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The causes of war: interpretations overstretched
studies on the end of textile quota system
Trade Union case
studies on the end of textile quota system
New World Bank study on Latin America
02/2005 |
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The causes of war: interpretations overstretched
Sabine Kurtenbach and Peter Lock (eds.):
Kriege als (Über)Lebenswelten. Schattenglobalisierung, Kriegsökonomien und Inseln der Zivilität (Theaters of war. The informal side of globalisation, war economies, and islands of civility).
Bonn, Dietz Verlag 2004, 325 pp.,
Euro 12.70, ISBN 3-8012-0337-9
More and more attention is being paid to the economic causes of war: Every belligerent party has to provide supplies and weapons to its soldiers. Material procurement can become a reason to start a conflict, especially for troops not serving a state. The book edited by Kurtenbach and Lock justifiably emphasises that war economies are a part of the global economy. The book deals with the concomitant illegal transfers of weapons, drugs, natural resources, black markets, and migration, all of which are viewed as the unofficial, “the informal side of globalisation” or even “shadow globalisation”.
The book makes clear that economic decision-makers from industrialised countries are co-responsible for the armed conflicts in poor countries. And it shows how war economies can be starved. For instance, Kurtenbach calls on the industrialised countries to fight “the informal side of globalisation” by means of regulation. Angelika Spelten’s illustrations of how transnational companies can set off or mitigate conflicts are also important.
The various authors reach different conclusions about the causes of violent conflicts across the globe. Lock and Kurtenbach go the furthest: they plead for an end to the distinction between war and other types of violence. Lock justifies this with a model in which the global economy consists of three overlapping spheres: a formal one, an informal one, and a criminal one.
He holds that globalisation is making the formal economy and the tax revenue of states smaller. At the same time, more and more young people have no chance of formal employment. A growing chunk of global society is thus operating outside of the rule of law. Criminal violence, he argues, competes with “rudimentary self-organisation” in regulating informal, unequal bases for exchanges. But Lock does not go so far as to claim that civil wars arise for economic reasons. However, he does feel that economic issues increasingly determine the characteristics of wars. He thus describes them and organised crime as two versions of a single phenomenon that he calls “regulative violence”.
In doing so, Lock derives an unconvincing theory from some important observations. For instance, Frances Stewart emphasises in his chapter that civil wars cannot necessarily be ascribed to poverty and inequality. To begin with, causality is mutual. Second, certain kinds of inequality are more prone to lead to conflicts than others. According to Stewart, the existence and creation of a politically exploited group identity distinguishes civil wars from criminality.
Luiz Martinez’ case study of the war in Algeria is also worth mentioning: It shows how Islamic resistance groups and criminal organisations were created in the course of the conflict and took advantage of each other – while the state manipulated them both. Martinez takes a close look at local organisations and the consequences of their forced disbanding, explaining how a lot of what seems to be criminal or random violence when viewed from the outside was actually politically driven. After all, it was connected to a dispute about the “proper order” of (local) society and the legitimacy of collective violence. When the opponents of the state had lost all legitimacy and were only viewed as criminals by the general public, their defeat was imminent.
It is clear, then, that a justified claim to legitimacy distinguishes political violence from crime. The term “regulative violence” obliterates this distinction. While criminal violence and war are both “regulative” and can be mixed, it is more important analytically to see what sets them apart, Lothar Brock argues in his introduction to the collection of essays – thus contradicting Lock and Kurtenbach.
Lock and the other authors in this collection – such as Ehrke, whose criticism of the World Bank’s economic analyses of wars is well worth reading – tend to derive political conditions from economic ones. For instance, Lock writes that the state’s capacity is derived from a mix of formal, informal, and criminal economies on its territory (for the state determines the tax revenue). But the reverse – the strength of the state determines the mixture – seems just as true. Even if their approach seems to be pushing it too far in spots, Lock and Kurtenbach have edited a collection of essays that provides excellent food for thought. After all, they are open-minded enough to include the contradictions to their own ideas.
Bernd Ludermann
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