Rethinking the Greed–Grievance Nexus: Property Rights and the Political Economy of War in Sri Lanka
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343305050691 |
| Author | Benedikt Korf |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
201
How Greed Produces Grievances
Considering protracted, low-intensity, and
largely intrastate wars in the post-Cold War
period, Kaldor (1999) contrasts ‘new’ civil
wars to ‘old’ ones. Old civil wars are political
and fought over collectively articulated noble
causes of grievances, with a broad popular
support and controlled violence. The new
civil wars seem to be private looting without
popular support, where ‘greedy’ roving and
stationary bandits compete for who can best
tax and exploit a desperate population.
While the literature on the political economy
of war is useful for detecting vested interests
of warlords and combatants, there has been
a tendency to understand greed and griev-
ance in antagonistic terms of ‘either–or’,
while the two may, in fact, be causally linked.
© 2005 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 42, no. 2, 2005, pp. 201–217
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343305050691
Rethinking the Greed–Grievance Nexus: Property
Rights and the Political Economy of War in
Sri Lanka*
BENEDIKT KORF
Department of Agricultural Economics and Social Sciences,
Humboldt-University of Berlin
The literature on civil wars tends to understand greed and grievances in antagonistic terms of ‘either–or’.
This article suggests that in the political economy of conflict, greed and grievances may be causally linked
and reinforce each other: war (or shadow) economies of combatants and the survival economies of civil-
ians are intertwined. Gains made by conflict entrepreneurs and war profiteers feed grievances about
identity, economic inequality, and lack of political power. Once civil war is onset (for whatever reason),
the political economy of war produces a self-sustaining logic of clientelism along the lines of perceived
‘friends’ and ‘foes’. These dividing lines get reinforced in everyday political networks of survival. This
everyday clientelism, in turn, nourishes grievance discourses along the same lines. These grievances con-
tribute to heighten the motivation for people to fight for ‘justice’. In this way, greed produces grievances,
which in turn stabilize the war economy and offer economic opportunities for greedy entrepreneurs of
violence. Case studies from Sri Lanka on local resource conflicts in the context of civil war support this
proposition. They indicate that because of the civil war and the breakdown of state and civic institutions,
ethnicity becomes a mechanism for civilian actors to access resources available largely through arbitrary
power. Civilians thus become part of the ‘game’. In effect, this leads to ‘ethnicized entitlements’, where
the ethnic groups are asymmetrically endowed with bargaining power to access resources, depending
upon their affiliation with militant actors and their respective initial power resources. These ethnicized
entitlements satisfy greed for some war winners and feed grievances among those at the losing end.
* I would like to thank Indra de Soysa, Stefanie Engel,
Konrad Hagedorn, Ulrike Joras, Norbert Ropers, Christine
Schenk, Claudia Trentmann, and three anonymous review-
ers as well as Nils Petter Gleditsch for their valuable
comments and suggestions. The contributions of the
following persons to field research in Sri Lanka are grate-
fully acknowledged: Rathnayake M. Abeyrathne, K.
Devarajah, D. Dharmarajah, Tobias Flämig, Eng. Jassim,
M. Rhiyas, Christine Schenk, and Monika Ziebell.
Research for this article has been made possible through
funding from GTZ, BMZ, Humboldt-University of
Berlin, ZEF, and the Robert-Bosch-Foundation. Naturally,
only the author bears full responsibility for any errors.
Correspondence: pfudili@gmx.de.
05 korf (ds) 1/2/05 1:49 pm Page 201
This article suggests that in the political
economy of conflict, greed and grievances
reinforce each other: war (or shadow)
economies of combatants and the survival
economies of civilians are intertwined
(Collinson, 2003; Goodhand, 2003; Keen,
2000; Korf, 2003, 2004). Gains made by
conflict entrepreneurs and war profiteers
feed grievances about identity, economic
inequality, and lack of political power. Once
civil war is onset (for whatever reason), the
political economy of war produces a self-
sustaining logic of clientelism along the lines
of perceived ‘friends’ and ‘foes’. These
dividing lines get reinforced in everyday
political networks of survival. This everyday
clientelism, in turn, nourishes grievance dis-
courses along the same lines. These griev-
ances contribute to heighten the motivation
for people to fight for ‘justice’. In this way,
greed produces grievances, which in turn sta-
bilize the war economy and offer economic
opportunities for greedy entrepreneurs of
violence.
Case studies from Sri Lanka presented in
this article support this proposition. They
indicate that because of the civil war and the
breakdown of state and civic institutions,
ethnicity becomes a mechanism for civilian
actors to access resources available largely
through arbitrary power. Civilians thus
become part of the game. In effect, this leads
to ‘ethnicized entitlements’, where the ethnic
groups are asymmetrically endowed with
bargaining power to access resources,
depending upon their affiliation with
militant actors and their respective initial
power resources.
Property rights are the arena where com-
batants and civilians negotiate the rules of
the game. In the Sri Lankan case, what deter-
mines the alliances and institutions of
warfare is not the maximum capacity to reap
profits – as the original greed hypothesis may
imply – but the drive to maximize political
control. Ethnicized entitlements are the
result of institutional mechanisms in which
greed and grievance are linked in a struggle
over political control: those who gain
political control then also enrich themselves
economically and share the benefits within
their own ethnic realms.1These institutional
mechanisms deepen grievances among civil-
ians, triggering emotional upheaval that
allows warlords to stabilize their political
control and to continue warfare.
The article proceeds as follows: the next
section reviews the greed–grievance debates
and more recent studies on the duration of
war. I will argue that it is essential to under-
stand the micro-level mechanisms in the
political economy of war. Following this, the
article introduces the case study method and
describes the empirical studies from the war
zones in Sri Lanka, first giving a historical
account of land colonization and related
conflicts and then assessing three case studies
of local resource conflicts, linking them to
the broader greed–grievance nexus. In the
conclusion, I will briefly discuss the impli-
cations of clientelism in warfare and the
potential and actual negative effects of the
ethnicization of entitlements on the peace
process in Sri Lanka.
On the Political Economy of Civil
War
The academic debate on the causes of civil
wars has been fruitfully stimulated by the so-
called greed versus grievance debate, which
has produced a dichotomy of arguments to
explain the incidence of rebellion and civil
warfare (Berdal & Malone, 2000; Ballentine
& Sherman, 2003). On the one hand, while
some scholars emphasize grievance factors
and argue that civil wars are caused by
inequality, political oppression, and conflicts
over scarce resources that escalate into
violence (e.g. Azar, 1990; Gurr, 1993;
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 42 / number 2 / march 2005
202
1I am thankful to one of the referees for helping me clarify
this aspect of the empirical studies.
05 korf (ds) 1/2/05 1:49 pm Page 202
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