| Abstract [eng] |
Master thesis “Right Sector’s Goals: Greed and Grievance Theories” has been purposed to analyze a topical issue of the Right Sector’s goals and motivation in Ukraine, who fight with separatists in Donbas, but who also have political aspirations in the country itself. The Right Sector consists of two different wings under the same banner: the political and the paramilitary. Research aims to find out the motives and goals the two wings of the organization. Greed and Grievance theories are used in this research, in order to find out whether economic factors (Greed) or justice factors can be used to explain their behavior. Since the Maidan Revolution, Right Sector has maintained only marginal public support. Currently, the party holds just one seat in the parliament of 422. Nevertheless, as the group has become more outspoken against the current Petro Poroshenko administration, its numbers have risen drastically. From 1.8 percent in October 2014, the group’s popular support stood at 5.4 percent in late 2015. The “Right Sector” has a lot of similarities with other European, especially EasternEuropean, radical Rightwing organizations. Nevertheless, differently from the other European organizations, the “Right Sector” currently faced enormous increase in support, mainly due to Maidan events. In March 2014, on the basis of the movement - Right Sector political party was founded showing first concrete actions to achieve their political aspirations. The greed motivation behind the conflict or civil war has been popularized by empirical work on the causes of civil war where a cross-section of conflicts in different nations is analyzed together econometrically, and greed is proxied by the availability or abundance of retrievable natural resource rents. Meanwhile, in the context of civil war or rebellion, grievance is sometimes described as a justice-seeking motivation. Central idea to the grievances is identity and group formation. These theories of collective action provide some useful insights into the organization of rebellion. These theories give insides and suggestions how these two parts of the same organization could be judged by their goals and motives. For operationalization needs, the following set of criteria has been applied: financing, recruitment, geography, relative deprivation, polarization, horizontal inequality. The Right Sector was split into two categories – political wing and para-military wing. After the research, a conclusion was reached that the Right Sector’s paramilitary wing can be more easily explained using the Greed theory criteria, which suggest that this part of the organization is more greed than grievance driven (evaluation of +4 and +2 accordingly). In case of political wing of the Right Sector, both theories received the same evaluation (+3 and +3 accordingly), suggesting that both factors play a role in the behavior of this wing. The results of this research partly coincide with the hypothesis raised before carrying out the research – the paramilitary wing is more driven by the Greed theory criteria, but the political wing is driven more by Grievance theory. |
