Peace and Conflict
Underlying Causes
Properly managed, diplomatic conflict often helps produce growth and promote sustainability. But, given the wrong conditions, benign conflict can turn deadly and protracted.
“Ethnic”, “tribal”, and “factional” are often words associated with the sources of violence, but they can distract us from a deeper understanding of root causes. In fact, the underlying conditions are often the same: rapid growth in both overall population and density; competition for resources or other economic opportunities; social divisions based on class, race, ethnicity or religion; and political instability often associated with weak systems of governance.
Demographic information is often a valuable diagnostic tool when looking for root causes of conflict. High fertility rates, resulting in rapid population growth and high population densities, contribute to resource depletion, scarcity, and environmental degradation. Governments may also be unable to provide adequate social services, infrastructure, or employment opportunities for rapidly growing populations, which stimulates discontent among the populace.
High fertility rates create young populations (half the world’s people are under age 25), which means there is a large pool of 15-29 year olds. Young men of this group – without sufficient education, employment, or hope for a better future – may be easily recruited into groups engaged in violence. Other demographic indicators of reduced social capacity that may presage violent conflict are high levels of maternal and infant mortality, and low levels of education and women’s empowerment.
Economic trends are also important gauges of potential conflict. Low levels of per capita income slow or negative economic growth, high levels of external debt, and a widening rich-poor gap may foretell the social and environmental declines that often lead to conflict. Economic inequality, in particular, carries with it the seeds of lethal conflict. In many developing countries an economic elite – sometimes ethnically or religiously different, but often not – has gained control over land and other natural resources like fishing grounds, forests, minerals, or irrigation rights. Denied access to those resources, the vast majority of the population may both be unemployed or marginalized in other ways and ready to take some sort of action for a larger share of the wealth.
In other cases, class differences may be less pronounced. Instead, environmental degradation and destruction through natural disasters or climate change may have left an entire population in an impoverished and vulnerable state. The subsequent struggle to gain control of valuable resources – whether diamonds, oil, copper, or other strategically important raw materials – has fueled intrastate and interstate wars in many parts of the developing world.
Social divisions – whether based on class, caste, ethnicity or religion – often provide the “fault lines” that delineate opposing groups in deadly conflicts. The history of the last century is filled with examples of religiously motivated low-intensity wars, like Muslim vs. Christian, Buddhist vs. Hindu, Protestant vs. Catholic, Muslim vs. Hindu, to name only a few. But beneath philosophical antipathy are generally economic or political drivers, which are equally powerful.
Of course, no lethal conflict can be carried on without weapons themselves, and their easy access is a major factor in many of the low-intensity wars currently being fought in the world. The proliferation of small arms in poor countries makes it more likely that benign conflicts conceivably solved by mediation will turn into deadly ones. By the same token, larger conflicts have the potential to become medium and high-intensity wars by virtue of the weapons available to the combatants.
Despite the end of the Cold War, superpower rivalries and the accompanying arms race continue. The arsenals of the US, Russia, and China hold more than 30,000 nuclear weapons. The US, in particular, is continuing to upgrade its nuclear program, and pursuing space-based weapons, which may force China and Russia to expand and upgrade their own defense budgets and arsenals.
Several regional powers also possess nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In the early 21st century, the US Department of Defense identified about 25 states that are pursuing weapons of mass destruction and / or delivery systems for those weapons. The likelihood of “rogue states” or non-state actors securing – either through diversion or construction – nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction is also significant.
The combination of all these factors provides a dangerous “multiplier” effect. Rapid population growth in developing regions combined with over-consumption by industrialized nations is degrading the global environment. The resource scarcity caused by this environmental degradation and the uneven distribution of these resources has created large numbers of marginalized groups. Expanding globalization has accelerated the “clash of civilizations” between rich, secular, industrialized nations and poorer, often theocratic, developing nations.” And access to highly lethal tactical and strategic weapons has increased the casualty potential of any resulting clashes.