Reasons for Wars

Interview

Wars and armed conflicts are very destructive in their nature, yet this is the reality we live in. Rational leaders quite often choose to embark on the path of war believing that gains from it can be higher than its cost. Massimo Morelli, professor of Political Science at Columbia University talks about the five categories of reasons wars are waged and addresses how knowing the cause can help in its resolution.

Interview

Wars and armed conflicts are very destructive in their nature, yet this is the reality we live in. Rational leaders quite often choose to embark on the path of war believing that gains from it can be higher than its cost. Massimo Morelli, professor of Political Science at Columbia University talks about the five categories of reasons wars are waged and addresses how knowing the cause can help in its resolution.

Interviewee: Massimo Morelli, Professor of Political Science and Professor of Economics at Columbia University

Interviewer: Maria Prosviryakova, RIAC

Photo: Professor Massimo Morelli

Wars and armed conflicts usually occur when sides involved are not able to reach a mutually advantageous agreement. In your research on the reasons for wars you indicate 5 reasons for why negotiations or bargaining may fail. Could you elaborate on this?

One of the reasons traditionally discussed in the theory on the rational explanations of war is the lack of symmetry of information. This could be due to many different causes: there could be parties in the contest that are stronger than the opposition felt; the information problem could be about the resolve, which is very difficult to measure; there could be other sources of uncertainty that could make one or both players underestimate the cost, the duration or the ease of the conflict.

The second source is what we typically call “commitment problem”. This is a big set of issues that interact with one another but are conceptually separate. The commitment problem is related to appeasement. In order to appease one potential threatening power you may need to commit to a future stream of transfers, or agreements, or contracts. But that commitment of future concessions is something that - as the Munich agreement shows - is usually impossible to obtain. Therefore, within that category you can have wars that started to prevent another country or a group of countries from becoming stronger in the future or to preempt a potential attack. So, usually this lack of commitment relates to some expectations or concerns about future consequences of the current peace agreement.

The third category, which is sometimes subsumed under the second one, is about indivisibilities. For example, when a war is related to religious differences or desires of one party to obtain indivisible goods, such as having the capital of the new state in Jerusalem. Indivisibilities are the issues that are difficult to replace with transfers or agreements of other sorts. If Palestinians could feel that Israel is committed not to increase the settlements in the West Bank, then the issue of Jerusalem would be less important than it is. So, it is still in the category of commitment.

The other two categories are the theories that look at the benefits and costs of war for the general population and the benefits and costs of war for leaders. Sometimes the leaders have most of the benefits, whereas the population is bearing most of the costs, like in the World War II.

Democracy in some sense helps all of these causes, in particularly this last one. The more democratic the state is, the more likely that the leaders have a similar benefit-cost ratio calculations to make with respect to the citizens.

Additionally, there are other reasons that I mention in my survey, including the difficulties when there are multiple players involved in the conflict, because the bargaining becomes more and more difficult. And lately I have being working on the importance of power shifts which is a more dynamic source of concern.

Photo: alissaeverett.com
Soldiers of the DRC

What should a researcher look at to determine the real reason for an armed conflict?

We can learn from various theoretical and empirical studies that the presence of natural resource endowment – oil and gas in particular, but also other resources for new technologies - brings tensions to those regions that are rich of those materials.

For example, now I am working on the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the north-east of the country –North Kivu, South Kivu and Katango regions – they have a rich combination of natural resources. In the empirical study we distinguish villages with and without natural resources, look if they have multiethnic characteristics, look at their economic activities and what the differences in the family structure between migrants and native population, and so on in order to get a precise description of the composition of the studied regions. Then, comparing the descriptions of these villages, and studying these villages before and after the conflict outbreak (or before and after the discovery of new resources), one can learn the most likely causes of conflicts.

The sense that we got so far is that the most likely causes of conflicts are commitment reasons. The commitment problems are particularly severe in the presence of a new potential resource strength.

So, suppose, you have two regions and one of them all of a sudden discovers the coltan mine, which is 30 times more valuable than it was before. And if that region is particularly populated by the group of people that happens to be not the group that controls the country’s government, then there would most likely be tensions in terms of the potential desire to secede. Because the government’s commitment to treat this region better in the future cannot be easily retained in the contract.

If studying, for example, the Chechnya wars, as a positive scholar (a normative one would immediately jump to conclusions regarding to what one should do), I would try to disentangle the ethnic, religious and ideological dimensions from the institutional perspective in a way that the surplus from natural resources and other economic activities were divided among various groups or classes. Historically that notion has been a very important variable. Thus, in the Northern Ireland a big change came when public employment, including employment in the police, was offered to people of different religions, not just to the Protestants.

Giving a sense of inclusion and integration to people of different ethnical, religious and cultural backgrounds is usually a good thing to do, but the question here is to what extent some of the cleavages that emerged in those conflicts were the cleavages that could have been avoided by some reforms of institutions within Russia.

Can understanding reasons of armed conflicts provide us with the information on the duration of the conflict?

There is a link between what really causes the war and how long you would expect the conflict to last. In the cases, where the conflict is most likely caused by the asymmetries of information and other uncertainties, the conflict shouldn’t be typically expected to last too long, because the regulation of the information should occur relatively quickly. For example, the information about the other party’s strength can quickly become evident during the war.

Whereas commitment problems cannot really be resolved during wars. Commitment can perhaps be obtained with institutional building or giving the contracting power to the third party. But it takes time and usually you cannot do it during the war. So, those conflicts tend to last longer.

Additionally, wars related to indivisible objects or desires, are very difficult to resolve in a short time. For example, the long-lasting Arab-Israeli conflict.

What can we infer about the scale of violence?

The scale of the conflict depends on the relations that the population has with the leaders and the causes for war. For example, the history of Sudan is full of all types of violence - from mass killings to civil wars. The Darfur area was not only rich with natural resources, but also the population of that area had an ethnicity different from the leaders’. Basically, it was an explicit goal of the leaders to move millions of people out of that area in order to obtain control over it. It was not really a question of winning the war in terms of obtaining control over an oil well by itself. The goal was achieved by killing more than 400 000 people and by displacing ¼ of the population across the border.

So, when it is part of the goal for leaders to change the demographics of a region, then the scope can be extremely large.

How does understanding the reason for armed conflict can help us in its resolution?

If one understands which one of the five categories is the most likely reason for war, then one can have a sense about what the interest of the leader could be. And this will, of course, be helpful in negotiation phases and in creating lasting commitments. In some other cases it could be helpful for the third party intervention, which may include peacekeeping forces, mediation or even the third party taking sides in the conflict.

For example, if it is a commitment problem, then one can think about how to regulate the contracting. In the Democratic Republic of Congo different types of mines are controlled by the government, by rebel groups, by Chinese government, by French and American companies and so on. So, we have a combination of international and national interests and the question is: which one of them can actually reduce the commitment problem? In this case the foreign company may provide more commitment to future sharing, because they do not necessarily have the same interest of the conquest that a national group might have. Foreign companies only have the interest in profits. So, once you set up a sharing rule or some kind of a contract with a foreign company, it could be easier to commit to this contract than to the one directly controlled by the government or a rebel group. These are the implications that one could derive from understanding the cause for the conflict.

So, if we state rational reasons for war as the advancement of the interest of the sides involved, what could be the irrational reasons for war?

Historically, people focused a lot on religion. But there are doubts about this being the main reason for wars, even such as the Thirty Years' War or the Crusades. It is clear that the religious motivation was part of the political situation of that time. But if one looks at the details about where exactly the conflict erupted - for example, Europe, during the period of the Crusades – then you can actually see that the map of conflicts is the one that encompassed a lot of material interests. One caveat is that the religion presents a sort of invisibility that therefore creates an additional potential source of war, but it is not difficult to incorporate it into the analysis as long as you can categorize it within one of the five categories.

I would rather try to include any irrational reasons into one of the five categories, than created the sixth category.

Even if you are factoring the potential for crazy leaders of the so called rogue states – that can enter the category of agency problems. You can say that having a leader with a strange utility function with respect to the rest of the people is one of the many potential cases in which the benefit-cost calculation for the leader is different from the benefit-cost calculation of the population. So, this is embedded in one of the five categories.

Professor Morelli, thank you so much for the interview.