Too Poor for Peace?: Global Poverty, Conflict, and Security in the 21st Century

Chapter 3: Poverty and Violence: An Overview of Recent Research and Implications for Foreign Aid

50 DOZENS OF COUNTRIES around the world have suffered civil conflicts in the past few decades, with the highest concentration in sub-Saharan Africa. The humanitarian consequences have been staggering: at least 3 million civilian deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (the former Zaire) civil war, and millions of other deaths in Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Angola, Somalia, Uganda, Mozambique, and Liberia, among others. And civil conflict is not just an African problem, as continuing violence in the Middle East and elsewhere (Colombia, Nepal, and so on) demonstrates. The direct humanitarian consequences of war for survivors are enormous in physical insecurity, loss of property, and psychological trauma. There may also be lasting economic development costs for societies that experience violent civil conflicts. And the international “spillover” effects of conflicts can be large for neighboring countries faced with refugee flows, lawlessness on their borders, and the illicit trade in drugs, arms, and minerals that proliferates in conflict zones. This insecurity has foreign policy implications for the United States along multiple dimensions. But what causes this insecurity and what can be done about it? In this chapter, I first describe recent academic research that finds a strong link leading from poverty to violence in less developed countries. I then lay out some of the implications of this core finding for public policy and in particular for the design of foreign aid. Poverty and Violence: An Overview of Recent Research and Implications for Foreign Aid EDWARD MIGUEL 3 03-1375-3 ch3 3/30/07 1:29 PM Page 50 Poverty Leads to Violence in Less Developed Countries There is increasing evidence of a poverty-violence nexus, at both the macro and micro levels of analysis. This section surveys and critiques recent academic research, highlighting the key findings. Cross-Country Evidence There are multiple hypotheses regarding the central causes of violent conflict in less developed countries. Oversimplifying a little, there are two main lines of theorizing. One set of theories stresses the role that political repression, or what are sometimes called “grievance” factors, play in driving conflict. In this view, ethnic groups that experience discrimination should be the most likely to organize armed insurrections against the state, and conflicts should be most likely to erupt in undemocratic states and those with pronounced social divisions. A second set of theories focuses on economic conditions as paramount, rather than political factors. In other words, in this view, poverty and falling income are the key to sparking civil conflicts. This may be either because poverty breeds armed violence aimed at looting assets and natural resources or, in a variant on the theory advanced by Fearon and Laitin,1 because poor states simply have limited institutional capacity to repress armed uprisings. Of course, these two sets of theories are not mutually exclusive; a region that is neglected by the central government in terms of public investment and jobs may become poorer due to its political marginalization, leading to violence. In this case, both perspectives apply. Turning to the evidence, there is strong support for the poverty-violence nexus. Recent academic research analyzing patterns in real-world data strongly favors the claim that poverty and falling income are the critical drivers of violent conflict in less developed countries. In fact, the povertyviolence link is arguably the most robust finding in the growing research literature investigating the causes of civil wars. But, in a twist, there is far less solid evidence linking political repression to violent conflict. In a cross-section of countries around the world, Collier and Hoeffler find strong correlations between national income levels and economic growth rates on one hand and the occurrence of civil conflict on the other.2 They make the theoretical point that joining an armed group becomes more attractive , especially for unemployed young men, when legitimate income-earning options are scarce. There are often numerous lucrative looting, mining, and Poverty and Violence 51 03-1375-3 ch3 3/30/07 1:29 PM Page 51 smuggling opportunities open to armed groups in many developing societies. In contrast, in Collier and Hoeffler’s study, the measures of country democracy , income inequality, and ethnic fragmentation are not robustly associated with civil conflict, although they note that research on the role these factors play in civil war’s onset remains active.3 The key methodological concern with this poverty-violence analysis is the possibility of reverse causation: Could violence be...