No. 112/2021

24 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 112/2021 CLOSE UP ON RESEARCH she previously worked at the Centre for the Study of Afri- can Economies. She moved to Konstanz, where she is now a Humboldt Professor, with her husband and two sons back in January 2019. “My life could have turned out quite differently at various points,” she says, citing the example of her much acclaimed article “Greed and grievance in civil war” which she pub- lished together with the British development economist Paul Collier in Oxford Economic Papers in 2004. This paper played a major role in making Hoeffler one of the world’s most frequently cited social scientists – whereby the text nearly wasn’t published in a journal at all. In the aforementioned paper, which became the corner- stone of her career, the development economist demon- strates that, ultimately, it is not political defects and social inequality that lead to civil war. Instead, as Hoeffler and Col- lier wrote at the beginning of the 2000s, it was much more important whether a civil war could be financed. Where there is no money, according to the results of her data anal- ysis, there is no war either. IF YOU FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL, THINGS GET EXPLOSIVE “Motivation on its own doesn’t trigger wars,” says Hoeffler. Basically, there are small groups of people who want to overthrow the system – in every country, Hoeffler claims. “Whether they really gain the power that could endan- ger the state depends heavily on their financial support,” she explains. But when you ask where the money for civil wars comes from, then it gets politically explosive. You end up, for instance, with organised crime. Frequently, other coun- tries are involved, too. Proxy wars break out that would be impossible without external financing. This, Hoeffler says, is one of the reasons why it took her and her colleague Paul Collier five years to find a respected scientific journal that would publish their article. “Civil wars were simply not a topic for economic science.” W hen it comes to her research, economist and political scientist Anke Hoeffler is not easily thrown off course, almost as though she were following an inner com- pass. When she gets her teeth into a topic, no obstacles are too great. Tenacity was also required to establish her research topic within her discipline. Anke Hoeffler inves- tigates the causes of violence and wars. “To do so, I rely on what I can prove and calculate statistically,” she says. It is her perception for topics of global importance as well as her persistence that recommended Anke Hoeffler to be a recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Profes- sorship. In 2019, she was granted Germany’s most valua- ble research award that comes with funding of up to five million euros. She thus joins the ranks of 84 top interna- tional researchers to date (as of December 2020) whom the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has brought to Ger- man universities under this programme since 2008. Part of the aim is to break up what are often antiquated struc- tures in the German academic system and infuse it with new interdisciplinary spirit. Anke Hoeffler is seated in a spacious sitting room with picture windows working on her laptop. It is the last days of the researcher’s summer holidays in Oxford, UK, where The Humboldt Professor Anke Hoeffler studies the causes of violence – whether in civil wars or people’s own homes – and what it eventually costs. Text MARLENE HALSER THE HIDDEN COSTS OF VIOLENCE