Year: 2002
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: placed discipline for understanding the origins, dynamics and consequences of conflicts in poor countries.After briefly reviewing the spread of conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa and emphasising their diversity, this paper focuses chiefly on the literature on the costs of conflict and on the causes of conflict.The main argument of the paper is that conflict directly expresses social, political and economic relations and that therefore it requires analytical tools directly geared towards understanding relations.However, the majority of the literature only addresses conflict via concepts with an indirect grasp of relations at best.So, the majority of the literature is dominated either by structuralist explanations and concepts of stratification (such as ethnicity, income inequality, poverty) or by the non-relational methodological individualism of neo-classical economics.The two are sometimes combined, for example in the expanding amount of cross-sectional large sample statistical or econometric analysis.This methodological distinction is yet to be adequately highlighted and explored in the literature.Research into direct social relations in individual contexts, and their expression through armed conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa, has so far chiefly been confined to case-study material of considerable value.
Author: Christopher Cramer
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2098038399