Civil Wars in Guatemala and Tajikistan: Causes and Recovery

Introduction: The Logic of Civil War

It is estimated that between 1900 and 1967, there were 526 civil wars fought throughout the world. Today, there are literally dozens of wars ongoing around the globe, and dozens more that have ended in recent years, such as the civil war in Guatemala and the civil war in Tajikistan.

Leonardo Sciascia, a Sicilian writer, captured the inner logic of such conflicts in a short story about a Sicilian man dragooned into fighting on Franco's side during the Spanish Civil War. Sciascia writes:

"A civil war is not a stupid thing, like a war between nations... A civil war is something more logical, a man starts shooting for the people and the things he loves, for the things he wants and against the people he hates; and no one makes a mistake about choosing which side to be on... Despite its atrocities, a civil war is a kind of hora de la verdad, a moment of truth."

This quotation expresses the view that civil war is not simply an outbreak of irrational hysteria based on some immutable and fixed "ethnic" antipathy, but is rather a perfectly sensible venting of feelings that cannot be contained by normal peacetime relations. Civil war, in this sense, is fundamentally class-based — about the uneven distribution of income, wealth, and political power.

Theoretical Framework: Inequality, Distribution, and Conflict

According to Christopher Cramer, most literature concerning civil wars has highlighted the role of political instability in the relationship between growth and inequality. Although there are interlinkages between distribution, conflict, and growth, these interlinkages are complex and cannot be read off or predicted from any convincing repeated empirical relationship between variables that are often laden with too much unclear meaning. Cramer takes the title of his article, "Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Exploring Growth, Distribution and Conflict Linkages," from the Sciascia story described above.

For Sciascia, civil war is "a moment of truth," for it exposes and brings to the surface a conflict that is otherwise only latent and hidden from view. While some see war as the continuation of politics by other means, others suggest that war is the continuation of political economy by particular means.

This view contrasts greatly with typical perceptions of civil war in developing countries, where wars used to be understood in terms of "proxy" Cold War ideological contests but more recently have been seen in terms of some primordial anarchy. This argument may be one aspect of the larger claim that "political and economic progress are not tied together in any easy, straightforward, functional way."

Cramer argues that the idea that inequality leads to instability or conflict, and that this conflict has exclusively negative effects on growth, merely oversimplifies the true relationships and the nature of their interaction, and can actually be misleading. He points to clear counter-examples, such as India, which has over a long period combined highly unequal distribution of income and power with relative political stability. Moreover, to the extent that political instability in India has risen in recent times, it is not clearly associated, at an aggregate level, with a decline in investment or growth.

Cramer believes that maldistribution is not always necessary and is hardly sufficient to provoke extreme instability. Where it is significant in the emergence of conflict, it is most likely combined with low growth and sharp economic crisis before the war, and with other factors — including the political economy of identity relations — that themselves will not neatly fit into a quantifiable variable. Furthermore, where distributional issues are significant, this does not mean that anyone can predict some cut-off point beyond which a given Gini coefficient will be associated with a certain degree or form of instability or the outbreak of civil war.

Generally, civil war is messier than the clear notion of conflict between classes; however, the idea of civil war as an hora de la verdad — a moment of truth — is certainly useful. The political economy of civil war in the least developed countries may confirm the notion that "in periods of transition or crisis, generative structures, previously opaque, become more visible." From a long-run perspective, conflict as a "moment of truth" is what gives it a potentially cathartic effect, yet this perspective is lacking among the ultra-pessimists of cost-of-war analyses.

Cramer stresses a need for caution in the international application of supposedly equalizing and stabilizing policies in the interests of political stability, peace, and growth. The appropriate policies are likely to be specific to each country, and rather than hoping growth will arise from a prior condition of equality, policies should focus on growth more urgently on a basis of inclusion — primarily through employment — rather than the difficult-to-achieve redistribution of assets.