Conflict and Development

— This article debates the rehabilitation of exhausted stone quarries in Palestine, focusing on its embeddedness in the geo-political context and on the role it plays as a component of building a smart city. While concentrating on the local context, attention is given to the connection with the political economy through notions of accumulation by dispossession, holding power, normalization and the specific context of occupation. Unrehabilitated quarries contradict the main smart city development goals and possibilities: they pose hazardous effects to humans, animals and the environment. Moreover, economic activities and employment opportunities are left out of sight – concepts that make the core values of creating a smart city. Local municipalities, together with ministries and cooperative initiatives play an important role. Data for this article is obtained from interviews with a wide range of stakeholders during a case study of stone quarries, factories and crushers, conducted during April and May 2015 in the central and southern part of the West Bank, mainly in the Bethlehem and Hebron districts. These include the private sector (owners of quarries, factories and crushers, the Union of Stone and Marble, the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce and Industry, workers), the academic sector (Palestine Polytechnic University and Bethlehem University), the public sector (the Palestinian ministry of national economy, licensing manager at the ministry, ministry of environmental affairs, two municipalities), and the health sector (insight in the archives of a hospital). Interviews were qualitative and half-open. Apart from that a literature study provides the base for comparative elements with rehabilitation of quarries elsewhere. Further more, the article touches upon quarry rehabilitation as urban recovery as a component of building sustainable communities – as a part of development of smart cities.

The study investigated the relationship between economic imperatives and the worrying involvement of the youth in armed-violence and criminal activities in Benue State such as armed robbery, cattle rustling, cultism, kidnapping, among others, especially in the post-amnesty period. From the secondary data collected, it was glaringly discovered that most of the youth who engage in crime in Benue State do it because of economic deprivations and exclusion. Crime in Benue State has burgeoned into outrageous proportions despite the amnesty programme and recovery of illegal arms because of the economic status of the agrarian state which has been stifled and crippled due to negligence. The poor handling of the amnesty left the youth with no other option but to turn to violent crimes in order to fend for themselves. Some of these youths were used by the affluent political elites and are left with illicit arms. These arms in their possession are subsequently, used for the commission of various crimes. Most of these youths do not leverage on the competitive opportunities in agriculture to empower themselves because of the allurement of wealth from crime. They, therefore, decline involvement in this age-long economic activity. Economic security is the major pathway to fighting crime in the state. Again, opportunistic politicians who have capitalized on the economic impoverishment of the youth and empowered them with money, arms and drugs to aid the violation of the due process of electioneering must sincerely be checked by the security agents to forestall the relapse of the state to crime.

Ghana is locally and internationally described as an oasis of peace and stability in a continent circumvented by conflicts. This is because the country has not experienced any civil war or large-scale violence since independence in March 1957. Nevertheless, it is faced with pouches of relative violence, including ethnic conflicts, land/resource based conflicts, religious violence and chieftaincy disputes, having devastating implications on socioeconomic development. This paper contributes to the debate on the implications of the Bawku chieftaincy conflict on basic education in the Bawku Traditional Area of the Upper East Region of Ghana. The Protracted Social Conflict Theory underpinning the Bawku chieftaincy conflict was examined. Data for the study were drawn from both primary and secondary sources, comprising books, articles, journals, newspapers, theses, interviews and focus group discussions. The study revealed that the conflict has had devastating effects on basic education in the area in terms of completion rates, gender equality, educational attainment rates and educational infrastructure. To minimise the adverse effects of the conflict on basic education in the area, the paper recommends campaign on the implications of the conflict on the socioeconomic development of the area, particularly on basic education by the government, non-governmental organisations and opinion leaders.

This essay supports the theoretical approaches of conflict and development and reveals that unequal development and resources scarcity deepens the poverty and creates conflicts in the society. Resource scarcity and unequal distribution of available resource create new marginalization and grievances. The marginalized, deprived, and excluded people struggle for their rights through non-peaceful means. This case study presents a theoretical analysis of an International conflict, i.e., East Pakistan Crisis, 1971, and reveals that political, economic and social inequalities create an understanding of deprivation among the masses causing large-scale violence and conflict in society.

While the WTO secretariat, key delegations, several NGOs, and industry publicly present the 30 August 2003 WTO Decision as an attempt to reconcile intellectual property with access to medicines, our research shows otherwise. We draw on qualitative analyses of 54 interviews and a lexicometric analysis of press releases to show that their enthusiastic public statements contrast deeply with their internal, cynical beliefs. Most of these actors not only consider the WTO Decision to be fundamentally flawed but claim to have known this prior to its adoption. We argue that a procedural norm of consensus-seeking impeded traditional bargaining over this sensitive issue and that distrust among participants hindered truth-seeking deliberation. Caught between strategic and communicative actions, state and non state actors found themselves trapped in their own rhetoric of reconciling intellectual property with access to medicines. They realized that the appearance of a solution, rather than a functional solution, provided the only realistic outcome to a fruitless and publicly damaging continuation of debate. From a theoretical perspective, this case study sheds a new light on the gray zone between rational choice theory and constructivism, where both discourse and strategies matter. From an empirical perspective, it illustrates the risk of seeking consensus within international regimes when the procedural norm of consensus coexists with a high level of distrust.

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of an International conflict, i.e. East
Pakistan Crisis, 1971, and reveals that unequal development creates conflict in society.
Natural resource scarcity and environmental degradation can also become a source of
conflict, so marginalised and excluded people fight for their rights through non-peaceful
means. This essay supports the theoretical approaches of poverty, environment, and
conflict nexus and reveals that unequal development and resource scarcity deepens the
poverty and creates conflicts in the society, causing harm to the environment. The degraded
environment increases the poverty as environment and poverty are interlinked, and the
poor have limited choices other than to degrade the environment for their survival. This
vicious downward spiral link between poverty and degradation of the environment requires
working extensively for poverty alleviation to reverse the environmental decline.

The toll of warfare is often assessed in the short run and in terms of mortality. Other aspects of health have received limited attention, especially after warfare ends. This paper estimates the impact of exposure to US Air Force bombing during 1965-1975 on the disability status of individuals in Vietnam in 2009. Using national census data and an instrumental variable approach, the paper finds a positive and statistically significant impact of war time bombing exposure on district level disability rates about forty years after the end of the war. A ten percent increase in bombing intensity approximately leads to a one percent increase in the prevalence of severe disability at the district level. Impacts are highest for severe disability and among persons born before 1976. Smaller yet significant positive impacts are observed among persons born after the war. Results suggest that the toll of warfare on health persists decades later.