(‘revolutions’, ‘civil wars’) at the national level using large-scale cross-country datasets, at the expense of consideration of local conflicts.<sup>11</sup> A consequence has been the privileging of theories of conflict that focus on national-level phenomena<sup>12</sup> and of policy ‘solutions’ that (implicitly if not explicitly) privilege technocratic interventions (better constitutions, stronger laws, more police). Similarly, there has been a relative lack of comparative analysis of cases of failure (violent outbreaks) and success (i.e., where structural conditions would predict serious problems, but where violence did not eventuate and/or was addressed early on) (Ross 1993). While conflict management has become a sub-field of the development enterprise, recent advances in social and political theory on the relationship between conflict and development (e.g., Varshney 2002) are yet to fully inform the mainstream perspectives (on the means and ends of development) that drive contemporary development policy and practice. Even within the contemporary ‘mainstream’, practical theories and models for understanding when and how conflict can be productive (rather than destructive) are still to emerge.

We construe the development process, and its relationship with conflict, as inherently one of multiple, uneven, and contested transitions in social structures, rules systems, and power relations; as such, it is necessarily political and can (indeed, too often does) result in violent conflict. In this paper, we focus on the ‘micro-politics’ (King 2004) of these transitions at the local level, as they are experienced (welcomed, ignored, resisted) by poor villagers and the elites who preside over them through their engagement with development projects. Gaining an insight into such local dynamics can illuminate the two-way process of how states in transition shape local environments and how local peoples can constrain, interpret and realize these changes, in turn shaping the transition itself and the nature of the new and reformed state institutions and social structures which result. This, we argue, can, in turn, provide vital insights into how development actors can support the creation of legitimate and effective institutions to manage the intertwined processes of conflict and development.

# **3. Development Projects as Potentially Part of the Problem** **_and_ Solution**

If our analysis above is correct, it is likely that specific development projects will have differential impacts on local conflict and the ability of communities (and the state) to manage it. On the one hand, projects—even (or especially) those that seek to ‘empower’ the poor and enhance the ‘participation’ of marginalized groups—might be expected to generate tensions, given that they provide new resources and decision-making mechanisms which can be used to either strengthen, modify or undermine existing local power relations. At the same time, projects may provide spaces and resources, and/or change underlying incentives, in ways that makes conflicts less likely to emerge or, when they do, less likely to escalate into broader unrest.

> 11 The legal anthropology literature, in particular, contains many insights on why local conflicts emerge and escalate in a range of developing world contexts (on Indonesia, for example, see Just 2001), but sadly has had little impact on those working on conflict and development issues in development agencies.  Moore (2004) presents a particularly useful collection of pieces on how particular communities maintain order in the context of perennial conflicts surrounding property, common pool resources, leadership, and family dynamics.  Interestingly, this literature is increasingly influential in the emerging field of access to justice (for example, Golub 2003, World Bank 2004) but conflict units within development institutions have largely remained focused on large-scale conflicts.

> 12 This is beginning to change with the rise—at least in some quarters—of the consideration of social variables (such as proxies for ‘social capital’) and consideration of different forms of social structure, inter-group and state-society relations as being determining factors for development outcomes (see King 2004 for a review).

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