Probing violence

At Kutum in northern Darfur, a peacekeeper of the African Union Mission in Sudan mans the gun on a Mamba fighting vehicle.-AMIS/HO/STUART PRICE/AFP

A new book argues that violence in developing countries is an essential aspect of primitive accumulation and the transition to capitalism.

ANALYSING war and violence may be among the most challenging tasks in social science. This is not only because the subject immediately calls forth emotional reactions and ethical positions, which render a hard-headed and dispassionate assessment more difficult. It is also because of the very complexity of violence, especially the collective violence that is often described as war, and the wide variation that is so affected by the intricacies of economic, social and historical context.

All these make any attempt to explain the nature of violent conflict in the developing world a daunting challenge. Yet this challenge has been brilliantly taken up in a recent book by Christopher Cramer (Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries, London, Hurst and Company, 2007) that effectively cuts through much of the current debate to provide a bold but convincing perspective.

The title itself is an insight, based on a quotation from a character in a short story by the Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia. Civil war is not a stupid thing, like a war between nations, the Italians fighting the English, or the Germans fighting the Russians, where I, a Sicilian sulphur miner, kill an English miner, and the Russian peasant shoots at the German peasant; a civil war is something more logical, a man starts shooting for the people and the things that he loves, for the things that he wants and against the people that he hates; and no one makes a mistake about which side to be on.

Even if this need not always be true, it highlights the possibility that there may be some underlying sense, however destructive and unfortunate, in conflict. It is the search for this deeper sense that motivates this book. It is an attempt to understand war and violence in different terms from the currently dominant paradigm, which, Cramer argues, is based on two fallacious and mystifying approaches. One effectively barbarises developing-country violence, treating it as pre-modern, based on possibly primordial animosities and certainly far removed from the (idealised) image of peaceful, developed, capitalist societies. The other situates the compulsions to conflict within the narrow confines of the methodological individualism and constrained maximisation beloved of neoclassical economics.

These approaches combine to generate what can be called the liberal treatment of war as essentially pathological, an aberration or perversion, a form of development in reverse. In contrast, Cramer argues that development in general and capitalist development in particular is not possible without conflict that may often be very violent, and such conflict can take on a wide variety of forms including war. So, even destructive violence may contain dynamics that have the potential to bring about long-term progressive change.

This is not a new argument: indeed, Karl Marx put it succinctly in the famous sentence from the first volume of Capital: Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. Yet it is still fresh and illuminating because Cramer develops it with very wide-ranging and detailed examples from more contemporary experience, in analysis that reflects both a strong political economy foundation and a strong sense of history. In the process, he takes on and demolishes effectively many currently popular but inadequate and sometimes even misleading arguments about the nature of violence.

Thus Cramer provides an incisive critique of some exclusively economistic explanations of war, in particular those based on the binaries of either scarcity or abundance of resources. He shows how models that try to capture the motivation for violent conflict solely in terms of greed versus grievance (stemming from inequality) are lacking in several important respects. To begin with, the search for statistical regularities in such modelling is misguided, to say the least, given the diversity and complexity of conflicts and the sheer difficulty of getting accurate information on many relevant indicators. Then there is the issue of reducing human behaviour (both individual and collective) to the rather rigid principles of rational utility maximisation that simply cannot explain much conflict.

And then there is the problem that such theorising typically leaves out the crucial role of power. Game theory tries to model competition and power but produces something like a desiccated lemon at the foot of a tree: the juice and flavour of power having been driven off, there are only the dry membranes of rationality left (page 136). Cramer points out that commodity theories of war, whether they assume that resource abundance creates conflicts over their control or that natural degradation and scarcity lead to war, end up fetishising commodities and thereby depoliticising wars. Instead, he suggests that these wars are reflections of societies which are undergoing phenomenally disruptive traumas of change. This in turns brings out the central argument of the book that violence in developing countries is an essential aspect of primitive accumulation and the transition to capitalism, even if such a transition is partial and incomplete. Modern societies, in part, may be the unintended consequence of the business of war characteristics of contemporary violent conflicts that are often regarded as signs of the pathological meaninglessness or the undoing of development are in fact dramatic examples of processes that have been, historically and logically, at the very heart of modernisation, development and the transition to capitalism (page 172).

This argument is developed with many examples, but especially with a detailed consideration of the specific case of Angola. At first sight the recent war in Angola fits in with many of the monocausal explanations of war, especially in terms of resources conflicts, and with the notion that it is development in reverse. Yet Cramer shows how a more complex reading based on the argument above is more compelling and plausible.

There are, of course, many analytical pitfalls in all this, and Cramer is apparently aware of all of them. He negotiates the methodological minefield with finesse: noting the importance of specificity and the fragility of general explanations; avoiding both the liberal interpretation of war and the romantic notion of redemptive violence; recognising the complex interplay between the internal protagonists and external actors; and emphasising that his argument does not make a case for accepting wars as inevitable if tragic consequences of necessary historical transition.

He notes that large economic and social transformations are inevitably conflictual experiences: the challenge is both to minimise the damage and to maximise the potential for productive change.

This is where the policy implications of this analysis become so significant. In a trenchant chapter on post-conflict reconstruction, Cramer shows how the mistaken perceptions of why conflicts occur and the effects that they have in developing countries then translate into problematic aid and policy advice that reduces the possibility of any positive effects from such conflicts. Donors and external agents typically depend upon the ahistorical notion that a country emerging from war is a blank slate which can be written upon with neoliberal economic markings. It is often assumed that in terms of institutions and social relations, there is a post-conflict vacuum that can be filled as desired and that free market activity will deliver both peace and prosperity.

Needless to say, this does not work, and so the subsequent peace can be as damaging as the previous war. Cramer emphasises the shortcomings of the current economically orthodox policy model and insists that there is a diversity of positive policy responses for managing post-conflict situations. But one important policy message does come through despite all the possible variation: For economic development to achieve some progressive momentum in the wake of violent conflicts, and for the violence of war to peter out rather than mutate into pervasive post-war violence, a powerful central state is necessary, not the flimsy, decentralising and enabling bureaucracy of the post-conflict reconstruction makeover fantasy (page 277).

This powerful state is necessary but not sufficient, of course what is also necessary is a longer-term development momentum resulting from particular socio-economic forces. And here the external factors that Cramer touches upon in his analysis of war come into play more strongly. In particular, there is something that he does not mention explicitly but which remains significant: the still powerful role played by imperialism, which prevents developing countries from making the accumulation process more productive and inclusive, and in some cases even from making the full transition to capitalism.