More than 30 civil wars are under way now. In the past half century, more than 200 civil wars have killed millions of people and left countless others destitute. Civil wars result from grievances and antagonisms which are deep-seated enough to cause neighbours to be willing to slaughter neighbours. Peace is often fragile. In half of all civil wars, the peace does not hold and the war starts again. Civil war has been one of the biggest causes of suffering and underdevelopment in recent decades.

Neighbours don’t normally kill each other and very different ethnic and religious groups normally live side by side successfully. Of course there are conflicts, but most countries have ways of resolving those conflicts peacefully. The most common grievances are where a group feels it is discriminated against in access to political power, or resources such as jobs.

It is tempting to dismiss wars as being the result of a long history of hatred, say between Christians and Muslims or Hutus and Tutsis. But that is to ignore that these groups have lived together in peace for centuries and it also ignores the underlying grievances, which have often been made starkly worse by outside pressures – from colonialism, the Cold War, and now free market globalisation. We in the north bear some responsibility for most of the civil wars in developing countries.

Many civil wars were anti-colonial independence wars. But the heritage of colonialism has been long lasting. Colonial powers usually privileged one group over another and those divisions were perpetuated after independence; sometimes the only way to bring about change and equity seemed to be to go to war.

During the 1948-88 Cold War between the Capitalist West and Socialist East, the two sides fought several "proxy" wars. In Afghanistan, Allende's Chile, Nicaragua, Angola and Mozambique the Eastern bloc supported a socialist-oriented government and the West created and supplied an armed opposition movement, provoking bloody civil wars. On the other side, the West propped up dictators in Indonesia, Iraq, Zaire (now Congo), Pinochet's Chile and elsewhere where the opposition was brutally suppressed, hundreds of thousands died, and where civil war was often a result. More recently the "war on terrorism" has led to the support of brutal dictators and justified suppression of opposition movements.

Outsiders have supported one side or the other in civil wars to obtain drugs, diamonds, oil and minerals.

'If modernisation benefits one sector... this can lead to violent conflict'

Globalisation and modernisation have also played critical roles. Increasing globalisation in recent years has impoverished many states, especially in Africa. Squabbling over decreasing resources can lead to war. If modernisation benefits one sector of a society and not another, this can lead to violent conflict. In Sierra Leone, for example, young people went to war against an increasingly corrupt government which could no longer provide enough school places and jobs.

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Content last updated: 25/01/2005

About the author

Joseph Hanlon is a senior lecturer in Development Policy and Practice at the Open University. He is the principal author of the new course TU875 War, Intervention and Development, which started in 2005. He is also a journalist who has written on Africa, and was a policy advisor for the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel poor country debt.

This article was originally published 3/02/05

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