Armed Conflict and Hunger--Underlying Causes of Hunger and Conflict

Hunger and conflict usually have roots in structural violence; in colonial legacies and statist policies of racist or religious exclusion and political-economic discrimination (see, for example, Heggenhoughen, 1995); and in struggles over control of strategic resources, conventionally land, water, and trade routes, but more recently, oil. Sources of discontent include skewed land distribution, excessive tax burdens, and wage and price policies that preclude decent standards of living. Unequal access to education and nutrition services, and unequal treatment before the law, enflame perceptions of unfairness, which in turn leads often to violent expression of desire for change. Denials of civil-political or economic-social-cultural rights based on race, religion, ethnicity, geographic location, political ideology, or occupation rouse animosities. Tensions ripen into violent conflict, especially where economic conditions deteriorate and people face subsistence crises. Hunger causes conflict when people feel they have nothing more to lose and so are willing to fight for resources, political power, and cultural respect.

Armed uprisings have accompanied struggles for land, water, and other essential resources perceived to be inadequate overall or unfairly distributed in many developing countries. A key factor triggering "peasant wars" of the 20th century was subsistence desperation, the perception by revolutionaries that they had nothing more to lose and nowhere else to go. In Algeria, China, Mexico, Russia, and Viet Nam subsistence crises and struggle for land by peasant cultivators followed years of deprivation, marginalization, and abuse by dominant political interests. According to Wolf (1969), political education and consciousness-raising have also played a role by affording individuals in oppressed groups an opportunity to ally with urban interests, to question their circumstances, and to perceive possible political openings to overturn unjust regimes. Early 20th-century wars also depended on some cosmopolitanization, plus improved access to outside sources of information and material resources, including arms.

Photo: Martin Lueders

Members of the Krahn tribe living in former Ministry of Education building; Monrovia, Liberia, 1997. The education system collapsed during the civil war that lasted from 1989 to 1995. Samuel Doe, a member of the Krahn tribe, overthrew the existing Liberian government in 1980. Members of the Krahn tribe served as enforcers for his regime, and the ensuing brutality led to widespread rebellion by 1989. These Krahn tribesmen are refugees.

The civil wars of the late 20th century also can be viewed as responses to lingering colonial legacies of racism and political-economic discrimination. Again, trigger causes are often subsistence crises. In Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Sudan, government regimes were finally toppled when they responded inadequately to famine situations they had helped create. Unfortunately, none of these wars immediately improved subsistence conditions; instead, all magnified suffering and food shortages. In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, protracted civil wars followed protracted food crises and human rights abuses. Ordinarily, such wars would have been limited by the need for leaders on both sides to assure a subsistence base for their supporters. Unfortunately, civil wars during the Cold War and post-Cold War era have persisted for decades because political and humanitarian regimes have provided both food and military aid that keep conflicts alive.

Whereas simple models of environmental determinism (such as those articulated by neo-Malthusians) interpret population pressure and environmental resource scarcities to lead inevitably to warfare, illness, starvation, and death, more nuanced models such as those of Wolf (1969) and Homer-Dixon (1991, 1995) suggest that additional forces must be present, such as abuses of human rights and social inequalities, plus cultural values that insist that such goings-on are unjust and intolerable and best addressed by violent action. According to these models, violent struggles arise as much from perceptions of unfairness as from absolute shortages. High population densities in regions of low natural resource availability do not automatically or naturally engender violent conflict.

Homer-Dixon (1991, 1994, 1995, 1995-96) suggests that before World War II, many violent conflicts were the result of relatively simple interstate competitions for key resources, such as land and water. Conflicts over the last 50 years, however, have tended to be what Homer-Dixon calls group-identity conflicts, which arise where newly arrived migrant groups compete with an original resident group for existing resources, especially in emergent multinational states. Opposing groups rarely act alone, but enlist outside political actors, either neighboring states or international forces, to perpetuate the violence. Violence also occurs when a dominant group denies resources and causes scarcities for persons who are economically or culturally marginalized. The marginalized group, in frustration, views those who visibly control greater wealth and power as the source of their destitution and oppression. When their demands for greater political power and control over resources go unmet, they are ripe for violence.

The trigger condition for violent conflict may be natural, such as a prolonged drought that reduces their status from bad to worse, or political, such as a reduction in social welfare programs or an increase in the tax burden on the marginalized group. Homer-Dixon's case histories also suggest that food insecurity usually accompanies the movement from conditions of perceived environmental scarcities to conflict. By devastating land and water resources, demolishing social institutions and markets, and creating shortages of capital and trained manpower, violent conflicts exacerbate conditions of environmental scarcity and competition for resources, creating the potential for additional or unending conflict. Armed violence usually destroys social infrastructure that otherwise might allow political reforms and economic growth as solutions to natural resource scarcities (Homer-Dixon, 1991).

Violent conflict in the late twentieth century has been as much ideologically as economically motivated and usually framed and fought in religious or political terms. In Iran, the successful overthrow of the Shah by Shi'ite Muslims was a protest against economic and civil-political human rights abuses by peasants and poor urban workers who were deprived and hungry. But the revolution was framed as a religious movement that joined the disadvantaged with elements of society that are economically better off advocating a fundamentalist Islamic state over and against corrupting Western and secular influences. In Sudan, coups and countercoups since the 1950s usually have been responses to the government's inability to respond effectively to famine. But conflict lines are drawn racially, ethnically, and religiously, pitting northern Arab Islamic interests against southern Sudanese African, Christian, or animist interests, in a drawn-out struggle for control over land, water, and oil, in addition to the hearts and minds of people.

Famine was an initial trigger of the multidecade Ethiopian civil war that originated in the 1974 overthrow of Haile Selassie's corrupt regime by the Dergue, a socialist junta. But the worst famine followed rather than precipitated the initial violence, as the Dergue leadership forcibly resettled whole ethnic populations and denied them emergency food when they could not produce food for themselves. Civil war along regional and ethnic lines continued, with outside assistance, for another 20 years as Eritrean interests sought independence from Ethiopian rule and Tigrayan forces struggled for leadership within the Ethiopian polity that remained. Hardship and food insecurity were always part of the picture, but ethnic and political factors were probably more influential on the particular form the conflict took.

Photo: Martin Lueders

ECMOG (the West African Peacekeeping Force) soldiers at checkpoint, central Monrovia, Liberia, 1997. The soldiers were the representatives of a multinational armed force which helped restore peace to Liberia after many years.

In Latin American and other African conflicts, underlying structural violence is generally framed more in political-economic terms than in religious terms. Central American revolutionary struggles are for land and social justice. They pit ruling elites, struggling to maintain power, against the indigenous and mestizo poor, who seek environmental resources, fair wages, an end to state terror, and a political regime without racism that protects human rights. Significantly, Latin American elite attitudes of social superiority have proven to be so ingrained that leftist revolutionary leadership has proven itself as incapable as the forces they overthrew of reversing social injustice and improving indigenous and lower-class access to land, social services, and opportunities (MacDonald, 1988; Barraclough, 1989). Central American struggles also pitted Catholic reformers against entrenched ecclesiastical elites, and Protestants against Catholics in religious disputes that fractured communities but always had an underlying political-economic dimension.

Similarly, African and Middle Eastern struggles for control over water and related land resources have led to border wars between Mauritania and Senegal and Israel and Palestine, but these conflicts are anchored in ethnic, religious, and political ideological differences.

Southeast Asian conflicts in Cambodia and Myanmar (formerly Burma) involve a mix of material and ideological factors. Sri Lanka's Tamil-Sinhalese civil war is rooted in a struggle for land but fanned by ethnic-religious conflict. India's regional conflict in Kashmir is a struggle by the local population for religious autonomy as much as for land. Similarly, Indonesia's conflict in East Timor is motivated by the Indonesian government's desire to control not only Timorese material resources, but also the population's society and culture.

Warring states and factions of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia demonstrate seething ethnic and religious conflict underlying struggles for land and political control over resources perceived to be limited. Protracted conflicts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Tajikistan, and the former Yugoslavia illustrate combined cultural-religious and political-economic factors underlying conflict over who will control these territories in the post-Cold War period. As a result, areas that were formerly food self-sufficient or self-reliant are now entirely dependent on food aid.

Some of these conflicts--Armenia-Azerbaijan is a case in point--also involve oil. Control over oil development and revenues was a major factor in the Biafran-Nigerian civil war (1967-70), the Sudanese civil war, and the multiple wars in the Middle East, most recently the Persian Gulf War. Oil explains outside interests in these local conflicts but the wars themselves are framed in ethnic and political terms that usually include desire by local leadership for autonomy to profit from oil revenues.