Abstract
This chapter focuses on the destabilizing consequences of development in late-industrializing countries, in both domestic politics and in international relations. Section One addresses the notion of development as viewed from the Western experience, and argues that (economic and political) development is closely related to the process of state formation, which is a violent process for the North as well as for developing countries in the South. In Section Two, late development is introduced, in relation to the income distribution in developing countries, and in Section Three, recent work on linkages between income concentration and conflict in ‘Third World’ countries will be reviewed. In Section Four, issues of environmental scarcity and of violence in developing countries will be touched upon, and Section Five deals with the problem of the weak state. Some conclusions will be drawn in Section Six.
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Notes
See Lloyd G. Reynolds, Economic Growth in the Third World: An Introduction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 7ff.
Income figures taken from Angus Maddison, Dynamic Forces of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics 1750–1975 (London: Macmillan, 1980)
Imperial institutions are analysed in John H. Kautsky, The Politics of Agraristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972)
The notion of growth-generating institutions builds upon the work of, among others, Max Weber. See Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Sec Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), pp. 148–72.
Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (London: Blackwell, 1993), Table 7.1, p. 243.
See John D. Stephens, ‘Democratic Transitions and Breakdown in Western Europe, 1870–1939: A Test of the Moore Thesis’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 94, no. 5, March 1989, pp. 1019–77.
Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991).
Jack A. Goldstone, et al., Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991).
For empirical work on the Kuznets’ curve for European countries, see Y.S. Brenner, et al., Income Distribution in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
It should be observed, however, that the side of the inverted U-shaped curve reflecting movement towards greater equality, fits better than the trend towards concentration during the early phase of economic growth. The facts about income concentration at lower levels of development are not well documented and populations entering intensive growth vary greatly in the level of pre-growth income concentration. Tribal communities enter intensive growth from fairly low levels of income and of wealth concentration compared with landlord states. For an informative review of literature and further analyses of determinants of income concentration in developing countries, see S. Chan, ‘Income Inequality among LDCs: A Comparative Analysis of Alternative Perspectives’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 33, 1989, pp. 45–65.
E.N. Muller, ‘Democracy, Economic Development, and Income Inequality’, American Sociological Review, vol. 53, no. 2, 1989, pp. 50–68.
United Nations Department of International Economic and Social Affairs, Mortality of Children under Age 5: World Estimates and Projections, 1950–2025, in Lester Brown, et al., Vital Signs 1993: The Trends that are Shaping our Future (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 97.
Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: Free Press, 1968).
Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 260ff.
For varieties of Lerner’s modernization scheme, see the stimulating exercise of Erich Weede, Enwicklungsländer in der Weltgesellschafi (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlagsanstalt, 1985)
For a more optimistic view, see Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecomunications in a Global Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)
Dipak K. Gupta, The Economics of Political Violence: The Effect of Political Instability on Economic Growth (New York: Praeger, 1990).
For effects of regime repressiveness and intensity of sanctions on collective violence, see Erich Weede and Edward Muller, ‘Rationalität, Repression und Gewalt’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 42, no. 2, 1990, pp. 232–47.
For a critical, although not fully convincing, review of several empirical studies on the relationship between inequality and violence, see Mark Irving Lichbach, ‘An Evaluation of “Does Economic Inequality Breed Political Conflict?” Studies’, World Politics, vol. 41, no. 4, July 1989, pp. 431–70.
John Rothgeb, ‘Investment Dependencies and Political Conflict in Third World Countries’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 27, no. 3, 1990, pp. 255–72.
This sort of event represents 10 on the intensity scale in the Conflict and Peace Data-Bank. COPDAB gives data on, inter alia, domestic conflict events. The data are described by Edward Azar, ‘The Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) Project’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 24, 1980, pp. 143–52.
Edward Azar, The Codebook of the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (College Park, Maryland: Center for International Development, 1982).
This finding calls into question the explanatory power of deprivation theory versus rational choice theory. Collective rebellion by the poorest segment of society is much less frequent, and rebellion by the better off more frequent than one would expect on the basis of deprivation theory. See Erich Weede, ‘Ungleichheit, Deprivation und Gewalt’, Kölner Zeitschriftfür Soziologie und Sozial Psychologie, vol. 45, no. 1, 1993, pp. 41–55.
Edward Muller and Mitchell A. Seligson, ‘Inequality and Insurgency’, American Political Science Review, vol. 81, no. 2, June 1987, pp. 425–51
T.Y. Wang, ‘Inequality and Political Violence Revisited’, American Political Science Review, vol. 87, no. 4, December 1993, pp. 979–83
Probably the best short review of studies of collective violence at hand is in Erich Weede, Mensch und Gesellschaft: Soziologie aus der Perspektive des methodologischen Individualismus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), pp. 262–84.
William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited: The Unravelling of the American Dream (New York: Freeman, 1992), p. 272.
Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, ‘Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict’, International Security, vol. 19, no. 1, summer 1994, pp. 5–40.
Taken from Paul Harrison, The Third Revolution: Population, Environment and a Sustainable World (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 40–41.
For penetrating analysis of variables involved in various state-society relations in the ‘Third World’, see Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
‘The lord prevented deviance and fostered a social structure of atomized households in order to maintain complete peasant dependency’. Joel S. Migdal, Peasants, Politics and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 44–5
See C.H. Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the East Indies (16th, 17th and 18th Centuries) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 41ff.
Data-based research by Maniruzzaman suggests that if arms transfers to ‘Third World’ governments go up as a percentage of GNP per capita of the recipients’ economies, the probability of a military coup shoots up, as well as increasing the length of military rule. He also finds that civilian deaths from political violence are related to military takeovers as a result of military rule, not as its cause. His findings imply an external political link between internal violence and political underdevelopment of ‘Third World’ countries. Talukder Maniruzzaman, ‘Arms Transfers, Military Coups, and Military Rule in Developing Countries’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 36, no. 4, December 1992, pp. 733–56.
According to the FAO, all 17 major fishing regions of the world are currently harvested beyond capacity. See Lester Brown and Hal Kane, Full House: Reassessing the Earth’s Population-Carrying Capacity (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 76.
B.V.A. Röling, International Law in an Expanded World (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, 1960), p. 83.
See, for example, the documents on ‘development law’ and on the ‘right to develop’ of poor countries, in F. Snyder and P. Slinn (eds), International Law of Development (Abingdon: Professional Books, 1987).
David Halloran Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949–1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 253.
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Houweling, H.W. (1996). Destabilizing Consequences of Sequential Development. In: van de Goor, L., Rupesinghe, K., Sciarone, P. (eds) Between Development and Destruction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24794-3_8
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