Download Group Inequalities in Post-Conflict Societies Dr. Rajesh Venugopal

Group Inequalities in Post-Conflict Societies
Dr. Rajesh Venugopal
London School of Economics
Paper presented at SAPRI Conference, ‘Delivering Inclusive and Sustainable
Development’, New Delhi, April 2012
Introduction
What kinds of economic policies will help sustain a peace process and promote
longer-tem stability and reconciliation in deeply divided post-conflict societies?
Have post-conflict policies designed by aid agencies and national governments
been sensitive to the issue of horizontal inequalities or group-based ethnic and
regional differences, and what has been their impact?
This presentation is based on a recently released book Horizontal Inequalities
and Post-Conflict Development that I co-edited with Frances Stewart and Arnim
Langer. In this book, we set out to evaluate the extent to which post-conflict
reconstruction has addressed problems of horizontal inequalities by looking at
the experiences of seven diverse post-conflict countries - Burundi, Rwanda,
Nepal, Peru, Guatemala, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Afghanistan. These were
then balanced with four cross-cutting thematic studies on macro-economic
policies, privatisation, PRSP’s, and employment generation that broadened the
country coverage of the book to Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kosovo, Liberia, Haiti,
Mozambique and Cambodia.
Papers
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Guatemala
Burundi
Rwanda
Afghanistan
Nepal
Peru
Macro-economic Policies
Employment
Privatization
Authors
Susan Woodward
Corinne Caumartin & Diego Sanchez-Ancochea
Janvier-Desire Nkurunziza
Sebastian Silva Leander
Jonathan Goodhand, C.Dennys, D.Mansfield
Graham Brown
Jose-Carlos Orihuela
Frances Stewart & Arnim Langer
Frances Stewart
Rajesh Venugopal
The findings from these studies are important because they reveal important
types of gaps in the redressal of what are often deeply entrenched forms of
group-based discrimination and deprivation and marginalisation, each of which
have distinct implications for policy and further research. These are: recognition,
policy design, effectiveness and paradigm shifts.
Horizontal inequalities are group-based inequalities, and are distinct from the
traditional economic concept of inequality on two counts. Firstly, they refer to
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inequalities of specific groups rather than individuals. Secondly, they are multidimensional, and refer to inequalities in political, social, and cultural status.
Research into the relationship between horizontal inequalities and conflict has
demonstrated that violent conflict is most likely to arise in areas where
economic, social, political and cultural status inequalities occur simultaneously,
and where some groups are deprived across every dimension. In these
situations, group leaders, who face political exclusion, and their political
followers, who see themselves as experiencing unequal treatment with respect
to assets, jobs and social services, are likely to be inspired to mobilise and
possibly engage in violence.
The global incidence of violent conflict, which increased substantially during the
early 1990s, has been on the wane since the late-1990s, with a large number of
war-torn countries such as Angola, Liberia, Guatemala, and Sri Lanka having
entered a fragile and extended process of transition from war to peace. This in
turn has spurred a necessary shift in the policy agenda from ‘conflict’ to ‘postconflict’, and an evolution in the development research agenda from the
economic costs and causes of conflict towards the economics of post-conflict
recovery and peace-building. This book as such represents a natural progression
in the research agenda on horizontal inequalities from the pre-conflict to postconflict phase.
Post-conflict countries are typically very fragile in the short-to-medium term,
with high risk of return to conflict, or its transformation into other forms of
social violence such as crime or domestic violence. It is therefore critical to
understand whether and how horizontal inequalities are being addressed in the
post-conflict setting, and what impact this has had.
It is also important to recognize that post-conflict countries are very different,
not just because of the very different historical and cultural background, but also
because they have different levels of economic development, political stability,
physical security and inter-community reconciliation.
Burundi
Income p.
head
Low
Rwanda
Low
Low
High
Nepal
Low
Low
Medium
Peru
Middle
Medium
High
Guatemala
Middle
Low
High
Upper middle
Low
Medium
Low
Low
Medium
Country
Bosnia
Afghanistan
High value natural resource availability
HIs
Low
High
The recognition of group and regional inequalities in conflict and post-conflict
peace-building is perhaps most widespread and sophisticated in the design of
political institutions, where the idea of power-sharing based on some form of
consociationalism have gained broad acceptance. Indeed, since the end of the
cold war, a number of novel institutional arrangements and constitutional forms
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were innovated to distribute power across communal groups from Lebanon’s
1989 Ta’if Accords, the 1995 Dayton Agreement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the
1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. Since then, the new
constitutions of Afghanistan in 2004 and Iraq in 2005 have similarly been
carefully crafted to distribute calibrated amounts of representation and
executive power to elites of all major ethnic/religious groups in order to reduce
violence and resolve conflicts through institutionalised elite-bargaining.
While this growing consciousness of the relevance of political power-sharing is
to be applauded, there is however, no commensurate attention to the equally
important issue of economic power-sharing. For example, in a review of 38 peace
agreements from 1948-1998, Hartzell and Hoddie (2003) find that an explicit
commitment to economic redistribution was the least common form of powersharing, compared to the more commonly addressed issues of sharing central
powers, regional devolution and military integration.
The lack of appropriate attention to economic factors in peace processes and
agreements owes largely to three factors. Firstly, conflict resolution is still
considered to be a largely political issue, separate from the economic content of
reconstruction and recovery. Secondly, there is an assumption that political
power-sharing will implicitly contains economic consequences and address
group-based economic deprivation. This is indeed the case up to a point,
particularly where there is substantial institutional reform incorporating
enabling measures such as decentralisation, which can be a very important
source of overcoming historical forms of discrimination and structural barriers
(see the case study of Guatemala by Caumartin and Sanchez-Ancochea in our
book). However, political power-sharing is by design based predominantly about
the empowerment of ethnic elites, and on elite-level bargaining, which can create
and enshrine systems of ethnocratic patrimonialism that can limit the
distribution of the peace dividend to a very thin privileged layer.
Thirdly, the redressal of historically deep-rooted group deprivations requires a
sustained and committed medium-to-long-term policy effort that extends well
beyond a single electoral cycle, and that must contend with the endemic shorttermism of post-conflict reconstruction. Much of the policy and academic agenda
for post-conflict peace-building focuses on shorter term measures of
stabilisation, security, institution-building, democratisation, demobilisation, and
reconciliation. Furthermore, most aid donors have a time horizon of two to five
years and focus on projects that have a rapid, measurable impact rather than the
more challenging, longer-term commitment that is required to redress historic,
structural deprivation.
With these concerns in mind, we set out to investigate the extent to which postconflict economic policies have addressed the issue of horizontal inequalities
along three parameters: (i) recognition; (ii) implementation; (iii) effectiveness.
1. Recognition: Have post-conflict countries and donor agencies recognised the
role of horizontal inequalities in conflict, and have they made any commitments
to tackling them?
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2. Implementation: Has the rhetoric of recognition been translated into the
reality of policy design, and have these policies been adequately funded,
implemented and mainstreamed into policy?
3. Effectiveness: Once recognised and implemented, have these policies actually
been effective in addressing HIs, and has this in turn, had an impact on violence
and conflict?
Country
What happened to HIs
Recognition
Implementation
Afghanistan
Probably worse
Unclear
Inadvertently
worsened His
Nepal
Worsened during
conflict; too early to tell
post-conflict
Yes
Yes
Too early to tell
Rwanda
Probably worsened
No. Ethnic
categories not
permitted.
N/A
Ineffective
Yes
In part
Partial;
inadequate
resources
A decade later
In part in socal
sectors
Yes, but gaps
remain.
Improvement in public sector
job allocation as required in
the political agreement that
brought an end to the war
New market-based group
inequalities
In social sectors
Yes, but gaps
remain.
New market-based group
inequalities
No
Inadvertently
worsened HIs
New within region in
equalities as well as marketbased group inequalities
Burundi
Peru
Some improvements in
social sectors and
public sector jobs, not
economy
Social HIs improved;
economic worsened
Guatemala
Social HIs improved;
economic worsened
BosniaHerzegovina
Getting worse
Yes by donors,
less so by the
state
For political HIs
but not
economic
Effectiveness
Inadvertently
worsened His
HI dynamics
War and drugs reduced HIs.
State-building and counter
narcotics worsen it.
New inequalities from war
economy
Recognition:
One of the most important findings of our book is that there is now widespread
explicit recognition that ethnic and regional economic inequalities were at the
root of conflict, and that they need to be addressed. In numerous post-conflict
countries as well as in the policy and programming documents of donor
agencies, there is a growing rhetorical commitment to the prioritisation of
policies that address horizontal inequalities. Such explicit commitments were
present in Guatemala, Peru, Nepal and Burundi, and is broadly present in the
international policy discourse of employment policies and PRSP. This in itself is a
significant accomplishment.
Given that many post-conflict states were clearly discriminatory and practiced
decades of rhetorical denial, recognition is an important and historic step
forward and the legitimation of grievances and underlying socio-economic roots
of conflict. While it is important to tread with caution on this issue due to the
significant divergence in individual cases, the fact that most countries have some
recognition of discrimination means that the policy debate of relevance has
moved on towards issues of implementation and effectiveness.
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In other words, the emerging challenge is one of translating rhetoric into
effective policy design by theorising appropriate ways in which HI's can be
addressed. This in turn requires engagement and research on the ways in which
contentious HI-reducing policies have been negotiated, sequenced, and
prioritised through post-conflict political institutions. As the case studies in our
book demonstrate, this has proven to be an extremely challenging task in which
the circumstances are rarely conducive and the mechanisms can be very
counter-intuitive.
Implementation:
The key comparative conclusion we arrived at was that important progress has
been made in implementation, but there remain significant gaps. Post-conflict
states from Peru to Burundi have made substantial progress in translating the
recognition of HI's into policy design. But this process has followed unusual,
unintended, and frequently very illiberal pathways that are frequently based on
political economies of elite capture, patrimonialism, illicit crops or violence.
Indeed, the real-world trajectories of post-conflict reconstruction are fragile,
inconsistent, uneven, and prone to violence, rarely resembling the idealised
discourse and linear transitions implicit in the liberal peace-building project.
As the experiences from Burundi, Guatemala and Peru demonstrate, the political
economy of policy reform and the implementation of HI-sensitive policies took
place in institutional circumstances of elite capture, ethnocracy, and counterinsurgency. As our case study of Burundi demonstrates, elite capture of the state
by Bururi Tutsis caused decades of ethnic and regional favouritism that are
slowly being undone following the 2007 peace agreement. However, the
political economy of redressing these inequalities was in turn based on making
unrealistic, unfunded promises of widespread social spending, and is limited by
elite capture of the state by other previously excluded groups.
One very important point that distinguishes the presence and absence of
recognition and implementation is the nature of conflict termination. Negotiated
settlements were much more likely to result in recognition and implementation,
whereas a one-sided military victory did not as it placed much less pressure on
the government to do the needful.
Effectiveness:
Compared to the progress made in recognition and implementation, the
effectiveness of policies was far more uneven, weak, and gap-ridden.
Successful outcomes required strong recognition and commitment to HIs,
adequate funding, the presence of reasonably strong institutions, and sustained
policy attention to a comprehensive range of ancillary social-political
interventions. In contrast, negative outcomes were caused by inadequate
recognition and commitment to HIs by the states and international actors, the
presence of countervailing policies, weaknesses in institutional design and state
capacity, and the growth of sources of economic prosperity that directly or
indirectly benefited some (usually richer) parts of society disproportionately.
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On enabling legislation, let me draw on the case of Guatemala, where important
advances were made in extending public education to historically deprived
indigenous communities, and this was facilitated by the process of
administrative decentralization. However, the ability to achieve a more broadbased improvement in economic welfare to these groups was limited by the
absence of land reform.
In Burundi, there have been some ambitious plans to redress the historic
domination of the country by one region since 2007, but the effectiveness of
these programmes has been limited by resource constraints and inadequate
planning.
In Peru, a great deal of state resources were devoted to addressing historic
deprivations in the insurgency-hit areas during the 1990s. However, these
policies, which were often quite effective, came without explicit recognition that
they were addressing conflict grievances, and were delivered at the cost of
political and civil freedoms. No attention was also paid to improving economic
inequalities.
The existence of countervailing policies were often found to diminish the
effectiveness of even very well meaning and sustained policies by the state. In
many cases, these were caused by the parallel rise of new forms of inequalities
generated through market-reform and globalization-led growth. In some
respects, the state attention to HIs dealt with an older form of inequality whereas
new elites and widening disparities were being generated in other sectors of the
economy.
Conclusion
This paper sought to provide evidence for the extent to which horizontal
inequalities have been addressed in post-conflict countries. It concludes broadly
that there have been important advances in the recognition and implementation
of such policies. While it is important to maintain vigilance on these two areas,
the policy agenda has shifted and it is important to recognize that the pending
agenda now is largely one of ensuring better effectiveness. Many well-meaning
policies lack effectiveness because of a lack of institutional capacity, sustained
commitment in the long-run, and the reproduction of inequalities by the market.
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