After seeing this discussion of Bill Easterly’s discussion of international development and my graphical summary of some of Page Fornta’s work on conflict resolution, Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Project at Simon Fraser University, sent me this political science take on Paul Collier’s rejection of grievance-based explanations of the drivers of armed conflict:

The dismissal of political and economic grievances as drivers of civil war is one of the most contentious findings to emerge from quantitative research on armed conflicts. Critics of Collier and his co-author Anke Hoeffler have argued that the proxy measures they use are inappropriate, that a number of other assumptions are problematic, and that other quantitative studies, plus a mass of case study evidence, demonstrate that grievances are indeed important risk factors for armed conflict.

But there is a more profound reason for contesting the claim that grievances don’t matter in explaining the onset of civil wars–one that cannot be rebutted by creating more appropriate proxy measures, better cross-national data, or using different statistical significance tests.

All the variables that Collier and Hoeffler rely on as proxies for grievance use nationwide data–this is also true of the equally influential research of Stanford’s James Fearon and David Laitin on conflict onsets The proxies that these scholars use are intended to measure average levels of grievance for whole populations. But whole populations don’t start wars.

The outbreaks of conflict that Collier/Hoeffler and Fearon/Laitin are seeking to explain only involve a tiny fraction of the population of the countries in question, at least initially. It is the motivations and behaviour of these individuals that matter in determining what starts civil wars, not the grievances of the rest of society.

So even if the proxy indicators Collier and Hoeffler rely on were appropriate measures of societal grievance, they would still tell us nothing about any grievances harboured by the relatively small number of individuals who actually start rebellions.

The policy implications of Professor Collier’s stance are sobering. If grievance doesn’t matter then negotiating peace agreements makes little sense since their central rationale is to address grievances.

But peace agreements do matter–a lot. There has been a huge upsurge of negotiated settlements over the past 20 years. Indeed more than 70% of all such agreements signed since 1946 have been completed since 1990. Not only are there more peace agreements, but they are much more stable–i.e. less likely to relapse into war. This is in part because today’s agreements tend to be better crafted–lessons have been learned. But it is also because the implementation of these agreements is now far better supported, not least by the peacekeeping missions whose successes Page Fortna has written about so persuasively.

Interesting. I don’t really know anything about this area except what I learned when Page spoke in our seminar a couple of years ago. In particular, I hadn’t been aware of the research controversy about the relevance of grievances in civil conflict.