'Critically examine the relationship between war and underdevelopment' - Essay Example

Before analyzing the impact of war on development, the present paper will first provide a precise discussion of factors that cause war. Structural and determinist explanations of the causes of war or violence suggest that circumstances compel people to involve in war. There can be several economic factors relating to grievances, inequality or scarcity; social issues relating to some kind of ethnic, religious or gender differences; or political factors like incompatible claims to power, resources etc.

Some other explanations look at the agency problems and claim that war results from the choices that people’s agency choose and their fight is quite rational. If the previous two approaches of explaining the causes of war are combined, then it can be said that people’s choice of getting into violence or war is shaped by the prevailing circumstances, which may be based on some conflicting interests or differing rationalities among groups. There is no doubt that war has numerous negative impacts on social, political and economic life of people.

Many people are of the opinion that war negatively affects development of a country or region. Huge costs are involved in war. There are a lot of studies which have described several negative effects of war. Among various types of costs, the economic costs are the most important ones that directly affect the developmental process of a country or region. According to Dreze and Gazdar (Dreze and Gazdar, 1991, p. 930), the economic and welfare consequences that resulted from UN-Iraq Gulf war was more severe than the suffering that resulted directly from the war.

There exists a distinction between direct and indirect costs of war on human welfare. Direct costs imply the destruction that the war causes to the civilization, while indirect costs are those that are realized in the later periods. During war several economic strategies are undertaken which produces huge impact, mostly in a negative way on the development. For