Courtesy of CNN
her own interests or needs, for power, money, land, or security. Some gain influence and profit quite handsomely from wars. Greed is a predictor of civil war; more than a grievance, such as poverty or suffering. Greed is the true ugly face of many elite leaders who take advantage of the frustrated and the impoverished to mobilize them towards their own goals, not theirs.
on a side and join the fight. However, a niche of followers are zealous believers; they passionately follow the leaderโs plan. They devote their lives and sacrifice everything for the fight. These are different from the improvised masses forced to fight out of a need to mark their existence or to take back their rights. The zealous followers have a cause that they believe in and pursue with unyielding allegiance.
Some leaders might be acting out of an altruistic sense; an obligation to topple the vicious system and do what is right. Nelson Mandela is an extraordinary example of such a leader who changed the history of South Africa, and paid the price of his opposition by serving 27 years in prison. On the other end of the same spectrum is Bin Laden who operated various bombing attacks and was an influential leader in Al Qaeda. Coming from a wealthy family, he had no need for money or power; he acted out of his belief in violence as the answer, and killing as the decisive action to reach his vision.
The enmeshed leader and followers become a single unit, a fighting group that moves, thinks, and acts as one. The motivation for the group to start a war might be economic factors; being denied a fair share of the resources, especially when that deprivation is on the bases of ethnic or religious differences. Another motivation might be against group eradication, to restore their security, and protect their own rights. But the most influential force might be group identity acting behind all of the other reasons to fight. The unmet needs of autonomy, selfworth, sustenance, and belonging might be the underlying forces, rather than the superficial political, economic, and territorial reasons.
No war would ever erupt without the fighting masses, and the dynamics of joining a civil war are quite complex. A robust factor is the socialization of humans and their reaction to โothersโ, with cultural elements and religious teachings accentuating the differences between them and us. In-group identification becomes the sole path for identity formation; a person grows up wanting to belong to the group, and that translates into his identity being conditional to fighting the groupโs war. Values of pride, cooperation, and dignity become contingent on killing and eliminating the other. There is a definite comfort and merry contentment in being โinโ, sharing the same norms and values, and adhering to oneโs group with a sense of safety and shared fate. Some join because their interests lie in the war, others join simply because once a war erupts you have to kill or be killed and with no other option โ they bet
Whether it is family, ethnicity, religious group, or nation, polarization has been manufactured to use these unmet needs and to see those outside oneโs group as alien, untrustworthy, privileged, or different. Leaders know very well how to pull the strings of polarization and produce a heated war for identity. โThe otherโ is used as the scapegoat behind difficulties and troubles, and only through their abolishing that the group will gain back their rights. A systematic sense of discrimination erupts civil war in order to assert group identity and to find a scapegoat to fight with; the end result: a supposedly more equal world.
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