The Maoist insurgency in Nepal is one of the highest intensity internal conflicts in recent times. Investigation into the causes of the conflict would suggest that grievance rather than greed is the main motivating force. The concept of horizontal or inter-group inequality, with both an ethnic and caste dimension, is highly relevant in explaining the Nepalese civil war. There is also a spatial aspect to the conflict, which is most intense in the most disadvantaged areas in terms of human development indicators and land holdings. Using the intensity of conflict (fatalities) as the dependent variable and HDI indicators and landlessness as explanatory variables, we find that the intensity of conflict across the districts of Nepal is significantly explained by the degree of inequalities.

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Social violence in Indonesia centres around vigilantism/popular justice and group brawls. This kind of violence occurs frequently and, hence, can be described as `routine'. While episodic violence associated with intercommunal and secessionist strife gets most attention, the everyday type does not produce headlines, escaping academic scrutiny. As a result, there is no social policy to reduce everyday violence other than police responses. This study seeks to examine the socio-economic determinants of the `everyday' kind of social violence in Java. The authors employ count-data analysis of panel data for around 100 districts in Java during 1994—2003. Economic crises, which are measured by the size of economic contraction and the increase in poverty, are positively associated with the level of violence. Growth acceleration and poverty reduction are good for social harmony. The study finds a non-linear relationship, in the form of an inverted-U-shaped curve, between violence and the stages of development in terms of income and education. Initially, violence increases as income or education rises, but, later on, the level of violence falls as income or education continues to increase. This is because, at first, the opportunity cost of violence decreases, and then it increases. Therefore, an emphasis on human development in the early phase of development will have a strong violence-reducing impact.

Two phenomena have been recently utilised to explain conflict onset among rational choice analysts: greed and grievance. The former reflects elite competition over valuable natural resource rents. The latter argues that relative deprivation and the grievance it produces fuels conflict. Neither the presence of greed or grievance is sufficient for the outbreak of violent conflict, something which requires institutional breakdown, which we describe as the failure of the social contract. The degradation of the social contract is more likely in the context of poverty and growth failure. We provide a synthesis of the greed and grievance hypotheses. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We look at the type of natural resource dependence and growth in developing countries. Certain natural resources called point-source, such as oil and minerals, exhibit concentrated and capturable revenue patterns, while revenue flows from resources such as agriculture are more diffused. Developing countries that export the former type of products are regarded prone to growth failure due to institutional failure. We present an explicit model of growth collapse with micro-foundations in rent-seeking contests with increasing returns. Our econometric analysis is among the few in this literature with a panel data dimension. Point-source-type natural resource dependence does retard institutional development in both governance and democracy, which hampers growth. The resource curse, however, is more general and not simply confined to mineral exporters.