What is the problem/issue being addressed?
The ERC consolidator project grant Violence, Elites and Resilience in States Under Stress (VERSUS) engages in the study of disaggregated violence and politics in Africa. This project assesses the roles of elites in political networks, and estimates the effect of formal and informal characteristics and relationships on the arrangement and distribution of power. The relevance of the project is to better understand political survival, the use of violence and policy-entry points to improve the political situation of people.
Over the last decade, conflict has increased. In that time, developed countries have also invested heavily in political engineering and development. But these solutions have created new problems, and more people than ever are directly exposed to violence. Where can we go from here? First, we must reconsider what we know about conflict and patterns. Second, we must understand how power and politics creates conflict.
Often we hear that conflicts are evolving too fast for us to understand or address them. Conflicts are evolving, changing and growing. But they are also both understandable and predictable. The secret is to know about power and how it creates competition.
Yet, conflict is not a reversal of economic development, and the forms and locations of disorder in the past 10 years (at least) underscores that our association of poverty and state failure and conflict produced blinders, not solutions, to the scourge of violence. This disputes what is perhaps the most important finding of conflict literature which is that per-capita income is systematically and negatively associated with civil war. This is not true. Conflict is not a development problem. it does not come from the poor seeking to rectify their problems. Conflict is a political problem, and it occurs between those with something to lose. It is between the political strong, not the poor or politically excluded.
Conflict vastly changed since the end of the cold war, and our explanations for ongoing violence were completely apolitical. VERSUS challenged that interpretation, linking new forms of conflict to inclusion, elite status and growing economic opportunities.
● Why is it important for society?
VERSUS asks how the composition and competition within governments in developing countries can assist researchers, governments, policy makers and practitioners in understanding how crises develop. It provides updated details on the composition of leadership in crisis and democratizing states; it develops accessible models to understand the conditions that lead to uncertainty, and it describes the governing logic of states.
It is important because
When politicians, policy makers, analysts and the public know this information, they can explain and understand why there is conflict in poorly developed countries, and why conflict looks the way it does. For example, election violence is common, but it often looks quite different across countries – even those with similar political systems. The reason—as we found across Versus- is that the layers of power and contest create centers of competition
We also learned that many countries with a dictatorial regime actually have leaders who spend a considerable amount of time managing their own elites, so that they can survive in power.
● What are the overall objectives and conclusions
The overall objectives of VERSUS is to link the domestic politics of African and unstable states to the crises that occur therein. There is little known or researched about the general patterns of domestic political behaviour, composition of government and strategies of political survival across African states; this has led to serious misdiagnosis in which crisis happens and how it evolves. VERSUS advanced this field through testing theories of governance and structure, composition and elite actions. It explained why we see the types of government we do across states, and what conflict vulnerabilities those governments generate.
The conclusions of the project are that conflict is widespread, varied and often beneficial to elites-- if violence can influence a political goal, someone will use it. Political competition causes conflict-- the more inclusive the political system, the more competition. External powers have interests, not preferred outcomes—leading to many supporting non-state armed groups. Groups and elites respond to the ‘violence market’—it is helpful to think of conflict as a business with rules to maximize market share. Impunity is far more important than grievance in generating conflict. Conflict isn’t a breakdown in governance: it is a feature of modern governance and political change. Finally, data can tell us how bad it is, but data are not an oracle and cannot suggest fixes
Through VERSUS, we have shifted the academic conversation about conflict and the public discussion. Our overtly political lens for conflict is now incorporated into many government analyses of violence.
