THE BOTTOM BILLION

WHY THE POOREST COUNTRIES ARE FAILING AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT

PAUL COLLIER

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS              2007

PART 1II

PART 2: THE TRAPS

Chapter 2: The Conflict Trap

ALL SOCIETIES HAVE CONFLICT; it is inherent to politics. The problem that is pretty distinctive to the bottom billion is not political conflict but its form. Some of them are stuck in a pattern of violent internal challenges to government. Sometimes the violence is prolonged, a civil war; sometimes it is all over swiftly, a coup d’état. These two forms of political conflict both are costly and can be repetitive. They can trap a country in poverty.

Civil war

73% of people in the societies of the bottom billion have recently been through a civil war or are still in one. Many other countries have had civil wars at one time or another – the United States had one in the 19^th century, Russia one early in the 20^th century, and Britain one back in the 17^th – but, as these examples show, wars are not necessarily traps. The American, Russian, and British civil wars were ghastly at the time but were over fairly quickly and were not repeated. For low-income countries, however, the chances of war becoming a trap are much higher.

Causes of civil war

• Rebel movements justify their actions in terms of a catalogue of grievances: repression, exploitation, exclusion.
• Sorting out the causes of civil war is difficult: historians cannot even agree on what caused the First World War.
• Most wars have multiple layers of causality: personalities, hatreds, mistakes.
• Our approach was to try to explain civil war statistically, looking at a range of possible causes: social, political, geographic, and economic.
• We found a comprehensive list of civil wars at the University of Michigan, for many years the world’s leading center for data on such political questions.
• We matched this list of civil wars against a mass of socio-economic data, country by country and year by year, with the goal of trying to determine the factors that affected the likelihood of a civil war developing in a given country within the next five years.
• We entitled one of our papers “Greed and Grievance” and another “Doing Well out of War.”
• We reached the policy world – I was invited to address the General Assembly of the United Nations – and have been featured in the media.
• We were also asked to use our model to predict where the next civil wars would be – the CIA was apparently interested. But we were never that foolish. Our predictions may have been used to damage the very countries I was concerned to help; they might have become self-fulfilling prophecies.
• The model can tell you the sort of countries most at risk. But it cannot tell whether Sierra Leone will have another civil war next year. That depends upon a myriad of short-term events.
• The first link we found was between risk of war and the initial level of income. Civil war is much more likely to break out in low-income countries; halve the starting income of the country and you double the risk of civil war.
• As an approximation, a typical low-income country faces a risk of civil war of about 14% in any five-year period. Each percentage point added to the growth rate knocks off a percentage point from this risk.
• If a country grows at 3%, the risk is cut from 14% to 11%; if its economy declines at 3%, the risk increases to 16%.
• When a civil war looks to be in the cards, investors flee, and the economy declines. It looks like decline causes war, but actually it’s the anticipation of war that causes decline.
• Low income means poverty, and low growth means hopelessness. Young men, who are the recruits for rebel armies, come pretty cheap in an environment of hopeless poverty.
• A now-famous study of a Chicago drug gang found that young men were attracted into the gang and willing to work for practically nothing because of the small chance of big money if they managed to climb up the hierarchy of the gang.
• If the economy is weak, the state is likely to be weak, and so rebellion is not difficult.
• Rebel leader Laurent Kabila, marching across Zaire with his troops to seize the state, told a journalist that in Zaire rebellion was easy: all you needed was $10,000 and a satellite phone.
• Everyone was so poor that with $10,000 you could hire yourself a small army.
• Dependence upon primary commodity exports – oil, diamonds, and the like – substantially increases the risk of civil war.
• That’s why Kabila needed a satellite phone: in order to strike deals with resource extraction companies. By the time he reached Kinshasa he reportedly had arranged $500 million worth of deals.
• There have been several cases where international companies have advanced massive amounts of funding to rebel movements in return for resource concessions in the event of rebel victory.
• Natural resources help to finance conflict and sometimes even help to motivate it.
• In the case of conflict diamonds, the attention that has been drawn to the problem by the NGO Global Witness has paid off.
• So low income, slow growth, and primary commodity dependence make a country prone to civil war, but are they the real causes of civil war?
• Donations from diasporic communities have been one of the key sources of finance for rebel movements, so rebels have learned how to manipulate their public relations.
• Is it generally true that well-founded grievances provoke rebellion? The evidence is much weaker than you might imagine.
• There is basically no relationship between political repression and civil war.
• Rebels usually have something to complain about, and if they don’t they make it up.

About the worst case of ethnic discrimination I can think of occurred after the Norman invasion of England. The Normans, a small group of violent, French-speaking Vikings, killed the English elite, stole all the land, and subjected the native 98% of the population to two centuries of servitude. During this time there were many civil wars. None of them was a rebellion of English serfs against Norman masters. All the civil wars were one bunch of Norman barons against another, trying to grab yet more resources.

• A flagrant grievance is to a rebel movement what an image is to a business. But occasionally we can disentangle a rebellion enough to get past the image.
• Let’s move on to another illusion: that civil war is based in ethnic strife. This may seem self-evident if you go by newspaper accounts, but I have come to doubt it.
• What else makes a country prone to civil war? Geography matters a bit.

 

Why do civil wars last so long?

The costs of war

The conflict trap

Coups

 

Why it matters for G8 policy

Wars and coups keep low-income countries from growing and hence keep them dependent upon exports of primary commodities. Because they stay poor, stagnant, and dependent upon primary commodities they are prone to wars and coups. Wars and coups feed on themselves in other ways that make history repeat itself.

The costs that these conditions generate are predominantly borne not by those who perpetrate them. The costs of war even spread beyond the war’s temporal and geographic boundaries. As a result, they not only trap the countries that experience them, but make them more difficult in entire regions.

If wars and coups could readily be avoided by good domestic political design – democratic rights – then the responsibility for peace would be predominantly internal. That is, we might reasonably think that peace should be a struggle waged by citizens of the country itself, rather than something for us to become actively concerned about. But the evidence is against such internal solutions. Democratic rights, hard as they are for a people to establish, do not reduce the risk of civil war, and they do not reduce the risk of coups. When the growth process fails in a low-income society, it is exposed to risks that are hard to contain. I do not want to claim that only the economy matters, but without growth peace is considerably more difficult. And in societies of the bottom billion the economy is stuck. So breaking the conflict trap and the coup trap are not tasks that these societies can readily accomplish by themselves.

Chapter 3: The Natural Resource Trap