ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how communities react to war and the extent to which they are included as agents of change or simply treated as passive victims in the recovery process. It is impossible to generalise about the causes of war but several significant determinants can be mentioned, including political power struggles between rival groups, conflict over resource distribution or management, etc. The most striking factor about wars in the latter half of this century is the number of intra-country wars between rival ethnic or political entities. The effects of these civil wars have been devastating and the proportion of civilian deaths in war time has grown from 50 per cent in the Second World War to a staggering 90 per cent by the early 1990s (Sivard 1992). The face of war has changed; fighting is no longer isolated to clearly delineated battlefields and conducted by uniformed generals. It now permeates all the strata of society. The rules of war have become blurred. Whole sections of the civilian population are viewed as the enemy and thus as legitimate targets. It is civil and political society as a whole and not merely the armies of the opposing sides that become the targets. Conflict and violence and their effects become part of everyday experience in warzones. Faced with this, communities can either acquiesce or they can resist. The first section of this chapter explores the consequences of conflict and shows how acquiescence becomes a survival strategy which in itself can in the end lead to resistance.
