violence and war in agrarian perspective

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Violence and War in Agrarian Perspective

CHRISTOPHER CRAMER AND PAUL RICHARDS

The bulk of analysis and commentary on violent conflicts in developing countries over thepast 20 years or so has neglected the dynamics and tensions of agrarian political economy.Introducing a special issue devoted to these agrarian dimensions of armed conflict, non-warviolence and post-war repertoires of political mobilization, this paper argues for a newresearch and policy agenda. In doing so, we revive some older analytical approaches andsuggest that they can refresh and enhance current scholarship.We argue too for a historicalperspective: not simply to highlight precedents but, rather, because such a perspective helps to

clarify the issues involved and their centrality to processes of rural change, as well as to showthat there may be long-run continuities in patterns of conflict. Bringing the agrarian backin to the study of violent conflict means investigating access to land and capital and meansof mobilizing labour; it means investigating changes in the institutional regulation of suchaccess and control; and it means identifying the tensions, techniques of compulsion andmodes of resistance developed around productive relations in, typically, a globalized context.

Keywords: agrarian change, violence, war, political economy

INTRODUCTIONMany regard the decade-long and brutal civil war in Sierra Leone, concluded in 2002, as theexemplary instance of warlord greed.At a conference in October 2003 to launch a $30 millionreconstruction package, the World Bank country director Mats Karlsson offered a differentperspective:

[Sierra Leone] once had an agricultural sector that not only provided basic subsistence butalso produced for export. Agriculture was undermined through heavy taxation viapervasive price distortions by depriving rural areas of basic social services . . . Domesticterms of trade were turned against agriculture through under-pricing of farm output by

state Produce and Marketing Boards, persistent currency over-valuation and explicitsubsidies on food. Public spending was concentrated in [the capital] and a few provincialcentres while the limited infrastructure and social services in the rural areas decayed. Landtenure became insecure as land came to be allocated in line with the political goals of theone-party state. These policies caused a huge redistribution of income from the ruralpopulation to the non-poor, alienating rural inhabitants and creating fertile grounds forthe ensuing conflict, which virtually destroyed what remained of agriculture. (IRIN NewsService 2003)

Christopher Cramer, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS),Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London

WC1H 0XG, UK. E-mail: [email protected] Paul Richards, Technology and Agrarian Development group,University of Wageningen, P.O. Box 9101, 6700 HB Wageningen,The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected] thank the editors of the Journal of Agrarian Change for enticing us to put together this special issue, and for

their patience and support during the process.We also thank the authors of the contributions and the anonymousreviewers.

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 11 No. 3, July 2011, pp. 277297.

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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In short, the war in Sierra Leone was, in Mr Karlssons view, the product of systematicexploitation of the countryside. It fed off rural impoverishment and agrarian despair.A postwarstudy has shown that the bulk of the fighters were rural in background (Humphreys andWeinstein 2004). In this volume, Peters and Richards add the information that the Sierra Leonerebel movement had its own populist agenda for agrarian reform (2011, this issue). So even theposter-child for greed not grievance theories of post-Cold War armed conflict, it turns out,embodied the sentiments of peasant revolt.Why have researchers paid so little attention to thepossible agrarian roots of current civil wars?

Research and analysis of violent conflict in developing countries has adjusted the depth offield in the post-Cold War era to focus more sharply on categories such as ethnicity, inequalities(vertical and horizontal), poverty and unemployment, mineral resource endowment, elitebargains, economic opportunities and so on. Other relevant dimensions are lost in a blur ofinattention. Seemingly, topics associated with worn-out explanations from the Cold War periodare dumped in a rush to find new and ingenious causes of the worlds ills.The contributions

to this special issue may help to bring back into sharper focus one of those older, and nowneglected, dimensions: the agrarian roots and dynamics of violent conflicts. For the evidenceshows that much recent and ongoing violent conflict has roots in, and is shaped by, agrarianstructures, relations and change. And processes of agrarian structural change are themselvesinherently conflictual and frequently violent. Paying more attention to these dimensions maynot only enrich our understanding of variations among violent conflicts, but may also con-tribute to more appropriate attempts to intervene through mediation, conflict resolution,post-conflict reconstruction and peace-building initiatives. For asVellema et al. (2011, this issue)argue, with regard to the case of violent rural conflict in the Philippines, externally sponsoredpeace negotiations in Mindanao, as well as being undermined by arbitrary and externally

imposed deadlines, risk failure partly because of their lack of appreciation of the deep historicalroots of agrarian change and patterns of labour mobilization, illicit accumulation strategies andpopulation changes.

How far the shift of analytical focus has captured a change in reality from principled topredatory wars or one of perception is still in doubt, despite effective critiques of the newwars thesis (Kalyvas 2001).This special issue suggests that the shift in perception has certainlyaccounted for a failure adequately to assess the social and agrarian roots of violent conflicts.Class analysis generally, wrote Buijtenhuijs (2000, 118), and peasant wars more specifically,ceased to be fashionable topics in academic circles. Instead, social scientists have tended to seethe underlying motivation for wars in developing countries in terms of ethnic chauvinism or

individual pecuniary gain (ibid., 120).This shift has possibly been most marked in the literature on sub-Saharan Africa, where theimagery of conflict has replaced the principled peasant of Zimbabwean or Mozambicanliberation struggles, or the aggrieved forest guerrillas of the Mau Mau, with mindless loosemolecules of West African insurgencies (Kaplan 1994) or the hyped and globally brandedSomali warlord gangsters. However, it may also be in sub-Saharan Africa that the materials haveaccumulated for a renewed interest in social structure, class relations, agrarian change and theirrelevance to the origins, forms and trajectories of violence and conflict over the range of thepeacewarpeace or no peace/no war continuum.

Mkandawire (2002) argued that one reason for the frequently extreme violence of African

insurgents might be that they were essentially urban groups with urban agendas who, becauseof an unfavourable balance of forces in the cities and major towns, were forced to roam anunfamiliar countryside where the population was not typically eager to rebel.Therefore,Africanrebels may find it difficult to swim among fishes, as Maos dictum would have it; instead, they

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easily become roving bandits, living off predation and extreme violence.Against this view, Ellis(2003) argued that in most African conflicts there has been a less than clear distinction betweenurban and rural areas: one could perhaps generalize by saying that it is probable that many rebelgroups operating in recent years have been composed of people from both city and village or,more likely, of people who have spent much of their lives in between the two and cannot beeasily described as either city people or village people (Ellis 2003, 462). Literature on ColdWar-era sub-Saharan African conflicts has included exploration of the agrarian context for andimplications of such conflicts (e.g. Kriger 1991; OLaughlin 1996;Wuyts 2003), while literatureon more recent conflicts has also revived interest in the agrarian dimensions of violent conflictin Africa (Besteman 1996, 1999; Chauveau and Richards 2008).

Some of the papers in this special issue take this agenda further, especially by emphasizinghistorical continuities and connections. Munive (2011, this issue) traces the origins of wartimerecruitment and militia hierarchies in Liberia in pre-war institutional patterns of labourmobilization in the rural hinterland. Peters and Richards (2011, this issue) add to the existing

literature on rural social dynamics in Sierra Leone by exploring a longer term set of historicalprocesses linking slave-based mercantilism, colonial indirect rule, rural rebellion and post-civilwar reconstruction with current international investment in land and mineral extraction. AndVerwimp (2011, this issue) seeks to complement contrasting explanations of the pre-1994massacres in Rwanda with an exploration of the hitherto neglected crisis of a rural develop-mentalist ideology in which there was no place for lingering pastoralist communities.

If classic wars of greed such as that in Sierra Leone turn out to have deep roots in ruralsocial crisis, how much more should we be looking to the agrarian roots and dimensions of acomplex crisis that embroils Afghanistan and Pakistan, or those of the conflict spreading acrossthe central forest region in India? It hardly needs to be added that the Latin American war on

drugs is in effect a war against an agrarian mode of production. Thomson (2011, this issue)explores narcotics production within the larger and longer-term context of coercive develop-ment and conflict in Colombia. Elsewhere, as in Mindanao, for example (Vellema et al. 2011,this issue), narcotics production becomes a form of renegade capitalism, in the shadows of andset against the official shaping of a relatively recent property-rights regime dominated byChristian outsiders to the islands.

The drama of the narcoticssecuritydevelopment nexus may be captured in the idea that,in Afghanistan, opium is the development of the people. Opium poppy production andprocessing in Afghanistan, a sectoral surge that largely flowed into insecure spaces rather thancreating insecurity, has had substantive consequences for the organization and control of land,

participation in rural wage labour markets, and the emergence of a sophisticated primarycommodity-processing, export-oriented industry. Prices are to some extent buoyed not byproduct differentiation, branding or a speciality market as, say, for coffee but by a marketstructure shaped by illegality. Though narcotics production does not directly generate govern-ment tax revenue, it is arguable that in some areas opium acts as an adhesive of local politicalsettlements, while also generating jobs, foreign exchange, and fuelling the licit economythrough invested surpluses and money traded by the Hawaladar (Goodhand and Mansfield2010).

BRINGING THE AGRARIAN BACK IN

What, though, do we understand by the agrarian roots of violent conflict? First, the analyticaland empirical focus needs to swing to rural areas and communities rather than remaining fixedon national level data in cross-country datasets, or on the rational individual devoid of a social

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or spatial context. Indeed, there is increasing interest in the spatial dimensions of violentconflict. Nathan (2005) points to evidence that most civil wars in the Uppsala Conflict DataProject dataset are not actually located in areas characterized by natural resource extraction.TheArmed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED) shows how geographically more precisedatasets may be assembled at the cross-country level (Raleigh et al. 2010). ACLED data alsohelp to challenge some of the causal (often, in fact, only correlative) claims made in theliterature on violent conflicts in developing countries.1 It is precisely this focus on thesignificance ofwhere violence occurs and the need to account for the where that Verwimp(2011, this issue) brings to his analysis of massacres in Rwanda in the early 1990s, highlightingthe role of paysannat settlement schemes in particular.

Beyond geography, studying the agrarian dimensions of violent conflicts involves seeing howaccess to and control of land and labour, as well as financial capital, is shaped by social structuresand relations, including class, gender and age. Moreover, such studies point to changes in thesestructures and relations, which in turn pose threats to established and institutionalized patterns

of access and control. These changes may be driven by demographic pressures and increasingland scarcity, sometimes artificially accelerated by new forms of foreign investment (Peters andRichards 2011, this issue) or by immigration and shifts in labour markets, or greater integrationinto global markets. Central to most of these changes, and the tensions they may generate, arepolicies: policies regulating property rights, investment in rural infrastructure, establishingsectoral change in productive activities and so on.

Agrarian activity is concerned with cultivation (any kind of care for and production of cropsor domestic animals), and typically requires access to land, as well as labour, capital andtechnology. The requirements for land, and the specific kinds of skill required to manage andmaintain land successfully, often give to agrarian studies a distinctive cast; for example, a concern

with ecological factors (climate, soils, seeds, animals, diseases etc.) not found in other areas ofeconomic or social analysis. Typically, agrarian analysis looks at the ways in which cultivatingand non-cultivating classes (e.g. farmers and farm labourers on the one hand, and merchantsand those who live from rents on land) combine or compete in constituting the economic andsocial systems of agrarian society. Transitions are a particular focus of analytical concern forexample, from subsistence to feudal or capitalist, market-based relations of production sincethese more readily lay bare the tensions and contradictions associated with specific agrariansocial formations.

Agrarian conflicts are focused on land (including issues of tithes, rents and taxes), and on thedivision of labour in cultivation (including struggles over the technologies through which

labour is applied to land). Agrarian struggle in late medieval/early modern Europe allied serfs,peasants, modernizing tenants and merchants against a rentier aristocracy that formed thebackbone of state power (as instanced by the English peasants revolt of 1381; Dobson 1970).More recently, agrarian struggle has assumed new transnational forms in the past five centuriesor more, as vast tracts of land in the NewWorld, the Tropics and the Southern Hemisphere havebeen taken into cultivation via settler colonialism and Great Power imperialism. During thistime, agricultural commodities have increasingly been produced and traded on an interconti-nental scale, a process that continues in the twenty-first century.

The commodification of people, as chattel slaves, and the trading of these slaves over hugedistances to supply labour to tropical plantations for sugar, cotton and coffee from the fifteenth

century was a key aspect of agro-globalization. Agrarian struggle continues to be marked by

1 Explanations for conflict onset and diffusion appear to be contingent on the scale at which research isundertaken (Raleigh et al. 2010, 652).




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these divergent international legacies. Peasants in parts of Asia and Latin America wrestle withplantations and agribusiness, while African cultivators continue to manifest hostility towards themercantile ruling elites whose founders built their wealth from slave recruitment.The need toincorporate the rich literature on the history of agrarian struggles into debates about post-ColdWar violent conflict seems as obvious as its neglect, in favour of factors such as criminality,drugs and diamonds, seems surprising. Below, we expand on the relevance to contemporaryconflicts of a history of slavery and marronage.

Large-N studies of the causes of armed conflict in poor countries did not begin with thework of economists arguing over resource curse explanations for post-Cold War conflict.Theapproach was already well established in agrarian studies. On the basis of a statistical analysis ofthe livelihood of social movements engaging in armed violence in 70 agrarian commodityexporting countries over the period 194568, Paige (1975) decided that the data supported twobasic scenarios for violent agrarian struggle. Conflict was most likely, he concluded, in condi-tions where cash crops were produced either by decentralized sharecropping or long-distance

labour migration. In both scenarios, a non-cultivating upper class lacked resources or supportto assert control over an increasingly well-organized agrarian workforce, whose leaders werethen able to make a bid for state power. In both cases, he argued, the land-owning class lackedsignificant links with industrial or finance capital.With little scope to diversify or redistributewealth, this class had little option than to fight for the land. Thereafter, however, there weresignificant differences between the two cases.

In the sharecropping case, the market splits the traditional agrarian social structure alongclass lines and the agricultural workers are progressively converted into a rural proletariat (Paige1975, 120). Lacking scope for individual economic action, this proletariat then turns tocollective political action, and an organized working class . . . confronts an economically weak

and politically rigid upper class . . ., resulting in revolutionary war.Although the migratory labour estate system shared with the sharecropping system the

economic weakness and political rigidity of the estate owners and their dependence on land astheir only source of income (ibid., 121) the migrant labourer, Paige suggests, is less susceptibleto proletarian modes of mobilization. Plantation workers return to distant rural homes,seasonally or at the end of contracts, and depend (in these distant homes) on customaryinstitutional arrangements. Chiefs and traders are their allies in securing land and credit.Mobilization for political action takes the form of support for the political ambitions of anationalist elite of chiefs, merchants and minor functionaries. Violence is directed againstplanters, but it reflects communal rather than class-based ties, and a nationalist rather than a

socialist regime eventuates (ibid., 121).Paige then offers the insurgency in Vietnam as an instance of the first scenario, and theanti-settler uprising in Angola in the early 1960s as an instance of the second. Both conflictssubsequently attracted Cold War superpower involvement, resulting in long and complex wars.These later developments should not be allowed to obscure their agrarian roots.The purposeof our present volume is to ask to what extent agrarian factors continue to play a part inshaping conflicts in Africa, Asia and Latin America beyond the end of the Cold War. Can wepeer through the fog of international Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan or greed-not-grievancein Sierra Leone to grasp the nature of agrarian tensions shaping these wars?

AGRARIAN CONFLICTS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Clearly, there is more to a historical perspective than the five years before civil war onset thatarbitrarily enters into statistical analysis of many such wars. It is not possible sensibly to analyse




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electoral violence in Kenya without appreciating the long-run effects of colonial policy,anti-colonial uprisings and post-colonial manipulation of resettlement schemes. Understandingthe early phases of anti-colonial struggle and later phases of war in Angola is limited withoutknowledge of the history of Bakongo political organization and its persistence through Por-tuguese colonialism. Nor can wars in Central America be explained without appreciating thelong-run history of, and shifts in, liberal ideologies and collective struggles; or to account forviolence in the Philippine islands without acknowledging a long history of settlement, identityformation, conquest and expropriation, resettlement, and contested agrarian property rights andproduction regimes. In short, agrarian issues involve economic resources, structures and incen-tives as well as the effects of price shocks but cannot be reduced to these factors, andcertainly not in straightforward individualist ways. Social relations, political histories, the forgingof collective norms and ideals and the evolution of ideologies all influence how agrarianchallenges are addressed, what responses they generate, what forms of conflict and protestemerge, and the salience of violence within these conflicts.

There is, meanwhile, a longer history of peasant uprisings and agrarian conflicts to whichmore recent experiences may be connected and with which they may be contrasted. Aninstructive instance in this literature is the English Peasant Revolt a dramatic and violentinsurrection by peasants and yeomen farmers of Kent and Essex in 1381 (Dobson 1970).Theinsurrectionists were driven by a mix of resentment at attempts to hold down rural wages inthe face of labour shortages caused by the Black Death and the new cultural and religiousaspirations associated with the Reformation and the New Learning. A sentiment from one ofthe instigators of the revolt the Lollard preacher, John Ball, in his sermon at Blackheath retains universal resonance: when Adam delved and Eve span who then was the gentleman.

Even excluding the long history of pre-capitalist violent conflicts, there are important

antecedents to violent agrarian transitions in developing countries.The American Civil War wasa national conflict rooted in a struggle over the institutions for controlling access to labour.The Reconstruction period after the war was in many ways a losers peace (Suhrke 2011): theNorths military victory was followed by an intense and often violent political conflict in theSouth, as Southern groups fought to reverse the abolition of slavery and extension of the voteto blacks (Foner 2002; Leman 2006).The latter part of the nineteenth century was character-ized by ongoing efforts to protect institutionalized privileges in ownership of productive assetsand in access to cheap labour.This was not simply a matter of a slaveholding class of plantationowners resisting Northern reconstruction ideals of 40 acres and a mule racial democracyand liberalism. Rather, fundamentally vicious forms of labour control (through convict labour,

for example) persisted in modernizing sectors of the economy (Lichtenstein 1996). Andindustrial violence in rural areas in the late nineteenth century in the form of timber machineor textile loom injuries to workers was intense enough to form the focus for far-reachinglegal and social changes, such as the shaping of ideas of and laws to protect against child labour(Schmidt 2010).

Avner Offer (1989) demonstrates the importance of the agrarian dimension of the FirstWorld War. Offer makes the overall point (one we endorse) that economics alone never startedany war, and that wars must be explained by examining the war projects of relevant agents.Economic rationality (he suggests) will generally be an aspect, but alongside emotion (andemotional miscalculation), and desire for the approval of others, sometimes to the extent of

overcoming the demands of self-interest:2

2 This is not too far removed from Clausewitzs trinity of factors behind wars. On the Clausewitzian trinity, andon the Freud/Einstein correspondence on emotions and other factors behind war, see Cramer (2006).




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resentment of the colonial government. This then became one of the complex causes of theMau Mau uprising. As Throup (1987, 11) explains, the Mau Mau movement was:

an alliance between three groups of discontented Kikuyu: the urban unemployed and

destitute; dispossessed squatters from the White Highlands; and poor peasants, tenants andmembers of the junior lineages of mbari (sub-clans) in the Kikuyu reserves who hadendured the second colonial occupation, particularly the communal terracing campaign,at the moment they were being transformed into a landless rural proletariat as the seniorlineages attempted to establish their exclusive access to land.

The Mau Mau rebellion is one of the most renowned of the anti-colonial uprisings. Less wellunderstood but just as momentous was the 1961 uprising in Angola against Portuguese colonialrule.This was a conflict shaped by, and in which the protagonists were constrained by, agrarianrelations and structures control of access to land, capital and labour. It was one of the casestudies in Paiges (1975) Agrarian Revolution. Paige outlined a set of hypotheses about the

political implications of variations in relations between cultivators and non-cultivators in exportagriculture. His work was notable for its attention to different export commodities and theimplications of their productive, technical requirements. Agrarian Revolution is also notable forintegrating historical and anthropological data with large-N cross-country and case-studystatistical analysis.

Paige is struck by the fact that the earliest upsurge of violence is found not in districtsimmediately adjacent to the border, but in those districts where coffee planting, by Portugueseimmigrants, is most intense. He develops the hypothesis that conditions and grievances asso-ciated with coffee planting, not external nationalist agitation, are the immediate cause of arevolt, later taken over for its own purposes by the UPC, led by Holden Roberto and the

forerunner of the FNLA.Northern Angola in the early 1960s was changed dramatically by responses to a global coffee

price boom and the expansion of a migratory labour estate system.Within a decade after 1950,Angola had become one of the four largest coffee suppliers in the world. Because of therelatively late formal incorporation of the northern kingdom of Bakongo into PortugueseAngolan rule, there were still substantial vestiges of Bakongo political institutions, loyalties andpractices that were important in shaping the character of the 1961 revolt, which took on tonesof modern nationalist uprisings and had little explicit class-based organization or ideology.Coffee shortages during the Korean War pushed up world prices. With a lag while infor-mation about the profits to be made from Angolan coffee filtered into Portugal and stimulated

a rush of migration to Angola; and while coffee bushes planted to take advantage of the pricerises matured the area under coffee and the volume of Angolan coffee exports increasedsharply, although this peak in the early 1960s coincided with an expansion in output by manyother countries.

That foreign-owned estates came to dominate the sector was not a function of theproduction or processing requirements of the low-grade Robusta grown in Angola. In mostrespects, northern Angola is more suited to relatively small-scale coffee farming. Instead, arguedPaige (1975, 230), the dominance of the estates depended on the legal and political advantagesof European settlers under colonial rule. Most of the northern coffee estate owners werePortuguese with a background of peasant poverty in Portugal, who had either migrated earlier

and lived a marginal life as bush traders in northern Angola, or who migrated directly to takeadvantage of the coffee boom. Most amassed large debts in setting up their coffee businesses,and after prices fell from the late 1950s onwards they survived only on sustained governmentsupport.Their productivity was low.The economic viability of the estates rested above all on




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forced expropriation of the land of African farmers and on forced labour mobilization.A risingproportion of workers on the coffee estates were migrant contract workers recruited from theOvimbundu central plateau.

Coffee estate producers in northern Angola were constrained within an economicallyinefficient productive system, unable to exploit economies of scale, reliant on forced labourand, in that area, with no practical means of substituting machinery for wage labour. Anyprotest movement to break up estates or improve labour conditions would effectively bea zero-sum threat to the producers existence. These producers were capital-poor and hadbarely any economic alternatives: they depended entirely on racial/ethnic discrimination andon the politics of the colonial state. Effectively, the estate owners depended for their positionon the exercise of violence (both direct and actual, and embodied in the structures of colonialpolicy). And that in turn limited the tactics open to an African opposition. The migratoryand forced labour system precluded a class-based associational interest group among estateworkers, so that the only effective organization available to direct resistance to the Portuguese

was the traditional tribal structure or the communal party organization of the UPA (Paige1975, 257): the Unio das Populaces de Angola (UPA) being the nationalist movementlargely restricted to Bakongo politics and the group that was to evolve into Holden RobertosFrente Nacional de Libertao de Angola (FNLA).The fact that outside the estates land accesswas organized communally and by lineage also favoured a communal framework protestmovement, but given the otherwise highly underdeveloped regional economy and the speedof changes in the coffee sector, there were not enough material or institutional foundationsfor that movement to take on a class form. Further, the fact that the organization of thecoffee sector took away privileges, land and wealth from the richer Africans of the area madefor greater solidarity among the African population rather than fostering sharp differentiation.

Meanwhile, the military discipline on estates plus the classic ethnic divide-and-rule tactics ofemployers meant that migrant workers were tied more to their home villages than to fellowworkers.

Such were the main structural features of the northern coffee-growing areas of Angola bythe beginning of the 1960s and their implications for political ties and interests. Three moreimmediate moments or triggers acted in this structural context to bring about the 1961 revoltthat proved to be the beginning of the protracted struggle for independence in Angola. Theindependence of the Congo (the present DRC) in June 1960 meant that the half of theBakongo population living in the Congo were independent while the other half, living inAngola, were still under colonial rule: Congolese independence quickened the expectations of

northern Angolan nationalists. The UN took up the issue of Portuguese colonialism andscheduled a Security Council debate on Angola for March 1961. And the coffee boom turnedto slump: by 1961, most northern coffee estate owners were facing huge losses and, even withgovernment financial support, were passing the problem on to the African population througheven lower real wages and tighter labour control. Sure enough, the uprising broke out in March1961, taking a nationalist rather than socialist revolutionary form and involving a coalitionamong estate workers and African smallholder farmers.

Although there has before and since Paige been argument over the extent of involve-ment of nationalist organizations (especially the UPA) in directing the rebellion, and althoughmost Portuguese commentators after the revolt blamed foreign agitators and terrorists, Paige

is adamant that this was very much a popular uprising and that local economic tensions in thecoffee economy were the main source of the strength of the uprising. His argument issupported by statistical analysis of a dataset of incidents of violence compiled from press sourcesand memoirs. Independent variables include size and number of concessions granted to coffee




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planters. The data provide clear support for the idea that the earliest incidents of revolt arefound in the districts most affected by influx of settler coffee planters.

SLAVE WARS AND MARRONAGE

Forced labour in coffee plantations in the late 1950s and early 1960s was but the latest (and notthe last) episode of coercive labour mobilization in Angola.The area of West Central Africa thatcame to be known as Angola had experienced hundreds of years of slave trading and violentconflicts (Miller 1988). Other areas addressed by contributions to this volume Liberia andSierra Leone, the Philippines, Colombia and beyond also have long and specific histories ofcoercive labour mobilization and unfree labour. Indeed, any account of the associationbetween war and agrarian conditions must take account of slavery. Slavery enduring forcedlabour, whether legally sanctioned or not is a recurrent condition throughout history andacross the globe. Where people can, they will enslave others. But equally, since there is a

universal instinct to be free, slaves will abscond where they can, and form independentcommunities of runaways (maroon communities).5 This is especially likely where slaveholdersmeans of exerting force slacken, or where frontier conditions increase the likelihood that a bidfor independence in forests, mountains or swamps will succeed. Slavery can only be maintainedby force but, equally, maroon communities cannot survive without the exertion of counter-force; guerrilla warfare is the essential condition for maroon independence.

The most fruitful questions about slavery are not about the condition itself, but about thecircumstances in which slavery is imposed and begins to break down. Slavery arises in amultitude of circumstances as an answer to the issue of how to deploy alien populationscaptured in inter-state war, or as a product of raiding or kidnapping in marginal regions with

few tradeable products other than human labour, or as a means of dealing with debt or crimein the absence of more sophisticated or costly sanctions (such as jails).The condition of slavery as Durkheim pointed out can only be maintained by constant force. The progress of thedivision of labour in society brings about transformation of slave-based societies. Slavery wascommon in the Classical world, but there were also many routes to manumission.These routeswere typically most accessible to urban slaves who had acquired specialist skills. These skillsgenerated wages by means of which such slaves could buy freedom.

Manumission was less common under chattel slavery in the New World, especially in NorthAmerica. The slaves had been recruited from Africa for their hardiness in relation to thedemands of frontier agriculture and resistance to tropical diseases such as malaria.The demands

of agrarian labour in frontier conditions ensured that most African slaves continued to workunder the simplest, gang-based, forms of the agrarian division of labour. As the institutionevolved, tasking became more common, but racial difference reinforced stereotypes of anineducable underclass of hewers of wood and drawers of water, thus prolonging force (relativeto skill) as the basis of social order in New World slave-holding societies. Accordingly,marronage endured as a cherished route to freedom.The agrarian systems of the Americas longremained war economies, a condition carried over into post-slavery, post-Civil War US peace-time in the institution of convict labour, on plantations but also very much in railroadconstruction, in mines, and in turpentine and lumber processing (Lichtenstein 1996).

One of the best-documented cases, from a rich literature on marronage (Price 1996), isJamaica, where the first maroon communities in the island took shape as a result of

5 A recent overview of Asian agrarian history (Scott 2009) places marronage at the heart of a long-term andunfinished struggle between centralizing, coercive states and self-governing hill peoples. Scott suggests that his basicmodel of state/non-state conflict applies also to the long-term history of Africa, the Americas and Central Asia.




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English colonists driving Spanish settlers from the island in the mid-seventeenth century(Patterson 1977). The African slaves on the island organized first as a semi-independentguerrilla force allied with the Spanish against the English. Isolated maroon farms in the hillswere also a source of food for the beleaguered Spanish. However, after the Spanish aban-doned the island, maroon settlements became an important exit option for slaves freshlylanded from Africa, many from the West African Gold Coast. The environment of the for-ested hills of Jamaica was recognizably similar to the conditions that many of the slaves hadknown at home, and African guerrilla and subsistence tactics continued to serve maroonindependence well.

The first maroon war lasted for almost a century, until 1740 (Patterson 1977), and endedinconclusively. An important factor in the conflicts prolongation was the inability of theEnglish to mobilize sufficiently effective forces to eliminate the maroon threat. The Africanslave population of the island greatly outnumbered the English settler population, and many ofthe latter were not landowners with a strong vested interest in establishing an effective coercive

regime, but agents working on behalf of absentee investors living in grand style in England.These agents sometimes, allegedly, connived in the ruination of plantations, hoping to buy themcheaply. In any case, few members of the agent class were willing to r isk their lives volunteeringfor a militia capable of addressing the maroon threat effectively.

The government of Jamaica sent for foreign experts in bush warfare (a contingent of Indiantrackers from the mainland Mosquito Coast). Even this was insufficient to resolve the problem,and negotiation proved necessary. A die-hard group of maroons eventually petitioned to berepatriated to West Africa, and became an important founding element in the infant settlementfor freed slaves at Sierra Leone in the early nineteenth century.

More recently, Sierra Leone has faced an underclass rebellion of its own, in which it is

tempting to see elements of the Jamaica story recapitulated perhaps most notably in theactions of a diaspora-oriented regime that hired South African bush warfare experts to help itdeal with a forest insurgency that was eventually resolved not through force, but by negotiation.Indeed, it is not irrelevant to ask how much the present pattern of supposed new war in Africaowes to older cultural and organizational templates associated with agrarian slavery andmarronage.The trans-Atlantic slave trade had a huge impact within Africa, even if some aspectsof this story are far from fully understood.

Originally, it appears that slavery in western Africa (from where most of the Atlantic slavesoriginated) was mainly a means of dealing with debt and crime. But demand soon outstrippedsupply. Increasingly, slaves were recruited through force, either as a result of slave-raiding of

decentralized populations by horse-borne raiders from interior mercantile polities, sometimesthinly disguised as jihad, or (in forest regions) by the expedient of kidnapping.Judicial slavery also became degraded by greater demand from the Atlantic trade. For

instance, a late-eighteenth-century observer in Sierra Leone (Thomas Winterbottom) notedthat, as the demand for slaves increased, banishment as a slave increasingly resulted fromtrumped-up charges (Winterbottom 1803). A category of case on which Winterbottom com-ments was the tort of woman damage (the alleged adultery of a junior male with the wife ofa polygamously married big man).The tort still survives in rural Sierra Leone in local courtsrehabilitated by international aid in the aftermath of the Sierra Leone war and a recent study(Mokuwa et al. 2011) establishes that the pattern of cases correlates significantly with variations

in peak labour demand on upland rice farms (i.e.woman damage is connected with agrariandemands for cheap labour). These kinds of cases are among the abuses of justice that someyoung people involved in the Sierra Leone civil war cited as reasons for joining the rebelmovement.




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Meillassoux (1991) notes that as early as the seventeenth century, free-booter enclaves werebeginning to emerge in the West African interior, either as refuges from slave-raiding attacks oras gathering points for disaffected youths expelled or absconding from peasant society for arange of offences.6 Whether these enclaves are better classed as maroon or bandit communitiesremains to be debated, but Meillassouxs account of one such militia formation an armedmeritocracy founded by the warlord Biton Coulibaly, from which the city-state of Segou onthe Niger eventually emerged seems plausibly comparable in a number of respects not least,the emphasis on military prowess as a basis for youth social advancement with the bushmovement built by the rebel leader, Foday Sankoh, in the Sierra Leone forests during the 1990s.

The slave trade also induced the establishment of slave plantations within Africa.The upperWest African coast north of Freetown is one region in which such plantations were numerous,mainly growing red rice for the victualling of slave vessels.These plantations appear mainly tohave been staffed by slaves from the interior, pending their eventual overseas sale. Doubtless,attempts to abscond were frequent, and were put down by violent means. There were also

full-scale slave revolts, and attempts at marronage.We know about one substantial instance ofmarronage on the edge of the Upper Guinean forest in the late eighteenth century (Mouser2007), but other instances of slave rebel groups retreating into more inaccessible regions of theforest perhaps await discovery (cf. Scott 2009).

Domestic and farm slavery was still widespread in western Africa at the beginning of thecolonial period. In poor agrarian conditions, slavery was often disguised by the lack of any moregeneral division of labour in village society. Each person grew his or her own crops, whetherslave or free. Legal emancipation took place in the early years of colonial administration, andformer slaves often sought to better their condition by looking for paid work in towns, minesor plantations. The children of former slaves looked for their eventual emancipation through

education.As in the Classical world, the children of slaves knew that true manumission is relatedto acquisition of skill.

It is thus worth noting that two of the emblematic instances of African new war wereamong the last countries to enact legal emancipation (Sierra Leone in 1928 and Liberia in1930). In both countries, the agrarian division of labour has, since emancipation, remainedhighly underdeveloped. Opportunities for young people in rural areas were further constrainedin the 1980s by cuts to aid budgets in the name of structural adjustment. It is perhapsunsurprising, therefore, to find rural revolts in these two countries in some cases staffed byrecruits whose grandparents knew agrarian slavery at first hand recapitulating the motivationallanguage and violent guerrilla organizational know-how associated with earlier episodes of

African marronage. As the longer-term history of slave societies suggests, the problem of thistype of violence may not be fully addressed until routes towards social cohesion via acquisitionof skill are fully opened.

PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION LIVES ON

Much of slavery especially, but not exclusively, the Atlantic slave trade has its corollary inthe violent appropriation of land. Between clear-cut enslavement and the protracted civil war,

6 Millers (1988) majestic history of the Angolan slave trade points to a number of refugee and escaped-slavemaroon-type communities emerging within West Central Africa in the eighteenth century: Slaves fled from the

marketplaces of the interior, taking refuge among the very people who had just sold them to the Euro-peans . . . Some fugitives established maroon colonies of their own within Portuguese territory, and there are hintsthat a major colony of renegades existed throughout the century virtually on the outskirts of Luanda. Some ofthese colonies had extensive fields and fortifications . . . and lived by raiding Portuguese slave-run plantations inthe river valleys (1988, 3856).




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more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working class that Marx (in Capital,p. 303; cited in Denning 2010, 83) argued created the normal working day, there have been, andare, other mechanisms essentially forcing people to join the ranks of free labour supply as wagelabourers. And one of the enduring mechanisms, again tied to coercive appropriation of land,has been primitive accumulation. Interest in primitive accumulation has revived in recent years(Moore 2000, 2003; Byres 2004; Khan 2004; Cramer 2006).7 Classically, as in the Englishenclosures, primitive accumulation involves the appropriation of land for private purposes,which kicks off a double movement enabling the emergence of capitalist relations of produc-tion: an amassing of investible capital and the creation of a wage labour class. Land appropria-tion (later supported by a raft of other mechanisms such as hut taxes) effectively deprivedpeople of subsistence livelihoods.They were they are forced to sell their labour power orto make up the numbers in a reserve army of labour.

Enclosure experiments set the precedent for a wave of colonial conquest, violent disposses-sion and resistance. In Ireland, Romists and Common Irish, wrote William Petty, began the

1641 rebellion by trying to repossess English-owned estates.This backfired spectacularly: the Actof Settlement in 1652 reallocated nearly 8.5 million acres of land from Catholics to Protestants.Catholic ownership of land shrivelled from more than 60 per cent to less than 10 per cent.There is an echo of this in the Christian planting land grabbing and large-scale settlement

of Mindanao (see Vellema et al. 2011, this issue). One among many racial rather than religiousversions of the accumulation of land by conquest was in North America, where the rhetoric ofthe heroics of nudging the frontier of civilization westwards masked the fact that conquestwas the historical bedrock of the whole nation . . . Conquest was a literal, territorial form ofeconomic growth (Limerick 1987, 267).The virgin lands of a Jeffersonian imagination wereoccupied and their redistribution to the benefit of white farmers was complex, venal and cruel.8

Primitive accumulation has been a provocation to violence, it has been carried out byviolence and has followed warfare and conquest, and it has often been a feature of therearrangements secured during violent conflicts. It is such a common feature of the past 500

years of Angolas history, for example, that it becomes an organizing principle of the narrativeof that history. This narrative encompasses: slavery and early colonial settlement; twentieth-century settlement fuelled by Portuguese immigration (for example, in the coffee boom of thelate 1950s); the postwar enclosure of land rich in diamonds in the northern Lunda region; andgovernment-forced evictions in peri-urban farming and housing areas in the 2000s, forpurposes of development and beautification.9 It has been at the leading edge of develop-mental conflict in Colombia. It is a provocative feature of the commercializing intrusions into

the central forest regions in India, where a civilizing frontier rhetoric, not unlike that ofnineteenth-century North Americans, has masked profoundly conflict-inducing policies. It isthe spectre underlying social protests in rural Peru, where nightwatch patrols (rondas campesinas)have challenged multinational mining projects on the grounds that they will erode the delicateecological viability of small-scale farming (Taylor 2011, this issue). At worst, episodes anddynamics of primitive accumulation simply recur, in a loop of coercion, redistributions andreproduced destitution. At best, primitive accumulation is so fundamental to the evolution ofmore sustained and expansive capitalism that it must lead to a reinterpretation of clichs ofdevelopment as conflict prevention and of the security-development nexus.

7 And it has been extended into the persistent mechanism of accumulation by dispossession highlighted byHarvey (2003).8 As Limerick (1987) has it, frontier is an unsubtle concept in a subtle world.9 See Marques (2006) on the Lundas; and see Human Rights Watch (2007) on forced evictions near Luanda.




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A CONTINUUM OF VIOLENCE AND VARIETY OF CONFLICTS

It is precisely to a renewed attention to such local economic tensions, and to variations inagrarian structures and relations, and their implications for political conflict and the peacewarcontinuum, and at the same time to deeper histories than are often admitted to analyses ofviolent conflicts, that this special issue hopes to contribute.

On the one hand, the contributions to this special issue help to signal the significance ofstudying the agrarian roots, dimensions and consequences of many recent and ongoing violentconflicts. On the other hand, such study may help in deepening understanding of the hetero-geneity of violent conflicts. For much recent conflict literature has been poorly served both bycommitment to unit homogeneity of civil wars (or to what Gutirrez-Sann 2008 calls thesimilarity hypothesis), for example, and by what efforts there have been to disaggregate amongsuch conflicts; for instance, according to whether they are internal, international or inter-nationalized internal, and so on.There are structural features of international relations and the

world economy that also affect variations over time in the technology of rebellion, leading forexample to Kalyvas and Balcellss (2010) distinction between irregular (guerrilla) wars, con-ventional wars and non-conventional symmetry wars.10 A possible matrix of violent conflictsmight incorporate both this kind of distinction and its roots in international relations and theeffects on the heterogeneity of violent conflicts of local, including agrarian, social and economicstructures and relations.11

We argue, further, for an empirical and analytical range that extends beyond a disaggregationof those phenomena typically classified as civil wars, or indeed as wars or intermediate armedconflicts. Instead, despite the usefulness of analyses restricted to civil war datasets, we argue forthe continued relevance of a continuum of violence or a peacewar continuum.This is not least

because of the common roots of many different phenomena of social conflict and violence inagrarian structures and in processes of fundamental agrarian change. One example is the originsand early development of the Sicilian Mafia. Salvatore Lupo argues strongly against the fantasythat the Mafia is a phenomenon of backwardness, a throwback to feudalism that would vanishonce the sound of locomotive whistles echoed through the villages of the desolate Sicilianhinterland (2009, 10). The idea cyclically resurfaces, Lupo writes, according to whichmodern changes (agricultural land reform, industrialization, education and the developmentof more liberal sexual ethics) ought ipso facto to destroy the phenomenon . . . (2009, 10).A verysimilar argument also resurfaces and has dominated much thinking in the post-Cold War era,in the form of the straightforward argument that development is conflict prevention, that

development retards war (World Bank 2003).12By contrast, the Mafiosi most specifically seen as emblematic of this traditionalist view Calogero Vizzini and Giuseppe Genco Russo were organizers of co-operatives, intermediariesin the transfer of land from large landowners to peasants. They were not the handmaidens offeudal latifondismo. There is historically a close correspondence between the Mafia and thefragmentation of large landed estates, a close integration of Mafiosi into international markets,

10 Kalyvas and Balcells (2010) argue that once one disaggregates in this way, it is possible to reveal a dramatictransformation in civil wars after the end of the Cold War, with a striking decline in irregular wars in particular.Where insurgency or guerrilla war involves asymmetry between the two main warring parties (insurgent andstate), conventional wars are more symmetric in terms of level and type of military technology between rebels and

states and involve a high level of military technology, while in symmetric non-conventional wars, the militarytechnology of the two sides is matched but at a low level.11 Berdal and Suhrke (2011) emphasize the need, similarly, to overcome a similarity hypothesis about war-to-peace transitions, distinguishing among varieties of postwar violence.12 Frances Thomson takes particular issue with this idea in the context of Colombia (2011, this issue).




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in the sulphur mines of the interior and the dynamic agricultural areas of peri-urban borgate inthe Palermo hinterland, the area where citrus exports took off in the nineteenth century.

Agrarian change, indeed a protracted crisis and transformation of the latifondismo systemwithin a larger, also protracted and uneven, transformation of Sicilian and Italian politics, wasvery much the context for the emergence of the Mafia. Historians of the Mafia (includingGambetta 1996; Dickie 2004; Lupo 2009) locate much of its origins in the rural areas ofincreasingly realized commercial (especially export-oriented) value and in control over (throughownership and/or management of) citrus groves and parcelled-out large landholdings or stateland. Gabelloti renters and leasers of land parcels were particularly central to the dynamicsthat sometimes pitted emergent classes against landowners and sometimes pitted rival com-petitors for local land monopolies against one another.The Mafia phenomenon often involved

gabelloti or giardini (managers or watchmen) using the threat of rustic brigands (often a threatthey themselves created) to insinuate themselves into positions of control of the flow ofresources and to offer protection.13 In this, the Mafia emerges as a micro-version of Tillys

(1990) state-as-racketeer argument.

CAUSE AND EFFECT: EMPIRICAL CHALLENGES

One of the distinguishing features of Paige (1975) was the combination of research methods.The study combined cross-country statistical analysis with a set of contrastive, highly detailedcase studies.This combination of methods bridges the common divide in the recent literatureon violent conflicts between the more quantitatively minded research by many economists andsome political scientists and the more qualitative research of many others.

Paige adopted a different research approach in later work (1998) that also focused on the

structural implications of particular export commodities, though in this case exclusively coffee.Recent literature has stressed, often in a highly determinist way, the possible significance of aresource curse, usually referring to mineral resources, and in particular to the role of oil inraising the risk of civil war. However, it is just as clear that other resources, includingagricultural export commodities, have often been at the heart of violent conflicts. Here too, thephysical properties and technical requirements of production for specific commodities aresignificant. But rather than fetishizing commodities themselves, what is more significant is theset of social relations and political dynamics both shaped by, and shaping, commodity produc-tion.Thus, it is not simply whether a mineral is located at a point or dispersed as a resource,or whether or not a commodity can be grown with capital-intensive mechanization. On a

similar note, Snyder (2006) argues that lootable resources may contribute to armed conflict insome contexts, but to political order and stability in others.

Central American conflicts of the 1980s were:

deeply rooted in the social and economic structures of the region.These structures in turnwere shaped by a single commodity that has dominated these small export economiesfrom the nineteenth century to the present coffee . . . [The] coffee elite shaped thepolitical institutions that emerged in the early twentieth century and survived the collapseof these institutions in the economic and political crises of the 1930s . . . Coffee andpower have been closely linked in Central America since the nineteenth century. (Paige1998, 3)

13 Lupo (2009) is adamant, however, and in contrast to Gambetta (1996), that the intertwining of materialinterests and politics in Mafia behaviour cannot be reduced to a simple economic logic.




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More recent work in the vein of institutional political economy also argues that factorendowments do not determine economic or political fate. Nugent and Robinson (2010)compare the Latin American coffee economies of Colombia and Costa Rica with El Salvadorand Guatemala, to argue that their different political and economic trajectories were shapednot simply by topography or the innate characteristics of coffee but by variations in thebackground, composition and strategies of nineteenth-century elites and in their approach toland laws and the mobilization of labour, which in turn affected paths to either smallholdercoffee production or plantation (and labour repression) production: Our analysis suggests thatthe domain of theories which emphasize factor endowments as the main source of variation ininstitutions is limited. At least for the economies we consider, endowments were not fate(Nugent and Robinson 2010, 79).

The contrasting cases of Ghana and Cte dIvoire are instructive here. Cocoa and tensionsover land, and the rights of migrant strangers to land leased for cocoa production, areundoubtedly present in both countries, but in only one case (thus far) have these issues become

enfolded within, and contributed to, a nexus of political violence and civil war. Furthermore,both countries sell their cocoa in the same market, and are subject to the same global marketfactors and constraints. In short, the commodity factor alone cannot provide the basis for anadequate explanation of why (and when) war breaks out.14 It seems likely that here as inCosta Rica, El Salvador and Guatemala variations in the background, composition andstrategies of elites will prove to be equally important.

The key in Paiges Coffee and Power is precisely how coffee elites in three Central Americancountries powerfully shaped and dominated politics from the late nineteenth century throughto the latter part of the twentieth (at least); how very comparable countries followed suchextraordinarily different political trajectories through the twentieth century socialist revolu-

tion, supported by sections of the coffee elite in Nicaragua; revolution from above (fascism inBarrington Moores 1973 terms) in El Salvador, in which coffee elites supported the extremeright-wing party set up by a death-squad leader; and sustained democracy in Costa Rica, alsodominated by coffee elites); but how all three countries and their coffee elites then convergedon a late-twentieth-century neoliberal ideology. In terms of research methods, Paige (1998)combined interviews with members of coffee elite families with a historical political economyof each country.The emphasis is on the way in which narrative reflects and constructs ideology:ideology in Marxs sense of inversion of the reality rather than simply a set of beliefs.

The study of new wars has been undermined by needless disputes; for example, betweensocial scientists (e.g. proponents of large-N statistical approaches to causality of war) and

postmodernists stressing the importance of the analysis of agency and discourse. A similarstand-off (between proponents of structuralist and behaviourist models) undermined the pro-ductivity of studies of peasant revolt a generation ago, which is perhaps one reason why thisliterature has not presented itself more forcefully in recent debates. Neither approach rules outthe other; both are needed for a fully rounded interpretation, as Durkheim long ago made clear,in arguing that human ritual agency generates and harnesses emotional energies to collectiveends, and thus forges institutions and structure.There is room in a more constructive approachto the agrarian dynamics of violent conflict for combining cross-country statistics, statisticalanalysis of individual case study surveys, life histories, interviews, textual analysis, archival workand so on.

However, all these methods have to deal with the particular salience of problematic evidence:evidence that is missing or that is distorted by interests; evidence that is coloured by the

14 See Austin (1996) and Ryan (2011).




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emotions driving violence, its experience and its interpretation; or evidence that is simplydifficult to collect and interpret.Violent conflict is not alone in facing such problems, but maybe especially prone to them.15 Reconstructing violent incidents or episodes and trying tounderstand the sequence of events, and the motives and causes that led to them, is never easy.The challenges involved ought to be taken as a warning not to get carried away by thetemptations to deduce such causes and motives from abstract axioms, or to infer them frompatchy and often at best second-hand evidence. Two honest and meticulous examples of thechallenges involved are Todorovs (1996) local history of an act of resistance to Nazi andcollaborationist rule in an Auvergnac town late in the Second World War and Roosas (2006)history of an event, similar in its failure and in the terrible vengeance that it unleashed, inIndonesia in the mid-1960s.

For historians of Indonesia, the September 30th movement, a group of troops loyal toPresident Sukarno who in 1965 kidnapped and executed a number of army generals whothey held responsible for plotting a right-wing coup, has been difficult to fathom for

decades. The movement and its consequences, effectively the takeover of power by Suhartoand the reprisals that he instigated, one of the worst bloodbaths of the twentieth century(Roosa 2006, 4), was hugely significant but has been plagued by empirical difficulties. Therehas been little primary evidence available for scrutiny and most of that is unreliable: Dif-ferent individuals joined the movement with different motivations and expectations, and theypossessed different levels of knowledge about the plan. As with many covert operationsinvolving such a wide array of people and institutions, there were mistaken assumptions,mis-communications, and self-deceptions (Roosa 2006, 19). John Roosas own approach,partly an interpretation in the light of new empirical evidence, is to try to avoid aRashomon-like ending, in which one character tells another: Well, dont worry about it. It

isnt as though men were reasonable;16 and at the same time to avoid an overly neatSherlock Holmes-like resolution. Though Roosa does not offer this analogy, it is temptingto see many such incidents and episodes of violence including many addressed in thisspecial issue more in terms of Carlo Emilio Gaddas That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana.For Gadda, nothing can be explained if we confine ourselves to one cause: The apparentmotive, the principal motive was, of course, single. But the crime was the effect of a wholelist of motives which had blown on it in a whirlwind (like the 16 winds in the listof winds when they twist together in a tornado, in a cyclonic depression) and had endedby pressing into the vortex of the crime the enfeebled reason of the world (Gadda2007, 56).

Meanwhile, Todorov (1996) reconstructs the acts of a resistance group in Saint-Amand-Montrond who, hearing on the radio of the Normandy landings in 1944, came out into theopen to liberate their town led, Todorov argues, above all by the idea that to preserveFrench dignity they must liberate their own town and took hostages, some of whom theyexecuted. Their timing was premature. Collaborationists and German soldiers responded byre-taking control of the town, rounding up some 70 Jewish people in the area and dumpingtheir bodies down wells. Though much of this tragedy can be reconstructed, there is stillevidence missing, some survivors of the time refused to talk to Todorov, and the evidencethat exists is clearly coloured by interest. So Todorov (1996, xviii) writes in his preface that

15

See: Cramer and Goodhand (2011) on the deployment of factoids, and false pretensions to hard science, inthis field; Cramer et al. (2011) on the ethical and methodological challenges of research on conflict contexts inAfrica; and Murray et al. (2002) on the overall problem of data availability and reliability in violent conflicts.16 Rashomon is a film directed by Akira Kurosawa (1950), in which four people provide four different narrativesof the same crime and in which there is no resolution that reveals the truth.




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tomorrow I could discover some details, some implications of the acts that I describe,that have eluded me and that would change the overall meaning. Everything that followsmust therefore be read in light of this explicit limitation: according to what I know atpresent .

This special issue bears out the complexity of the issues and contributes to what weknow at present. This includes the issue of for what purpose we seek to learn. Scholarsrange across the gamut of motivations some analysing war because it is there, or becauseit is a key part of what they might seek to understand (e.g. social change more generally);others because they are embedded intellectuals, seeking to contribute to knowledge of how,effectively, to prosecute war, or how to make peace. The kinds of conflicts covered in thisissue are inescapable challenges to all these scholarly learning projects. But also at stake is theissue of what peasant groups themselves learn in the process of living through and partici-pating in armed conflict. The current special issue covers a range of outcomes. At oneextreme is Lewis Taylors case study of Peru (2011, this issue), in which peasant groups

appear to have developed a range of organizational skills in the process of mobilizing for civildefence during the period of the Shining Path insurgency, which they have more recentlyput to use in confronting international mining capital through organized but less violentmeans. At the other extreme is the worrying case of Sierra Leone, where authoritarian localrulers appear to have learnt little or nothing from the disaster of the civil war, and wherethe operations of international mining capital, facilitated by these rural ruling elites, are oncemore provoking stirrings of revolt among violence-prone rural youth. In short, only carefulcontextual analysis will reveal whether war builds capacity for more war or strengthensdetermination to contest land appropriation and other aspects of primitive accumulation byother, non-violent means. It is by encompassing such a wide range of causes and outcomes

that the papers in this issue make their case for bringing the agrarian back into the studyof violent conflict in developing countries as a core concern. In doing so, they also amountto a new research agenda requiring, as we suggest, a breadth of analytical ambition and ahitherto unprecedented combination of methods.

The numbers, worldwide, of those who remain dependent on peasant livelihoods (notsimply subsistence farmers, but families living in rural areas combining farming with off-farmwage labour and often sustained by remittances) is often a shock to those far removed fromthe soil upwards of 2 billion. The peasantry is an enduring presence in the modern world,and the topic of peasant revolt, we argue, needs urgently to be reinstated at the centre ofdebates about recent civil wars. The locus of transition detected by studies of the Wat Tyler

rebellion of 1381 was an economic and cultural order in the countryside that the enfeebledagrarian regime was increasingly unable to subjugate: London 1381, Kabul today? Collec-tively, the following papers make a case for viewing a surprising number of importantintra-state wars today as conflicts at the point of transition from feudal/patrimonial tomarket-oriented, capitalist (or perhaps at least combined) modes of production in whichagrarian struggles play a central part. These issues are unlikely to fade fast. Instead, they willonly become more obvious, partly because of their increasingly clear but ever-present globaldimensions. Global food and energy price trends, the volatile play of commodity futuresspeculation upon prices of export crops and consumer foods, climate change, concerns overforeign investment and so-called land grabbing are all capable of provoking struggles: over

access to land for instance, peasants displaced by flower farm concessions or pastoralistsexcluded by pasture enclosures; over water use; over the conditions of labour; or over thegendered and generational relations of power. This special issue is offered in support of theclaim that war studies needs now to make an agrarian turn.




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