Potential Rebels Research Articles

Primary Commodities and War: Congo-Brazzaville's Ambivalent Resource Curse

Political economists argue that developing countries with abundant natural resources are likely to suffer from the curse, a double-barreled affliction of poor governance and irresponsible economic behavior.1 Analysts have applied this approach to civil wars, arguing that primary commodity dependency may stimulate armed rebellion.2 Abundant natural resources are a honey pot, tempting potential rebels to try their luck, especially in the world's poorest regions. With few legal economic alternatives, young males will turn to violent resource plunder for survival and enrichment. This phenomenon is especially widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, resource theorists claim, because economic conditions there are particularly grim. Indeed, the incidence of civil war was higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions during the 1990s, and African war-related casualties have claimed a disproportionate share of the world's total in that decade.3 Political rebellion, in this view, has much in common with regular crime, but its incidence is lower due to greater risks and start-up costs.4 General arguments about the effects of resources on civil war rely on large-N statistical analyses, but they find support in case studies from Colombia to Afghanistan.5 Some studies suggest that globalization exacerbates the resource effect on conflict, as improved transportation and communication helps even the least sophisticated warlord sell bootleg resources on world markets. Others suggest that dwindling superpower patronage makes resource-driven wars particularly attractive for elites and mid-ranking members of developing region bureaucracies and militaries. This article tests the hypothesis that abundant natural resources stimulate war by analyzing four separate incidences of armed conflict in the Republic of Congo (CongoBrazzaville), a small nation bordering on the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo-Kinshasa, formerly Zaire). Drawing on interviews with former militia fighters, politicians, and in-country foreign observers, it analyzes the effects of oil wealth on armed conflict.6 The resource curse theory proves valid in some respects but underspecified in others. Following an ill-fated attempt at democratization, Congo-Brazzaville endured four rounds of brutal militia fighting in 1993, 1997, 1998-99, and 2002.7 Three main militias, loosely affiliated with each of Congo's broad ethnoregional groupings,

Inequality and Indignation

Inequalities often persist because both the advantaged and the disadvantaged stand to lose from change. Despite the probability of loss, moral can lead the disadvantaged to seek to alter the status quo, by encouraging them to sacrifice their material self-interest for the sake of equality. Experimental research shows that moral indignation, understood as a willingness to suffer in order to punish unfair treatment by others, is widespread. It also indicates that a propensity to apparently self-defeating moral can turn out to promote people's material self-interest, if and because others will anticipate their actions. But potential rebels face collective action problems. Some of these can be reduced through the acts of indignation entrepreneurs, giving appropriate signals, organizing discussions by like-minded people, and engaging in acts of self-sacrifice. Law is relevant as well. By legitimating moral and dissipating pluralistic ignorance, law can intensify and spread that indignation, thus increasing its expression. Alternatively, law can delegitimate moral indignation, or at least raise the cost of its expression, thus stabilizing a status quo of inequality. But the effects of law are unpredictable, in part because it will have moral authority for some but not for others; here, too, heterogeneity is an issue both for entrepreneurs and their opponents. Examples are given from a range of areas, including labor-management relations, sexual harassment, civil rights, and domestic violence.

Everyday Time and Life Time

Most human beings are aware of living in a certain age, that life is a transitory phenomenon, and that time passes - slowly or quickly. Since the discovery of time, humanity has gained control over time as a dimension, but the question that needs to be posed is who exerts this control and how this relates to us as individuals. I wish to draw a distinction between `everyday time' as something relatively routine, or cyclical, and `life time' as a linearly experienced framework in which we seek biographical continuity and coherence. Making this distinction lays bare the culturally specific asynchrony between these two time frames, and the issue of who controls them. In capitalist modernity, the battle for control over time continues to be waged in many different ways. The strategies used by individuals to `heal' the gap between everyday time and life time make everyone a potential rebel offering resistance against the appropriation of time.

The Escalation of Insurgency: The Provisional Irish Republican Army's Experience, 1969–1971

There exists a substantial body of revolutionary analysis focused on those elusive objective conditions that permit rebels to rise with some hope of success. There is, of course, no more a general consensus on how to begin an insurrection than on how to prevent one. At one extreme there exist the more simpleminded adherents of Règis Debray who have suggested that a small band of the brave, a foco, may alone spark an insurrection against an oppressive regime. At the other are those reluctant rebels who insist on so extensive a roster of assets that the moment to rise continues to recede into the distant future. Still within the middle ground conditions have sufficiently encouraged some so that, possessed of a just cause and hopeful of ultimate victory, the armed struggle has been launched. As a result in southern Africa and Latin America, on Mindanao and in the Basque country of Spain, there are insurrections under different banners. Some appear close to victory and others on the verge of disaster, a few are little more than the disorderly residue of past hopes and others scarcely begun. For all a crucial question remains how to escalate the initial thrust. An insurrection may begin as the act of an urban conspiracy, spring from the operations of a rural foca, evolve out of the spontaneous rising of the masses; but unless the moment is ripe any insurrection can flicker out in the recriminations of exiles or be interned with the dead. And, perhaps, no set of potential rebels have had as much experience and as little luck in identifying the moment to strike as the Irish. Yet, the news from Northern Ireland indicates that this time they must be doing something right—or the British something wrong.

Nicholas Maw's New Opera

The Rising of the Moon is Nicholas Maw's second opera, and like its predecessor, One Man Show, it is a comedy. As far as subject matter and its treatment go, however, the resemblance ends there. One Man Show is a farce, based on a flimsy comic idea by Saki. The Rising of the Moon is a romantic comedy whose central situation—though necessarily presented in high theatrical relief—is essentially realistic and depends for its effect on the portrayal of a number of true-to-life three-dimensional characters. Beverley Cross's libretto, based on an entirely original idea, is set in Ireland in the year 1875. This was a tragic period in Irish history. After years of unavailing struggle for home rule and for the emancipation of a Catholic people from minority government by Protestants, Ireland had found herself in the mid-nineteenth century still bound in a most unfavourable union with England. Her economic and industrial growth was deliberately kept down by legislation in Westminster, prompted by fears of competition with home industry. The poverty of most Irish peasants was extreme, as it had been even before the potato famine of the late 1840s, and many were still suffering at the hands of unscrupulous landlords who were quite prepared to implement laws which made eviction the normal penalty for non-payment of rent. In these circumstances the English were naturally both hated and feared. Yet those who tried to stir popular feeling into action—Daniel O'Connell, the Young Irelanders, the Fenians—found their hands tied by Ireland's internal religious and social divisions, and by the listlessness of an underfed, underclothed, even underhoused people. Such revolutionary outbreaks as took place were isolated and poorly organised, and although the English executive in Ireland—including the army—might tend to regard all Irish peasants as potential rebels, they had long since learnt that the rebel bark was a good deal worse than the insurgent bite, and so they treated the natives accordingly.