Violence, Identity and Poverty
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343307084920 |
| Date | 01 January 2008 |
| Published date | 01 January 2008 |
| Author | Amartya Sen |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
5
Violence is omnipresent in the world around
us. On the root causes of contemporary
global violence, theories abound – as theories
are prone to. However, two particular lines of
theorizing have come to receive much more
attention than most others: one approach
concentrates on the culture of societies, and
the other on the political economy of poverty
and inequality. Each approach has some
plausibility, at least in some forms, and yet
both are, I would argue, ultimately inad-
equate and in need of supplementation.
Indeed, neither works on its own, and we
need to see the two sets of influences
together, in an integrated way.
I begin with the cultural approach – or
more accurately, cultural approaches. Different
cultural theories have something in common –
they tend to look at conflicts and violence as
they relate to modes of living as well as religious
beliefs and social customs. That line of reason-
ing can lead to many different theories, some
less sophisticated than others. It is perhaps
remarkable that the particular cultural theory
that has become the most popular in the world
today is perhaps also the crudest. This is the
approach of seeing global violence as the result
of something that is called ‘the clash of civ-
ilizations’. The approach defines some postu-
lated entities that are called ‘civilizations’ in
primarily religious terms, and it goes on
to contrast what are respectively called
‘the Islamic world’, ‘the Judeo-Christian’ or
‘the Western world’, ‘the Buddhist world’, ‘the
Hindu world’ and so on. Divisions among
© 2008 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 45, no. 1, 2008, pp. 5–15
Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore) http://jpr.sagepub.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343307084920
Violence, Identity and Poverty*
AMARTYA SEN
Harvard University
The article discusses two main approaches to explaining violence in contemporary global society.
Theories based on the culture of societies, among which the theory of the clash of civilizations is the
most influential, attempt to explain violence by referring to antagonisms between collective identities.
Theories of the political economy of power and inequality seek the sole cause of violence in economic
factors. While each approach has some plausibility, both are inadequate on their own. When applied as
sufficient explanations, they may distort our understanding in a way that undermines the possibility for
both alleviating poverty and reducing conflict. The causal mechanisms are more complex than economic
reductionism is capable of accounting for. Poverty and inequality are importantly linked to violence,
but must be seen together with divisions between factors such as nationality, culture and religion. In
turn, these factors must not be based on a false image of solitary identities and unavoidable antagonisms
between cultural groups. The article suggests that the coupling between cultural identities and poverty
increases the significance of inequality and may contribute to violence. Approaches to explaining violence
should avoid isolationist programmes that explain violence solely in terms of social inequality and depriv-
ation or in terms of identity and cultural factors.
* Spring Lecture at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Oslo,
21 May 2007. Parts of the argument presented here draw
on my Nadine Gordimer Lecture given in Johannesburg
and Cape Town, South Africa, in April 2007, and which
will be published in The Little Magazine (Delhi).
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