Analysing violence and war

Faisal Khan
Dawn, 18 October

War is the father of everything. – Heraclitus (535-475 BC)

THE questions people ask about violence and war are phrased by their preconceptions. Why are some developing countries prone to violence?

There is an implicit assumption that violence and war in developing countries is a deviant condition. Developing-country violence is painted as an aberration in a more normal world of liberal peace exemplified by the prosperity and stability of the developed world.

The mainstream liberal perspective in the study of violent conflict creates binary oppositions between the chaotic barbarism of the South and an idealised image of the bourgeois civilisation of the North. This inquisition continues with identifying and comparing the supposed variables that produce violence.

Generally, these are the essentialist ideas of ethnicity, tribalism, identity, primordial animosity and inequality working as over-rationalised factors in deciphering the distance of violent-prone societies from the enlightened orderly ones.

The commonly held belief is that western liberal states have outgrown destructive violence or that their violence is only defensive and perverse. On the other hand, people see violence and wars in the developing world as a function of backwardness, of a democratic deficit, a lack of modernity and a failure to grasp the value of liberalism. This is a simplistic, flawed and a dangerous view of history and human relations.

It asserts the notion that unless a modern democratic state escapes violence, it is decidedly incomplete. In fact the Abu Ghraib torture images, the illegal detention and torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and the thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan in selfish wars are evidence that western liberal society is no different from ours.

Violence, therefore, is not just an aberration. Violence does not always signify a reversal of progress and development. No major institutional and structural change has ever been smooth, peaceable and democratic. Violence is simply a norm in development and it is part of potential development. Liberal interpretation crudely regards violence and war as products of the pathology of underdevelopment.

In recent years, within the liberal tradition, orthodox economic theories of violence and war have proliferated. At the heart of orthodox economics is the application of the idea of maximising behaviour by rational individuals making choices.

For example, let’s take three common determinants of violent conflict in mainstream economic theory: poverty, unemployment and the disproportionate number of young men. In these models, the poor are no more or less inherently prone to violence than anyone else. However, the poor choose violence more often than those who are better off because they have a comparative advantage in violence. This is what they do most efficiently, i.e. at least in terms of cost, because the opportunity cost of violence is relatively low for the poor.

Poor people do not forego much by selecting violence, precisely because there is little else on offer for them anyway. The unemployed, particularly the youth, then find it a better trade-off to engage in violence as other opportunities are scarce.

What is problematic about this theorisation of the causation of violence? There is no empirical value to these arguments. Firstly, there is no evidence to make the assumption that poverty is so gruelling that the opportunity cost of being killed is very low. It is akin to saying that the poor engage in war because their life is cheap! War involves both killing and getting killed — the dangers are equal for all. It is not always the poor or the worst off that are engaging in violence.

Secondly, there is no reliable way of measuring that it is actually the presence of young men that leads to the outbreak of violence more than any other factor. There is ample evidence of the coercive recruitment of young people in contemporary armed conflicts. A clear example of this is the aggressive and threatening recruitment drive of the Pakistani Taliban in the Tribal Areas for suicide bombers and fighters.

Individual motivations are constrained by a range of factors including economic incentives, political conditions and social pressures. Similarly, individuals display a variety of complex compulsions other than utility maximisation that constrains the choices they make. In essence, a model focussing explicitly on individual rational choice behaviour is bound to be flawed.

Basic elements of a richer analysis of contemporary armed conflict can be found in the alternative approaches of historical political economy. Individuals and the choices they make do matter in conflict. However, these occur in specific conditions and within social and historical features of change.

The subtleties of each contemporary violent conflict in the developing world raise the concern that no universal theory of war and violence is possible. The causes and mechanisms of violent conflict are not only multiple, they also vary. For example, the emergence of Pakistani Taliban and proto-Taliban militants in the NWFP and the tribal areas is shaped by the organisation of political power and economic production during colonialism, state building and regional conflicts.

These are the historical processes and empirical realities within which the study of conflict has to be based. Abstract economic models cannot capture the contingencies of the political and economic dynamics of violent conflict. Moreover, this includes moving beyond the perception of conflict as a socially wasteful and retrogressive phenomenon. The western democracies of today have all been born out of brutal periods of civil war, economic disparity and political turmoil.

The other analytical level at which to understand conflict is at the level of class formation, class relations and primitive accumulation. For example, the Balochistan insurgency can be understood as a conflictual process through which the ruling classes have been able to forcefully acquire tracts of resource-rich land and deprive hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of livelihood and subsistence by displacing them.

The brutal acquisition of land in Balochistan signifies usurping the means of production of peasants leading to a process of proletarianisation. This is very much a trend in the other parts of the country where land relations are under stress and property rights are coercively usurped by ruling elites.

The Okara farms issue and contested mega urban development schemes are further examples of such asset transfers that are occurring within the continuum of peace and violence in the country. These are all instances of primitive accumulation that is indicative of capitalist transitions that have always been violent.

In other words, war and non-war violent conflict displays symptoms of an enabling environment for the transition to capitalism and the reproduction of capitalist relations. Understanding violent conflict in the developing world as a characteristic of political and economic transition allows us to identify its role in the processing of new institutions, political relationships and specific social transformations.

However much it is denied by contemporary theoreticians, the effectiveness of violence is perhaps a deeply held belief, which is why a lot of people choose violence as it works.

We have to move beyond a retrogressive view of violence that seeks the fantastical elimination and prevention of conflict and war. Attractive mainstream theories and models look good on paper but hardly capture the diversity and dynamics of violent conflict.

We have to move towards a more plausible understanding of the political, economic and social functions of conflict, violence and war in our society. It is through exploring its historical functions that we can arrive at a better understanding of both its productive and adverse effects.