2 million lives and displaced more than 4 million others. Colombia has
experienced nearly 40 years of civil war. In 1994 some 800,000 Tutsi died
in just three months of ethnic conflict in central Africa.
It has been estimated that civil war causes GDP per capita to decline by
2.2 per cent per year, the result of a loss of production from the destruction
of transport networks, capital stock, physical capital, infrastructure and nat-
ural resources. Highly skilled workers are driven to emigrate. The economic
damage from political instability is soon felt. For example, it took only a
few months in 2002 for the instability in Madagascar to deter investment
and destroy jobs in the textile industry, at a cost to one of the world’s poorest
countries of £10 million a day.
Another cost is the ‘culture of violence’ that develops from the break-
down of government, the dislocation of civil society, the violation of human
rights and the growth of corruption. For example, since Nepal’s Maoist
insurgency began in 1996 there have been 4,000 casualties, poverty has
increased, civil rights have been suspended or arbitrarily abused by the
security services, and children have been pressganged as soldiers. Children
in Burundi are also forced by the militias to fight. The southern part of the
Sudan is called an ‘ethics-free zone’ by aid agencies, such is the scale of
civilian abuse by the government. Vigilante and paramilitary groups prolif-
erate, either with the tacit support of the government or beyond its control,
as in Colombia where there is collusion between the military and right-wing
paramilitaries. Military expenditure increases at the expense of government
spending on social services and economic development, in turn leading to
further hardship, insecurity, and ‘crowding out’ of social expenditure to
finance spending on law and order (Mohammed, 1999).
Conceptual difficulties
It is not surprising then that considerable effort has been expended
on explaining political instability in the Third World. But the concept of
‘stability’ is fraught with difficulties which need to be recognized before a
proper evaluation of causal explanations can be made.
First, ‘stability’ is a highly normative concept. What is instability for one
person might well constitute the welcome overthrow of a detestable regime
for another. (Many in the West welcomed instability in communist Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union.) The USA has long been actively engaged in
destabilizing regimes that it does not like. One person’s stability is another
person’s repression. It is not easy to exclude values from the analysis of
220 Understanding Third World Politics