Greed Vs Grievance Theory

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to study the Niger Delta conflict and contribute to the ongoing debates on greed vs. grievance thesis as to the cause of the Niger Delta conflict. To begin with, the central focus of this study is to determine whether greed and grievance factors has a link to the conflict or are applicable to explaining the causes of the conflict. The study adopts resource conflict debate as the anchor of the research but greed vs. grievance theory stands for the analytical and interpretation of data. The studies of different scholars regarding resource conflict theory were outlined and analyzed for the purpose of this paper.
Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler “greed vs.grievance” theses is a chief source thus are reviewed

Most recently many post-cold war conflicts have exhibited different characters of warfare from the Clausewitzian concept like the Liberian civil war from 1989; the conflict became the sight of bloodshed between different factions and tribes. The characteristic of ’inter-state’ conflict became a new ’intra-state’ conflict. The Liberian conflict exhibited a characteristics that new and flexible methods such as the so called ‘shadow economies’ were developed in boundary regions, involving the creation of a mercantile system where the conflict parties could haul out natural resource for financial support (Duffield, 2001:

Recently conflicts have yet again come to the focus of many scholars and there have been countless approaches to manage and explain the contemporary conflicts and strategies in the 21th century and thus many theories have accumulated the conflict debate communities. One such theory came from Collier and Hoeffler (2000), their theory explains that the incidence of “primary commodity” (primary commodity – oil, diamonds or gemstones or timber) has been found to be associated with conflicts, the occurrence and duration of conflicts. Their theory is based on the ground that the fighters involved in this type of conflicts are fighting for self-enrichment and power, which on its own creates a conflict economy situation. As conflicts and strategies evolve, the characteristic of contemporary conflict ought to be viewed in a larger and broader perspective. While the Western democracy celebrates its victory over communism and the end of the cold war, the belief was that their liberal view of democracy would fill in and become a standard to prevent the occurrence of conflicts. Then again, these present day liberal types of power and regulation were the inverse of the new 'intra-state' conflicts or the 'New Wars'. In opposition to the Western standards, these new sorts of