Social Science Research Council

The origins of conflict have earned increasing attention from social science scholars over the last dozen years or so, owing to the end of the Cold War, the spectacle of genocide, state collapse, and massive refugee crises, and confusion in the international community about how to respond. Many approaches to the questions of causes are active and much progress has been made empirically-notably, a considerable amount of that progress has resulted from economic and statistical analyses.

A logical next step in this and intersecting approaches is to consider, or revisit, larger scale structural influences. In particular, the changes in the global economy over the last two decades appear to be ripe for scrutiny with respect to local effects that may yield or reinforce conditions conducive to conflict. For example, it is widely acknowledged that structural adjustment and similar policies that emphasize a reduction of state bureaucracies to disencumber economic markets have in many places reduced the size of states, including social services such as education and the capacity of states to cope with emerging causes of social unrest, warlordism, and organized violence. Rapid changes in economic rules might also have deleterious effects, for example, state-sponsored reforms in land-tenure systems that disenfranchise large numbers of pastoralists and small farmers, deplete resources necessary for sustainable agrarian livelihoods, and undermine traditional social authority. These effects may open up social and economic systems to predatory strategies of state officials and their cronies, clan rivals, warlords and gangs from abroad, etc., and spiral into serious conflict. When coupled with other, similar influences-political globalization, for example, which may further erode state sovereignty-the effects for human security may be quite significant.

A different interpretation of globalization's effects holds that trade in particular and economic growth generally increase well being, stability, interconnectedness, and accountability, reducing the risks of armed conflict. With the possible exception of trade, however, these claims-like the criticisms of global economic policies-have yet to undergo sufficient, comprehensive empirical scrutiny.

The Social Science Research Council undertook two sets of inquiries to explore the relationships between globalization and conflict.

First, we convened a Conference on the Economic Analysis of Conflict to explore these underspecified relationships empirically, and to integrate findings into theories of conflict and of international relations.

Second, we funded empirical research in the "conflict zones" by local scholars. The first set of commissioned research projects focused on the relationships between globalization, natural resources and conflict. The second year took up issues of globalization, conflict, and state capacities to control violence.