States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World: Lessons from the Philippines

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Woodrow Wilson Center Washington, DC 2 May 2006
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Civil Strife The Biggest Challenge to
International Security

• Three quarters of all wars since 1945 have been
  within countries.
• The number of wars has declined in recent years,
  but they are still a significant challenge to
  human security and development in many regions.
• As many people have been killed since 1980 by
  civil wars as died in World War I.
• Regional and global effects
• Neighborhood effects refugees, disease, economic
  dislocations.
• Global effects pandemics, terrorism, organized
  crime, drug trafficking.

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The Causes of Civil Strife

• There is no single cause of civil strife.
• Studies have found correlations with demographic
  and environmental factors, suggesting that they
  are among the many causes of violent internal
  conflict. These factors include
• Population size
• Population density
• Infant mortality
• Early stage of the demographic transition
  (measured in high births high deaths)
• Youth bulge (large numbers of people between 15
  and 24)
• Rapid rates of urbanization
• Scarcity of cropland and freshwater per capita
  (in the 1990s)
• Dependence on natural resource exports

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Relevance Outside the Ivory Tower
Sustainable development is a compelling moral
and humanitarian issue. But sustainable
development is also a security imperative.
Poverty, destruction of the environment and
despair are destroyers of people, of societies,
of nations, a cause of instability as an unholy
trinity than can destabilize countries and
destabilize entire regions. Secretary of State
Colin Powell, July 2002
Globalization has exposed us to new challenges
and changed the way old challenges touch our
interests and values, while also greatly
enhancing our capacity to respond. Examples
include . . . Environmental destruction, whether
caused by human behavior or cataclysmic
mega-disasters such as floods, hurricanes,
earthquakes, or tsunamis. Problems of this scope
may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities
to respond, and may even overtax national
militaries, requiring a larger international
response. National Security Strategy, March 2006
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Organization of the Book

• Chapter 1 Plight, Plunder, and Political
  Ecology
• Chapter 2 States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife A
  Theoretical Framework
• Chapter 3 Green Crisis, Red Rebels Communist
  Insurgency in the Philippines
• Chapter 4 Land and Lies Ethnic Clashes in
  Kenya
• Chapter 5 From Chaos to Calm Explaining
  Variations in Violence in the Philippines and
  Kenya
• Chapter 6 Conclusions and Implications

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Neo-Malthusian Hypotheses
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The Deprivation Hypothesis

• The argument
• Population and environmental pressures contribute
  to falling wages, unemployment, and landlessness,
  thereby increasing poverty and inequality.
• Widespread deprivation leads to frustration,
  grievances, and increases the risks of collective
  violence.

Population growth, environmental degradation,
natural resource scarcity
Absolute and relative deprivation
Civil strife

• Criticisms
• It ignores collective action problems.
• It disregards the critical role played by the
  state.

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The State Failure Hypothesis

• The argument
• Population and environmental pressures increase
  grievances and demands on the state for costly
  investments while simultaneously undermining
  state capacity and legitimacy.
• Weakening state authority opens up political
  space for violence.

Absolute and relative deprivation
Population growth, environmental degradation,
natural resource scarcity
Civil strife
Strains on state capacity

• Criticisms
• It misses key causal dynamics.
• It fails to systematically incorporate
  intervening variables.

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My Argument
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Demographic and Environmental Stress

• The independent variable demographic and
  environmental stress (DES)
• A composite variable
• The justification for considering all three
  components is their high degree of interaction.

Population growth
Environmental degradation

DES
Unequal resource distributions
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Strains on Society

• Renewable resource scarcity shrinking
  availability and/or access to essential renewable
  resources (e.g., cropland, water, forests,
  fisheries)
• Economic marginalization poverty and inequality
  via falling wages, unemployment, landlessness,
  etc.
• Demographic shifts youth bulges and rapid
  urbanization

Strains on society
DES
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Strains on the State

• Rising demands from disadvantaged social groups
• Declining revenues due to the adverse economic
  effects of population growth and environmental
  destruction
• Threats to state legitimacy
• Rising factionalism among state elites

Strains on society
DES
Strains on the state
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Two Pathways to Civil Strife

• State failure (modified) bottom-up violence
  security dilemma dynamics
• State exploitation top-down violence
  predatory leader dynamics

State exploitation
Strains on society
DES
Civil strife
Strains on the state
State failure
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Intervening Variables

• Groupness collective action potential affected
  by patterns of social cleavages
• Institutional inclusivity degree to which social
  groups have institutionalized influence over
  executive policy usually affected by the amount
  and quality of democracy

State exploitation
Strains on society
Groupness
DES
Civil strife
Institutional inclusivity
Strains on the state
State failure
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Summary Conjunctural Predictions and Evidence
from the Book
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Competing Hypotheses The Challenge from
Neoclassical Economics
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The Honey Pot Hypothesis

• The argument
• Rebel groups are encouraged to form and fight
  over abundant supplies of valuable natural
  resources (e.g., oil, diamonds, copper, coltan,
  timber).
• Thus, resource related conflict is driven by
  abundance and greed rather than scarcity and
  grievance.

Incentives to seize areas or the state to control
access to valuable resources
Abundant supplies of valuable natural resources
Civil strife
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The Honey Pot Hypothesis (cont.)

• Criticisms
• Scarcity and abundance can both occur
  simultaneously at different levels of analysis.
  Locally abundant resources are only worth
  fighting over if they are globally scarce.
• Honey pot dynamics are much more likely to apply
  to nonrenewable mineral resources (such as oil,
  precious metals, and gemstones) than renewable
  resources.
• Abundance (of a particular resource) can produce
  scarcities (of other resources), meaning that the
  pathologies of rival approaches may interact.
• The honey pot hypothesis ignores the ways in
  which state weakness and rising DES-related
  grievances make even those conflicts centered on
  locally abundant resources more likely.

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The Resource Curse Hypothesis

• The argument
• Dutch Disease Dependence on natural resources
  makes countries vulnerable to price volatility
  and produces crowd-out effects that hurt
  long-term economic development.
• Rentier states State control of abundant
  supplies of valuable resources contributes to
  corrupt, authoritarian governments.
• Weak authoritarian governments are prime targets
  for rebellion.

Dutch Disease Rentier states
Abundant supplies of valuable natural resources
Civil strife
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The Resource Curse Hypothesis (cont.)

• Criticisms
• As with the honey pot hypothesis, Dutch Disease
  and rentier state dynamics are much more likely
  to occur in the context of nonrenewable mineral
  resources, especially oil.
• The developmental pathologies of the resource
  curse and those emerging from DES can both occur
  and interact with one another within the same
  country over time.

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Future Implications
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DES and International Security in the 21st Century

• Demographic and environmental pressures will grow
  in the decades ahead.
• Population pressures
• Unsustainable consumption
• Poverty and inequality
• Climate change
• This will probably increase the risk of civil
  strife in the worlds least developed nations in
  the decades ahead . . .
• . . . But the risk of DES induced violence will
  be affected by
• The spread of democracy
• The quality of civil society

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Questions?