Conflict and the social contract

The rational choice approach has put forward two competing hypotheses that explain civil war in developing countries: greed and grievance; see Murshed (2010, ch. 3) for a survey where it is suggested that although these may be necessary conditions for the outbreak of large- scale violence, they are not, however, suffi cient. There must be other factors at work, related to the institutional failure to resolve confl ict peacefully. Addison and Murshed (2006) label these mechanisms as the ‘social contract’. Thus, even when capturable resource rents constitute a sizeable prize (greed), violent confl ict is unlikely to take hold in states with a framework of widely agreed rules, formal and informal, that govern resource allocation and the peaceful settlement of grievances. Such a viable social contract can be suffi cient to restrain confl ict, and following its collapse on the road to war, reconstructing a new social contract is key to long- term confl ict resolution.

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