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South Asia is the second most violent place on earth after Iraq. While conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan have attracted global attention, parts of India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal have also experienced long-running conflict. The result is human misery, destruction of infrastructure and social cohesion, and death. The knock-on effects are huge.
What is conflict? Where is it concentrated? Is conflict a problem for development, or a failure of development? What should policymakers do?
Conflict is a clash between two opposing groups, external or internal to the country. An example of external clash is state-to-state conflict, which is on the decline. Internal conflicts have resulted in three times as many deaths as wars between states since World War II (Fearon and Laitin 2003).
There are two types of internal conflict. The first is conflict against the state or civil war. Examples of this are terrorism, which is an extreme manifestation of conflict and reflects a certain degree of organisation of conflict. It is carried out by a relatively organised group of non-state actors, and directed against the state. The second category includes people-to-people conflict, or ethnic conflict. Examples of this include localised land conflicts, religious and ethnic riots, homicides or other crimes (Stewart 2008, Varshney 2002).
These two types of conflict have evolved differently in South Asia. People-to-people conflict has declined. In India, communal and ethnic riots between Hindus and Muslims are on a downward trend but terrorism has increased.
Is conflict a problem for development, or a failure of development?
Figure 1 plots conflict rates (number of people killed in terrorist incidents normalised by population) and real per capita income for a large group of countries. The downward sloping line suggests that countries that have low per capita income have higher conflict rates. This is consistent with other findings that report higher conflict rates in low income countries (Collier et al. 2003).
The relationships between conflict, income, and poverty are much more complex than is commonly supposed. High income does not guarantee peace and stability. Figure 1 shows that the relationship between conflict and per capita income is not very tight – there are many countries which are outliers. What is even more striking is that these outliers are concentrated in South Asia. Most South Asian countries (except for Bangladesh) have much higher conflict rates for their stage of development.
Figure 1. Conflict and violence, 1998–2004
Source: Global Terrorism Database II, 1998-2004. 2008.
Note: Figure takes the arithmetic mean for fatalities and income per capita for the period 1998–2004. Fatality is the number of total confirmed fatalities for the incident. The number includes all victims and attackers who died as a direct result of the incident.
It is not possible to infer causality from Figure 1. If it is conflict which holds back development, then policymakers should focus on controlling conflict, i.e., increase military and police interventions to reduce conflict. But if it is low income and high poverty which cause conflict, then the focus should be on direct policy interventions to reduce poverty and human misery. In India, there is evidence that states that had higher incomes and fewer police had less violence than ones that had more police and less income (Justino 2009). There is also some evidence that horizontal inequalities (inequality between identity groups) can be a factor in causing conflict (Stewart 2008). This suggests that it is not enough just to have “development” but it must be shared fairly across groups.
Given the inverse association between conflict and per capita income, we would expect that conflict rates should be much higher in lagging regions within countries – i.e. those regions that have lower per capita income compared to national average? Indeed, this is exactly what we find – conflict is concentrated in lagging regions within countries.
Figure 2 shows that in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, conflict is concentrated in the lagging regions. Conflict rates are higher in the lagging regions of Pakistan (Baluchistan, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and North-West Frontier Province), India (Maoist insurgency in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Orissa), Sri Lanka (North), and Nepal. Lagging regions have experienced more than three times the number of terrorist incidents per capita, compared with leading regions, and almost twice as many deaths per head of population in such incidents.
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