Violence, Governance, Development

SOAS/Mo Ibrahim FoundationGovernance for Development in

AfricaMauritius, 2014

CAUSE or CONSEQUENCE?

Plenty to discuss

• What are the analytical connections between governance and violence?

• How big a problem is violence?

• How are violence and development linked?

1. Governance and violence

Violence/Governance• The allocation of ‘violence rights’

– the feud– Class privilege– State monopoly

• Violence, taxation, and state formation – still valid?

• Incomplete monopolies of violence• Managing the violence problem

– Coalitions/settlements– Economic development and rents

Violence/governance

• Violence reflects lack of governance?

• Violence reflects governance?– Violent rules of the game

• Violence as source of governance?

Violence/governance/states

• North, Wallis and Weingast: bad governance (rent distribution to elites) ensures that violence reduces value of elite privileges, persuades them to lay down arms, creates better governance (managing the V problem)

• Contrast with OA societies: force subject to rule, impersonal access to opportunity

• Giustozzi – primitive accumulation of force, followed by consolidation

2. Trends, levels, classificationIs it in the indicators? Expert opinion or official data?

Peace and Conflict, 2010, CIDCM

Spagat, Restrepo and Vargas

Source: Moser & McIlwaine, World Development, 2006

Implications

• Violence is pervasive, multi-faceted

• Violence is difficult to measure

• Hobbes, Hobsbawm, Hardt and Negri

• Continuum of violence

3. Violence and Development I

From Hirschman to Hirshleifer

• The Passions and the Interests…Hirschman argued that this was a historical curiosity

• However, the argument rose again in different form: war is development in reverse

• The way of Coase vs the way of Macchiavelli

• Or ‘greed’ vs ‘grievance

G.r.i.e.vance

• Growth (5 years before onset)• Repression (elections, press freedom, etc)• Inequality (Gini coefficient)• Ethnicity (ELF)

G.r.e.ed

• Goodies (% of primary commodity exports in GDP)

• Rascals (% of 15-24 year old males in population)

• Education (number of years average schooling)

How to overcome constraints on collective action

• Direct, material rewards, now, to individuals• Coercion• Norms & ideology• Joint production (Kriger; Kalyvas) of violence by local

and national, outside and inside communities – intimacy

• Whatever’s easiest (economic or social endowments) but this will shape the form of conflict (Weinstein)

Friendly Fire?

• Regressing endogenous variables on endogenous variables

• Failing to reflect anything in the last 25 years of economic theory or technique

• Conclusions not justified by findings• Might be published in an IR journal but not in

a 3rd rate economics journal.

4. Post-conflict aid

The triple transition & rising post-conflict aid

• The liberal peace thesis• The idea that aid to post-conflict societies is

more effective than other aid• The idea of international public bads• The idea that there is a vacuum at the end of

the war and it is an opportunity for dramatic change.

World Bank Post-Conflict Reconstruction Lending, 1980-98

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

year

US

$ m

illio

n

Africa post-conflict East Asia & Pacific post-conflictSuth Asia post-conflict Europe & Central Asia post-conflictMiddle East & North Africa post-conflict Latin America & Caribbean post-conflict

Aid volatility coefficient

From Boyce and Forman (2011), “Financing Peace” – WDR input paper

From Boyce and Forman (2011), “Financing Peace” – WDR input paper

From Boyce and Forman (2011), “Financing Peace” – WDR input paper

5. Violence and development II

Violence as development in forward gear

• The mafia in Sicily: throwback or functional to capitalist development and global integration?

• Colombia – bananas, palm oil (not the usual ‘conflict commodities, though those too

• Angola 1961• American civil war• Mozambique and the mechanism of primitive

accumulation

Where to?

• Guided by the possibilism of Keynes and Hirschman, rather than by ‘mindless theorising’ or ideology/fantasy, the real challenges are to distinguish scope for positive change in conflict.

• And in post-conflict:– How to pay for the peace– How to produce the peace– How to work for peace