Keen, David. "Greed and grievance in civil war". International Affairs, Vol.88, No.4 (2012): 757–777.

Keen, David. "Greed and grievance in civil war". International Affairs, Vol.88, No.4 (2012): 757–777.

• The argument about whether 'greed' or 'grievance' is the primary motivator in civil war is generally conducted between Dr. Frances Steward, arguing that inequality between groups is the primary cause of war, and Dr. Paul Collier, contending that economic factors or the opportunity for lucrative conflict is the main cause of civil war (757).
• Dr. Collier's work does have a number of important contributions in understanding civil war, particularly his focus on financing as being crucial to civil wars, which has led to a number of initiatives to purge commodities markets linked to rebel groups, and increased banking transparency (759).
• The author argues that, rather than being factual correct, Dr. Collier's work is massively popular because it provides simple and understandable answers to extremely complex questions -- although it does this by excluding key information -- and because its answers are politically convenient because they delegitimize the political concerns raised by rebel groups (757, 765, 768, 769).
• One of the major faults in Dr. Collier's explanations is that he only considers the effects of 'vertical inequality' between individuals or households, not the more substantial 'horizontal inequalities' between ethnic, cultural, or regional groups, which do predict the presence of civil wars (760).
• Critically, the work of Dr. Steward and others shows that the existence of these inequalities does not automatically cause civil war, but instead provides the potential for civil war. Civil wars occur at the combination of political and economic inequality, as peace can be sustained in cases of only one form of inequality (761).
• The foundations of Dr. Collier's research rest on his proxy variables for greed and grievance, but these divisions are questionable, and many 'greed' variables could also demonstrate the effect of grievances. For example, Dr. Collier treats access to education as a 'greed' motivator, whereas case studies show that unequal access to education is a major grievance in many conflicts (761).
• Considering that many of his claims are obviously wrong, like a claim that big countries are automatically more secure, Dr. Collier is overzealous in his policy recommendations. His recommendations are broad and widely read, ignoring local specific circumstances (762-763).
• The author believes that Dr. Collier's work has been so popular because of its numerous claims of 'brand new' research breakthroughs, which largely ignore disagreement within the field. This is within a largely self-referential trend in Dr. Collier's research, with larger scholarship rarely engaged with (763, 765).
• "Collier went so far as to say there was no point in asking rebels why they rebelled, since they would always say it was because of grievances. [...] in the course of their more recent emphasis on ‘feasibility’ they actually went further, holding motivation (of any kind) to be irrelevant to any useful understanding. Since rebels are not deemed worth speaking to and grievances are considered largely irrelevant to understanding conflict, the answers to questions about that conflict seem now to lie not in the wisdom of Darfur, for example, but in the wisdom of Oxford and the sophistication of Washington"(766).
• The most dangerous implication of Dr. Collier's research comes in the form of his economic rationalism regarding opportunities for civil war. Whereas other theories would call on governments to redress grievances, his stress on greed as a motivator means that the only solution is making insurgency more difficult. This essentially recommends that successful counterinsurgency, not political settlement, is the way to peace (769).
• Moreover, the solutions proposed by Dr. Collier and those influenced by him complete ignore grievances to the point of not addressing serious wrongs. Focusing on economic growth allows government or rebels who have committed atrocities to get away with that behavior by not providing restitution (772).
• "Policies of liberalization that were pushed by the international financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s actually seem to have fuelled conflict in a number of ways: by encouraging devaluation and inflation; by creating private oligopolies; by reducing state services; by encouraging corruption when state salaries were eroded" (771).