Greed, Grievance, and Gaddafi: How Well Do Rational Choice Frameworks Explain the Libyan Uprising of 2011?
Abstract
During the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, only the revolution in Libya escalated into a civil war resulting in the successful overthrow of an autocratic ruler. The Libyan case provides an interesting study against which to test various rational choice frameworks for intrastate rebellion. Libya possesses many characteristics that typically predict civil war in these frameworks, including abundant extractable natural resources and high unemployment. Nevertheless, a deeper examination of the Libyan rebellion reveals that a complex combination of incentives was in play that defies any particular economic framework of conflict. The political economy of the Libyan situation gives a rich understanding of the different ways in which greed, grievance, and other incentives can provide the basis for an escalation into intrastate conflict.
INTRODUCTION
The Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 removed four long-standing autocratic leaders.1 Of these, only the revolution in Libya escalated into a full-scale civil war,2 culminating with the end of Muammar Gaddafi’s forty-two year rule. What began as nonviolent protests culminated as a six-month conflict, resulting in thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, of battle deaths among rebel forces, government soldiers, and civilians.3 This paper examines the war through some of the major rational choice- based intrastate conflict frameworks, most notably those based on Paul Collier and Anke Hoffler’s groundbreaking work on the role of greed and grievance in civil wars, in order to analyze the extent to which these frameworks are appropriate lenses through which to understand recent events in Libya.
Section II briefly outlines the political, social, and economic developments in the country under Gaddafi’s rule, and the basic timeline of key events during the uprising in order to have a contextual foundation from which to understand the factors that sustained the conflict. Section III provides an overview of the major frameworks that have used large-N analyses to isolate incentive-based rational choice factors as key drivers of intrastate conflict and that have become popular in policy discussions in the last decade. Finally, Section IV concludes the paper by examining the various factors that drove the war and by analyzing what these factors suggest about the appropriateness of rational choice frameworks in explaining the events in Libya.
THE LIBYAN CONTEXT
Libya Pre-2011
Libya’s history is a story of tribalism, colonialism, monarchy, and autocracy. The modern state of Libya was created in 1951 by a United Nations (UN) mandate following periods of tribal rule, Ottoman dynasties, and Italian colonization, making it the first African state to achieve independence from European rule.4 Though ruled by one monarch, the new state comprised three historically separate political and economic entities: Tripolitania in the Northwest, Cyrenaica in the East, and Fezzan in the Southwest. From the start, Libya was “an unlikely geographic entity”5 due to the disparate cultural and historical ties of its three regions, a difficulty augmented by extreme poverty and apparent lack of natural resources. However, the economic situation changed forever following the discovery of oil in 1959, leading to an increase in per-capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the next decade from thirty thousand to two thousand US dollars.6 Enormous concessions to Western oil companies by the Libyan king created strong resentment, culminating with a bloodless coup d’état led by twenty-seven-year-old Colonel Muammar Gaddafi on September 1, 1969, against the monarchy.
Over the next four decades, Gaddafi led a radical, erratic, and opaque political and economic system. Politically, Gaddafi created a complex structure of ever-changing rules that led to constant turnover of local officials, frequent reorganization of the official power structure, and no space for independent civil society. He effectively created two parallel governing structures: a powerful “revolutionary sector” which he ran along with his inner circle, and a functionally subservient bureaucratic sector in charge of running the official committees.7 Gaddafi also took measures to address the underlying tribalism that he believed was threatening his ability to maintain power. Soon after the coup, Gaddafi began working to dismantle the tribal system as a political entity and relegate it to a purely social institution, thus mitigating the ability of tribes to serve as non-regime organizing forces.8 However, this effort was unsuccessful, and in the 1990s Gaddafi instead co-opted tribal leaders through regime-sanctioned positions of political control. This had the effect of making tribes “one of the main sources of political legitimacy of the regime,”9 and supported the continued importance of tribal identities. In a rare independent survey in 1996, ninety percent of young Libyans declared themselves “attached” or “very attached” to their tribe.10 The concept of tribalism has received significant attention in coverage of the Libyan uprising, and is examined further in Section IV.
The oil industry has long dominated the economy of Libya. Though partnering with foreign companies, the government has complete domestic control of the industry, creating a classic primary commodity rentier state. Despite attempts at diversification, in 2006 the oil sector in Libya still made up ninety-five percent of export earnings, ninety-two percent of government revenue, and seventy-three percent of GDP, which led the World Bank to declare Libya “one of the least diversified oil-producing countries in the world,” with the share of hydrocarbon revenues in the economy almost double that of Saudi Arabia or Iran.11 Oil abundance removed the need for Gaddafi to rely on taxation and therefore the responsiveness to the citizenry that taxation entails. Gaddafi instead used state coffers to create a massive security apparatus that shut down all dissent.12 Corruption also flourished. On its scale, ordered from least corrupt to most corrupt, Transparency International ranked Libya 146th out of 178 states in 2010.13
Though Libya has a relatively high per-capita GDP by world standards at approximately twelve thousand US dollars in 2010,14 this is due to the small population (around six million) combined with a highly centralized oil industry, meaning that income has remained “heavily skewed.”15 Much of the windfall from the oil industry has gone to the Gaddafi family and a very small circle of close advisors.16 Inequality is widely acknowledged to be a major problem and, though objective statistics are non-existent, regime-controlled newspapers put the unemployment rate in 2009 at just above twenty percent.17. A youth bulge has augmented these economic problems, with sixty percent of the population under the age of thirty.18
The 2011 Uprising and Civil War
In order to understand the appropriateness of any conflict framework for Libya, it is crucial to first examine the sequence of events that turned a small protest into an armed rebellion that quickly escalated into full-scale civil war. The first major protest took place on February 15, 2011 in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city and the historical capital of the Cyrenaica region, which has long been a traditional hotbed of opposition against the regime. The stated cause of that protest was the arrest of human rights lawyer Fathi Terbil.19 However, protest organizers were also clearly inspired by the recent non-violent toppling of Zine al-Abadine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Calls to replicate these protests went out over popular blogs and social networking sites for weeks, leading to the detention of at least one blogger.20
The Benghazi protest on February 15, 2011 attracted a few hundred Libyans, but online coverage of the events led to additional protests taking place in Bayda and Zentan—much closer to Tripoli—on the same day. Protestors clashed violently with police across the three cities, resulting in dozens of injuries. Though the regime maintained a tight lid on state- controlled media reports, the Qatar-based and widely available Al Jazeera network reported heavily on the protests using citizen-submitted video and helped publicize calls for a countrywide “Day of Rage” on February 17, 2011.21
February 17, 2011 marked the beginning of a shockingly swift turn of events during which the Gaddafi regime lost control of much of the country to an unorganized popular movement within a matter of days.
Large protests across the country were met with lethal violence from security forces, resulting in at least fifteen deaths in Benghazi alone.22 This served as a crucial turning point. On the following day, the number and violence of the protestors began to seriously threaten regime control in Benghazi, with the first reports of security forces being killed by and defecting to the protestors.23 Over the following two days, violence escalated with protests around the country, and by February 20, 2011 the protestors had gained complete control of Benghazi with the help of a large number of defecting soldiers who began to form the core of an organized armed rebellion.24 It is notable that over the subsequent week as protests turned into a rebellion, the opposition to the regime emerged independently in both the east (Benghazi, Bayda, Ajdabiya) and the west (Zintan, Misrata, Zawiyah), creating a two-front war. By February 27, 2011 after ten days of seemingly disorganized protests, the rebels created the National Transitional Council (NTC) rebel government based in Benghazi, amassed an artillery of weapons on both the eastern and western fronts, begun organizing and training Libyans into a group of coordinated militias, and controlled most major cities, including territory representing eighty percent of the country’s oil production.
After losing control of much of the country, Gaddafi began striking back on both fronts. By the end of February, Gaddafi’s army was launching full-scale aerial bombing raids and ground assaults on rebel-controlled cities.25 At this point, Gaddafi had begun hiring mercenaries from Mali and Niger to fight for him.26 Over the following two weeks, a stalemate set in, with the rebels firmly in control of the east and the mountainous west, the government in control of Tripoli and its surroundings, and fierce fighting in the towns in central Libya going back and forth between government and rebel control.
By mid-March, the situation for civilians had grown dire, and Gaddafi’s public statements made it clear that he would fight with “no mercy or compassion” and without concern for anything but the survival of the regime.27 Concerns about the ability of the nascent rebel army to prevent a government offensive that would lead to a brutal massacre led the United Nations (UN) to approve Resolution 1973 on March 17, 2011, which sanctioned international intervention through the creation of a no-fly zone.28 This led to the next phase of the war: a five-month period spanning the summer during which the rebels slowly moved towards Tripoli with the backing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) sorties while establishing greater organizational capacity in the East. Finally, the war culminated with the NATO-backed rebel advance into Tripoli on August 20, 2011, giving the NTC de facto administrative control of nearly the entire country. This control was fully consolidated in October with the capture and execution of Gaddafi. Since that time, the NTC has worked to create a strong and unified government, but fissures have already emerged among the many semi-independent militias that formed the rebel confederacy. These fissures will be discussed further in Section IV.
RATIONAL CHOICE FRAMEWORKS FOR EXPLAINING INTRASTATE CONFLICT
This section provides a brief discussion of the most influential frameworks for understanding the role of incentives in explaining intrastate conflict, leading into an analysis of whether the Libyan conflict can be understood through these frameworks.
Traditional popular explanations for the outbreak and sustainment of civil conflict usually point to ancient ethnic, religious, and economic grievances that unleash irrational barbarism that leaves all parties worse off.29 This has created, in the popular imagination, a vision of civil war as anarchic and largely unstoppable.30 These sorts of explanations usually stem from the discourse of the fighters themselves, who nearly always justify their cause as a reaction to previous injustices.31 This inductive analytical method of examining the proximate causes and discourse of specific conflicts to glean larger patterns of the roots of civil war led to what can be understood as a grievance-based framework. Under this framework, rebels are generally reacting to some combination of ethnic or religious hatred, lack of political rights, government economic incompetence, and overall economic inequality.32 Though scholars have further categorized and parsed out the various potential grievance-based factors, as discussed in greater detail below, essentially these explanations deal with the self- identities of fighting groups and how these self-identities are perceived to fit into their overall societies.33
Contrasting the image of the emotion-based rebel movement is an increasingly influential literature of conflict theory based on rational choice models. Though rational choice theories of conflict have been around for quite some time,34 over the past decade, better access to data and better data analysis tools have allowed researchers to conduct a series of large-N econometric analyses.35 The first, and likely the most influential, major study using this methodology was outlined in Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler’s 2000 World Bank paper “Greed and Grievance in Civil War.”36 In this paper, Collier and Hoeffler test a number of variables against a data set of occurrences of outbreak of civil war. The variables are broken down as proxies for different aspects of two broad categories of motivations for rebels: grievance motivations, which include the identity and inequality factors described above, and greed motivations, which include a number of factors that would make it economically rational for rebels to incite violence, including the potential to control primary exports and a low economic opportunity cost of participation. The analysis finds that, in fact, the grievance factors are not correlated with the outbreak of violence, whereas a number of greed factors, most notably primary commodity exports and the presence of a diaspora community available to fund the conflict, are highly significantly correlated with violence.37 This correlation is enhanced when combined with dominance of one ethnic group; however, ethnic fractionalization is not found to be a factor.38
In the ensuing decade, the basic Collier and Hoeffler greed/grievance framework has been criticized as well as refined and built upon using different variables and datasets. Collier and Hoeffler themselves have revisited and updated the framework a number of times to improve the model, including adding the presence of young men with low education levels as a significant indicator of a lack of opportunity cost.39 Collier also delves deeper into the mechanisms through which economic incentives for rebellion help overcome major barriers to recruiting and mobilizing rebels, including collective action problems and the “time inconsistency” issue for rebels trying to gain recruits while the revolt is small without the ability to immediately extract rent as a fighter.40 More recently, Collier and Hoeffler adjusted the framework to look more closely at the dichotomy between motivation and feasibility. Through larger and more robust analyses, they found that any sort of motivation, be it greed or grievance based, is much less important than simply whether or not a successful revolution is feasible given underlying conditions. In their analysis, these conditions include: being under the French security umbrella (discourages rebellion), the proportion of young men in the population (encourages rebellion by making recruitment easier), and the proportion of mountainous terrain (encourages rebellion).41
Christina Bodea and Ibrahim Elbadawi (2007) argue that civil war is a spectrum of different types of conflicts in order to parse out a more nuanced understanding of how various rational choice variables can explain the type of conflict that breaks out.42 Contrary to Collier and Hoeffler, they find that a grievance framework can in fact be used to understand the determinates of civil war. Specifically, they found that ethnic fractionalization does increase the likelihood of war and that democratic political systems are better at reducing the risk of civil war than autocracies. Another interesting nuance of this study is that different primary commodities have different effects on conflict, with oil increasing the chances of civil war while not increasing the chances of a coup or other lower level forms of violence.43
Syed Murshed and Mohammad Tadjoeddin (2008) also build on the greed/grievance framework, asserting that “greed based explanations for conflict require further refinement” and should give more consideration to “institutional mechanisms that cause the competition for resource rents to descend into outright warfare.”44 They revisit grievance through a more subtle lens by subdividing grievances into those related to relative deprivation, polarization, and horizontal inequality. They then go a step further, synthesizing both greed and grievance into a higher-level framework of how factors interact to produce the breakdown of the social contract.45 Greed and grievance are insufficient in and of themselves to cause conflict. They must instead be combined in such a way that groups can no longer resolve resource disputes peacefully.
All of these econometric models demonstrate a high correlation between primary commodities and conflict. Michael Ross (2003) has looked more deeply at this effect to understand how different commodities can provide different incentives that lead to variable outcomes. He separates out commodities into “lootable,” meaning easy to extract, and “non-lootable,” meaning difficult to extract without technical expertise. Ross finds that “non-lootable” resources such as oil tend to favor the government and therefore make conflicts briefer, but that these resources also tend to lead to separatist rather than non-separatist conflicts.46
A major rational choice alternative to the Collier and Hoeffler framework and its derivatives is the work of James Fearon and David Laitin. Using large-N techniques, Fearon and Laitin agree that rebels make a rational choice based on feasibility. However, in their model this choice is determined by whether or not the factors that favor small-scale insurgency exist, in particular, a weak state, poverty, and rough terrain.47 Following this finding, Fearon argues that the relationship between primary commodity resources and civil war is not due to the fact that these commodities allow for rebels to finance themselves as proposed in the greed framework. Rather, he argues that these commodities tend to create the political and economic situations, such as a weak state, which then favor insurgency.4
The results of many of these studies, particularly those of Collier, have been widely publicized and have had an enormous influence on both the academic study of war and policymakers’ understanding of conflict. It is not difficult to understand why the rational choice framework might seem attractive to a policymaker, since it implies that through proper control of the industries and incentives involved in conflict, the ability to reduce conflict will increase dramatically. Nevertheless, despite the popularity of these large-N based rational choice frameworks, scholars question whether these models are truly explanatory. Michael Ward and Kristen Bakke (2005) point out that, while the correlations may be strong, the models cannot properly explain the underlying causal mechanisms due to the broad nature of the variables involved.49 This means that for any given past case, the models are not truly illuminating, and for any potential future case, the models are realistically unable to make accurate predictions.50 Nicholas Sambanis reflects this same sentiment while arguing for the necessity of case studies rather than just large-N analysis because these econometric analyses are often “right for the wrong reasons yet also wrong for the wrong reasons.”51 Furthermore, Christopher Cramer argues that the rational choice analyses attribute different causal mechanisms to the same variable, such as oil production indicating the availability of financing for Collier and Hoeffler but the weakness of the state for Fearon, and thus lose true explanatory value.52
APPLYING RATIONAL CHOICE MODELS TO LIBYA
Can the Libyan uprising and subsequent civil war be explained through a rational choice civil conflict framework? This section examines, through the rational choice frameworks described above, the discourse of the Libyan uprising and the economic factors that may have affected the fighting in order to determine whether the rational choice frameworks fit this crisis and what other frameworks could one could use to gain a deeper understanding of the situation.
The Libyan Rebel Discourse
In selecting his proxy variables to represent grievance, Collier identifies four possible narratives used by rebels: ethnic or religious hatred, economic inequality, lack of political rights, and government economic incompetence.53 Though he concludes that these narratives mask the true underlying economic motivations, it is important to understand what narratives emerged from the Libyan conflict in order to analyze how the conflict fits into the overall rational choice frameworks.
It is impossible to identify any one representative voice among the Libyan rebels because the rebel coalition consisted of a large number of militias and groups that, while eventually coordinated under one overall military objective, voiced a wide range of grievances. Nevertheless, it is possible to use statements issued through official and semi-official rebel channels, such as the NTC and the Libyan youth group Shabab Libya, as well as analyses of the social media postings of Libyans involved in the rebellion, in order to paint a basic picture of the overarching rebel discourse.
Nearly all public rebel statements, from chanting in the streets to the official demands of the NTC, focus on the injustices incurred by the Libyan people at the hands of Gaddafi. For example, a blog documenting popular chants of the revolutionaries identified over thirty separate chants focusing directly on Gaddafi and his immediate family.54 In addition, in a press release following the end of the war, the NTC outlined thirteen separate cases dating back to 1977 in which Gaddafi allegedly used his power to murder Libyans and foreigners.55 The focus on human rights abuses committed under Gaddafi seems to be the dominant theme in the NTC’s public rationale for war. In a statement outlining their reasons for fighting, the NTC points out:
There is a colossal amount of evidence, both material and anecdotal, through the 42 years of the regime’s rule that is etched in the lived experience of Libyans, those in the country and those who were forced to migrate abroad due to political oppression. Libya was considered in the international community as a pariah state and its track record of human rights violations and sponsoring of violence has been well known and documented.56
Libya’s tribal demographics received a significant amount of Western media attention during the war, with many news sources isolating tribal divisions as an important cleavage between the fighting groups. However, an analysis of social media statements by those affiliated with the Libyan rebellion reveals that the dominant identities demonstrate pan-Arab and general nationalist victimhood sentiments, rather than tribal divisions.57 Essentially all public statements from official rebel sources similarly played down tribal divisions, a point articulated directly by Libyan writer Alaa al-Ameri in an article in the Guardian entitled “The myth of tribal Libya.”58 It does not appear that tribal divisions played a major role for rebel organizing.
As with nearly all rebellions, the Libyan rebels portrayed a public narrative of grievance. In this case, though, the grievance narrative was targeted towards the human rights abuses of the Gaddafi regime, and included minimal discourse on common themes such as ethnic, religious, or tribal divisions, economic inequalities, horizontal inequalities, or government economic incompetence. Rational choice conflict theory posits, however, that public discourse often conceals true underlying motivations, and in order to understand the Libyan war in the context of the rational choice frameworks, it is therefore necessary to further examine how other factors may have played a supporting or central role.
Economic and Rational Choice Factors in the Conflict
Many of the proxy factors used to denote a rational choice-based rebellion are indeed present in Libya. Most importantly, Libya is nearly entirely dependent on an extractable primary commodity, a factor that indicates a higher likelihood of rebellion in nearly all rational choice frameworks. In addition, Libya’s youth bulge has created a situation in which young men represent an extremely large proportion of the population. Though GDP is high, many of these young men are unemployed, creating low opportunity cost for participation in a rebellion. Finally, though the eastern portion of the country is flat, the western front was fought in heavily mountainous terrain, another factor commonly used by rational choice theorists to indicate incentive for rebellion.
However, a closer examination of the specific context reveals that although incentive-based factors were important in explaining some parts of the conflict, the way these factors played a role is different than would have been predicted by the rational choice frameworks. The importance of oil exemplifies this dynamic. Oil was undoubtedly an essential factor in determining the outbreak and course of the revolution because the utter economic dominance of oil in Libya means that it is an essential factor in any major event in the country. Collier and Hoeffler’s greed-based model would attribute the incentives for joining the rebellion through the lens of economic control of the oil industry. In reality, though, the oil industry was entirely shut down during the course of the war, and has since resumed production through a well-regulated government ministry that has been run by a respected technocrat.59 Furthermore, though the rebels controlled approximately eighty percent of the oil industry from the beginning of the conflict, there was no effort to become a separatist movement and extract these rents for economic gain, as Ross’s model would predict The lack of rebel actions to extract rents through oil seems to indicate that few individual rebels were motivated by the prospect of gaining wealth directly from control of the oil industry.
Fearon’s interpretation of the oil industry as a proxy for a certain structure of state institutions is a better explanation. However, Fearon uses oil as a proxy for state weakness, and Gaddafi’s regime was a strong autocracy during his forty-two-year rule. As a result, Fearon’s insurgency framework does not seem to explain oil’s direct influence in this case. Rather than directly incentivizing rebel violence, it is more likely that oil shaped the war through its structuring of the economy, which gave Gaddafi both the resources and incentives to quell the rebellion with force. For example, Gaddafi’s oil wealth allowed him to hire mercenaries to reinforce his troops, a crucial ability that could not have been made without state coffers filled with oil money.
Oil may also have played an important indirect role in financing the continuation, if not the outbreak, of the war. Late in the war, it was revealed that much of the opposition’s financing came from foreign groups and governments, most conspicuously from the government of the tiny energy-producing Gulf state of Qatar.60 Qatar was also the first Arab state to grant official recognition to the NTC as the legitimate government of Libya, a pronouncement that came one day after Qatar Petroleum signed an oil marketing deal with the rebels.61 It is unlikely that the rebel groups would have been able to maintain themselves throughout the war without this financing and diplomatic cover. Although the Qatari government has not explicitly stated that it gave this financing as a way to secure future economic influence in the energy sector, top Libyan officials have publicly expressed concern that this is in fact the case.62 In this sense, on a conceptual level Collier and Hoeffler’s overall feasibility framework may be somewhat appropriate in explaining oil’s role; though extraction of rents from oil was not an immediate incentive for the rebels themselves, the foreign funding brought in due to the presence of oil made it feasible for the rebels to continue to fight. Qatar played a similar role in this case to the diaspora community indicator in Collier and Hoeffloer’s model by providing the financial and diplomatic support to make a prolonged rebellion feasible.
Other variables that rational choice theorists use were present in Libya. The large percentage of unemployed men undoubtedly played a role in decreasing the opportunity cost of joining the rebellion. The presence of mountainous terrain is less clear as a factor, even though the western mountains helped provide cover for some rebels, since the center of the uprising broke out on entirely flat, coastal territory.
Another interesting factor to consider is the essential role played by NATO. From a rational choice perspective, the presence of NATO support for and protection of the rebels would provide an enormous incentive for rebellion by significantly increasing the likelihood of success. However, in order to have this effect, the rebels would have to have known, or at least had some reason to believe, that NATO would eventually support their cause. As the NATO intervention was highly contested and was not implemented until a full month after the war began, it is unlikely that this could have been a salient factor in any rebel’s decision to fight.
In addition, like all wars, the dynamic of the Libyan violence changed throughout the life of the conflict, and going forward, the situation could conceivably enter a new phase in which direct economic incentives play a much greater role in fueling violence. There have been reports of continued militia control in many cities, and in some cases, these militias have used their power to loot and rob fellow citizens.63 It remains to be seen whether the NTC will consolidate its control peacefully or whether militia fighting could descend into a new conflict with a new incentive structure.
Greed, Grievance, and Alternative Frameworks
The influence of rational incentives, especially oil, in the conflict was overall much more subtle and multifaceted than any of the major rational choice theories would indicate. The ability for both sides to access resources from the oil industry (direct access in the case of the government and indirect access through foreign support in the case of the rebels) certainly played a role in creating a situation in which protests were more likely to turn into civil war than in other Arab Spring uprisings. However, it is unlikely that many individual rebels’ standards of living actually increased due to involvement in the war, especially given the relatively high access to services in Libya prior to that time. While poverty was a problem, Libyans were overall better-off than citizens of other Arab states who chose not to rebel. Although the rebel fighters may end up richer in the long-run due to the revolution, in the immediate aftermath of the war they will likely be poorer. Though some of the proxy variables supporting rational choice hypotheses were present in Libya, it seems that explaining the rebellion through these models amount to being, to quote Nicholas Sambanis, “right for the wrong reasons.”64
So does the rebels’ grievance narrative therefore explain the causes of the war? This too would be an oversimplification. Though political repression does seem to have been a legitimate motivator, the grievance narrative does not explain how the rebels managed to overcome collective action problems or why these long-standing grievances manifested into conflict in 2011 as opposed to years or even decades earlier. Grievance clearly combined with the structural economic factors to allow the conflict to become a full-scale civil war. However, Murshed and Tadjoeddin’s synthesis of greed and grievance interacting to break down the social contract also does not reflect the Libyan situation, as the social contract was no different in 2011 than in previous years.
Overall, it seems that pure grievances cannot explain why conflict broke out. Rational choice explanations also do not take into account many of the nuances of the Libyan context. Libya, with its distorted economy, unique leader, and complicated relationship with the West, is a highly idiosyncratic country, and it is inherently difficult for large-N studies to account for such idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless, a rebellion did break out, and rebels did in fact manage to band together in such a way as to topple the regime with outside support. Thus, it is necessary to look to alternate frameworks in order to understand the underlying causes of the rebellion.
Collier himself attempts to interpret the choices of Libyans to rebel, and more specifically the key choices of Libyan army soldiers to defect, through a new model that he calls, somewhat whimsically, “red line and salami slicing.”65 In this model, the key incentive for defection is the knowledge that a red line exists after which the international community will intervene on behalf of rebels, allowing for the “salami slicing” of government soldiers to the rebel cause due to the knowledge that the regime will likely fall. This theory, however, rests on the assumption that the rebels could have assumed that if Gaddafi continued to fight, the international community would intervene to assist the rebels. Given the fact that most key rebel defections took place in the first month of the war, before NATO became involved and during a period in which intervention remained highly uncertain, the incentive to fight due to imminent international support is not a plausible explanation.
A more direct explanation of how the rebels could overcome collective action problems without a clear economic incentive for rebellion comes from a theory first developed by economist Timur Kuran in 1995.66 Kuran examines the inability of experts and models to predict the outbreak of revolutions, and concludes that the beliefs of actors leading up the outbreak of a conflict in authoritarian regimes are often masked due to the phenomenon of “preference falsification.” This refers to the fact that, many times individuals’ private preferences, and hence the individuals’ predilection to engage in conflict, is often kept hidden until some indication exists that others hold the same preference. Thus, a regime may appear in control until “a small, intrinsically insignificant event will…activate a revolutionary bandwagon” during which “long-repressed grievances burst onto the scene.”67 The swiftness with which a small protest could turn into a full war in Libya implies that the sudden revelation of collective anti-regime preferences allowed for the rebels to overcome collective action problems, as potential recruits clearly saw the rapidity with which most of the population moved toward rebellion. The presence of satellite television and social media helps explain why this collective preference revelation could happen more easily in 2011 than in earlier years. Indeed, a paper examining the role of “network ranges,” or the time it takes for information to be spread among the population, in the Arab spring uprisings found that as different forms of media reduced the network range, citizens more quickly chose to join the rebellions.68
The preference falsification and revelation framework seems to be an important model for understanding both how the Libyan rebellion could erupt so quickly and why it was easier for the uprising to occur in 2011 as opposed to past years. However, this model cannot explain why the uprising in Libya escalated into civil war whereas similar uprisings elsewhere remained peaceful. The underlying economic forces seem to offer some explanation here, though not by creating direct incentives for the rebels but rather by creating an overall structure that allowed for both sides to escalate the violence successfully. It seems that, as is often the case, the real world is much more complicated than any one economic model, and while these models can help to explain events, the idiosyncratic elements of rebellion remain vital to a deeper understanding of the causes of conflict.
CONCLUSION
The Libyan rebellion of 2011 provides an interesting example of conflict to test rational choice theories. While many of the underlying factors that predict conflict by rational choice models are present in Libya, the specific dynamics of the Libyan conflict involve a rich combination of different incentive structures that defy any particular economic framework. The conflict is still recent, however, and further research into the political economy of the Libyan situation will give a better understanding of the different ways in which grievance, greed, and other incentive factors can escalate conflict into civil war.
Endnotes
1 Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.
2 Though the conflict in Syria has arguably escalated into a civil war, the regime of Bashar al-Assad has yet to be unseated.
3 Rod Norland, “Libya counts its martyrs, but the bodies don’t add up,” The New York Times, September 16, 2011. Accessed December 10, 2011. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/world/africa/skirmishes-flare-around-Gaddafi-strongholds.html?pagewanted=all.
4 Ronald Bruce St. John, Libya: Continuity and Change, (London: Rutledge, 2011), 21.
5 Saskia van Genugten, “Libya after Gadhafi,” Survival, 53:3 (July 2011), 63.
6 Dirk J. Vandewalle, Libya since 1969: Gaddafi’s Revolution Reconsidered, (NY: Macmillan, 2008), 15.
7 St. John., 64.
8 Amal Obeidi, Political Culture in Libya, (Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001), 117.
9 Ibid., 120.
10 Ibid., 121.
11 The World Bank, “Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Country Economic Report,” (July 2006), 1.
12 Camilla Sandbakken, “The Limits to Democracy Posed by Oil Rentier States: The Cases of Algeria, Nigeria, and Libya,” Democratization, 13:1 (February 2006), 145.
13 Transparency International, “Corruption Perceptions Index 2010.” Accessed December 1, 2011. Available at http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010.
14 World Bank Data. Accessed December 1, 2011. Available at http://data.worldbank.org/country/libya.
15 Leendert Colijin, “Libya,” Rabobank Economic Research Department Country Reports June 2010, 2.
16 David Rohde, “Shady dealings helped Gaddafi build fortune and regime,” The New York Times March 24, 2011. Accessed December 10, 2011. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/world/africa/24Gaddafi.html?pagewanted=all.
17 IMF, “Libya: Oil Wealth Distribution,” Africa Research Bulletin, (March 2009).
18 Staff, “Italy’s shame in Libya,” The Economist February 25, 2011. Accessed December 11, 2011. Available at
19 Staff, “Libyan police stations torched,” Al Jazeera English February 16, 2011. Accessed December 10, 2011. Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/02/20112167051422444.html.
20 Amnesty International, “Libyan writer detained following protest call,” Amnesty International News February 8, 2011. Accessed December 11, 2011. Available at http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/libyan-writer-detained-following-protest-call-2011-02-08.
21 Ibid. note xvii.
22 Staff, “Benghazi clashes deadly,” BBC News February 18, 2011. Accessed December 11, 2011. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12506787.
23 Ibid.
24 David Kirkpatrick, “Gaddafi’s son warns of civil war as Libyan protests widen,” The New York Times February 20, 2011. Accessed December 11, 2011. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/africa/21libya.html?pagewanted=all.
25 David Kirkpatrick, “Gaddafi’s forces hit back at rebels,” The New York Times February 28, 2011. Accessed December 10, 2011. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/world/africa/01unrest.html?pagewanted=all.
26 Staff, “Gaddafi hiring Tuareg warriors as mercenaries in Libya” International Business Times March 4, 2011. Accessed December 11, 2011. Available at http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/118924/20110304/libya.htm.
27 David Kirkpatrick, “Gaddafi warns of assault on Benghazi as UN vote nears,” The New York Times March 17, 2011. Accessed December 11, 2011. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/africa/18libya.html?&pagewanted=all.
28 Ibid.
29 C. Cramer, “Homo Economicus Goes to War: Methodological Individualism, Rational Choice, and the Political Economy of War,” World Development, 30:11 (2002), 1848.
30 David Keen, “Incentives and Disincentives for Violence.” In Mat Berdal & David Malone, Greed & Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil War (Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 21.
31 Paul Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and their Implications for Policy. Prepared for the Department of Economics, Oxford University, (2006), 2.
32 Paul Collier, “Doing Well out of War: An Economic Perspective.” Mat Berdal & David Malone, Greed & Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil War (Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 95-96.
33 Syed Murshed & Mohammad Tadjoeddin, “Revisiting Greed and Grievance Explanations for Violent Internal Conflict,” Journal of International Development 27 (2009), 21.
34 Cramer, 1847.
35 Large-N econometric analyses of conflict are studies that use datasets containing the characteristics of a large number of conflict events to test these events against predictor variables (i.e. demographics, geography, etc.) in regression models.
36 Paul Collier & Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 2355, May 2000.
37 Ibid., 26.
38 Ibid.
39 Collier in Berdal & Malone, 97.
40 Ibid., 99-100.
41 Paul Collier et. al., “Beyond Greed and Grievance: Feasibility and Civil War,” New Security Challenges Program, (November 2007), 23.
42 Cristina Bodea & Ibrahim Elbadawi, “Riots, Coups and Civil War: Revisiting the Greed and Grievance Debate,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4397, (November 2007), 4.
43 Ibid., 17.
44 Murshed & Tadjoeddin, 96.
45 Ibid., 104.
46 Michael Ross, “Oil, Drugs, and Diamonds: The Varying Roles of Natural Resources in Civil War.” In Karen Ballentine & Jake Sherman, The Political Economy of Armed Conflict (Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 56.
47 James Fearon and David Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” The American Political Science Review 97 (2003), 75-90.
48 James Fearon, “Primary Commodity Exports in Civil War,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49:4 (2005), 483-507.
49 Michael Ward & Kristin Bakke, “Predicting Civil Conflicts: On the Utility of Empirical Research,” Presented at the Conference on Disaggregating the Study of Civil War and Transnational Violence, UC Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation (2005), 5.
50 Ibid.
51 Nicholas Sambanis, “Using Case Studies to Expand Economic Models in Civil War,” Perspectives on Politics 2 (2004), 260.
52 Cramer, 182.
53 Collier in Berdal & Malone, 95-96.
54 “Libyan Chants” Blog. Accessed December 12, 2011. Available at http://libyanchants.blogspot.com/.
55 Libyan Youth Movement, “NTC Press Statement 25.10.2011,” from Shabab Libya Press Statements website, October 26, 2011. Accessed December 12, 2011. Available at http://www.shabablibya.org/uncategorized/ntc-press-statement-25-10-2011.
56 National Transitional Council, “Q & A.” Accessed December 21, 2011. Available at http://www.ntclibya.com/InnerPage.aspx?SSID=15&ParentID=11&LangID=1.
57 Patrick Prax et. al., “The Construction of Identity by the Libyan Youth Movement on Facebook,” Uppsala University Department of Media and Informatics, (2011).
58 Alaa al-Ameri, “The myth of tribal Libya,” The Guardian March 30, 2011. Accessed December 12, 2011. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/30/libya-tribal-myth-national-dignity.
59 David Gritten, “Key figures in Libya’s rebel council,” BBC News August 25, 2011. Accessed December 12, 2011. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/world-africa-12698562.
60 Charles Levinson. “Libyan rebels’ books detail their fighters’ pay,” The Wall Street Journal October 11, 2011.
61 Staff. “Qatar recognizes Libyan rebels after oil deal,” Al Jazeera English March 28, 2011. Accessed March 16, 2012. Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/03/201132814450241767.html.
62 Carolina Alexander, “Jibril turns against foreign powers that aided Qaddafi overthrow,” Bloomberg (November 14, 2011). Accessed December 12, 2011. Available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-14/jibril-turns-against-foreign-powers-that-aided-qaddafi-overthrow.html.
63 Ruth Sherlock, “Libyan revolutionaries burn, loot village homes,” The Los Angeles Times October 5, 2011. Accessed December 12, 2011. Available at http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/05/world/la-fg-libya-fighting-20111006.
64 Ibid. note xlviii.
65 Paul Coller, “Army salami: How to dump a dictator,” Global Policy June 21, 2011. Accessed December 13, 2011. Available at http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/21/06/2011/army-salami-how-dump-dictator.
66 Timur Kuran, “The Inevitability of Future Revolutionary Suprirses,” The American Journal of Sociology 100:6 (May 1995), 1528-1551.
67 Ibid., 1533.
68 Michael Makowski & Jared Rubin, “An Agent-Based Model of Centralized Institutions, Social Network Technology, and Revolution,” Towson University Department of Economics Working Paper 2011-05, Octover 2011.