Conflict Case Studies

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Conflict according to Miriam Webster occurs primarily as a result of a clash in the interests and the opposing action of incompatible goals or divergent ideas. Conflict arises from a variety of causal factors either a section of the population or community feels excluded from the developmental process, competition for political power, clashing of religious, political or social values. Africa has seen its fair share of conflict which is ethnic based rebellion against state, coup de tats, varying religious ideologies etc. but the appropriation and exploitation of natural resources has been fingered as a leading cause for the wars in Africa.
Using the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as a case study, this essay explores how the existence of …show more content…

Additionally, Collier, 2000 found that those countries whose economy largely depends on one agricultural export or natural resource are highly prone to conflict. Le Billion 2006 & Ross 2003 assessed the accessibility of resources both to the government and rebel groups to loot and concluded that the more a resource is easily accessible, then there is likelihood of war. Point resources like oil or kimberlite which are highly controlled are difficult to loot unlike sparse resources like diamonds and gold which are inexpensively harvested and easily smuggled. Lootable resources will be more attractive to armed insurgents for control of the territory. Collier and Hoeffler (1998, 2004) contend that conflict can arise between the government of the day and rebel groups that have the objective of capturing the state or seceding in order to gain control of the natural resources. Humphreys (2005) on the other hand suggests the use of various relevant mechanisms in order to link resources to conflict and the duration of those conflicts like the greed and grievance mechanism, sparse networks mechanism and the weak states mechanism. Le Billion (2001) looks the relationship between conflict and natural resources by emphasising that not only does the presence of …show more content…

Clientelist regimes “can divest themselves of the need of the popular legitimacy by eliminating the need for broad based taxation of a diversified formal economy, financing a repressive security apparatus, rewarding a close circle of supporters” (Le Billion, 2001: 567). When citizens are untaxed by their governments, they do not have power over the government and so they have no incentive to monitor their activities and hold them accountable. Furthermore, when the government is not providing them with basic services like health or education, citizens cannot withdraw their support for the government because they have no institution that they can fall back on. These types of governments do not have any need to create working institutions for its citizens as they do not collect tax from them, so they rather focus on the sectors that pay rent. In the case of the DRC public clinics and pharmacies run out of medicine all the time and health conditions are continually on the decline. Malnutrition is at all-time low and communicable diseases according to (UNICEF, 2001) like malaria, measles, typhoid and other respiratory diseases are killing people on a daily basis because healthcare has plummeted. For Ross (1999), the rentier states adopt policies that favour elite classes over development policies that support

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