On the incentives of violence: Greed and pride in Sri Lanka's civil war

This paper revisits the rationalist conceptions of warlordism in civil wars, which has amounted to the greed hypothesis as opposed to grievance. This argument states that rebels are not motivated to generate public goods-the betterment of society-but seek private gain. While initial studies focused on explaining why civil war breaks out in the first instance, there is now increasing interest in modelling violence and warlordism in an ongoing civil war. In this paper, a contextual model is suggested to explain the dynamics of violence in the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. We conceptualize a game theoretical model, which distinguishes extrinsic C greed') and intrinsic motivations ('pride'). We utilize narratives from the civil war of Sri Lanka and model a game that involves two layers of actors: combatants (rebels and army) and civilians (farmers of different ethnicities). In order to understand the causal linkages between greed, pride and grievance, we analyze local conflicts over resources situated in the civil war zones and ask how these localized conflicts are intertwined with the broader political struggles

Blood, timber, and the state in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

West Kalimantan (West Borneo) has a history of violent communal conflict.1 It also has extensive forests that have been looted for decades. The argument will be that these two are linked, but not by the grievances of the forest dwellers. Except in its first few days, the two main episodes of 1997 and 1999 were not driven mainly by grievances among marginal groups. Rather, explanations based on the ‘resource curse’ carry more weight. These focus attention on the contested nature of the state, rather than on rebellious activities of marginal groups. When state institutions were thrown into disarray by the sudden resignation of President Suharto in 1998, Dayak militants already close to state power rewrote the rules of local politics by demonstratively ‘cleansing’ certain areas of an unpopular immigrant minority. This theatrical manoeuvre impressed political rivals sufficiently to allow Dayaks to gain control over several timber-rich districts, which had a thriving black economy. Malays later imitated these techniques to stem the tide