Threats to Peace: Development and Conflict

正在进行结构改革的国家的经济增长往往涉及人力和物质资源的大规模重新分配。即使这种增长从长期角度来看是合理的，它也会在短期到中期带来困难，它可能会给个人和群体带来困难，这些个人和群体一辈子都无法从他们的痛苦中得到补偿。因此，经济增长可能存在冲突也就不足为奇了。该项目明确地为社会冲突的理论和实证研究带来了经济视角，而不是将这种冲突简单地描述为“文明的冲突”。这个项目的三个组成部分中的每一个都描述了可能导致冲突的经济和社会特征之间的相互作用。第一部分研究了不同族群之间的两极分化是如何因每个族群内部的经济不平等而加剧的。第二个组成部分研究的是小群体还是大群体与国家发生冲突，以及这些结果如何受到“冲突奖”性质的影响。最后一部分研究贸易自由化与暴力之间的关系。一个中心主题（和早期的发现）是，社会冲突虽然是出于经济动机，但往往是按照种族界线组织起来的：种族两极化的社会是冲突的。第一个项目通过相互作用的经济因素扩展了这一研究；具体来说，是群体内部的经济不平等和两极分化。这种不平等综合了冲突过程的两个不同方面：群体中的穷人提供劳动力，富人提供资金。这种金融和劳动力的反常协同作用在基于阶级的冲突中通常是不可用的。它可以使种族暴力变得突出。群体不平等/冲突关系似乎得到了强有力的实证支持。第二个项目探索经济和种族之间相互作用的另一个方面。它结合并调和了两种截然不同的冲突观点——一种是“多数人的暴政”，即大群体将自己的偏好强加给小群体；另一种是“帕累托-奥尔森理论”，即小群体比大群体更有可能发起游说或冲突。通过改变冲突收益的性质，这两种观点得以调和：私人收益鼓励较小的群体发生冲突，而公共收益则相反。这些关系在数据中非常明显。之前的另一个主题是，经济增长在短期内可能是高度冲突的，尤其是在各个部门或群体的增长不平衡的情况下。最后一个项目研究印度的贸易自由化和性别暴力。报告显示，减少贸易壁垒——尤其是非关税配额——对减少针对妇女的暴力行为产生了重大而积极的影响；特别是关于强奸。进口配额的减少造成了大规模的行业劳动力流动；当关税在配额的情况下发生变化时，情况就不一样了。该研究将自由化与男性劳动力的错位和女性劳动力的新进入联系起来，并将这些过程与性暴力联系起来。虽然长期的持续增长最终可能会缓和冲突，但各群体或部门之间的中期不平衡增长很可能会激化冲突。这项研究的智力核心结合了传统的经济理论——理性的个体、以博弈论的方法论使用为特征的战略环境，以及均衡解决方案的概念——来产生并测试对我们一生中最重要的现象之一的预测：内部社会冲突，通常以种族界限划分。

Economic growth in countries undergoing structural transformations often involves a massive reallocation of resources, human and physical. Even if such growth is warranted from a long-term perspective, it can bring hardship in the short to medium run, and it can do so to individuals and groups who will never be compensated for their pains, in their lifetime. It is not surprising, then, that economic growth can be conflictual. This project explicitly brings an economic perspective to the theory and empirical study of social conflict, as opposed to simplistic pronouncements describing such conflict as a "clash of civilizations."Each of the three components of this project describes an interplay between economic and social characteristics that could lead to conflict. The first component studies how polarization across different ethnic groups can be exacerbated by economic inequality within each group. The second component studies whether small or large groups enter into conflict against the State, and howthese outcomes are influenced by the nature of the "conflict prize." The final component studies the connections between trade liberalization and violence.A central theme (and earlier finding) is that social conflict, while economically motivated, is often organized along ethnic lines: ethnically polarized societies are conflictual. The first project extends this research by interacting economic factors; specifically, within-group economic inequality, with polarization. Such inequality synthesizes two different aspects of the conflict process: the poor in a group supply their labor, the rich their finances. This perverse synergy of finance and labor is typically unavailable in class-based conflicts. It can make ethnic violence salient. The group-inequality/conflict nexus appears to find strong empirical support.The second project explores yet another aspect of the interaction between economics and ethnicity. It combines and reconciles two very different views of conflict -- one, the "tyranny of the majority," in which large groups impose their preferences on smaller groups, with another, the "Pareto-Olsen thesis," which argues that smaller groups are more likely to initiate lobbies or conflicts rather than larger groups. The two views are reconciled by varying the nature of conflict payoffs: private payoffs encourage smaller groups to be conflictual, while the opposite is true of public payoffs. These relationships are strongly visible in the data. Another previous theme is that economic growth might be highly conflictual in the near term, especially if that growth has been uneven across sectors or groups. The final project studies trade liberalization and gender-based violence in India. It shows that the reduction of tradebarriers -- especially non-tariff^ quotas -- has had a significant and positive impact on violence against women; specifically, on rape. The reduction of import quotas has created large sectoral movements of labor; the same is not true when tariffs change in the presence of quotas. The study connects liberalization with the dislocation of male labor and with the new entry of female labor, and links these processes to sexual violence.While sustained growth in the long term could finally tame conflict, there is every possibility that medium-term uneven growth, among groups or sectors, could inflame it. The intellectual core of this research marries traditional economic theory - rational individuals, strategic environments characterized by the methodological use of game theory, and equilibrium solution concepts - to generate and test predictions about one of the most significant phenomena in our lifetime: internal social conflict, often demarcated along ethnic lines.