22 Scarcity and Surfeit
factors" adding that "in short, bad leaders are the biggest problem".130
Whether leaders based their actions on ideological beliefs (concerning the
organisation of political, economic, and social affairs in a country); whether
their actions are essentially a result of power struggles that may or may not
result in assaults to state sovereignty, the role that individual leaders and elite
groups play on the onset and escalation of disputes is undeniable. This line
of reasoning looks at the ways in which political elites often promote conflict
"in times of political and economic trouble in order to fend-off domestic chal-
lenge~s':'~' Analysing patterns of contemporary African politics, Patrick
Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz term this the "instrumentalisation of disorder",
which:
" ... in brief, it refers to the process by which political actors in Africa
seek to maximise their returns on the state of confusion, uncertainty
and sometimes even chaos which characterises most African polities.
Although there are obviously vast differences between countries in this
respect, we would argue that what all African states share is a gener-
alised system of patrimonialism and acute degree of apparent disorder,
as evidenced by a high level of governmental and administrative ineffi-
ciency, a lack of institutionalisation, a general disregard for the rules of
the formal political and economic sectors, and a universal resort toper-
sonal(ised) and vertical solutions to societal problems."132Likewise, issues in contention also partly explain the complexity of armed
conflicts, in that they may be perceived as being realistic or unrealistic by the
parties involved. For example, a notable feature of many armed conflicts is
that "parties involved often disagree on what the conflict is 'really' about,
one side defining the issues as being a set of (to them) salient problems, the
other claiming the actual core issues as something completely different':133
Nevertheless, groups in conflict have varying degrees of integration between
them in that thev , might - have a close relations hi^ or not communicate at all.
Within existing relationships, conflicting issues may constitute only a frac-
tion of the overall issues present, but they may also constitute the core of the
relationship. Interdependence, for example, opens channels of communica-
tion allowing parties to more openly debate their differences and influence
one another. All conflict situations have therefore a mix of conflicting inter-
ests and cooperative ones and it is very rare to find a pure zero-sum conflict.
Even conflicts which may seem zero-sum can be "transformed when the
issue in contention is fractioned; that is, the disputed matter is broken up into
many component^"."^
Differences in the way parties perceive their power in relation to their
adversary as well as the resources they have available strongly affect their
relationship and may in some instances be themselves the basis for a poten-
tial conflict situation.13s Differences in power affect the way parties formulate