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Greed, grievances, and mobilization are generally offered as explanations for rebellion and civil war. The authors extend arguments about the precursors to nonviolent protest, violent rebellion, and civil war. These arguments motivate a series of hypotheses that are tested against data from the Minorities at Risk project. The results of the analysis suggest, first, that the factors that predict antistate activity at one level of violence do not always hold at other levels; second, the response by the state has a large impact on the subsequent behavior of the rebels; and third, the popular notion of diamonds fueling civil unrest is generally not supported. The authors draw inferences from their results to future theoretical and policy development.
Keywords: rebellion; civil war; violence; greed
Recent arguments and evidence suggest that civil wars are rooted in causes that reflect a combination of "greed and grievance" (Collier 2000). The more widely accepted explanations generally focus on the grievance dimension, which assumes some form of resource or political deprivation (e.g., Gurr 1970, 2000). The greed explanation, on the other hand, assumes that rebels act in pursuit of self-interested material gain. oil, diamonds, timber, and other primary commodities form the basis of the contestable resources over which rebels fight their governments. The term greed, moreover, serves as a convenient moniker to describe self-interested behavior and the resources available to pay selective benefits. In effect, a strong resource base serves as a mechanism for mobilization.
We posit that grievance-based issues are at the core of the process that leads to civil conflict but that "greed" becomes salient when the rebel leadership begins to face a difficult task of motivating soldiers. Tn effect, grievance leads to collective behavior, but defection is always a problem, so rebel leaders resort to selective benefits that tap into self-interested behavior. That is, since preferences of the leadership and soldiers generally differ, the leaders must pay selective benefits to keep rebel soldiers from defecting. This is made easier when extractable resources are contested and controlled by rebel forces. The most visible instances currently involve sub-Saharan African countries trading in easily extractable diamonds, but the opiate trade in Asia and South America also reflects this role of exploitable resources as one mechanism for fueling civil wars. Our...