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No factor devastates development more comprehensively than war. A society may have sound policies, a willing workforce and abundant resources, yet see decades of progress destroyed in a few years of conflict. War kills and displaces people, shatters infrastructure, collapses economies, empties schools and hospitals, and drives away the investment that development requires. The relationship runs both ways: conflict undermines development, but underdevelopment — poverty, inequality, weak states and competition over resources — also breeds conflict, creating a vicious circle from which the world's poorest societies struggle to escape. The economist Paul Collier brought this relationship into sharp focus with his influential analysis of the "bottom billion" — the poorest people on earth, trapped in a small number of countries where conflict is one of the principal "traps" that keep them poor. This lesson examines conflict as a barrier to development: the nature and causes of civil war, Collier's analysis and his "conflict trap," the daunting challenge of post-conflict reconstruction, and the role of the global arms trade in fuelling the violence. Throughout, the register remains respectful and non-ethnocentric: conflict is analysed as a structural and developmental problem, never as a cultural failing of particular peoples.
Key Definition: War and conflict in development refers to organised armed violence — between or, more commonly today, within states — that destroys lives, infrastructure and economies and obstructs development. The relationship is two-way: conflict causes underdevelopment, and underdevelopment is itself a major cause of conflict.
This lesson addresses key applied content of the Global Development specification:
Paper 2 is a single essay paper (2 hours, 80 marks across two options): one 10-mark "applying material from the Item, analyse two…" question and one 20-mark "applying material from the Item, evaluate…" essay. Remember: Paper 2 essays are worth 20 marks, not 30.
War, conflict and development connect across the specification:
The destructive effect of war on development is direct and comprehensive. Armed conflict harms development through several reinforcing channels:
Crucially, the relationship is two-way, and grasping this is the analytical key to the topic. Conflict undermines development; but underdevelopment is itself a major cause of conflict. Poverty, sharp inequality, competition over scarce resources, weak or unaccountable states, and grievances rooted in exclusion all make armed conflict more likely. The result is a vicious circle: underdevelopment breeds conflict, and conflict deepens underdevelopment — a self-reinforcing trap that is extraordinarily hard to break.
There is also a sobering connection to the topic's earlier themes. Sen's analysis of famine (from the measurement lesson) is directly relevant: he argued that famines stem less from an absolute shortage of food than from a collapse of people's entitlements — their ability to command food — and conflict is one of the most powerful destroyers of those entitlements, disrupting markets, displacing farmers and blocking the movement of supplies. War-induced famine is therefore not a natural disaster but a social one, produced by the breakdown of the economic and political order. This reframes conflict's human cost in terms the topic has already established: war does not merely cause hardship in some general sense; it destroys the very capabilities and entitlements that development is supposed to expand.
This two-way relationship can be represented as a vicious circle:
flowchart TD
A["Underdevelopment: poverty, inequality, weak state, resource competition"] --> B["Increased risk of armed conflict"]
B --> C["War: deaths, displacement, destroyed infrastructure, economic collapse"]
C --> D["State and institutions weakened further"]
D --> A
C -.->|"reconstruction can break the circle"| A
A central observation in the modern study of conflict and development is that the character of war has changed. Conflict today is overwhelmingly intra-state rather than inter-state — that is, it takes place within countries (civil wars, insurgencies, communal violence) rather than between them. These internal conflicts are disproportionately concentrated in the world's poorest societies, which is precisely why conflict is so central to the study of development.
Several features of contemporary civil conflict matter for development:
A note of caution on causes is essential to a non-ethnocentric answer. It is tempting, but mistaken, to attribute conflict in poorer societies to "ancient ethnic hatreds" or cultural backwardness. Sociologists reject such explanations as both empirically weak and ethnocentric. Ethnic and religious identities may be mobilised in conflict, but the underlying drivers are typically structural — poverty, inequality, competition over resources, weak states, and, as dependency theorists stress, the legacies of colonial border-drawing and divide-and-rule administration. Analysing conflict structurally, rather than culturally, is both better sociology and the respectful register the topic demands.
The most influential recent analysis of conflict and development is the economist Paul Collier's study of the "bottom billion" — the roughly one billion people living in a relatively small number of countries that have not merely failed to develop but have fallen behind, trapped in poverty while much of the rest of the world advances.
Collier's central argument is that these countries are caught in one or more "traps" that hold them in poverty, and the most important of these is the conflict trap. His analysis of conflict makes several key claims:
Collier's analysis is valuable because it is empirical, developmental and explicitly two-way, and because it focuses attention on the small group of countries where extreme poverty and conflict are concentrated. It also carries clear policy implications — for example, that supporting fragile post-conflict states to prevent relapse may be one of the most valuable of all development interventions, and that the international community has tended to neglect precisely those countries where the need is greatest. Collier's framework can, however, be set in tension with the more structural accounts: where Collier (broadly) emphasises the traps and characteristics of poor countries themselves, dependency and world-systems theorists insist on situating conflict within the global structures — the colonial legacy, unequal trade, and the international arms trade — that the next section examines. A strong answer holds both in view.
It is worth being precise about how Collier's position relates to the topic's central divide, because it is easily caricatured. Collier is not a crude "blame the victim" theorist who simply attributes poverty to the failings of the poor; his account is empirical and emphasises structural conditions such as commodity dependence and geography as much as governance. Nonetheless, the centre of gravity of his analysis lies with the characteristics of the poorest countries themselves — the "traps" they are caught in — rather than with the global system that helped produce those traps. That is why a complete answer pairs Collier's diagnosis with the dependency and world-systems emphasis on colonialism, unequal trade and the arms trade: the two are best read not as rivals but as complementary halves of a fuller explanation, the internal and the structural working together to keep the bottom billion poor and at war.
A structural dimension that a strong answer must address is the global arms trade. Conflicts in poorer societies are not fought with locally made weapons; they are very largely fought with arms manufactured in, and exported from, richer and more industrialised countries. This connects conflict in the Global South directly to the economies and policies of the wider world, and sharpens the structural critique:
The arms trade is therefore a powerful illustration of the structural reading of conflict. It shows that violence in the Global South cannot be understood as a purely internal matter: it is bound up with the industries, interests and policies of richer nations, exactly as dependency and world-systems theory would predict. Setting Collier's "traps" analysis alongside the structural account of the arms trade and the colonial legacy gives a balanced, two-sided treatment of the causes of conflict — internal characteristics and global structures — which is what examiners reward.
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