ABSTRACT
Although structural transformations such as the growth of the modern state system, the development of the global economy and the rise of global governance structures set the larger context, they by themselves do not make conflict. Conflict is made by human beings. By ‘first movers’, who one day may decide ‘enough is enough’ and begin to plan a rebellion, and by the active involvement of ‘followers’. Hence, the question remains how and why people mobilize for collective violent action against other (groups of) combatants, civilians or the state. At this point in the book it may have become clear that both actors and contexts, and therefore agency and structure-based theories have something to offer to students of violent conflict. Why not combine the two? This is indeed the approach of the theories and models under discussion in this fourth chapter. They emphasize the salience of group identity and organizational capacity, but also look at state power, models of economic development and international linkages as importantly shaping violent conflict. The idea of multi-causality is self-evident. It is also fraught with difficulties. Mono-causal explanations of conflict are often implausible, and yet it is very difficult to weigh particular causes in multi-causal explanations, and to see how they interact. How is multi-causality theorized? How to make ‘theoretical sense’ of the interplay of structures and actors? One of the underlying questions of this chapter is to see if, and how, this can be done. Writing a chapter on multi-causal approaches is equally tricky: because of the variety of research traditions underlying the approaches under discussion such a chapter can easily become labyrinthine. The glue that should hold this chapter together is the shared emphasis of the reviewed approaches on collective resentments. That is, on how a collectively felt discrepancy between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to’ translates in forms of discontent that in combination with a set of other factors explain the shift to collective violence. Simply put, what is emphasized is that engagement in collective violence is primarily affective, and not just calculative. The chapter’s agenda is two-fold. First, it aims to review and situate the work of two classic ‘conflict scholars’: Edward Azar and Ted Gurr. Both scholars draw on human needs theory, and have constructed multi-levelled, and multicausal conflict maps. They aim to identify key factors that determine group mobilization for protest or rebellion against the state or other groups. Since their approaches show resemblances to those of collective action theorists like Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly we will make a brief detour to contentious politics and collective action theory, and touch upon earlier discussions on identity, interests and rationality. The second aim of this chapter is to discuss issues of method and data, and to revisit the epistemological divide between explaining and understanding, and more specifically, quantitative and qualitative research methods. In the final part of the chapter, the somewhat ‘grand scheme’ models are complemented with more fine-tuned micro-political
frameworks. These provide added nuance to our analysis by calling for a disaggregated approach to violent conflict and highlighting the variation of violence in war.
