8 Scarcity and Surfeit
mobilisation and conflict when it provides the basis for invidious distinctions
among peoples (inequalities among cultural groups in status, economic well-
being, access to political power) that are deliberately maintained through
public policy and social practice.3G
At the other end of the aetiological spectrum a number of recent studies have
sought to portray contemporary wars as driven essentially by economic agen-
das, particularly those conflicts in the developing world. As Jakkie Cilliers
points out, this approach has been collated into that of 'resource-wars' and is
sometimes put forward as reflecting a 'new' type of war.37 While the role of
resources in the onset and continuation of violent conflicts has been the object
of study for many decades, until recently studies have for the most part centred
on the role played by scarcity or relative scarcity of resources as prime triggers
of violence, both at the individual as well as the collective level. Rupesinghe
and Anderlini, for example, consider that stagnation and protracted income
decline in poor and middle-income countries (i.e. the cases of Algeria, Sierra
Leone, Liberia and Lebanon); unequal growth and unequal distribution of
resources in cases of accelerated economic growth (i.e. Mexico and South
Africa) and finally structural adjustment policies and changing distribution of
resources may act as triggers of violent conflict.38 Development theory has also
focused on the role that resources and societal development play on the onset
of violence. In this respect, Gum considers that "for the last half century at least,
societies at low levels of development have suffered much more from societal
warfare than prosperous s~cieties".~~ Recent studies, however, have focused on
resource appropriation in situations of abundance as the fundamental underly-
ing cause of war. According to the 'resource-war' proposition, groups engaged
in violent conflict are not primarily motivated by grievance (i.e. ethnic discrim-
ination, inequality, historical animosity), but essentially by economic agendas
and therefore greed. Issues of identity and self-determination are dismissed in
favour of a focus on the role that resources, by and of themselves, play as the
main objectives of groups engaged in war.
A strand of the 'resource-war' hypothesis has recently become known as
the 'greed theory' of conflict through the work of Paul Collier and Anke
H~effler.~~ In its original formulation, Collier et a1 defined the 'greed hypoth-
esis' in the following terms,
"... the discourse on conflict tends to be dominated by group grievances
beneath which inter-group hatreds lurk, often traced back through his-
tory. I have investigated statistically the global pattern of large-scale civil
conflict since 1965, expecting to find a close relationship between meas-
ures of these hatreds and grievances and the incidence of conflict.
Instead, I found that economic agendas appear to be central to under-
standing why civil wars get going. Conflicts are far more likely to be
caused by economic opportunities than by grievance [my emphasis]. .."