A Joint Project of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs &

A Joint Project of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs &

the Centre for International Cooperation and Security

Conflict Prevention, Management and Reduction in Africa

Paper 5

Addressing the Political Economies of Armed Conflict in Africa

Cord Jakobeit with Michaela Maier

and Neil Cooper

Financed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland

Executive Summary

Conventional policy approaches to conflict prevention and management have too often disregarded the centrality of economic motivations, opportunities and agendas in civil wars. The paper takes this omission as a starting point and puts special emphasis on the political economy of civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa. We ask what progress has been made in our understanding of and responding to the challenge of today’s civil conflicts in Africa.

Many intrastate conflicts are self-financing via trade in natural resources, global financial flows, the misappropriation of aid and remittances of diaspora communities. Consequently, disrupting and managing these resource flows is a central policy approach to conflict resolution.

Special emphasis is put in this paper on the role natural resources play in influencing the likelihood of civil conflict, its duration and intensity. We show that different resources have different characteristics and thus different effects on conflict probability, either through abundance or through paucity.

We conclude with a set of recommendations for the European Union, thereby highlighting the importance of borderlands, a plea for bottom-up strategies and a suggestion to upgrade the various schemes promoting transparency and open accountancy in the trade of resources beyond the current voluntary compliance. But it should be equally clear that there are no uniform success-promising approaches to the transformation of war into peace economies. What is needed is the building of awareness, context-sensitivity and recognition of the specific characteristics of the target states, resources, and conflicts to be addressed.

1

1. Introduction

The prevalence of violent, mainly internal conflict in almost all regions of Sub-Saharan Africa constitutes an issue of intense political and public concern, interest and debate. From time immemorial, economic factors have played a central role in warfare. Economic agendas are all the more a reality, since the end of the Cold War led to a rapid decline of superpower financial support of the various warring parties in the developing world. As a result, the protagonists of intrastate wars were forced to open up new resources to finance their campaigns. This led to the development of increasingly sophisticated and diversified political economies of civil war in addition to more traditional fundraising channels via pillage and predation. To name but a few of the now available options:

• Trade in lucrative natural resources via licit world market channels or more illicit shadow economic

networks (constituting the phenomenon of so called “war economies”);

• Diaspora remittances;
• Anonymous financial transactions round the globe;
• Capture of foreign aid.

Assisted by insufficiently regulated globalisation, modern information technologies and weak states in the developing world, civil war actors have become able to benefit from business transactions with criminal networks, arms dealers and even legal corporations. Thus, their economic activities transcend the immediate war zones and penetrate the world’s commodity and financial centres and markets.

Against this background, it is all the more astonishing that the complex intermingling of political, economic and social aspects in today’s civil wars began to attract heightened interest within the international community, research circles and the wider public only at the end of the 1990s. A sound understanding of the nature of the economic dynamics behind violent conflict and its interplay with political aspects is the necessary precondition for all efforts and policies to transform war-torn societies into peaceful zones, regions and states.

This paper addresses the issues of the nature of war economies and their implications for CPMR in Africa. Section 2 introduces the topic by establishing the key elements and dynamics of the political economy of intrastate war and by discussing the question of the causal factors instigating civil wars. Special emphasis will be put on the role natural resources play in influencing the likelihood of civil conflict, its duration and intensity. It will be shown that it is not only the ‘paradox of plenty’ (abundant resources and the incentives to get control over them) which can enhance a country’s risk of war, but also the scarcity of resources that can trigger violent struggles over access. In sum, different resources have different characteristics and thus different effects on conflict probability, either through abundance or through paucity. On this basis, section 3 elaborates issues related to the transformation of war-triggering and conflict-prolonging economic behaviour into development-enhancing, inclusive peace economies.

Finally, section 4 addresses the urgent need for good resource governance to change the incentives of potential conflict actors and alter their opportunity structures in such ways that peace becomes more profitable than engaging in conflict predation and shadowy economic networks. It will be demonstrated that the first initiatives are already under way to come to grips with the phenomenon of resource conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Overall, the paper indicates that a political economy perspective can add valuable insights into the logic of many African civil wars. The first steps of the international community to prevent further violent breakdowns and bring ‘hot spots’ to a peaceful settlement and post-conflict reconstruction have heavily profited from this body of knowledge and have, by transforming theory into practice, further contributed to our understanding of the logic and dynamics behind intra-state wars. Nevertheless, much more has to be done to enhance our knowledge of these pertinent issues.

2. Economic dimensions of civil wars: beyond greed and grievance

Not least thanks to the work of World Bank economist Paul Collier and collaborators,[1] followed up by various other studies,[2] the whole field related to the political economies of internal armed conflict in the developing world in general and in sub-Saharan Africa in particular[3] has a permanent place on the conflict prevention and management agenda. Economic activity behind civil conflicts is now acknowledged as no secondary epiphenomenon (ending automatically with the termination of violence), but as a potential trigger of violent conflict and as a chief factor sustaining and nourishing civil wars. Dependent – inter alia – on the opportunity costs of insurgency, rebel greed and inequality between (ethnic) groups or between regions both matter in relation to economies of (civil) war. Within this context, the existence and accessibility of natural resources is a further factor of great importance.

2.1. Civil wars, economic activity and resources – fighting for profit or for justice?

The actual mainstream knowledge transcends the previous, simplistic dichotomy of explaining, understanding and tackling the economic forces behind initiation, duration and termination of civil conflict only on the basis of the ‘rebel greed’- versus ‘grievances of marginalized groups’-theses (see Box 2.1 on the following page). At the beginning of the 1990s, international policymakers and researchers began to realise that after the end of superpower conflict the vast majority of wars occurred within and not between states. The main characteristics of these conflicts are:

• They are concentrated in specific regions of the developing world, with Sub-Saharan Africa being mostly affected.
• In all these conflicts economics, economic aspects and agendas play a prominent role for actors (insurgents and governments). Onset and course of many civil wars are, inter alia, influenced by economic factors.
• In most African civil wars, natural resources play an important role – be it because of their paucity or abundance.

The central point of contention in the early debates about how to respond to the “new wars” was whether the main cause of rebellion is rebel greed or widespread objective grievances among the marginalized sub-groups of the population. Although figuring prominently on the agenda of conflict researchers, the debate was even in its early dichotomous stages never just an artificial scholarly dispute. The conclusions drawn from the debate had immediate and profound influence on the design of international policies in response to civil wars (especially in the Sub-Saharan region), not least because the main protagonists were World Bank economists. Therefore, the conflict management concept of the Bank and other international actors rested and still rests to a certain degree on the initially favoured pure ‘rebel greed’-explanation of civil wars.

Box 2.1 ‘Greed vs. Grievance’ in Civil Wars – All About Economics?

The box shows that our early coming to grips with the civil war phenomenon was rather simplistic. In its pure ‘either-or’-version, neither did it give an adequate picture of reality nor was it very useful as a basis to formulate policy approaches. Nevertheless, the stage was set for more nuanced ways to understand and address post-cold war civil wars. First, we began to move away from the interpretation of economic activity in conflict as a pure epiphenomenon of political motives and agendas ending automatically with termination of hostilities. Second, a host of conferences on the topic and diplomatic initiatives were initiated bringing together experts from such diverse fields as economics, development studies, political science, geography and area studies with government and international organisation officials. Policy lessons drawn from these activities are reflected in a number of policy instruments put into force within the last decade. The participation of the above-mentioned numerous disciplines did not lead to complete harmonisation between the greed- and grievance-advocates. Rather, and perhaps even more promising with regard to the design of policy measures, it forced the international community to open up the erstwhile blind economic eye and acknowledge both sides of the coin: political and economic causes of and agendas in intrastate warfare. Third, we began to appreciate that there exists some kind of inter-linkages between natural resource endowments and internal conflict. Indeed, one can even speak of a resource-conflict-nexus which implicates the centrality of various puzzling questions for effective conflict prevention and management approaches (see Box 2.2).

With regard to the above questions, our knowledge about the resource component in civil war economies is – at least in some respects – alarmingly underdeveloped. To be sure, great progress has been made since the inception of our examination of the political economy of internal warfare. Qualitative and quantitative studies as well as the lessons learned from international efforts to prevent, manage and settle civil conflict since 1990 have all generated valuable insights. But despite these positive advances, much has to be done before one can speak of a coherent body of structured understanding of all facets of the resource-conflict-interface.

That said, there are some aspects already understood quite well. To start with, natural resources are not all alike. They have different characteristics and this might entail different effects for the question as to whether, and how, scarcity or oversupply of the respective commodities affects the political and economic fate of countries. The current experience – especially regarding Sub-Saharan Africa – points to a staggering paradox: both primary commodity abundance (oil, non-fuel minerals etc) and paucity (e.g. land scarcity) can render countries more prone to intrastate conflict and warfare. In both cases, quite different mechanisms are at work linking different types of primary commodities to conflict. The next two sections address the political economic dimension of (violent) competition over scarce resources (2.2.) and the resource ‘curse’, i.e. resource abundance leading to domestic violence (2.3.).

2.2. Resource scarcity and domestic conflict

The statement that a lack of natural resources leads to a host of social and economic problems that might translate into violence is somewhat trivial. However, the interconnection between scarce resources and internal conflict is more often than not overlooked when policymakers, the media and researchers talk about resource conflict in Africa south of the Sahara. In this region, many countries do not have enough (qualified) human, social and physical capital.[4] Consequently, natural resources such as water, land and fertile soils make up the main or the only source of socio-economic development.[5]

Land scarcity has until recently not been a major characteristic of most Sub-Saharan economies. However, land surpluses in fact were reduced even in the past in that export agriculture was intensified and land was denied to large parts of the indigenous population by colonial and white-minority regimes which fenced off land for European settlers. But land scarcity as a widespread and growing problem and source of conflict is relatively new as a phenomenon and aspect of many local disputes.[6]

The heightened pressure on land is accompanied by an evolving tendency toward social inequality and exclusion in access to land and landed resources across Sub-Saharan Africa.[7] These outcomes have no single cause. They are a product of complex processes, combining the negative effects of:

• Increasing population (through high birth rates and the movement of people seeking better/more land or fleeing civil strife);
• Fencing off of large areas for plantations, tourism or conservation;
• Increased focus on cultivation and extension of cultivated land (intensified commercialisation of land);
• Peasants trying to intensify agricultural outputs because of shrinking world market prices and land degradation;
• Insecure land tenure (often conflictual co-existence of traditional, communal systems with individual property and land titles) and;
• Badly conceptualised and implemented land reform programs (see Box 2.4 for an overview of the conflict-producing fast-track land policy in Zimbabwe).

All this increases pressure on arable land, a trend that is further aggravated through the appropriation of land by political elites in often dubious or illegal ways. In a continuation of colonial practices, African governments often enable (colluding) national and local political elites to obtain private control over formerly communal land. As a result, poverty rises among peasants whose land was confiscated by the state. To make matters worse, most intense competition and conflict over land occurs in the most densely populated areas (Rwanda, Burundi, Kenyan Highlands, Hausa region in Northern Nigeria, semi-arid dry-lands in the Sahel zone). Even where land per se is not scarce (see Box 2.3), competition can arise over other valuable resources, such as flood plains, wetlands or water points in semi-arid dry-lands or areas with only a single rain per annum. This lies at the heart of many of the farmer-herder conflicts, taking place first and foremost in the Sahel zone where key resources (riverbeds, floodplains) come under intensified use and, as a result, generate various forms of competition and conflict. One of the most recent and intensively media-covered conflicts with a farmer-pastoralist-component takes place in Darfur/Sudan.[8] There is a long history of clashes over land between the Masalit, Fur and other ethnic African sedentary farmers on the one side and the Arab camel- and cattle-herding Beni Hussein from North Darfur and the Beni Halba of South Darfur. Traditionally, these conflicts were managed through negotiations between community leaders. But in the recent past, a combination of extended drought periods, competition over dwindling resources, the lack of good governance, easily available small arms and Arab pastoralist moving south with their flocks earlier than in former years made hostilities increasingly bloody and violent. Moreover, in 1994, an administrative reorganisation of the Karthoum government gave Arab ethnic groups a new position of power, thereby disturbing the fragile balance between farming and herding groups in their respective areas and politicising farmer-pastoralist conflicts. The Sudanese example shows again that resource scarcity does not per se lead to violence but can exacerbate pre-existing political tensions or add further complexity to ongoing conflicts over other issues.