Relief organizations and analysts of complex humanitarian emergencies recognized the essential linkages between war and hunger in the 1980s, building on the lessons learned from the famines in Sudan and Ethiopia. How can international donors and nongovernmental organizations address humanitarian suffering without exacerbating conflict? Mark Duffield’s latest book, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, examines this question and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the political economy of war and humanitarianism. Duffield provides a systematic framework that highlights the relationship between the emerging networks of globalization and liberal order and the “new wars” in the developing world. He builds on earlier literature that examined the conflict-producing potential of relief and the economic motivations of insurgents and broadens the research agenda to analyze how international economic structures provide opportunities to increase conflict.

In the early 1990s, following the Cold War, humanitarian space expanded as relief organizations developed means to provide aid in war zones. Following cross-border operations to provide food to areas controlled by insurgents in Ethiopia in the 1980s, there were several additional opportunities to engage in humanitarian relief during conflict through negotiated access agreements, such as Operation Lifeline Sudan, and through armed interventions, as in northern Iraq, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia. While humanitarian agencies developed methods to work in war zones, they increasingly recognized that their assistance could fuel conflict, as resources designed to feed and clothe the vulnerable became the focus of factional struggles and violence. Most tragically, the international impulse to provision refugee camps in eastern Congo following the Rwandan genocide gave its perpetrators the resources needed to reorganize and continue their violence.

Recent scholarship expanded the focus beyond humanitarian concerns to analyze the political economy of civil war. Earlier research emphasized how relative deprivation created grievances that motivated insurgencies, but Paul Collier and others asked whether greed is a better explanation, with leaders using violence in pursuit of enrichment. Applying economic theories to conflict and focusing on motivation led to the application of rational actor models to explain the behavior of militia leaders.

Since insurgents and governments alike use force to capture resources and pursue their political goals, a number of the most violent contemporary conflicts seem to have such economically driven dynamics. Conflicts such as these have winners as well as losers and certain parties that act violently to seize assets and accumulate wealth. In Angola, for example, the late Jonas Savimbi could continue to engage in civil war by shifting his resistance movement’s strategy from eliciting Cold War patronage to seizing control over diamond mines, while the government relied on oil revenues to sustain its military campaign. Similar economic incentives are at play in the diamond deals in Sierra Leone and Liberia and the trade by armed movements in a variety of valuable commodities such as minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, hardwoods and gems in Cambodia, and drugs in Colombia and Afghanistan.

Civil war in the developing world is often characterized as “chaos,” or “anarchy” in popular literature when the social, political, and economic institutions that support order seem to disappear and violence fills the ensuing void. Rather than existing in an anarchic vacuum, however, the actors engaged in war create alternative institutions that allow them to accumulate power and wealth, thereby sustaining the conflict. War is not a breakdown of society but rather the reordering of society and the construction of a new institutional order based on violence, fear, and predation.

Duffield’s contribution in Global Governance and the New Wars is to elaborate a larger framework for understanding these dimensions of conflict in political economy. He argues that market deregulation and the attenuation of nation-state competence have created networks of power and authority that promote both a liberal global order and new wars. Liberalism and conflict are therefore not antithetical but organically linked. Economic liberalization in the developing world has fostered the growth of the informal economy and the criminalization of many international transactions, thereby providing channels and mechanisms to provision and sustain war. As globalization and market deregulation have increased, shadow economies and complex transborder trading systems have been constructed to provide opportunities for local actors, including those in conflict, to engage with the global economy in order to sustain their organizations.

The same processes that have increased global trade, communications, and financial transfers allow for the development of networks for diamonds-for-guns swaps, money laundering, and narcotics trafficking that provide resources to armed factions engaged in civil war. As Duffield explains, “Modern warlords have pioneered the forging of links with the global marketplace and the use of foreign companies as a means of establishing local authority”—in other words, the ability to think globally while acting locally.

Humanitarian agencies and donors have responded to the challenges of civil war in the developing world by revising their mandates to emphasize issues of conflict resolution, conflict prevention, and post-conflict peace-building. Andrew Natsios, the head of the US Agency for International Development, has made conflict prevention a priority area for US development and humanitarian policy, and the World Bank has established a Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Program. Underdevelopment is seen as both a cause and a consequence of conflict: conflict resolution and security are therefore central to the concerns of development agencies. Duffield correctly recognizes this shift in the concept of development as quite radical, implying a need for a more intrusive set of interventions to transform social and political relations in order to resolve conflicts. Aid agencies are inclined to understand conflict as an internal question calling for more development assistance rather than recognizing the global political and economic structures that are critical to understanding how new, violent forms of power and authority are being constructed.

Duffield’s analysis provides scholars and policymakers alike with a comprehensive framework for understanding the merging of development and security and the relationships between global market forces and local conflicts. In the 1990s humanitarian agencies recognized that relief could fuel conflicts. Duffield urges an examination of how contemporary global forces of economic reform and market liberalization can do the same.