that in some cases, such as Quebec and Malaysia, to cite quite different examples, economic expansion or accelerated growth failed to reduce ethnic conflicts and even showed some growth in conflict.

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