International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   One of the recurrent themes in the academic as well as popular literature on war is the claim that the prospect of an economic gain motivates small groups of potential profiteers to unleash political violence. “All wars are fought for money” is the anti-war slogan attributed to Socrates, and George Orwell (1998 :75) wrote in a 1937 book review that “[War] against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.” Recent research on the origins of civil wars has recently reinvigorated the hypothesis that economic incentives are a root cause of armed conflict and that rebel leaders are nothing other than profit-seeking quasi-criminals (cf. Collier and Hoeffler 2004 ). To illustrate this conjecture, Collier (2007 :21) uses the claim attributed to Congolese rebel leader Laurent Kabila that “all you needed was $10,000 and a satellite phone” to instigate a successful military campaign. While the future president of the resource-rich country would use the money to hire a small army, Kabila used the phone to conclude contracts with mining companies: “By the time he reached Kinshasa he reportedly had arranged $500 million worth of deals” ( Collier 2007 :21). The thesis that war redistributes income within as well as between societies, and that this creates a destructive, bellicose incentive, has a distinguished ... log in or subscribe to read full text