The Importance Of Social Conflict

Social conflict is as old as human history (Ho-Won Jeong, 2008), it’s dynamics, process and solution has been a subject of inquiry among early thinkers—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau etc. Concived by Coser (1968) as “struggle over values or claims to status, power, and scarce resources, in which the aim of the conflicting parties are not only to gain the desired values, but also to neutralize, injure, or eliminate their rivals” (cited in Onyia 2005, p. 17). Efforts at understanding causes and dynamics of social conflict have yielded various typologies. While some of which—corelate of war (COW)—focused on inter-state related wars, thus defined conflict as “involving at least one member of intersate system on each side of the war, resulting

Leading this pack is Paul Collier, a mainstream economist. In an inquiry designed to explain ‘why civil wars’ occur in relation to determinant economic variables, Collier and Hoeffler (1996) concluded that ‘income per capita, natural resource endowment, inequality, and ethno-linguistic fragmentation’ are the major risk factors to civil war occurrence (cited in Cramer, 2003, p. 399). They concluded that, rather than cause civil wars, (greater) inequality “significantly reduces the risk and duration of war” (se Cramer, 2003, pp. 399). From their regression analysis which showed an inverse relationship between inequality and conflict, they argue that, a high degree of inequality in a state is indicative of the existence of dominant elite who for the sake of their attachment to the status quo, and desire to protect it, would permit the government to temporarily tax them in other to raise funds to execute war. Knowing this fact would deter potential rebels in that, they [potential rebels] would figure out that the government would have greater capacity to quell any aggression from any quarter. Thus, inequality is not good for conflict (Cramer 2003). Applying the same framework in his later study, Collier (2000a) concluded that, greed not grievance is at the root of civil wars. According to him, “it is the feasibility of predation which determines the risk of conflict. … rebellion is motivated by greed, so that it occurs when rebels can do well out of war” Collier 2000a, cited in Goodhand 2001,