Geweldstructuur in 40 ontwikkelingslanden in de periode 1950—1967

Abstract

In this article an attempt is made to give a classification of internal violence, occurring in 40 developing countries, in order to provide a ’structure of violence’ for each country in the period 1950-1967, and to correlate this structure to the changes in the real per capita income of these countries. For the collection of the various items of internal violence, Keesings Historical Archives (Dutch version) was used. They were classified as follows: I Diffuse socio-political unrest (strikes, demonstrations, riots etc., in which people were wounded, killed and/or property was destroyed). II Coup d’état-like activities. III Small guerrilla’s in the countryside and clusters of (anticolonial) violent actions in the towns. IV Limited civil or anticolonial war. V ’Endemic’ guerrillas. VI Situation of serious anarchy. VII ’Political’ pogroms and total civil or anticolonial war. Thus a ’profile of violence’ for each country was constructed. It appeared that in the Latin American countries coup d’état activities prevailed; that in several African countries these activities became numerous some years after independence was obtained; that in the Middle East countries all types of violence occurred and that in the ethnically complicated Asian countries, small and endemic guerrillas frequently arose. A relation between types and extent of internal violence, and level of national income and its yearly per capita growth (obtained from the O.E.C.D. publication: National Accounts of Less Developed Countries, 1967) could not be proved. The material suggests that national income and changes therein as such, may not be very interesting variables. Distribution of income and changes therein might be more relevant. The difficulty, however, is to obtain hard and fast data on these variables. The following suggestions are made: 1. To collect more detailed information from different sources on the various violent conflicts occurring within a number of selected countries, in order to obtain complete data on internal violence. 2. Redefinition or refining of the typology of violence, in order to make it less ambigious. 3. The selection of the countries could be determined by: a. the possibility of obtaining data on distribution of income and changes therein; b. the possibility of differentiating between ethnic homogeneous and non-homogenous countries; c. the possibility of differentiating between countries receives relatively much or little foreign aid.