A million little gestures: Bottom-up development flows, social welfare provision, and civil war

The reach of individual acts of philanthropy has become global. All together, these gestures represent hundreds of billions of dollars flowing to the poor in developing countries in an effort to reduce poverty, encourage economic development, and increase stability in politically unstable countries. The question arises: Do individuals, nongovernmental organizations, and companies acting to try and reduce poverty make civil war more or less likely? The civil conflict literature has, to date, largely isolated and examined the actions of states and groups that violently question their legitimacy. This book is an attempt at looking both deeper within the state and more broadly to its international context. It focuses on how the increasingly horizontal nature of international philanthropic flows has had a growing impact on states' social welfare and their propensity for civil war.;My argument is simple. In aggregate, individual micro-economic acts can have large macro-level economic and political effects. These acts include migrants sending money home, helping entrepreneurs start a small business, private individuals or public corporations in the developed world donating to international nongovernmental organizations' efforts to alleviate poverty or to address the results of natural disasters. Further, these economic decisions are becoming more frequent and more influential. They are also increasingly more horizontal and person-to-person than traditional international development efforts like overseas development assistance. These new horizontal flows are geared towards directly providing social welfare, are bypassing the state, and are large enough to have a macro-level impact on a country's stability and its probability of civil conflict. These flows are more effective, I argue, because they are less open to the state corruption, misappropriation, and inefficiency that has dogged traditional state-level aid.;This book examines three particular examples of this globalization and flattening of economic flows: migrants' remittances, microfinance, and private foreign aid. All three, I argue, represent significant and growing amounts of money that states are less able to manipulate than traditional capital flows and are more directly (and, I argue, effectively) spent on social welfare provision.;This book makes three significant contributions to the study of civil war. First, it is the first work that I am aware of that tries to capture how non-state actors' economic activities in general affect states' risk of civil war. Second, this book considers these non-state economic flows in conjunction and explores how they have a cumulative effect on providing social welfare and reducing the risk of conflict. Third, it collects and analyses country-year data on microfinance borrowers and private aid that has not been used in cross-sectional studies of civil war.;I argue that external microeconomic wealth that flows more directly to the population at an individual level rather than at the state level can help provide social welfare and other micro-level necessities. This social welfare fill in gaps that the state is unable or unwilling to provide, and previous research has found a lack of social welfare makes it easier to recruit rebel soldiers. In addition, these flows are dynamic and respond more quickly to the needs of the poor than more static and bureaucratic state-level aid.;Because the swelling amounts of international non-state economic flows are having a macro-level impact on state stability, these economic flows can, in part, explain why civil war is not triggered in some poor states. If concerns of social welfare are an underlying cause of civil war, then the growing amounts of private economic flows could be getting large enough to decrease a state's probability of conflict. I am not arguing that the absence of these flows are the primary reason behind the grievances that lead to war, but rather I argue that they are part of the reason why social welfare is still able to be provided to the poor in some countries but not in others.;The book first presents the current literature and then my argument. Three empirical chapters then focus on remittances, microfinance, and private aid individually. Then I look at the effects of these flows together. My empirical results support my hypothesized relationship between horizontal economic flows, social welfare provision and civil conflict---as these non-state economic flows increase, the probability of civil war decreases.;Why do civil wars break out in some countries and not others? This book argues that civil wars are at bottom caused by grievances against the state when the state fails to be able to provide for adequate social welfare for its citizens and lacks the economic and military strength to co-opt or defeat dissent. Non-state economic flows help explain why some poor states do not have such conflicts---non-state actors help fill in the social welfare gaps that increase the opportunity costs of rebellion. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...