10 Scarcity and Surfeit
of primary commodities, low education, a high proportion of young
men and economic decline between them drastically increase risks.
Greed seems more important than grievance... "49With these words, the 'greed versus grievance' debate began. The possible
effects of 'grievance' were statistically put to the test. Grievance was tested
through the following independent variables: rapid economic decline,
inequality, political repression, political transition and finally ethnic and reli-
gious fractionalisation. Collier found that a "prior period of rapid economic
decline increases the risk of conflict" in that "growth gives hope, while rapid
decline may galvanise people into action". A significant finding was that
"inequality, whether measured in terms of income or land ownership, has no
effect on the risk of conflict':s0 As concerns political repression, the results
were ambiguous. Collier found that a fully democratic society is safer than a
partial democracy but that these effects are moderate and only slightly sig-
nificant. However, political transitions increase the risk of conflict. As regards
ethnic and religious fractionalisation, the same results as above were con-
firmed. Collier's conclusions were as ground breaking as they were contro-
versial. In his words,
"... the grievance theory of conflict thus finds surprisingly little empiri-
cal support. Inequality does not seem to matter, while political repres-
sion and ethnic and religious divisions have precisely the opposite of
their predicted effects ... rebellions based purely on grievance face such
severe collective action problems that the basic theories of social sci-
ence would predict that they are unlikely to occur ... [my emphasi~]."~~In terms of measuring a 'greed' factor, Collier considers that it must entail
more than just asking belligerents their reasons for fighting because "those
rebel organisations which are sufficiently successful to get noticed are unlike-
ly to be so naive as to admit to greed as a motive':s2 This is due to the fact
that "narratives of grievance play much better with this [the international]
community than narratives of greed". Nevertheless, a narrative of grievance
by itself can serve a rebel organisation in attracting more people and new
recruits. This leads to the conclusion that "even where the rationale at the
top of the organisation is essentially greed, the actual discourse may be
entirely dominated by grievance': Because of this, the approach taken to
measure 'grievance' relies not on public statements by rebel leaders (for
example) but on the inference of "motivations from patterns of observed
behaviour" in order to "determine patterns in the origins of civil war, distin-
guishing between those causal factors which are broadly consistent with an
economic motivation, and those which are more consistent with grievance':
The measurement of 'greed' is then refined to include the weight of
primary commodity exports in a country's gross domestic product as an