When Passion Dries Out, Reason Takes Control (Introduction)

The literature on civil wars tends to understand people’s decision to join a rebellion as the product of a static source of motivation – often greed or grievance. Most studies thereby assume that the reason behind starting a rebellion is the same as the reason behind continuing it. However, since civil wars are normally very dynamic entities, this assumption seems puzzling. The purpose of this study is thus to apply a temporal perspective on the study of rebels’ motivation in order to examine how this is affected by the changing surroundings throughout a civil war.

By linking theory on greed and grievance with insights from motivational psychology, this paper argues that rebels are motivated by both reason and passion (the psychological equivalents to greed and grievance), but to different times. More precisely, it is argued that passion triggers civil war, while reason sustains it. A re-examination of two critical cases – the Liberian and Salvadoran civil wars – supports this argument. The findings contribute to the theorization of the field and provide one of few frameworks able to encompass both the outbreak and the continuation of civil war.

Introduction

Since the end of the Second World War, intrastate wars – or civil wars – have been the dominant form of violence. 20 percent of all nations have experienced at least ten years of civil war during the last 50 years, and in the world’s poorest region, Sub-Saharan Africa, almost a third of the countries entered the 90s with active civil wars (Blattman & Miguel, 2010: 4). These wars bring massive destruction to their countries, societies and citizens, and the social, psychological and economical costs last for many years (Collier et al., 2003: 15ff). Civil wars thus greatly affect the economy and thereby the livelihood of people, by destroying three of the most influential inputs to production (Chambers & Conway, 1992): human capital (see, UNCHR, 2007: 7, 23); physical infrastructure (e.g., Collier et al., 2003: 15); and social and political institutions. This has led one of the most influential scholars in the civil war literature, Paul Collier, to call civil wars “development in reverse” (ibid.: ix) and caused other scholars to argue that civil wars are one of the explanations of the income gap between rich and poor countries (Blattman & Miguel, 2010: 4). Citizens suffer tremendously from a civil war – people die and the economy dies with them – which makes one wonder: What makes people want to fight these wars?

In 1998 Collier and Hoeffler published what turned out to be the first article of several, arguing that rebels are motivated by economic opportunities when fighting civil wars. An explanation for the occurrence of civil wars which counterargued the narrative especially dominant within the Western media: that rebels are motivated by “raw ethnic or religious hatred” (Collier, 2000: 95). The debate between these two perspectives has been named the debate between greed and grievance. Through the last decade a large number of studies have been conducted, improving our understanding of the motivation of rebels to fight civil wars and the incentive structures surrounding them. Most of these studies have applied a static perspective to rebels’ motivation, leaving potential changes in rebel motivation throughout a conflict unresearched. This is exactly the focus of this paper which attempts to answer the following research question: How does rebels’ motivation change throughout a civil war.

Previous studies often distinguish between the onset and the continuation of a war without presenting either a sufficient theoretical explanation or empirical evidence. Among those is Stewart, who argues that economic opportunities might play a greater role later in the conflict (2000: 29), and Collier who argues that ethnic or religious cleavages could be used for mobilization purposes after the conflict has been started (2000: 95). Even though these studies soften their conclusions by opening up for other possible factors, they tend to stick to one explanation, thereby understanding rebels’ actions as motivated by one static source. Based on previous literature, one would therefore not expect any change to happen in the motivation of rebels throughout a civil war. People are either rational or emotional, and either way they are that continuously.

This paper presents an alternative argument that moderates this understanding of one constant source of motivation. By introducing recent developments in the field of motivational psychology (e.g., Bracha & Brown, 2007; Kaufman, 1999) into the literature on greed and grievance, this paper will argue that the source of rebels’ motivation can change fundamentally throughout a conflict. More precisely, it will be argued that (a) it is fruitful to broaden the concepts of greed and grievance to equal the psychological concepts of reason and passion. Based on this, it is argued that (b) people act in both passion (for instance due to grievances) and reason (for instance due to greed) depending on the environment facing them, and (c) since rebels are faced with very different situations in the onset of a conflict, where the mortality risk is extremely high, compared to in the midst of conflict, (d) it will take different motivational sources to make rebels choose to start a conflict and to continue it – namely, passion as the trigger and reason as the main sustainer. When asking if rebels are motivated by greed or grievance, one should therefore answer: Everything has its time.

This temporal approach has previously only been applied in few studies on civil wars. Regan & Norton argue that “grievance leads to collective behavior, but defection is always a problem, so rebel leaders resort to selective benefits that tap into self-interested behavior” (2005: 319), and Murshed & Tadjoeddin argue that “grievances … might be better at explaining why conflicts begin, but not necessarily why they persist” (2007: 1). However, both these studies leave a lot of questions unanswered. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, it develops a theoretical framework able to explain both civil war onset and continuation, thereby avoiding the theoretical shortcuts that Murshed & Tadjoeddin (2007) and especially Regan & Norton’s (2005) more inductive study, have to make. This is exactly what Blattman & Miguel call for in their review article on civil war, when emphasizing the need for consistent theoretical explanations (2010: 7). Second, the argument developed in this paper is tested against two in-depth reviews of critical case material. The empirical support for this theoretical framework is thereby a lot stronger than the single-case study methodology applied in several other studies. Even though this paper should mainly be seen as a modest effort to develop a theoretical framework able to explain rebels’ motivation in a temporal perspective, the empirical part thus helps validating its potential findings.

The paper will be structured in six parts. Following this introduction, the theoretical framework will be developed by drawing on existing civil war literature and insights from motivational psychology. Hereafter, the strengths and weaknesses of the case study approach taken in this paper are discussed, and a case selection based on a most different systems design is presented. The fourth part of this paper reexamines two cases – Liberia and El Salvador – and assesses the explanatory power of the paper’s argument. A critical discussion of the findings will be carried out in the fifth part, before a conclusion will sum up and point towards some policy implications.

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