Poverty causes conflict – generates bitterness and rage and it’s cost free

There are two main mechanisms by which poverty might be claimed to operate as a significant cause of conflict. First, poverty may generate bitterness and rage which, in turn, may cause poor people to protest. Protest may provoke repression and tensions may escalate into open armed conflict, completing the causal mechanisms of a ‘frustrationaggression nexus’ (Gurr, 1970). Second, poverty may cause conflict because violence is simply cost free, especially where there are incentives to engage in conflict. In other words, because the poor have ‘a comparative advantage in violence’ or because the ‘opportunity cost of violence’ is low for the poor, they are likely to make conflict more likely. Both possible mechanisms require further detail, of course, but this stylised version suggests that, in either, extreme poverty may increase the likelihood of conflict. On the one hand, if poverty provokes violent resentment then surely extreme poverty will intensify frustration and tip the balance even more easily towards conflict. On the other hand, if conflict is a function of the poor having a comparative advantage in violence, then surely the very poor, with even fewer opportunities and with even more dire lives than the less poor, will have an even lower opportunity cost of violence: again, this should make conflict more likely still. The two possibilities run together in the argument that ‘borderlands and other spatial pockets typified by weak state presence may indeed provide fertile ground for mobilisation of militant groups’ (CPRC, 2004).12 Yet this logic runs into two important questions. Who are the very poorest? And can one generalise to identify which sub-groups of the poor are more significant causal factors of and participants in conflict? Urban and peri-urban poor people have been important to the origin and prevalence of conflict and social violence in many parts of the world of late – e.g. in Monrovia (Liberia) and Freetown (Sierra Leone), in the pogroms of Surat (India), in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and in Mogadishu (Somalia) and elsewhere. However, probably the majority of people drawn into conflict are still rural poor people.13 The difficulty is, though, that it is just as commonly observed that the poor and disadvantaged do not automatically or usually rise up. If poverty and inequality were powerful causes of conflict, surely conflict would be more frequent? One would expect, in that case, a major conflict involving north eastern Brazil rather than the festering dispersed little conflicts and ‘everyday violence’ faced by the poor.14 China would be in dramatic violent ferment.15 Rather more of sub-Saharan Africa would be at war than actually is. Many parts of the world resemble the conditions identified before the civil war in El Salvador, where sociologists characterised the rural poor as ’fatally resigned to poverty and misery, as venerating both civil and military authority, and with little potential for class consciousness’ (Wood, 2003: 14), and identified ‘attitudes of self-deprecation, fatalism, conformism, and individualism among Salvadoran campesinos’ (ibid: 24). Further, extreme poverty may be characterised by alcoholism, mental health problems, disability, fragmented families, etc., all of which may dampen political involvement.