Turning War into Baseball

My question for the presentation on top of a picture of

Chicago White Sox pitcher Scott Linebrink in preseason.

March 5, 2009

Isaac Brekken, AP

This past Thursday I prepared a presentation about resource wars for my "Conflict in Africa" module, but unfortunately I did not understand what the professor wanted. My presentation was a general overview of and introduction to the entire subject, including a short history of resource wars starting in medieval and imperialist Europe, how different types of resources change the nature of the conflict/war, a quick look at greed and grievance theory, and then a few questions to jump start class discussion. It was supposed to last about 20 minutes, but I had enough material to go much longer. All of the other presentations for this module have also been introductions to the subject in order to start the conversation. This past week we had a new professor, and he wanted a quick 5 minute presentation towards the end of class in order to introduce the case studies, not the theories. So we had spent an hour and a half discussing what my presentation was going to say before my presentation, and I had much more to say about theory than the Sierra Leone and Liberia case studies. It was embarrassing and frustrating. I was a little bitter for the rest of the day, especially since I spent so much time putting the presentation together but then didn't even show the class much of it. Instead of staying home and making slides, I could have gone to the pub quiz and spent time with friends.

I've posted one of the slides that asked the question, "Are we turning war into baseball?" Here's a quick background to the question: 'greed and grievance' is an economically based theory that looks at statistics in order to predict when a civil war might occur or at least find the probability of a war. Collier's findings have shown that 'greed' indicators (like a warlord or soldier wanting to plunder resources like diamonds) are more likely to indicate a coming civil war than 'grievance' indicators (like a marginalized community left out of government funding). One of our articles by Cramer said that this theory had a huge problem because it uses economic statistics and numbers to predict or describe war. There are so many issues to consider when 'predicting' or 'describing' war that it would be impossible to measure all of them, turn them into numbers, put them into a formula, and crunch out some percentage that gives the probability of civil war. The end result is something like the weatherman saying, "There's a 30% chance of rain today." But social sciences are not as exact as climatology, which of course is a difficult field to make predictions in. Mathematical formulas about war are nearly impossible to achieve. I have a problem with Cramer's logic, though: if Collier's greed thesis is wrong because math can't prove it, then Cramer's preference for grievance is also difficult to prove. It really becomes a gut-feeling about what are the true 'causes' of a war, which isn't very scientific. My personal feeling on the matter is that the 'causes' of a war are insignificant, and there are multiple 'causes' that act together to start a war. It's been almost a 100 years since WWI, and there's still debate about what really 'caused' the war. Instead of focusing on the causes of a war, I'd rather focus on what keeps the war going, which can be a greed-based desire for plundering diamonds. If we don't deal with these greed-based desires, then we can't have a peace that will address the grievances. The counter-argument to my idea is that we have to fix the 'causes' in order to prevent the next war. I think we should keep looking forward to how we build a better society for the future instead of looking back at what caused our problems in the past.

This slide was supposed to start a quick discussion about whether or not we should use economic statistics to predict war, and I made a comparison to baseball. Statistics dominate baseball when trying to predict what each player will do. However, a player with a batting average .300 my strikeout before a .100 player hits a home run. That is not very likely, but it could happen. It really comes down to personal performance, and so does war. Why did Charles Taylor do what he did in Liberia and Sierra Leone when statistics would have predicted he should have done something else? Why didn't South Africa turn into a bloodbath when statistics said it should have? Why did Yugoslavia turn bloody when those societies had lived in peace for so many decades and centuries? I read an article at the beginning of this semester that said "fate," an idea never mentioned in social sciences, was something that helped Sierra Leoneans understand what happened. Following that idea, I think some wars happen when the didn't have to happen because someone sinned. They chose a selfish path instead of the selfless path. Like baseball, it's about the personal performance of a few influential elites. Putting math into the mix blurs this point.

I'm in Sarajevo this week while doing 'field research' in Bosnia. I'll try to post on the blog daily or every couple days, but I'm not sure how much time I'll have.