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World Bank Urges More Efforts to Prevent Civil Wars

(Bank study says civil conflicts affect people around world) (1780)
The international community should do more to prevent civil wars in
poor countries, the World Bank says.
In a May 14 press release announcing a new study of such conflicts,
the Bank said civil wars affect people around the world. The costs of
such wars include increased drug trafficking, infectious disease, and
terrorism, plus neighboring countries experience the costs of dealing
with refugees and stalled investment and economic growth, the release
said.
Civil wars are caused more by entrenched poverty and heavy dependence
on natural resources exports than on ethnic tensions or old political
feuds, according to the Bank.
The report urges a three-step preventive approach to war: more and
better targeted aid for countries at risk, better international
governance of natural resources, and better-timed post-conflict aid.
Poor countries also can "break this conflict trap by putting in place
the policies and institutions necessary for sustained growth," said
Paul Collier, lead author of the report.
The study proposes that rich countries shut rebel organizations out of
international markets, as is being done in the diamond market, and
increase the transparency of natural resources revenues.
It adds that military and aid commitments should last long enough for
development to begin, typically four to five years.
Since 1995 the Bank has supported reconstruction efforts in Bosnia,
Kosovo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East
Timor and Afghanistan, and its work has increasingly focused on
conflict prevention, the release said.
Following is the text of the World Bank press release:
(begin text)
[The World Bank
May 14, 2003]
WORLD BANK URGES INTERNATIONAL ACTION TO PREVENT CIVIL WARS
New Study Shows Links Between Conflict, Failed Development, and
international problems of disease, drugs and terrorism
PARIS, May 14, 2003 -- International action to prevent civil wars in
poor countries could avert untold suffering, spur poverty reduction,
and help to protect people around the world from negative spill-over
effects, including drug-trafficking, disease, and terrorism, says a
new World Bank study.
Contrary to popular opinion, ethnic tensions and ancient political
feuds are rarely the primary cause of civil wars, says the new study.
Instead economic forces such as entrenched poverty and heavy
dependence on natural resource exports are usually to blame.
Because of this, the study concludes that the international community
has both compelling reasons and the means to prevent such conflicts.
It urges three sets of actions to prevent civil wars: more and
better-targeted aid for countries at risk, increased transparency of
the revenue derived from natural resources, and better timed
post-conflict peacekeeping and aid.
"Every time a civil war breaks out some historian traces its origin to
the 14th century and some anthropologist expounds on its ethnic
roots," says Paul Collier, the lead author of the report, Breaking the
Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy. "Some countries are
more prone to civil war than others but distant history and ethnic
tensions are rarely the best explanations. Instead look at a nation's
recent past and, most important, its economic conditions."
Since 1995 the Bank has supported reconstruction in Bosnia, Rwanda,
Kosovo, Sierra Leone, other Balkan states, East Timor, the Democratic
Republic of Congo and Afghanistan. In response to these and other
conflicts, international attention and the Bank's own work have
focused increasingly on conflict prevention.
The new World Bank study analyzed 52 major civil wars that occurred
between 1960 and 1999. The typical conflict lasted about seven years
and left a legacy of persistent poverty and disease. The study found
that the negative effects of these wars extended far beyond the actual
fighting, to neighboring countries and to even to distant, high-income
countries.
Perhaps surprisingly, neither ethnic and religious diversity nor
income inequality increased the likelihood that a country would fall
into civil war. For the average country in the study, the risk of
civil war during any five-year period was about 6 percent. But the
risk was alarmingly higher if the economy was poor, economically
declining, and dependent on natural resource exports. For a country
like the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) in the late
1990s, with deep poverty, a collapsing economy, and huge mineral
exploitation, the risk of civil war was nearly 80 per cent.
"Failure to develop greatly increases the chance that a country will
be caught in a civil war, and such conflicts in turn destroy the
foundations for development," says Collier. "Countries can break this
conflict trap by putting in place the policies and institutions
necessary for sustained growth. Our new understanding of the causes
and consequences of civil wars provides a compelling basis for
international action."
Collier is currently senior advisor to the World Bank's vice president
for Sub-Saharan Africa and Director of the Centre for the Study of
African Economies at the University of Oxford. He undertook the study
during a just-concluded stint as director of the Bank's research
department.
The study challenges a common assumption that civil war combatants
should be left to fight it out among themselves. "This attitude is not
just heartless, it is foolish," Collier says. To start with, most of
the suffering caused by civil war -- death, injury, disease,
dislocation and loss of possessions -- is experienced by
non-combatants who have little say about whether the war should begin
or how long it should last.
Moreover, the domestic costs of civil war continue long after the
fighting ends. Countries that suffer a civil war often get locked into
persistently high levels of military expenditure, capital flight,
infectious disease, low growth and entrenched poverty. A country that
has recently emerged from war is at especially high risk of falling
into conflict again.
Local Wars, Global Casualties
But the negative effects do not stop at the border: neighboring
countries suffer immediate and long term effects, including the costs
of providing for refugees, increased infectious disease (such as
malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis), and higher military expenditure.
Throughout the region, investment dries up and economic growth
declines, heightening the risk that neighboring countries will
themselves fall into civil war.
Globally, three major social evils are in large part the by-product of
civil wars: hard drugs, HIV and international terrorism. For example,
about 95 percent of the global production of illegal narcotics is
located in civil war countries. Epidemiological research suggests that
the initial spread of HIV was closely associated with the 1979 civil
war in Uganda, and the large number of rapes along the border with
Tanzania. Finally, international terrorists need areas outside of
government control for large-scale training camps, such as those that
Al Queda ran in Afghanistan.
"The world is too small and tightly networked for the damages of
conflict to be contained within the country at war," says Nicholas
Stern, World Bank Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for
Development Economics. "The study shows that even if we are not
prepared to act from a sense of common decency, self-interest dictates
that the international community must work together to reduce the
number and length of these tragic and deeply destructive conflicts."
An Agenda for Action
Fortunately, there is a growing record of successes in such collective
action. For example, new international regulations in the diamond
trade have cut financing for rebel groups dependent on "blood
diamonds," helping to end rebellions in Angola and Sierra Leone. Rich
countries' agreement to make bribery of developing country officials a
crime has reduced the corruption that is often a contributing factor
in the onset of conflict. And an international ban on landmines
instituted in 1997 has already halved the number of causalities.
"There is a growing recognition that there can be no peace without
development and no development without peace," says Ian Bannon, head
of the Bank's Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit. "Developing
countries, donors, international organizations, NGOs and private firms
have a common interest in ending civil wars and an untapped potential
to build peace."
The study proposes a three-part agenda for action that incorporates a
variety of initiatives already underway:
-- More and better aid. Increased aid and changes in allocation and
administration could make such assistance more effective in preventing
conflict and in supporting countries recently emerged from war. These
changes include targeting aid to the poorest countries, which are most
at risk of civil war. In extremely poor countries with very weak
governance, assistance should focus on a few simple reforms, such as
improving elementary education or maternal health, in order to build
the constituency for further reforms. The World Bank's most
concessionary assistance is already targeted in this manner and a
growing number of bilateral aid programs are adopting similar
allocation rules.
-- Improved international governance of natural resources. Rich
endowments of diamonds, timber, oil, gold and other natural resources
are often associated with conflict, poor governance and economic
decline, in part because they provide a tempting source of revenue for
would-be rebels. The study proposes a series of measures to address
this problem: shutting rebel organizations out of international
markets, as is being done with diamonds; reducing poor countries'
exposure to commodity price shocks through insurance mechanisms; and
increasing the transparency of natural resource revenues, for example
by establishing a common format for reporting payments and supporting
public scrutiny of how these revenues are spent.
-- Coordinating Reductions in Military Spending and Sequencing
Military Interventions with Aid and Reform: Civil wars often lead to
regional arms races which undermine development and increase the risk
of war. One solution is for regional political organizations to
negotiate coordinated cuts in arms spending, and for international
financial institutions to monitor compliance. When the international
community intervenes militarily to stop a war, the military and aid
commitments should last long enough for development take hold. This
typically takes four to five years, but peace keeping forces and aid
are often sharply reduced after just two years, increasing the risk of
resumed hostilities.
The study concludes that if these three sets of measures were put into
place then civil wars would be fewer and shorter, and countries
emerging from war would be less likely to relapse. As a result, the
number of countries in civil war at any given time would fall by half,
to about one-in-twenty, from the current level of about one-in-ten.
Additional analysis on the relationship between civil war and
dependence on natural resource exports is contained in Natural
Resources and Violent Conflict: Options and Actions, a forthcoming
volume edited by Bannon and Collier.
The full text of is available at:
http://econ.worldbank.org/prr/CivilWarPRR/
(end text)
(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)