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David Smiley

– Research Associate in the Department of Economics at Macquarie Uni

In a previous article we tracked the failures of massive international efforts to reduce four global problems: poverty, human rights abuses, the degradation of the planet, and war. We asserted that these four problems cannot be solved separately and that none can be solved without land reform. We started with war, surveying theories of conflict offered by psychology, sociology, history, politics and economics. We concluded that they had little relevance beyond western society, and that they paid insufficient attention to conflict over land and natural resources. In the present article, though we will examine a surprisingly wide range of actual conflicts, we will find, in nearly all cases, wars are fought over some form of dispute over land. In the next article we will compare methods of conflict resolution.

INTERNATIONAL WARFARE
Imperialism has been defined as the control by one country over the territory of others, and with colonialism as its main form of implementation. In Africa and Latin America colonists simply pushed native populations into progressively less fertile land until they were forced to leave their traditional lifestyles and work for wages on the colonists’ estates. In other parts of the world, such as India, this process had already been completed by hereditary princes who now had to pay taxes to the invading imperial powers. As Edward Said, in his book on imperialism, said: “The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course”. Neo-imperialism can be defined as the control by one country over the energy and mineral resources of others. (See Ideological wars).

International wars. The realist school of international relations contends that the nation-state system is essentially a war system. Political clout, weaponry, national pride and diplomacy all give shape to wars, but the cause is always in relative deprivation of land and natural resources. National borders, the basis of sovereignty, have resulted from previous wars or from arbitrary subdivision. For example, in Africa and the Middle East many borders follow lines of longitude and latitude running through uninhabited desert. But straddling these lines are quite different, and therefore contested, borders around immense reservoirs of oil, gas and water. And where these extend under the sea, or under the ice, new forms of resource rights and resource conflict emerge.

Ideological wars. Those of fascism and communism have, for the time being, faded and been replaced by an Islamic fundamentalist form of warfare. Since this appears to have taken western social sciences completely by surprise, we will tread carefully here, noting only some implications of resource exploitation and leaving an analysis of western responses to the next article. The realist school of international relations sees the emergence of Islamism as two responses to economic and social changes following the arrival of Western oil companies. The internal response arises from Islam’s approval of hospitality and sharing, and its disapproval of greed. These Islamic values are seen as contradicted by those who now collect and hoard rentier wealth, a leisure class of elite sheiks, who must be overthrown.

The external response to the west reflects Islam’s humiliations: previous humiliations from western colonial intrusions, and new humiliations from western culture and from western superior technology and economic organization Both are responses to a threat to destabilize a powerful religious, cultural and very traditional society, and both concern the rent of natural resources. In May 2008 Osama Bin Laden then put land in the forefront of this whole debate, claiming that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was at the heart of the Muslim battle with the West.

photo credit: unusualimage

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Renegade Economist Podcast 90

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