Violence, Governance, Development

1. Violence, Governance, Development SOAS/Mo Ibrahim Foundation Governance for Development in Africa Mauritius, 2014

2. CAUSE or CONSEQUENCE?

3. Plenty to discuss • What are the analytical connections between governance and violence? • How big a problem is violence? • How are violence and development linked?

4. 1. Governance and violence

5. Violence/Governance • The allocation of ‘violence rights’ • the feud • Class privilege • State monopoly • Violence, taxation, and state formation – still valid? • Incomplete monopolies of violence • Managing the violence problem • Coalitions/settlements • Economic development and rents

6. Violence/governance • Violence reflects lack of governance? • Violence reflects governance? • Violent rules of the game • Violence as source of governance?

7. Violence/governance/states • North, Wallis and Weingast: bad governance (rent distribution to elites) ensures that violence reduces value of elite privileges, persuades them to lay down arms, creates better governance (managing the V problem) • Contrast with OA societies: force subject to rule, impersonal access to opportunity • Giustozzi – primitive accumulation of force, followed by consolidation

8. Is it in the indicators? Expert opinion or official data? 2. Trends, levels, classification

9. Peace and Conflict, 2010, CIDCM

12. Spagat, Restrepo and Vargas

16. Source: Moser & McIlwaine, World Development, 2006

17. Implications • Violence is pervasive, multi-faceted • Violence is difficult to measure • Hobbes, Hobsbawm, Hardt and Negri • Continuum of violence

18. 3. Violence and Development I

19. From Hirschman to Hirshleifer • The Passions and the Interests…Hirschman argued that this was a historical curiosity • However, the argument rose again in different form: war is development in reverse • The way of Coase vs the way of Macchiavelli • Or ‘greed’ vs ‘grievance

22. G.r.i.e.vance • Growth (5 years before onset) • Repression (elections, press freedom, etc) • Inequality (Gini coefficient) • Ethnicity (ELF)

23. G.r.e.ed • Goodies (% of primary commodity exports in GDP) • Rascals (% of 15-24 year old males in population) • Education (number of years average schooling)

25. How to overcome constraints on collective action • Direct, material rewards, now, to individuals • Coercion • Norms & ideology • Joint production (Kriger; Kalyvas) of violence by local and national, outside and inside communities – intimacy • Whatever’s easiest (economic or social endowments) but this will shape the form of conflict (Weinstein)

26. Friendly Fire? • Regressing endogenous variables on endogenous variables • Failing to reflect anything in the last 25 years of economic theory or technique • Conclusions not justified by findings • Might be published in an IR journal but not in a 3rd rate economics journal.

27. 4. Post-conflict aid

28. The triple transition & rising post-conflict aid • The liberal peace thesis • The idea that aid to post-conflict societies is more effective than other aid • The idea of international public bads • The idea that there is a vacuum at the end of the war and it is an opportunity for dramatic change.

30. Aid volatility coefficient From Boyce and Forman (2011), “Financing Peace” – WDR input paper

31. From Boyce and Forman (2011), “Financing Peace” – WDR input paper

32. From Boyce and Forman (2011), “Financing Peace” – WDR input paper

33. 5. Violence and development II

34. Violence as development in forward gear • The mafia in Sicily: throwback or functional to capitalist development and global integration? • Colombia – bananas, palm oil (not the usual ‘conflict commodities, though those too • Angola 1961 • American civil war • Mozambique and the mechanism of primitive accumulation

36. Where to? • Guided by the possibilism of Keynes and Hirschman, rather than by ‘mindless theorising’ or ideology/fantasy, the real challenges are to distinguish scope for positive change in conflict. • And in post-conflict: • How to pay for the peace • How to produce the peace • How to work for peace