Confronting Poverty: Weak States and U.S. National Security

Poverty, State Weakness, and Civil War

90 chapter four poverty, State Weakness, and civil War andreW LoomIS Grace Ikombi was eighteen years old in the early 1990s when he fled his dusty village in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for the capital city of Kinshasa. His father was dead after succumbing to malaria, a disease that can be cured with a $2 treatment. His mother had been murdered by Congolese rebels for providing medical care to loyalists of the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Ikombi was exhausted and hungry. “I heard that the rebels at least were eating,” he shrugged. “So I joined them.”1 In Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, 1,500 miles to the northwest of Kinshasa, stories like Ikombi’s are familiar. Morifère Bamba, a member of a rebel group operating out of an Abidjan slum, quit school at the age of twelve. His family was mired in poverty. His mother died and his father could no longer provide for him. So Morfère moved to Abidjan. “The city,” he said, “would give me the ability to realize my dream.” Yet Morfère found his road to employment blocked by violence on the street. He drifted between criminal gangs before landing in a rebel group. The rebellion offered him an identity as well as sustenance. Indeed, French researcher Ruth Marshall-Fratani observes of Côte d’Ivoire: “The gap between aspirations and possibilities has widened incredibly in the last fifteen years.”2 Côte d’Ivoire was once one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, relying heavily on agricultural exports to build its economy. To demographers and development experts, it was the “Ivorian Miracle” in a region marked by deep poverty.3 But as commodity prices dropped 04-0390-7 ch4.indd 90 12/8/09 12:24 PM 91 poVertY, State WeaKneSS, and cIVIL War in the 1980s and 1990s, state coffers were depleted, investors fled, and conditions began to deteriorate. Corruption and mismanagement—such as kickbacks from cocoa producers and extortion by the police—weakened the government’s financial base and eroded public trust in government . The infrastructure fragmented. By the late 1990s, only 55 percent of the adult population was literate and 58 percent had no access to potable water.4 Soon, Côte d’Ivoire fell into the same war-ridden cycle of impoverishment and conflict that has enmeshed the DRC. In the fall of 2002, war between rebel insurgents from the poorer northern region and government loyalists in the more prosperous south erupted in Côte d’Ivoire, fueled in part by cultural and political factors. As the state descended into civil war, it was ill-equipped to extinguish an insurgency fed by a volatile cocktail of soaring unemployment rates and a sharp economic downturn.5 Across the developing world, poverty undermines state capacity to create jobs, educate people, and provide basic health services. Today, civil conflict is by far the most common form of armed warfare, and its occurrence is overwhelmingly concentrated in poor countries that lack the capacity to govern.6 In 2005, 90 percent of armed conflicts occurred in low- and lower-middle-income countries.7 From Sierra Leone and Angola to Tajikistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, civil wars erupt disproportionately in countries and regions facing endemic poverty, sharp economic decline, or both. Overall, civil wars in the developing world have claimed more than 16 million lives in seventy-three countries and displaced 67 million people since 1945.8 Scholarship on the causes of civil war reveals a complexity of interacting factors, but the bottom line has become increasingly clear: countries with low income per capita face a substantially higher risk of civil war.9 Less clear are the specific circumstances under which poverty increases the risk of war, as the mechanisms vary from country to country. Still, one central trend is that poverty decreases state capacity, weak states create more opportunities for rebellion, and civil wars then lock poor countries into a spiral that further entrenches poverty. Because poverty undermines state capacity, it creates conditions that insurgents can exploit to launch, perpetuate, and restart rebellion. Poverty and state weakness contribute to each phase of conflict: the initial spark before conflict erupts, recruitment during an insurgency, sustained violence during a full-blown civil war, and recurrence after civil war has ended. 04-0390-7 ch4.indd 91 12/8/09 12:24 PM 92 andreW LoomIS Economists invoke...