(5 Scarcity and Surfeitconsidered the primary cause of contemporary warfare by the Minorities at
Risk Project. Nearly 100 national and minority peoples took part in serious
violent conflict at some time between 1945 and 1990. Sixty conflicts were
fought over issues of group autonomy and lasted at least a decade and at the
beginning of 1996 there were more than 40 violent ethno-political conflicts
under way.
Identity politics has assumed centre stage in the discourse of groups
involved in contemporary conflict. Kaldor considers this inevitable in con-
texts generally characterised by the weakening of the state and in some
extreme cases its disintegration, which often leads to "the erosion of the
monopoly of legitimate organised violence".23 Similarly, Holsti locates the
causes of "wars of the third kind" in the "fundamental quarrels about the
nature of communities and the problems of state-building" in a world where
communities "have adopted the mystique of statehood as the ultimate and
final political format".24 These wars are not about foreign policy, security,
honour, or status. They are about statehood, governance, and the role and
status of nations and communities within states. The growth in identity pol-
itics is attributed by Kaldor to the vacuum created by the absence of forward-
looking projects and the failure of "other sources of political legitimacy" such
as socialism or the nation-building rhetoric of first generation post-colonial
leaders. Holsti emphasises that "new and weak states are the primary locale
of present and future wars'"and that consequently we can understand con-
temporary war better "if we explore the birth of states and how they have
come to be go~erned"?~
'Greed versus Grievance': Tautological Debate or
Two Sides of the Same Coin?
A shift of focus has occurred. To explain these armed conflicts, analysts and
policy makers looked at the groups in conflict and their claims in order to
establish what these conflicts were about.26 lbrning away from the systemic
level, analysis began to focus on local actors and local situations to better
understand the reasons behind claims for self-determination aiming for inde-
pendence, autonomy, secession, the control or participation in government.
This shift in focus strongly influenced the development of conflict types by
analysts seeking to clarify the nature of the issues in conflict. Conflict causes
have in fact become the "most frequently invoked typology"' and within
these, as Singer points out, "all the usual suspects are found: territory, ideol-
ogy, dynastic legitimacy, religion, language, ethnicity, self-determination,
resources, markets, dominance, equality, and, of course, revenge"?' To a large
extent this explains the plethora of definitions that now exist for contempo-
rary wars and the relentless search for a 'golden formula' applicable to all.