Peace Science: Theory and Cases: Volume 11

Partha Gangopadhyay and Manas Chatterji have produced an outstanding book on Peace Science that will help further the establishment of this field as one with a solid academic base and with many practical applications in the world of policy. The field combines traditional international relations theory with peace and defense economics and national and global security studies in order to study peace. Peace science has made important contributions in recent years, many of which are treated in this book. Of course, more must and will be done to provide a framework to prevent war and promote peace, building on the earlier contributions, including this book.

By so doing the current research manuscript will offer a series of new insights into the problems and prospects of war, peace and conflicts. In order to shed new lights on the pressing issues related to peace, we will approach the problem and prospects of war and peace from new angles and thereby evade the dominant tradition, methodology and models within which the existing work had proceeded so far. Let us have a look at the central issues that our work will examine in great detail.

The fragmentation can either lead to an all-out civil war as in Sri Lanka or a frozen conflict as in Georgia. One of the main characteristics of fragmentation is the control of group members by their respective leaders. The chapter applies standard models of non-cooperative game theory to explain the endogenous fragmentation, which seeks to model the equilibrium formation of rival groups. Citizens become members of these rival groups and some sort of clientelism develops in which political leaders control their respective fragments of citizens. Once the divisions are created, the inter-group rivalry can trigger violent conflicts that may seriously damage the social fabric of a nation and threaten the prospect of peace for the people for a very long time. In other words, our main goal in this chapter is to understand the formation of the patron–client relationship or what is called clientelisation.

We can divide the humanity into 5,000 ethnic groups who reside in 160 distinct states in the world. On an average this implies that only one randomly picked state out of every 10 states is ethnically homogenous. In other words the borders between different ethnic groups do not accord with national borders. We, hence, live in a melting pot of ethnicity and most countries are ethnically heterogeneous. In an alternative fashion, we can make a statement about our ethnic diversity by making a simple observation that there are over 600 living language groups in 184 states in the world. There is thus a reason to believe that the human race confronts a serious and endemic ethnic diversity, which is also increasingly accompanied with unprecedented ethnic rivalry, competition, conflicts, violent clashes and all-out wars. Our chapter provides a comprehensive investigation into the economic causes and consequences of ethnic heterogeneity in our modern world. In order to understand the basic economics of ethnic diversity, we will focus our attention to what is commonly known as ‘global firms’ who employ people from diverse ethnic backgrounds. The consequences will be examined in the context of modern societies where the global firms play an important economic role.

Violent conflicts and peace are the flip sides of the same coin of our societies. In many societies, sometimes conflicts of violent nature paralyse our collective senses, which result in an appalling destruction of economic and social assets and abysmal loss of human lives. In similar societies, a peaceful resolution of serious conflicts takes place. Even many societies seem to traverse from conflicts to peace and to costly conflicts again. The goal of this chapter is to examine the foundation of cyclical fluctuations in the level of conflicts. One can ponder that a low level of conflict is a peaceful composure, while a high-level conflict represents a lack of peace. However, admittedly, it is impossible to pin down a level of conflict as a threshold between peace and violent conflicts. There is no science that we are to apply to define this threshold, or boundary, and we will rather depend on the common sense. Our simple definition of peace is somewhat tautological: peace is an absence of an unacceptable level of violent conflicts. What is an acceptable level of conflict in a society? It is important to note that it is virtually impossible to banish violence and conflicts from a society – especially at its current stage. We will thus externally impose a cut-off point for conflicts below which a society is taken as peaceful and beyond which the society descends into a conflictual crisis. Our intention is to explore whether the system has its own internal dynamics to fluctuate between peace and violent conflicts.

In recent years, economics has turned its serious attention to the explaining of conflicts and a peaceful resolution of conflicts. Some interesting and powerful microeconomic models have been developed, yet it seems there are gaps that motivate the current research. As our discussion shows below, the existing models are robust in explaining an equilibrium defence spending of a nation in a general equilibrium setting. Yet, there is little that we know about the regional distribution of defence spending that is likely to give rise to serious rent-seeking activities, politicking and consequent economic consequences in terms of regional disparity and inequality. In this work, we posit that defence spending is like a local public good that impacts on a regional, or local, economy. To be more specific, our model suggests that defence spending offers public infrastructure to a regional economy that, in turn, impinges on the costs of production of local firms, which thereby influence the competitive positioning of the regional economy in the national, or global, market. The goal of the work is to explore how the politics of allocation of defence spending can create an equilibrium regional inequality within a nation, which may in turn drive internal conflicts. Since an allocation of defence spending impacts on regional inequality, regional inequality becomes endogenous in our model. We establish an equilibrium inequality in our model that depends on the optimal allocation of defence spending across regions, which is driven by the electoral motive of an incumbent government.

The most powerful observation of Keynes is the potential role of prisoners' dilemma setting the forces for an over-arming by individual nations since each individual decision is correctly based on individual rationality, which unfortunately brings the collective disaster of an excessively armed world. The over-arming only hurts us by reducing our economic well-being, which clears the way for a violent conflict. How do we get out of this collective mess? Keynes suggested the role of negotiation, arbitration and coalition formation and application of moral ethics and penalty mechanism to break the tyranny of the prisoners' dilemma – a strategic concept unknown to Keynes.

The fundamental idea that we seek to establish in this chapter is that the establishment of regional or local, peace calls forth global peace. In other words, our argument is that local and regional conflicts are partly driven by global factors, especially what is commonly known as international tension. In order to achieve meaningful and sustained peace, there is a reason to believe that it is mandatory to manage and contain international tensions. The main thesis of this chapter is to explain or posit, conflicts as a product of continuing international chasms, splits and differences of political and social ideologies in our modern world. Thus, we argue that conflicts are, to some extent, driven by international tension or global, ideological and geo-political factors. Notwithstanding the global influence, local factors – such as income inequality, income growth or lack of it, political institutions – can and do exacerbate conflicts and a peaceful resolution of conflicts becomes a difficult phenomenon.

In many societies, conflicts of violent nature regularly spring up that usually cause a destruction of economic and social assets and needless loss of human lives. Violent conflicts and food entitlements seem to bear mutual feedbacks: first and foremost, as violent conflicts result in destruction of economic assets, conflicts usually tell upon the cultivation of foods, procurement and storage of foods and also the distribution and marketing of foods. The disruption in the agrarian sector can lead to serious decline in food availability and consequent famines, which can exacerbate and fuel further conflicts. On the other hand, the distribution and availability of foods can trigger violent conflicts in backward societies as a means to acquire and retain food entitlements, which can in turn jeopardise the agrarian equilibrium. Thus, the relationship between food entitlements and conflicts are a double-edged sword that can lend precarious instability to a backward society. During the last five decades, governments in developing nations have kept a close vigil on their agrarian sector, yet there is a clear indication in the global economy that warns of a looming food crisis, especially in the poorer regions of our globe. Food crises can seriously challenge global peace. Conflicts and hunger are hence complex phenomena. This chapter provides a comprehensive, and possibly the first, study of the economics of food entitlements and potential threats of conflicts in the current conjuncture.

The main thesis of the chapter is to introduce a new idea to the field of peace negotiations, which will require the development of a new model of negotiations to enforce peace. The existing models of peace negotiations highlight the existence of a positive peace dividend to parties involved in conflicts and peace negotiation. They, hence, usually highlight a gradual and dynamic adjustment, or movement, away from a conflict-ridden outcome towards a peaceful outcome that offers a positive peace dividend to all relevant stakeholders. In comparison with the status quo, peace brings additional economic returns and peace therefore offers a win–win situation. Despite the fact that a win–win situation does not ensure the enforcement of peace, as agents can easily get locked into what is commonly known as the prisoners' dilemma – yet the possibility of Pareto improvement makes negotiations for peace somewhat artificial. At least in the short run all agents involved in active conflicts are apprehensive of peace as they expect immediate (expected) returns from making peace can outweigh the expected returns from conflicts. An important work that sidesteps the win–win situation of peace dividends is by Isard and Azis (1999) who introduced the possibility of an immediate loss of economic returns from the peace process in their conflict management procedure (CMP). However, in the existing work on CMP, the long-run returns from peace outweigh that from conflicts. One therefore presumes that peace brings economic benefits to all. The existing CMPs therefore assume away any possibility of lower economic returns from peace. There are some important models in which peace negotiations are also modelled as a zero-sum game in which the gain of a party represents a loss to others, which is known as win–lose negotiations. In this work we introduce the possibility of bargaining and negotiations against the backdrop of potential immediate losses while peace is favoured simply for its intrinsic value and not for pecuniary returns. In the real world, there is evidence to believe that agents involved in conflicts are painfully aware of two things: first, the decision-making agents who choose between conflicts vis-à-vis peace are the leaders who get rarely affected by economic returns from conflicts or peace. It is usually the foot soldiers who bear the brunt of costly conflicts and can benefit from peace. Secondly, most people value peace for the sake of it as peace has an intrinsic value that ensures the protection of rights and their lives and protection from violence. Thus, peace is a collective good that provides little extra economic returns to actual decision-makers who choose between courses of conflicts or peace.

Our work provides a comprehensive examination of two major issues concerning the fragmentation of state and possible state failure, which will be one of the major deterrence for achieving peace in our world. There are two important sources of conflicts – one is for the rural society and the other is relevant for the urban society. In the rural set-up, we argue that the fragmentation of markets leads to clientelism between rich farmers and their subjugated clients, small farmers. We show this as an equilibrium phenomenon in which a handful of rich and powerful players, or farmers, can effectively control millions of small farmers, which can easily challenge the authority and the mandate and the jurisdiction of a nation state. This element of clientelisation can effectively fragment the state in a developing nation.